Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson

by S.C. Gwynne

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.