by Bruce Catton
But the trouble was that at this particular moment McClellan was indispensable.
He had warned Lincoln that Union soldiers would not fight in an avowed war against slavery, and there would be time enough later on to find out whether that was so; but what mattered most right now was that this could never be turned into a war against slavery or anything else unless the Army of the Potomac very speedily won a victory over Robert E. Lee, and there was not a remote chance that it could do that now without General McClellan. Its elements had been thrown in with Pope’s and had been beaten. Pope was wholly discredited, and the dispirited troops who were retreating into the Washington lines were not, at the moment, an army at all in any real sense of the word. They never had been an army, as the word is properly understood; they were young men who had heard bugles and drums and had seen flags waving and had felt something outside of themselves come in and move them; and now they were tired, dirty, unhappy, conscious that they had been beaten because they had been poorly led, the flame gone out of them. They were ready to quit and they could not conceivably be turned into a useful army again, in time to do any good, by anyone but the one man who had trained them, the man in whom they had unwavering confidence, to whom they had given a mystic and inexplicable devotion. And that man, of course, was McClellan.
Neither the War Department nor the Cabinet could see this, but Lincoln could, and he acted on what he saw — risking that which he dared not lose in order to win that which he had to have. He put McClellan back in command and in effect told him to pull the army together and go out and whip the Army of Northern Virginia.
… It became a legend, and a true thing to be remembered in the long years of peace, how McClellan this one time rose to a great challenge and met it fully. He was a small man, and he missed many chances, and he probably was afraid of something; not of death — there is much testimony about his courage under fire, and he had picked up the hard West Point training — but of life and the things that can go wrong in it; but for one evening of his life he was great, and the Confederate tide began to ebb as the sun went down over the Virginia hills to the sound of men who cheered as if they had touched the shores of dream-come-true. McClellan rode out from Alexandria on his great black war horse, a jaunty little man with a yellow sash around his waist, every pose and gesture perfect. He cantered down the dusty roads and he met the heads of the retreating columns, and he cried words of encouragement and swung his little cap, and he gave the beaten men what no other man alive could have given them — enthusiasm, hope, confidence, an exultant and unreasoning feeling that the time of troubles was over and that everything would be all right now. And it went into the legend — truthfully, for many men have testified to it — that down mile after mile of Virginia roads the stumbling columns came alive, and threw caps and knapsacks into the air, and yelled until they could yell no more, and went on doing it until the sun went down; and after dark, exhausted men who lay in the dust sprang to their feet and cried aloud because they saw this dapper little rider outlined against the purple starlight.4
And this, in a way, was the turning point of the war. It was odd that it should happen this way, because this war was one of the great hinges of history, a closing and an opening of mighty doors, and McClellan believed that it was something very different — a bit of a disagreement among gentlemen, which would be settled presently in the way of gentlemen so that everyone could go back to what they had had before the disagreement began; and no one would go back to anything after this. McClellan rode down the roads to the sound of a mighty cheering and a great crying, and because he did the war would go on and on to its destined end, with McClellan himself fading out of it in an extended anticlimax and with most of the men who called out to him dying or drifting off into the limbo of old soldiers who have had it.
No one could ever quite explain it. The men who threw their caps and yelled themselves hoarse and of their own will became a solid army again could never quite find the words for it, and the best McClellan himself could say finally was: “We are wedded and should not be separated” — which, after all, perhaps was the obscure essence of it. But whatever it was that really happened, it would finally give Abraham Lincoln what he was looking for. And American history would be different forever after.
3. High-Water Mark
The tension became almost unendurable, yet it lasted just a little more than a fortnight. Then it snapped, in a great explosion of fire and sound and violence, and the war came to a climax in its worst single day of death.
The Army of Northern Virginia had crossed the Potomac, and no one knew just where it was. No one could be sure, either, where Bragg’s western army had gone. The rumor suddenly reached Washington that Bragg’s men, having given Buell the slip, were coming east to join Lee, over whatever impossible mountain route across eastern Tennessee and Kentucky, and Lincoln was anxiously wiring the western commanders, asking them: “What degree of certainty have you that Bragg with his command is not now in the valley of the Shenandoah, Virginia?”1
Buell scoffed at the notion, which in point of fact was rather fantastic. Yet Buell was not the man to give reassurance. He had been outmaneuvered; Bragg had got away from him, and Buell was now in the act of chasing him up to the Ohio. The administration was impatient with him and planned to remove him; did actually send orders to George Thomas to take Buell’s place and was dumfounded when Thomas calmly replied that it would not be fair to remove Buell right now and that he would greatly prefer not to take the offered promotion. Buell stayed on, in uncertain tenure, while Halleck told a friend that the administration was going to guillotine all losing generals; the hard policy of the French revolutionists — win or be dropped — was going to prevail from now on. It might be unjust, Halleck admitted, but it was inevitable; the cause had to have victories.2
It would have to have three victories, for the Confederacy was striking in three places at once. The rough timing that co-ordinated Bragg’s offensive with Lee’s had been extended to Mississippi. There a tough little Confederate army had been put together, led by Earl Van Dorn, a handsome, curly-haired soldier who had been a friend of Sherman at West Point; a dashing romantic chap who had a reputation as a ladies’ man and who would one day die of it, dodging any number of Yankee bullets on the battlefield to take one from an angry husband in his own office.… Van Dorn had Pap Price with him and some stout fighters from beyond the Mississippi, and he was sliding forward now to attack Grant, or possibly to slip through Grant’s lines and join Bragg in Kentucky — a possibility which, Halleck was warning Grant, “would be most disastrous.”3
But the victory that was needed most and first would have to be won in the East; the West was where the North finally would have to win the war, but the East was always the place where the North could lose it, and the danger was never greater than in September of 1862.
