by S. C. Gwynne
Even better, McClellan had twelve thousand fresh troops under Major General William Franklin and four thousand more under Fitz John Porter to do the job. But here, once again, far from the fighting and lacking any feel for the battlefield, he fell prey to his own fears. Though Franklin was pleading to be allowed to attack, General Sumner, still in shock from what had happened to Sedgwick’s division, made his own passionate case that the condition of the 1st and 12th Corps—“all cut up and demoralized,” as he put it—made the Union right vulnerable to attack, and that Franklin’s men must be kept as defensive reserves. Little Mac, unable to see clearly the situation on his right where he stood, agreed with Sumner, and opted for defense over offense. Franklin would not be unleashed. It is noteworthy that McClellan was not just seeing phantoms here: Lee did want to attack the Union right that afternoon, and was planning to until Jackson and Stuart talked him out of it, so there would be no advance again that day on the Union right. In the center, the delay following the retreat from the Sunken Road had allowed Longstreet to patch up his battle lines so that instead of virtually nothing at all, there now was something vaguely resembling resistance. The Union momentum—hurt as much by the absence of General Richardson as the long delay—had dissipated.36
This left the southernmost sector of the battle as McClellan’s last big chance to strike at Robert E. Lee. By 3:00 p.m., Burnside finally had some momentum. He had dithered virtually all day in crossing the creek, which had allowed Lee to shift critical manpower from his right to his left. But now he advanced up the slope and engaged in a sharp fight with the outnumbered Confederates, and by 4:00 p.m. he was pushing the enemy steadily back. The 9th Corps had seized virtually all the high ground to the east and south of Sharpsburg. The town itself was in flames, its streets filled with beaten and demoralized rebel soldiers. There were no reserves left to save them. Burnside’s men had only to drive 1,200 yards farther to cut off the rebels’ line of retreat and flank the rest of Lee’s line.37
Lee, who was watching all this with a sinking heart, suddenly saw something else in his field glasses. Two hours earlier, A. P. Hill had arrived at Lee’s headquarters to tell him that his troops, detailed by Jackson to handle the surrendered Union soldiers and equipment at Harpers Ferry, were on their way. Now, from behind the ridge Lee could see a great cloud of dust rising in the clear sunlight, and a column of troops came into view. It was Hill’s Light Division, arriving without a moment to spare. Led by Hill in his trademark red battle shirt, they had left at 6:30 a.m. and covered seventeen miles in eight hours, and if they were tired they did not show it. Neither Burnside nor McClellan saw them coming. Deploying immediately on the field, at about 4:30 p.m. Hill’s men drove hard into Burnside’s flank and rolled it up. Soon the 9th Corps was retreating to its bridgehead, where the Confederates were happy to let it remain. The Union had suffered 2,350 casualties in Burnside’s attack, while the Confederates lost just over 1,000.38
The day’s battle was over. A snapshot of the field would have shown—in addition to the dead and wounded, broken weapons and busted caissons, dead horses, wrecked batteries, and discarded knapsacks and blanket rolls—that Lee’s army was in very nearly the same position it occupied as the day began. Only now there were more than sixty thousand Union troops in close proximity to their lines—most of them only a few hundred yards away. Only Porter’s 5th Corps was still behind the creek. With its four thousand men, McClellan could have used it to reinforce Burnside. But it wasn’t in Little Mac’s soul to commit his only reserves to a battle with an uncertain outcome.
A great flaming-red sun set on the battlefield, and soon the darkness came on and with it the weirdly beautiful sight of lanterns floating and dancing like fireflies over the killing fields while details searched for the wounded. The count of dead and wounded was ghastly: 22,717 men, 10,316 for the Confederacy and 12,401 for the Union. It remains the highest count for a single day in any American war. Jackson, in the cornfield and West Woods, had fought the single bloodiest part of it. This was in spite of the rather remarkable fact that McClellan had committed only 50,000 men to the fight. A third of his army never fired a shot.
• • •
The following morning Jeb Stuart’s chief of staff, Heros Von Borcke, found Jackson leaning on a fence behind the Confederate lines. He was drinking a cup of rare, hot coffee that his servant Jim had prepared for him from the contents of a Federal knapsack. Jim was always with him, and devoted to him, tending to matters involving food, clothing, bedding or lodgment, baggage, the care and maintenance of Little Sorrel, or whatever else was needed. It is not clear where Jackson found him, though it is likely Jim was a slave whom Jackson hired from his owner, one William C. Lewis of Lexington.39 He rode his own horse. He was an attractive, light-skinned, middle-aged black man with refined manners. Though he professed admiration for Jackson’s temperance, he himself liked both liquor and playing cards.40 Before them were deployed some unwounded 30,000 Confederates, still in their four-mile-long line. Nearly all of them had been in the fight. By contrast, McClellan had 33,000 fresh troops, 13,000 in new reinforcements plus 20,000 who had been present but had not taken part in the battle. That was in addition to his main army. McClellan could not, or would not, see his advantage. In his mind Lee had more than 100,000 men, possibly more. Jackson, typically, had the reverse view: he believed it was still possible to mount a Confederate attack. According to his aide Douglas, he was “ready to fight at the drop of a hat.”41 Meanwhile Lee, Jackson, and Longstreet fully expected a renewal of the Federal attack.
But September 18 passed with only intermittent picket fire. No attack came. McClellan had had enough. “I concluded that the success of an attack on the 18th was not certain,” he wrote later. “I should have had a narrow view of the condition of the country had I been willing to hazard another battle with less than absolute assurance of success.”42 But he also seemed perfectly content with what he had accomplished. “I feel some little pride,” he wrote his wife, “in having, with a beaten and demoralized army, defeated Lee so utterly, & saved the North so completely.”43 He had of course not defeated Lee at all. He had made a series of uncoordinated, piecemeal assaults and had failed to do what he needed to do to win, which was to move simultaneously against Lee’s center and right while attacking his left. He had actually achieved a drawn battle against a force half his size, a fact that would give the clear tactical victory to Lee.
But the purely strategic victory clearly belonged to Little Mac. The best evidence for this, on a strictly military level, was the withdrawal, starting after sundown on the night of September 18, of Lee’s army. His soldiers left in a thunderstorm, then marched south to Boteler’s Ford, where they crossed the knee-deep, three-hundred-yard-wide Potomac to Shepherds-town, Virginia. There they became entangled in a massive traffic jam that did not sort itself out until the following morning. The army had to fight a single rear-guard action when four Federal brigades managed to cross and threaten to seize some forty cannons. Jackson sent A. P. Hill and four regiments to remedy this, resulting in what Jackson called “an appalling scene of destruction of human life” as Hill’s men first ran the Yankees into the river, then shot them as they tried to cross it.44
Though it was a small affair, with no more than six hundred men killed or wounded on both sides, and did not really constitute the pursuit of Lee by McClellan, Jackson’s fierce and immediate counterstroke gained considerable fame as the Battle of Shepherdstown. Southerners saw it as a thumb in the eye of Federals who would dare to pursue Lee’s army into Virginia, a clear victory after the hazy outcome at Sharpsburg. Though initially depressed by the battle’s outcome and Lee’s retreat, Southerners, too, came to see value in Lee’s Maryland expedition: vastly outnumbered, he had fought McClellan to a draw; he had crossed the river unmolested and of his own free will; and Jackson’s stunning capture of twelve thousand prisoners was a great victory. Asked the Richmond Dispatch in response to claims of a glorious victory in the Northern press,
“If we have been thus badly beaten . . . why has McClellan not crossed the river and destroyed the army of Gen. Lee? . . . The truth is this: the victory, though not so decisive as that of Manassas, was certainly a Confederate victory.”45 That was a comforting thought, but not really true. It came to seem even better in the wake of two Confederate reverses in the West in October at Corinth, Mississippi, and at Perryville, Kentucky.
