Upon the Altar of the Nation (28 page)

 

On September 4, a triumphant President Davis proclaimed a national thanksgiving day for September 18. The fast days had done their job and now the time had arrived for measured thanksgiving: “Once more upon the plains of Manassas have our armies been blessed by the Lord of Hosts with a triumph over our enemies. It is my privilege to invite you once more to his footstool, not now in the garb of fasting and sorrow, but with joy and gladness, to render thanks for the great mercies received at his hand.”
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This time, with victories to count, the secular press was more willing to concede efficacy to religious observances. The
Richmond Daily Whig
enjoined all to observe the occasion: “To-day all the people of our fair land, which He has given us for a heritage should approach His footstool with joy and thanksgiving, and pour forth their hearts in praise and gratitude to Him who hath given us the victory.”
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Richmond’s Jeremiah Bell Jeter celebrated the thanksgiving with an unpublished sermon on “The National Victories.” His text, from Psalm 126:3 (“The Lord hath done great things for us”), yielded a classic jeremiad. In developing the parallel between ancient Israel and God’s new Confederate Israel, Jeter explained that both had experienced crushing defeats, but then turned to their covenant God and were delivered: “The Jews rejoyced in their restoration to their own land and well they might. Have we not cause to rejoice in our deliverance?” The recent victories around Richmond confirmed God’s presence with the Confederacy:

Of the many published sermons following the September thanksgiving, one delivered by Henry Allen Tupper, pastor of the Baptist Church in Washington, Georgia, stands out. Tupper had the distinction of also serving as a chaplain of the Ninth Georgia regiment and delivered a sermon to his home congregation. His text, from Psalm 124 (“the snare is broken”) had been a highly favored scripture during the American Revolution. From start to finish, Tupper’s sermon offered a vitriolic attack on the “Northern rapacity,” as only a chaplain involved in combat could produce. If the South had its “peculiar institution,” Tupper countered, the North had its “peculiar sentiment”—a sentiment so hateful to Southern sensibilities and life that nothing short of “monstrous barbarities” against the South can satisfy its bloodlust. In response to this apostasy, God blessed the South with “many providences,” so that “since our escape, how merciful has God been to us, as a Government, a people, and an army!”

By locating the Southern struggle in the American Revolution and invoking its rhetoric, sermons like Tupper’s grafted the short history of the Confederacy onto the long history of the American Revolution and, through that, to ancient Israel. On that rhetorical foundation, Tupper could conclude with a confident benediction: “Oh God, look down upon our bleeding country—hear the cries of our distracted mother—and arm her sons with hearts of fire, and sinews of steel, and let future ages know, in our rescue from the jaws of ruin, the glory of thy mercy, and the terribleness of thy wrath.”
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In September 1862 Tupper had confidence that just as Americans looked back to the Revolution for present history and comfort, so “future ages” would look back on these revolutionary years as the beginning of a very old and distinguished history.
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Meanwhile, in the Confederacy, President Davis passed the Second Conscription Act on September 27, authorizing the government to call out men between thirty-five and forty-five years of age. A million soldiers in arms was clearly not enough. Total war meant entirely new proportions of soldiers, which meant disproportionate carnage. By the end of the year, soldiers in uniform would number 918,121 for the North and 446,662 for the South, for a total of nearly 1.4 million men.
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With ever-increasing levies, and no end in sight, there was no room to think of exits or peace. It was a fight to the death and at the end only one would prevail.

P
ope had to go. But Lincoln saw no clear successors. Where were his Lee and Jackson? At the moment, and unbeknownst to Lincoln, Grant and Sherman were in the western theater. But in the all-important East, with no obvious candidate in view, Lincoln went back to the soldiers’ choice and reinstated the popular McClellan. One soldier’s song captured the respect the general still commanded with the soldiers:

McClellan returned to a hero’s welcome among the soldiers of the Army of the Potomac, but no one was more pleased than Robert E. Lee, who was presently entertaining thoughts of bringing Maryland into the Confederacy, and from there moving north to Washington. With McClellan effectively immobilized Lee would be free to maneuver at will and offset numerical shortcomings to his advantage.

By fall Lee had Davis’s complete trust and proceeded virtually unchecked. On September 5, 1862, Lee pressed the offensive, crossing the Potomac near Leesburg and occupying the town of Frederick, Maryland, two days later. This represented the first Confederate invasion of the North, and hysterical officials and journalists feared for Baltimore and Washington. Even Philadelphia was not considered safe before the menace of Lee’s bold tactics, Stonewall Jackson’s mysterious wanderings, and a flashy cavalry led by Jeb Stuart.

To secure his line of communications as he headed north, Lee again divided his army and sent Jackson’s six divisions to capture Harpers Ferry and secure supply lines to the Shenandoah Valley Again, Lee’s gamble paid off. On September 15, Jackson captured Harpers Ferry, taking with him an astounding eleven thousand prisoners. Meanwhile McClellan’s massive army of nearly ninety thousand remained safely and predictably cautious before Lee’s nineteen thousand effectives.

In what would stand as one of the most colossal overlooked intelligence finds of the war, Union Corporal Barton W. Mitchell discovered a copy of Lee’s orders wrapped around three cigars. “The Lost Order of Antietam” plainly showed how precariously Lee’s army was divided into four parts—McClellan’s army was actually closer to each Confederate wing than the wings were to one another.

Had McClellan acted decisively on this intelligence, he could easily have destroyed the Army of Northern Virginia in detail, by first smashing Lee’s army with overwhelming force and then turning on Jackson with similar results. In yet another instance of pathological caution, however, McClellan divined that the intercepted order must be a ruse planted by Lee to trap McClellan’s outnumbered army, so he held back for eighteen critical hours.
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Such are the contingencies of war, that with that fatal miscalculation, the moment to crush the Army of Northern Virginia, and quite probably the Confederacy with it, passed.

But a battle still remained to be fought. Lee’s newly combined force of forty thousand stood before an Army of the Potomac almost twice its size. But Lee had long since learned that raw numbers did not win battles—at least not in 1862—and decided to take his stand. Lee did not hesitate to divide his army and dramatically increase his hitting power. Of course the risks were enormous. If the Yankees ever had an inkling of a divided army, they would simply mass on one side and destroy it in force, then turn on the other and complete the destruction of Lee’s army. But that would require superior intelligence, and in the early years the Confederates—particularly Jeb Stuart’s cavalry—had the advantage. Lee knew exactly how strung out the Federals were and therefore where they were most vulnerable to flanking movements. With the Army of Northern Virginia reunited, the stage was set for the most horrific battle yet fought in the Civil War, and the single bloodiest day in American history.
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At daybreak on September 17, 1862, before the morning mist had burned away, Federal General Joseph Hooker’s First Corps engaged Stonewall Jackson’s seventy-seven hundred men in Miller’s cornfield along the Hagerstown Pike toward Dunkard Church. At the same time, Union General Edwin Sumner led five thousand men of General John Sedgwick’s division of Second Corps directly into a well-placed ambush by Confederate troops at West Woods just north of Dunkard Church. In twenty minutes, 40 percent of Sumner’s division was lost. Included among the wounded was Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who had been shot through the throat and left for dead.

The “Sunken Road” at Antietam. This photographic print on stereo card reveals the horror of the Civil War in a way that no other medium could convey to contemporary viewers. The Antietam photographs taken by Alexander Gardner and James Gibson were exhibited a month later at Mathew Brady’s studio in New York City.

Soon fighting broke out among other units, rapidly intensifying the engagement to the level of a battle. Battles, unlike skirmishes, involved units of tens of thousands rather than thousands. This meant, necessarily, casualties in tens of thousands rather than thousands. Rare was the commander who could simultaneously envision and assess fights across multiple fronts—each of which would have constituted a full-fledged battle a year earlier—and calmly deploy his legions. At Antietam, Northern commanders once again proved that they lacked that imperturbable vision.

Still the battle roared. Another battle raged just south of West Woods along a wagon-rutted old road known as Sunken Lane, but forever after remembered as Bloody Lane. There, two of Sumner’s divisions had marched south to attack Lee’s center. The rebels set their defensives in the hollow of the sunken lane where they were virtually impregnable. Wave after wave of General O. O. Howard’s famed Irish Brigade sought to breach the lines, leaving behind what the historian James McPherson describes as “a carpet of blue-clad corpses strewn across the fields northeast of the sunken road and a carpet of butternut and gray-clad corpses in the appropriately named Blood Lane.”
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Before the fighting around the road concluded, three thousand Union soldiers and twenty-five hundred Confederate soldiers lay stacked in rows, dead or waiting to die.

Despite heavy losses, McClellan’s brave infantry continued to pound Confederate positions furiously, and by midafternoon were well on their way to winning a battle of annihilation that could end the war. But as the critical moment to throw all into the wager arrived, McClellan once again lost his nerve, holding back nearly two full corps of reserves—over twenty thousand men—for fear of a Confederate counterattack.

One member of McClellan’s reserve force was Sergeant Major Charles Ward of the Thirty-second Massachusetts Volunteers. In a letter to his brother, written under live fire while the battle was raging, he described the frustration of hearing shattering gunfire, with needy comrades gone before, and simply jotting letters and “waiting for our time.”
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Ward was not alone in his frustration. When informed of McClellan’s timidity, Lincoln reportedly remarked: “He is an admirable engineer, but he seems to have a special talent for a stationary engine.”
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By midafternoon, Union General Ambrose Burnside finally crossed Antietam Creek over a stone bridge that has since borne his name and threatened to overwhelm Lee’s right flank. All appeared lost for the Southern contingent until, at the last moment, A. P. Hill’s division reached the battlefield from Harpers Ferry. Though exhausted by the forced march, Hill’s soldiers delivered a crushing counterattack that caught Burnside totally by surprise and saved the Army of Northern Virginia.

 

With no conclusive victory, Lee withdrew his army to Virginia, believing that he could yet strike Northern targets and terrify Northerners as far north as Philadelphia. In his wake, he left behind the worst wreckage of human lives in one day that America would ever see. Antietam implicitly rewrote the rules for acceptable losses in war, and no one protested. Twelve thousand four hundred Federals were killed and wounded alongside 11,724 Confederates for a total of 24,000 casualties in little more than twelve hours.
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Immediately after the battle, a writer for the
Philadelphia Inquirer
described rebel dead in characteristically lurid detail: