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Now Lincoln and Stanton became enraged at McClellan, believing that he was deliberately refusing to help Pope. “He has acted badly toward Pope,” Lincoln told his secretary John Hay. “He really wanted him to fail.” While the latter was almost certainly true, there is little hard evidence that McClellan, acting from pure enmity, actually wanted his country to fail, too.29
It was George McClellan. As he approached he saluted crisply and proceeded to inform them—to their numb amazement—that by order of President Lincoln he was now back in full command of the armies of Virginia. A few moments later General John Hatch, who hated Pope and felt mistreated by him, addressed his infantry in a parade-ground voice that was heard by all, “Boys, McClellan is in charge of the army again! Three cheers!”41 His men erupted, shouting and screaming “with wild delight.”
Jackson’s new fame went with them. It is impossible to underestimate the pride, wonder, and unalloyed happiness that surged through the Confederacy after Second Manassas. Victory had scarcely seemed possible. Ruin had seemed inevitable. Yet there it was: a huge Union army slinking back into Washington’s defenses, while the ragged boys in butternut and gray stood magnificent and bloody and triumphant on the field.
Lee approached the river with fifty thousand to fifty-five thousand men, a force that had been replenished by Richmond after Second Manassas. Twelve days later he had less than forty thousand.18 The cause was straggling on an unprecedented scale. Some of the men fell away for lack of shoes, some because of illness or diarrhea or malnourishment. Many wanted nothing to do with an invasion of the North. They were fighting only to protect their homeland, as they saw it, only to repel the invader. But “straggling” didn’t quite cover what was going on: a lot of this was outright desertion by men who
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Though little blood was spilled, Harpers Ferry was on paper the most comprehensive Confederate victory of the war.35 It was the largest surrender of Federal troops, larger in numbers than the surrender of British Generals Cornwallis or Burgoyne in the Revolutionary War.36 The defeat was so humiliating that when news of it was released in Washington, War Department censors cut the numbers of Union soldiers captured in half.37
But McClellan gave no such orders. This was to be the pattern of the day’s Union attacks: piecemeal and without coordination, thus failing to capitalize on the enormous Federal advantage in numbers.
Twenty-three hundred Union soldiers fell in fifteen minutes in the fight that would soon be known as the West Woods Massacre. (That is five men every two seconds.)
Antietam was really three battles, fought more or less sequentially on September 17 between dawn and dusk. The first of these was the four-hour Hooker–Jackson donnybrook in the north. The second, just as frenzied and recklessly violent, took place in the center.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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 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
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(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.
“Don’t trouble yourself about representations that are made of your husband,” he wrote. “These things are earthly and transitory. There are real and glorious blessings, I trust, in reserve for us beyond this life. It is best for us to keep our eyes fixed upon the throne of God and the realities of a more glorious existence beyond the verge of time. It is gratifying to be beloved and to have our conduct approved by our fellow-men, but this is not worthy to be compared with the glory that is in reservation for us in the presence of our glorified Redeemer.”
One night Stuart arrived at a late hour at Jackson’s headquarters to find the general asleep. Instead of returning to his own camp, he took off his saber and lay down next to Jackson to sleep, which touched off a nightlong struggle for the single blanket. The next morning Stuart awoke to find Jackson and some of his staff warming themselves by a campfire. “Good morning!” said Stuart. “How are you?” “General Stuart, I am always glad to see you here,” Jackson replied. “You might select better hours sometime, but I am always glad to have you. But General,” he said, rubbing his legs, “you must not
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But McClellan’s brief, bright hour was over. That same day, while long lines formed in front of Mathew Brady’s gallery in New York City to see gruesome photographs of dead soldiers at Antietam, his Civil War career ended. Lincoln, long-suffering and almost preternaturally patient with his problem child, had finally had enough. During the snowstorm, Lincoln’s emissary, the picturesquely named Brigadier General Catharinus P. Buckingham, arrived to tell McClellan that he was relieved, effective immediately, and replaced by Major General Ambrose Burnside.
wife.” Of Burnside he said accurately, “He is as sorry to assume command as I am to give it up.”25
Lee had decided to stand and fight behind the Rappahannock. He actually could not believe that Burnside wanted to fight there. As one Confederate officer put it, “If the world had been searched by Burnside for a location in which his army could be best defeated and where an attack should not have been made he should have selected this very spot.”34
“Major, my men sometimes fail to take a position, but to defend one, never! I am glad the Yankees are coming.”
The Union had suffered 12,653 killed and wounded, the Confederacy 5,309. Ambrose Burnside, stubborn till the end, wanted to personally lead an attack of his 9th Corps the next day, but was talked out of it by his generals. Though he has gone down in history as an incompetent field commander for his tactics at Fredericksburg, in fact there was often a fine line in the Civil War between tenacity and foolishness. At Gaines’s Mill, Lee spent more than five hours assaulting uphill against a phenomenally strong Federal position, and lost nearly 8,000 men in the process. Yet because his final
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Lincoln soon faced a full-scale mutiny from the Senate Republican caucus, which in effect demanded Secretary of State William Seward’s head in compensation for the loss. Though the president famously outmaneuvered the senators—and Seward kept his job—the shocking loss on the battlefield once again suggested a rudderless, divided country fighting a war with no clear end in sight.
On the way back to headquarters Jackson, riding now with McGuire and Smith, said nothing until they neared their camp, when he suddenly said, “How horrible is war.” “Horrible, yes,” McGuire replied. “But we have been invaded. What can we do?” “Kill them, sir,” Jackson said. “Kill every man.”54
war dragged on, many of the men in the Confederate States Army remembered the winter of 1862–63 as one of the most extraordinary times of their lives.
Facing stiff resistance, he turned north instead of south, captured a Union telegraph office just fifteen miles from Washington, and sent a wire to Union quartermaster Montgomery Meigs complaining that the substandard mules he was capturing were not up to the job of pulling all the provisions he was stealing.
In one a soldier is told that his head wound would require his head to be amputated. He replies that at least then he will be able to get a furlough, only to be told that his headless body is needed as a decoy to fool the enemy.22
Perhaps his most ardent desire, after peace itself, was to lead what he often called a “converted army.”28 His efforts were rooted in his own reluctance to make his feelings and beliefs public, though he felt considerable pressure to do so. “You suggest that I give my views and wishes in such form and extent as I am willing should be made public,” he wrote Reverend White in Lexington. “This I shrink from doing, because it looks like presumption in me, to come before the public and even intimate what course I think should be pursued by the people of God.”29 He preferred to push privately, and
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camps. In a letter to his old friend and business partner—and Maggie’s husband—J. T. L. Preston, he wanted the Southern nation itself to officially embrace God. Saying that he thought the United States had taken unnecessarily extreme means to separate church and state, he wrote, “Let our Government acknowledge the God of the Bible as its God, and we may expect soon to be a happy and independent people.”37
By these movements Hooker planned to force Lee out of his entrenchments and into the open, where he would either have to fight or retreat on Richmond. By April 30, everything was going exactly as planned.
Robert E. Lee, meanwhile, the great strategic and tactical genius, had failed to anticipate any of this.7 The best evidence of this failure was that, as Hooker’s men were marching, fully a quarter of Lee’s army was running an errand some eighty miles away in southeastern Virginia.
The day ended with Hooker’s troops in exactly the same position they had been in at dawn. Jackson’s men were two miles in advance of Anderson’s entrenchments. Jackson had won the day: Hooker’s huge army was suddenly penned up in dense thickets, where its numbers meant far less than they would have on open ground.
Jackson believed that Hooker would withdraw by morning. Lee had a different idea. As he saw it, Hooker’s quick retreat simply meant that he wanted to fight a defensive battle. Instead of withdrawing, he was digging in, and daring Lee to attack. Lee was right, as it turned out, and he fully intended to oblige his adversary.
Jeb Stuart’s subordinate, Brigadier General Fitzhugh Lee, whose cavalry had been doing the main reconnaissance, had discovered something extraordinary out there: rebel horsemen controlled virtually all the roads on the Confederate left, right up to the Federal picket lines, and thus the “eyes and ears” on Hooker’s right flank belonged entirely to the Confederacy. This was partly—though not entirely—because much of the Union cavalry corps was off with its commander George Stoneman trying to disrupt Confederate supply lines. Stoneman’s expedition would turn out to be an epic failure and one of
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There was a pause as Lee reflected on the high-risk plan they were so calmly discussing. He had divided his army once in February, sending Longstreet south. He had divided it again the previous day, leaving Jubal Early with his single division on the heights of Fredericksburg. Now he had decided not only to divide his army a third time, but also to march the largest part of it directly across his enemy’s front, roughly similar to what Edwin Sumner and John Sedgwick had done with the Union 2nd Corps at Antietam, where Jackson had slaughtered them like animals. Lee was betting—it was one of the
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Through their camps rushed frantic rabbits, deer, quail, and wild turkeys, then there was an odd silence, and then Jackson’s massive, screaming, onrushing wall of gray was upon them. It was so sudden and so overwhelming that men who were there later used storm or avalanche metaphors to describe it. There was very little they could do about it, except to drop what they had and run for their lives. There was an effort made here and there by Union infantry to form and make some sort of fight, but the shock of the assault was too much for most of them.