But all that was just white noise compared to the real significance of the Battle of Antietam, which was political and not military. For two months, Lincoln had been sitting on his draft of an Emancipation Proclamation. He had been waiting for a decisive victory so that issuing the document would not seem an act of desperation. McClellan and Pope had given him nothing but bitter, shattering defeats at Seven Days, Cedar Mountain, and Second Manassas. But now, with Lee’s withdrawal from the field, Lincoln decided that the outcome at Antietam was good enough. The hour had come. “I wish it was a better time,” he told his cabinet in a meeting on September 22, five days after the battle. “The action of the army against the rebels has not been quite what I should have best liked. But they have been driven out of Maryland.” That same day he issued the proclamation, which warned the seceded states that unless they came back into the Union by January 1, 1863, their slaves “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” Lincoln was using his war powers to seize Confederate property; he had no constitutional authority to free slaves in the border states of Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky, and Delaware. But for the other states the proclamation would create, in effect, an army of liberation, assuming that army could defeat and occupy individual Confederate states. That, of course, was a gigantic assumption. It was not even clear, on September 22, that Union soldiers—including George McClellan—would fight a war that was now explicitly about freeing slaves.
The Battle of Antietam arrested the singular momentum of the Army of Northern Virginia. But the Emancipation Proclamation changed the very nature of the war. It would no longer be about putting the Union back together. It was now explicitly about ripping it apart—and with it the social fabric of the South itself—and building something entirely new. Wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in the November 1862 Atlantic, “It is not a measure that admits of being taken back. Done, it cannot be undone by a new administration. . . . It makes a victory of our defeats.”46 As Halleck told Grant, “There is now no possible hope of reconciliation. We must conquer the rebels or be conquered by them.”47 After the Emancipation Proclamation, the only way the war was going to end was if one side won it by sheer force of arms—something the Confederacy would simply never be able to do. The proclamation also marked the beginning of the end of the South’s long dalliance with the European powers. Soon enough, they would gently withdraw to permanent onlooker status, having decided that the Confederacy was unlikely to win. Britain, meanwhile, was fast coming to the conclusion that it wanted nothing to do with an ally who, in spite of its protests to the contrary, appeared now to be fighting for the cause of slavery.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
STONEWALL JACKSON’S WAY
Had the war changed Thomas J. Jackson? After eighteen months of brutal dislocation that had changed so many others, the question is worth asking. There was no simple answer. He could, and did, often seem completely opaque, even to his own staff. Between his administrative duties—managing equipment, supplies, munitions, medical matters, and food, dealing with Richmond, overseeing promotions and other personnel matters—and his basic responsibilities for marching and fighting, Jackson presents such a seamless blur of activity that it is easy to lose sight of the man behind the rank.1 A rare exception was the two-month period that followed the Battle of Antietam. The Union army had offered no immediate pursuit. There was no fighting. There were no forced marches. Jackson spent almost all of that time in various camps near Bunker Hill, just north of his beloved—and dramatically changed—Winchester. And though he was still quite busy, in this period of extended rest the man himself became more visible.
He comes most sharply into focus through the eyes of a British army colonel named Garnet Wolseley, who visited Jackson’s camp in the second week of October along with two English reporters. Wolseley was one of the brightest stars in his country’s army. He would later become commander in chief of the British army and thus the most powerful military figure in the world. He had gone out of his way to meet the famous Confederate general, even though he had been told that the taciturn Jackson would be a difficult interview. But Jackson was not at all what he expected. With a newly shaven upper lip and chin and “only a very small allowance of whisker,” Jackson cordially welcomed his visitors into his tent.2 He began the conversation by speaking of his trip to England and the Continent in 1856, particularly of his fondness for English cathedrals, then asked his guests questions about various English subjects. In contrast to so many observers who found Jackson disappointing in person, Wolseley, an outsider who saw him unfiltered by the lens of the wartime army, was enormously impressed. (A later British visitor, a member of the House of Commons, said Jackson was the best-informed military man he met in America.3) This was not because Jackson’s manner had changed—one of the reporters present recalled him as courteous but somewhat distant and reserved—but his presence clearly had.4 Jackson was still Jackson, and dressed like Jackson. But Wolseley, the soldier’s soldier, believed himself to be in the company of a brilliant and fully formed leader of men.
