by Bruce Catton
4. The Romance of War Was Over
It all happened a long time ago, and that part of the reality which is represented by smoke and flame and bloodshed casts a thin shadow now, its original darkness bleached out by the years. Yet something endures, even if it is no more than the quiet truth that nothing is ever wasted, and the story of what happened along the Antietam is not just the story of young men who passed needlessly through the fire to Moloch. For in the end the young men who passed along that path were triumphant, and the incapacity which cost them so much has ceased to matter.
Their triumph was not the winning of a battle, for this battle seemingly was not won by anybody; to all appearances it was simply a stalemate that wrecked two armies. Yet victory was in it. After it had been fought—because it had been fought—history came to a turning point. Indecisive tactically, the battle shaped all the rest of the war: meant, at the very least, that the war now must be fought to a finish. There could no longer be a hope for a peace without victory. The great issues that created the war were going to be settled, at no matter what terrible cost. This fight was decisive.
Yet at the moment it did not look decisive. It looked like a standoff, and the morning after the battle the two exhausted armies lay on the field staring blankly over the silent guns, as if they were appalled by what they had done to each other. Here and there men on the rival lines made an informal truce so that the wounded could be carried in, but the pickets were alert and scattered shots rang out now and then, warning the ranging stretcher-bearers not to go too far. All day long the soldiers awaited a new outburst of fighting. Heavy reinforcements came into McClellan's lines, and generals went out to study new angles of attack; McClellan listened to them, nodded sagely, and decided to delay the offensive until next day. On the opposite side Lee considered an attack north of the Dunker church, regretfully gave it up when Jackson reported the Federal position there too strong to be carried, and waited for the day to end; and the hot sun came down on fields and copses where lay thousands of unburied bodies. And at last it was night again, and after dark the Federals heard in their front a steady, unbroken sound like the flowing of a great river, hour after hour—the tramping of the brigades of Lee's army moving back to cross the Potomac on the return to Virginia. When morning came the noise had ceased and the Union Army had the field to itself, with none but dead men in front of it.
The cavalry and Fitz-John Porter's infantry were sent on to the river to make sure the last Rebels had gone. They rounded up a few belated stragglers, and they did a good deal of sniping across the water at Lee's rear guard. Porter ran some artillery down to the bank, and that night some of his regiments crossed, captured a few guns, and went forward to see what further damage they could do. The Confederates struck back savagely in the gray of the next morning: A. P. Hill's division again, lashing out at McClellan for the last time. A new Pennsylvania regiment, which, having been armed with condemned muskets, somehow found itself on the front line, discovered that its weapons could not be fired, and took a brutal beating before it could get back to the northern shore. There was no more fighting. The Army of Northern Virginia withdrew slowly up the Shenandoah Valley, and the Army of the Potomac stayed where it was, too worn to pursue, and wearily went to work to tidy up the battlefield.
This battlefield was unspeakably awful by now. Swollen corpses darkened by the sun lay everywhere, giving off a frightful stench, and burial parties were put to work. (Any regiment which had got into the bad graces of its brigadier, a veteran wrote later, was sure to be given this assignment.) Great fires were built to consume the innumerable carcasses of dead horses, and nauseating greasy smoke went drifting down-wind and compounded the evil. The men dug long trenches for mass burials of dead Confederates—McClellan said they buried twenty-seven hundred of them, but the count seems to have been too high—and they tried to make individual graves for their own comrades, putting up little wooden markers with names and regimental numbers wherever they could.
Even men who had been in the thickest of the fighting were astounded when they went about the field and saw how terrible the killing had really been. One officer counted more than two hundred dead Southerners in a five-hundred-foot stretch of the Bloody Lane. An Ohio soldier wrote that the lane was "literally filled with dead." Stupefied Pennsylvania rookies gossiped fatuously that the Confederate bodies they were burying had turned black because the Rebels ate gunpowder for breakfast. One Northern soldier, moved by a somewhat ghoulish curiosity, carefully examined a body which hung doubled over a fence in rear of the Bloody Lane and found that it had been hit by fifty-seven bullets. Under the ashes of burned haystacks, in front of Burnside's corps, soldiers found the charred bodies of wounded men who had feebly crawled under the hay for shelter and had been too weak to crawl out when the stacks took fire.
Worst of all, perhaps, was the Hagerstown turnpike between the West Wood and the cornfield, where charge and countercharge had swept back and forth repeatedly, and where the post-and-rail fences on each side of the road were grotesquely festooned with corpses. The colonel of the 6th Wisconsin called this place "indescribably horrible" and said that when he rode through his horse "trembled in every limb with fright and was wet with perspiration." This officer served throughout the war, and when he wrote his reminiscences, in 1890, he said that what he saw along the Hagerstown road that morning was worse than anything he saw later at Spotsylvania's Bloody Angle, at Cold Harbor, or in front of the stone wall at Fredericksburg: "The Antietam turnpike surpassed all in manifest evidence of slaughter." Yet General Gibbon felt that the cornfield itself was even worse; the dead were actually piled on top of each other in places, and it seemed as if whole regiments had gone down in regular ranks. One soldier wrote that it would have been possible to walk from one side of the cornfield to the other without once stepping on the ground. There were two dozen dead horses and scores of human corpses in Mr. Miller's barnyard.1
There had been a great deal of killing, in other words. McClellan's official casualty list, which was made up a few days later, showed more than two thousand Federals killed in action and about ten thousand wounded. Rebel casualties were apparently slightly lower, although exact figures are lacking. Altogether, bearing in mind the number of wounded men who were to die, it is probable that five thousand young men lost their lives here; and whatever the correct figure may be, there seems no reason to doubt the accuracy of the contemporary writers who called the Antietam the worst single day of the entire war. Some regiments were down to pathetic remnants. Captain Noyes recorded that he met a company officer the morning after the battle who was carrying a huge piece of salt pork and was wondering what on earth to do with it—it was the day's meat ration for his company, just issued, and he was the company's sole survivor. Noyes added that he checked on this officer's amazing statement and found that it was true. Company G of the 12th Massachusetts had been reduced from 32 men to five; the whole regiment, even after it called in all convalescents and detailed men, numbered only 119 when it was formed for a review two weeks after the battle. The 80th New York had only 86 men to answer roll call the day after the battle, and the 28th New York—which had been a skeleton to begin with—was down to 53. The Irish Brigade had received 120 recruits just before the battle; it reported that 75 of the new men had been shot. Regimental losses of 50 per cent were common; had been suffered, for instance, by three of the four regiments in Sedgwick's front line during the fifteen-minute ambush in the West Wood.
The stragglers were at least coming back to the fold. General Meade, who was temporarily in command of Hooker's corps, wrote to his wife that the corps' "present for duty" total rose by five thousand in the three days after the battle, explaining that the increase was made up of "the cowards, skulkers, men who leave the ground with the wounded and do not return for days, the stragglers on the march, and all such characters." He added bitterly that this sort of thing was entirely due to the inefficiency of regimental and company officers.2 Like a good brigadier, Gi
bbon made a careful check of his own returns and discovered that the Black Hat Brigade's strength had increased by eighty in those three days; and he wrote proudly that "everyone of these were men who had returned from detached service and hospitals so that I had no stragglers." To add to his pride, he was learning that his brigade now had a new nickname, used by the whole army—the Iron Brigade, a name it carried for the rest of the war. Nobody was quite sure where it came from. The accepted story was that McClellan, watching its progress up the gap at South Mountain, had exclaimed in admiration: "That brigade must be made of iron!" Whatever its origin, the name stuck, and the brigade lived up to it valiantly the next summer at Gettysburg.3
The soldiers themselves were slow to realize just what they had achieved. All through the eighteenth of September, when the two armies waited in each other's presence for a renewal of the fighting, the battle had seemed unfinished. The Federals held part of the Rebel position, but only part of it; every offensive had been stopped just short of the goal, and the soldiers who had been driven back from the Dunker church, the Piper farm, and the edge of Sharpsburg knew perfectly well that their enemies had not been routed. It was only after Lee's army went back to Virginia that the Army of the Potomac began to see that it had gained more than it had lost. Meade probably expressed the general feeling when he wrote, three days after the battle, that the retreat of the Confederates proved that "we had hit them much harder than they had us, and that in reality our battle was a victory."4
A victory, indisputably, even if a negative one. Lee had invaded the North with high hopes; he had been compelled to fight along the Antietam, and after the fight he had had to go back into Virginia. At enormous cost the Army of the Potomac had won a strategic victory. The invader had been thrown back; or, if not precisely thrown back, he had been fought to a standstill and then had been allowed to go back, his late hosts very glad to see the last of him. However qualified this triumph might be, at least the invasion was over. There would be a new campaign now, and it would take place south of the Potomac.
McClellan was looking ahead to it. A week after the battle, when the last of the dead had been buried, he was making his plans: possess Harper's Ferry with a strong force, then reorganize the army thoroughly, get an abundance of new equipment and supplies, make proper replacements for the fallen generals, get those rookie regiments into better shape, and—all of this done—start south afresh. Privately he was jubilant. He had been cautious at first, writing his wife only that "the general result was in our favor"; but as the days passed his very need for inner reassurance made him see it in brighter colors. He wrote about the stacks of captured battle flags that had been brought to him and told his wife gaily: "You should see my soldiers now! You never saw anything like their enthusiasm. It surpassed anything you ever imagined." He had no doubt that his enemies in Washington would keep trying to get rid of him, and they might succeed, but that hardly mattered: "I feel now that this last short campaign is a sufficient legacy for our child, so far as honor is concerned." It seems that at last, as he thought it all over, he could see himself measuring up to some private, invisible yardstick. He wrote rather pathetically—for this was the commander of a great army, not a schoolboy mulling over his part in last week's football game—"Those in whose judgment I rely tell me that I fought the battle splendidly and that it was a masterpiece of art."