McClellan hastily reorganized the Army of the Potomac, got most of it north of the river, and took it cautiously north and west through Maryland, with cavalry patrols sending blind groping tentacles out in front reaching for Lee’s army.
If McClellan’s men had been in the lowest of spirits after the second battle of Bull Run, they had high morale now. Getting up into western Maryland was like getting back home. Civilian sentiment here ran strongly for the Union. As the army marched through towns and villages, people lined the streets to wave flags and to cheer, offering food and drink to any men who could break ranks and help themselves. The soldiers were no longer moving in a vacuum; they were touching the solid core of national sentiment once more, and they did not have to draw all of their inspiration from the little general who led them. They exulted in the welcome they were getting, told one another that they were in God’s country once more, and whenever they set eyes on McClellan they cheered until their voices broke, crowding close around him, trying to touch at least the horse he rode, assuring the man that they would do whatever he asked them to do.4
McClellan was as cautious as ever. Lee’s a
rmy lay on the western side of South Mountain, a high ridge that takes off from the Potomac as a continuation of the Blue Ridge and runs in a long slant for sixty-five miles to the north and east. The passes were held by Lee’s cavalry, and from the loyal people beyond the mountain came all sorts of unreliable rumors about Lee’s strength and movements. Halleck kept sending messages of warning: If McClellan slid too far to the right Lee was apt to come past his left and seize Washington, if he held to the left Lee might go around his right, too rapid an advance would be dangerous, to advance too slowly would permit Lee to invade Pennsylvania … and so on and so on, every warning underscoring the hesitancy that McClellan carried with him in any case, the unspoken threat of the guillotine always felt.
What McClellan would finally have done if he had been left to himself is beyond imagination; what actually happened was a dazzling stroke of pure, uncovenanted good luck that cleared up the fog of doubt and put the game squarely in his hands. To this day no one has known quite how it happened, and it is probable that no one will ever know, but some Confederate officer lost a copy of Lee’s orders outlining all of his plans and movements, and this copy was speedily brought to Union headquarters, authenticated, and laid before McClellan.
Now McClellan knew where Lee was, what he was trying to do, and exactly where he proposed to go.
There was a Federal garrison of ten thousand men in Harper’s Ferry, and Lee did not wish to leave this garrison lying across his line of communications. He knew that McClellan’s army had been badly disorganized at Bull Run and that it would take a little time to pull it back into shape, and McClellan was not in the least likely to move fast anyway. It seemed to Lee that it would be safe to delay the invasion while he gobbled up the Harper’s Ferry people, and this he undertook to do, dividing his army into four parts in order to do it.
With Longstreet and Longstreet’s command, Lee himself moved up to Hagerstown, Maryland, not far from the Pennsylvania border — there was some chance that Pennsylvania militia, stirred by the rising threat to the homeland, might come down to make trouble, and it was well to hold Hagerstown in some strength. One division of troops under D. H. Hill was placed at Boonsboro Gap, the principal pass through South Mountain, where the main road from Washington came west. All the rest of the army was sent down to surround and capture Harper’s Ferry, part of the men swinging back into Virginia to come on the place from the south and west, the remainder going down through Maryland in the lee of South Mountain, Stonewall Jackson in command of the lot.
The pieces of the Army of Northern Virginia, accordingly, were very badly separated. McClellan was at Frederick, Maryland, just a short march from Boonsboro Gap. He was closer to the head and the tail of Lee’s army than the head and tail were to each other — and with Lee’s orders on his desk McClellan knew all of this, and Lee did not know that he knew it. The utter destruction of Lee’s army was a definite possibility.
One thing McClellan did not know, and because he did not know it his movements would have a halting, trance-like quality. He did not know that Lee’s army was woefully, tragically understrength.
The army had fought hard and it had marched hard, and it was very close to sheer exhaustion. Thousands upon thousands of men had left the ranks, too worn down to go any farther. (The fact that many of these men had no shoes and that Maryland had hard roads on which a barefooted man could not march had a good deal to do with this.) Other thousands had innocently left the army when it crossed the Potomac, on the simple ground that they had enlisted to defend the South from invasion, not to invade the North; the idea that the homeland could be aggressively defended on northern soil was just a little too intricate for them. All in all, it is probable that Lee lost between ten and twenty thousand men from these causes in the first two weeks of September. Of enlisted infantrymen, present for duty equipped, Lee may have had fewer than forty thousand all told. His army was smaller than it was at any other time in the war until the final agonizing retreat to Appomattox.
Yet McClellan lived by the old faith. He still thought that he was outnumbered.
He was not taking as many men into Maryland as he had had on the peninsula. In the middle of September the Army of the Potomac numbered just over eighty-seven thousand, and by no means were all of these combat soldiers; nearly one fifth of the army, at this stage of the war, was occupied on various noncombatant assignments and could not be put on the firing line in battle. McClellan, of course, knew this — he always was acutely aware of his own army’s weaknesses — and he could not, for the very life of him, see that the other army was much worse off than his own. The shadowy, unreal host which outnumbered him from the beginning was still opposite him. Luck might have given him the greatest opening any Union general ever had, but when he set about exploiting it he would be very, very careful.5
His first moves were simple and direct.
He sent one corps to break through the mountain at Crampton’s Gap, five or six miles to the south of the main pass near Boonsboro; if it moved fast, this corps ought to be able to rescue the Harper’s Ferry garrison before Jackson swallowed it. With the rest of the army McClellan moved straight for Boonsboro Gap, planning to get to the far side of the mountain and destroy the separate pieces of Lee’s army before they could reunite.
The start was made promptly enough, and in each of the passes the Confederates were so greatly outnumbered that they had no chance to fight more than a delaying action. They hung on stoutly, however, aided considerably by the Pinkerton delusion as to numbers; D. H. Hill had five or six thousand soldiers to defend Boonsboro Gap, and the Federal command thought that he had thirty thousand, which meant that the attack could not be driven home until most of the army had come up. In the end, Hill hung on all through September 14, retreating only after night had come. Crampton’s Gap was lost sooner, but McClellan’s corps commander there, General William B. Franklin, did not think it safe to march boldly for Harper’s Ferry until the next morning. When morning came it took time to get his troops moving, and before he could accomplish anything Harper’s Ferry had been surrendered and the Confederacy had picked up ten thousand Yankee prisoners, vast quantities of small arms and military stores, and a useful supply of artillery. Jackson rode through the town after the surrender, a remarkably uninspiring-looking man in dusty uniform with an old forage cap pulled down over his eyes — he could no more look like a dashing soldier than could U. S. Grant. One of the surrendered Union soldiers studied him, remarked that he didn’t look like much, and then added bitterly: “But if we had him we wouldn’t be in the fix we’re in.”6
September 15 saw McClellan through the South Mountain gaps, and Lee was trying desperately to pull his army together before the Yankees could destroy it piecemeal. Lee thought at first that he would have to get everybody back into Virginia as quickly as possible, but when he learned about the capture of Harper’s Ferry he changed his mind. He would reassemble at Sharpsburg, a little country town a dozen miles south of Hagerstown, near the Potomac, behind the meandering valley of Antietam Creek; if McClellan wanted to fight they would fight there, and afterward it might be possible to go on with the invasion of the North. In any case, the fight would enable the Confederacy to get the military loot south from Harper’s Ferry.
So what there was of Lee’s army was ordered to take its place on the rolling hills west of Antietam Creek, and there the advance guard of the Army of the Potomac found it on the evening of September 15.
There, too, the Army of the Potomac faced it all day of September 16 — the day on which it was proved afresh that Lee could put up a consummate bluff and that McClellan could never in the world call the bluff. For half of the undersized Confederate army had not yet come up from Harper’s Ferry, and if McClellan had simply ordered an advance all along the line the Confederates who were present must, beyond all question, have been driven into the river, Lee in person with them. But McClellan made no advance that day. He needed the time to think things over, to examine Lee’s lines at
long range, to get his guns into position, to talk with his subordinates, to weigh the risks which he would not take. He presented Lee with twenty-four hours, which was not five minutes more than the absolute minimum Lee had to have for survival, and when at last the Union attack was made — at misty dawn on September 17 — the Confederates had just enough men on hand or coming up to make a fight of it.
There never was another day like Antietam. It was sheer concentrated violence, unleavened by generalship. It had all of the insane fury of the Shiloh fight, with this difference: at Shiloh the troops were green and many of them ran away at the first shock, while those who remained fought blindly, by instinct. At Antietam the men were veterans and they knew what they were about. Few men cut and ran until they had been fought out, their formations blown apart by merciless gunfire; and those who did not run at all fought with battle-trained skill, so that the dawn-to-dusk fight above Antietam Creek finally went into the records as the most murderous single day of the entire war.
It began with a Federal attack on the Confederate left, under Stonewall Jackson, posted in a cornfield and two woodlots in front of a whitewashed Dunker church. Joe Hooker, the handsome, profane, hard-drinking and hard-fighting commander of McClellan’s right wing, smashed the cornfield and its occupants with the concentrated fire of three dozen fieldpieces and then sent his army corps swinging straight up toward the Dunker church, which marked the high ground that anchored this end of the Confederate line. Some of the Confederate units here were mangled almost beyond repair, but just as Hooker’s men neared the little church Jackson brought up reinforcements — John B. Hood’s Texas brigade and three tough little brigades from D. H. Hill’s division — and the Federals were driven back to their starting point, a good fourth of their number shot down, half of the remainder driven off in disorganized flight.