“Dressed in his gray uniform, he looks the hero that he is,” Colonel Wolseley wrote in a British magazine a few months later,
and his thin compressed lips and calm glance, which meets you so unflinchingly, give evidence of that firmness and decision of character for which he is so famous. . . . Though his conversation is perfectly free from all religious cant, it is evident that he is a person who never loses sight of the fact that there is an omnipresent Deity ever presiding over the minutest occurrences of life. . . .
With such a leader men would go anywhere, and face any amount of difficulties; and for myself, I believe that, inspired by the presence of such a man, I should be perfectly insensible to fatigue, and reckon upon success as a moral certainty. . . . Jackson, like Napoleon, is idolized with the intense fervor which, consisting of mingled personal attachment and devoted loyalty, causes them to meet death for his sake and bless him while dying.5
Many of Jackson’s men would have agreed with Wolseley. Whether his wild popularity was somehow rooted in his unusual personality, or, as his cynical brother-in-law D. H. Hill believed, solely in his ability to win on the battlefield—or some combination of the two—there was clearly more to him than the old science teacher with a few glorious victories under his belt. Almost everyone who had known him before noted this change. His old friend Mrs. Fanny Graham from Winchester saw the transformation in physical terms. “He is looking in such perfect health—far handsomer than I ever saw him,” she wrote Anna after the general had stopped by for tea at her home in Winchester.6 A few months later Anna, too, would remark on this improvement in his looks that is apparent today in his few portraits.7 Gone is the almost petulant expression of the prewar photographs, replaced with the face—apparent in his famous “Winchester” portrait that his wife and friends all said was a true record of his appearance—of a man who indeed looked much more handsome, older, wiser, and more complete. It was perhaps no accident that someone whose many physical ills had virtually vanished—except for his unidentified sickness during the Seven Days—would seem physically transformed.8 Though he was considerably thinner than he had been before the war, he was otherwise, for the first time in his adult life, completely healthy.
Part of his change, too, was the fame itself, which attached itself to him and would not let him alone. He was adored and idolized all over the South. One Alabama private wrote, “If Jesus Christ were to ride along the ranks on the foal of an ass, there would not be half the cheering and huzzahing” the general received.9 When he walked to regimental church services, men would drop wh
at they were doing, including their card games, follow him, and stand in rapt silence while he knelt and often prayed aloud for them. (They were just as likely to return to their cards when he had departed.10) His mere presence in camp often sparked the feral crescendos of the rebel yell. Henry Kyd Douglas described a night in camp when “there broke forth that wild and joyous yell for which the Stonewall Brigade was famous. Other brigades and divisions took it up and it sprang from camp to camp with increasing vigor, until the bright arch of Heaven seemed to resound with the thundering acclaim. . . . When it was at its height I saw the General come out, bareheaded, from his tent, walk to the fence and lean his elbow on the topmost rail. . . . When it was all over, he returned slowly to his tent, and said in soliloquy as he entered: ‘That was the sweetest music I ever heard.’ ”11
One of the most telling signs of his renown—and his inability to escape it—was the song, written on the eve of Antietam, that was sweeping through Confederate ranks and that would become one of the more popular Confederate songs of the war. Set to a spirited, upbeat tune, “Stonewall Jackson’s Way” was a faithful reflection of the way he was seen in the ranks in the fall of 1862. In its third verse, the song dares anyone to “scoff ” at Jackson’s habits of worship.
Come, stack arms, men! Pile on the rails,
Stir up the camp-fire bright;
No matter if the canteen fails,
We’ll make a roaring night.
Here Shenandoah brawls along,
There burly Blue Ridge echoes strong,
To swell the brigade’s rousing song