Masterpiece of art it assuredly was not: rather, a dreary succession of missed opportunities. Not once had the commanding general put out his hand to pull his battle plan together and to undo the mistakes of his subordinates. The battle had been left to fight itself, and the general was a spectator; and in the end it had been a victory by the narrowest of margins—tactically, a victory only in the sense that the army had fought hard and then had not retreated afterward. Meade had said the most that could be said: we hurt them a little more than they hurt us.
Yet it was finally, and irrevocably, the decisive battle of the war, affecting the whole course of American history ever since.
For this stalemated battle—this great whirlwind of flame and torn earth and shaking sound, which seemed to consume everything and to create nothing—brought about the Emancipation Proclamation and put the country on a new course from which there could be no turning back. Here at last was the sounding forth of the bugle that would never call retreat.
All summer Lincoln had been waiting for a victory. Here it was, now: an uncertain victory, looking very much like no victory at all, but for all that, and with all of its imperfections, a victory, the all-important victory which he had to have if the war was to be won. One week later he issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, and the war was transformed.
Like the battle itself, the Proclamation at first seemed an achievement of doubtful value. It was just words, promising much but doing nothing. They were not even bold, straightforward words, it seemed. Perversely, they ordained freedom in precisely those places where the Union armies could not make freedom a fact and left slavery untouched elsewhere. They infuriated all sympathizers with secession—Gideon Welles noted glumly that "this step will band the south together"—and they left the abolitionists unsatisfied. They seemed to be neither hot nor cold, a futile attempt to find a middle course in a struggle which had no middle course—and in the end they had more power than a great army with banners.
Their real effect was first seen afar off, in London, where they gave this war in America a new aspect, so that statesmen found to their surprise that it was something with which they could not interfere.
In October the Emperor of France formally proposed that England, France, and Russia step in and bring about a six months' armistice—which, in its practical effect, would mean (and was meant to mean) independence for the Confederacy. Britain's Foreign Minister recommended acceptance of the proposal. But the British Cabinet rejected it, for a pro-Confederate in England now was an apologist for slavery, whether he liked it or not. By mid-January, American Minister Adams was writing in his diary: "It is quite clear that the current is now setting very strongly with us among the body of the people," and a little later Jefferson Davis himself recognized that the chance for intervention was dead and withdrew those famous emissaries, Mason and Slidell. By June, when it seemed in Britain most certain that the Confederacy must win—Hooker had been beaten at Chancellorsville, Lee was north of the border again, the Northern cause had never looked worse—public opinion had completely hardened and recognition was impossible.
In substance, then, the Proclamation meant that Europe was not going to decide how the American Civil War came out. It would be fought out at home.
And it would be fought to the bitter end. The chance for compromise was killed.
Until now there had always been the prospect that sooner or later the war might simply end, with neither side victorious. Reunion, continuation of slavery, some adjustment, perhaps, on the thorny issue of states' rights: the whole body of Northern sentiment on which the Copperhead movement was based had exactly that in mind, and there was plenty of feeling along the same line in the South. But the Proclamation made that impossible. The war had been given a deeper meaning and had become something that could not be adjusted. The deep, tangled issues underneath the war—slavery, the permanence of the Union, the dawning concept that a powerful central government might protect the people's freedom rather than endanger it—all of these, now, must be settled, not evaded; and settled by violence, violence having been unleashed.
It might still be argued that they could far better be settled in some other way, but the argument was no longer relevant. The war now was a war to preserve the Union and to end slavery—two causes in one, the combination carrying its own consequences. It could not stop until one side or the other was made incapable of fighting any longer; hence, by the standards of that day, it was going to be an all-out war—hard, ruthless, vicious, with Sheridan carrying devastation across the Shenandoah and Sherman swinging a torch across Georgia and Grant pitilessly grinding two
armies to powder so that the Confederacy, if it would not die in any other way, might die of sheer exhaustion. (Exhaustion of spirit, of people, of resources, of culture: a bleeding-white from which the country would be generations recovering. ) The war must ultimately go that way henceforward. It had come through its period of uncertainty, the period in which it might lead to anything. Now it could lead only to this. It could no longer be fought on simple enthusiasm like a swords-and-roses romance of knightly legend. From now on it would be all grim.
Which meant, finally, that McClellan's part in it was finished. The men who wanted to be rid of him at all costs—who would even have been glad to see him beaten, because that would give grounds for dismissal—could act against him now, not because he had been beaten but precisely because he had won. His victory meant the last thing on earth he would have wished it to mean: sweeping triumph, not merely for the abolitionists whom he hated and considered traitors, but for the implacable spirit of force that was to take control of the nation's destiny. He had let himself be made a political symbol: symbol of the belief in a limited war for limited objectives, a war consciously aimed at something less than destruction of the Southland's way of life, a war that would not bring about profound alteration in the national government. The battle he won meant that the cause he symbolized was not to prevail, and so the symbol itself would have to vanish.
By one of the great ironies of history, this cause and McClellan himself might have been triumphant if the victory along the Antietam had been complete instead of partial. And a complete victory had been within his grasp, over and over again. Run down the might-have-beens for a moment: