When darkness came at last, “the earth was absolutely hidden under acres of slain and dying,” Meagher wrote his brother-in-law Sam Barlow. If McClellan had steeled himself, he could have driven Lee into the Potomac, and perhaps won the war. But he feared that the general who’d mastered him at every turn had something hidden—more of those phantom reserves. Lee had no such thing, and soon, no hold on Union soil; the rebels retreated the following day back into Virginia. After more than twelve hours of fighting, only a few hundred yards had exchanged hands—here in a cornfield, there near the
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