The victory was fast and complete. In an hour and a half Jackson had shattered the 11th Corps and driven forward a full mile and a quarter to a point less than two miles from Hooker’s headquarters. The 11th Corps had suffered 2,400 casualties out of 11,000 men, including 1,000 captured. Jackson lost only 800 men.33
“I have just received your note, informing me that you were wounded,” Lee wrote. “I cannot express my regret at the occurrence. Could I have directed events, I should have chosen, for the good of the country, to have been disabled in your stead. I congratulate you upon the victory, which is due to your skill and energy.” Jackson listened, then said, “General Lee is very kind, but he should give the praise to God.”
“You find me severely wounded,” Jackson said, “but not unhappy or depressed. I believe that it has been done according to the will of God; and I acquiesce entirely in His holy will. It may appear strange, but you never saw me more perfectly contented than I am today, for I am sure my heavenly father designs this affliction for my own good.”
The Battle of Chancellorsville, from Jackson’s stunning flank attack to the withdrawal of the immense Union army under cover of darkness, is considered Robert E. Lee’s greatest victory. He had won it without Longstreet and with less than half as many soldiers as his enemy. But at terrible cost. There were 30,500 casualties in all in three days of fighting: 17,197 Union and 13,303 Confederate. And the indomitable Jackson was convalescing miles behind the lines. “Jackson has lost his left arm,” Lee told Lacy. “But I my right arm.”20 Fifty miles away, in Washington, Lincoln’s reaction to Hooker’s
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While washing oneself, one might imagine the cleansing blood of Christ; while dressing, one might pray to be cloaked in the Savior’s righteousness; while eating, to be feeding on the bread of heaven. Jackson had long lived this way, consecrating even his most trivial actions to God. Now he had leisure time to discuss his beliefs in detail. He asked his aide Lieutenant Smith, a former theological student, where the Bible gives generals models for their official battle reports. Smith replied, laughing, that he would never have thought to find such a thing in Scripture. “Nevertheless,” said
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“Well, before this day closes, you will be with the blessed Savior in His glory,” Anna said. Jackson replied, “I will be an infinite gainer to be translated.”
Soon “a smile of ineffable sweetness” came across his face and he said, “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.” Then, without pain or struggle, McGuire wrote, “his spirit passed from the earth to the God who gave it.”
Most Southerners believed, with good reason, that Lincoln would have treated them more fairly and more decently than Andrew Johnson and the radical Republicans.21 Most still disliked or hated the man. But in the North there was widespread admiration for Jackson, for both his Christian
I sought my state-room, to weep there. Is it wrong, is it treason, to mourn for a good and great, though clearly mistaken man? I cannot feel it to be so. I loved him dearly—but now—he is with dear, dear Ellie and the rest! Oh, God! Oh give us grace to acquiesce in these terrible mysteries of Thy providence.26
“The death of your noble son and my much esteemed friend, Hugh, must have been a severe blow to you,” Jackson had written, “yet we have the sweet assurance that, whilst we mourn his loss to the country, to the church, and to ourselves, all has been gain for him . . . that inconceivable glory to which we are looking forward is already his.”32 It was as though Jackson were telling his country, from beyond the grave, how to think about his own death.
Pardoned in 1868, he returned to Virginia to practice law and soon became the most vocal of the unreconstructed rebels. His writing helped launch the so-called Lost Cause movement, whose main tenets were that the North had beaten the South not by military skill but because it was able to field vastly more men and weaponry; that the war was about defending states’ rights against Northern aggression; that slavery was a benign institution; that Reconstruction was an attempt to destroy the Southern way of life; and that the leaders of the Confederate armies were principled, Christian men in
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