The Man Who Saved the Union (32 page)

R
obert E. Lee pushed the contest by invading Maryland. His army had scoured northern Virginia of all the supplies the region could produce; the farms and fields across the Potomac beckoned to his hungry soldiers. The North was vulnerable; its army was “
much weakened and demoralized,” Lee told
Jefferson Davis. Maryland contained numerous Southern sympathizers; a successful invasion would rally them to the
Confederate cause. An invasion might demoralize Northern voters ahead of the elections and compel the
Lincoln administration to change its policies. And by demonstrating Southern strength, an invasion could well prompt—or force—British and French
recognition of the Confederacy, which could do for Southern independence what French help had done for American independence in the Revolutionary War.

Lee crossed the Potomac with élan. “
To the People of Maryland,” he proclaimed: “Our army has come among you, and is prepared to assist you with the power of its arms in regarding the rights of which you have been despoiled.” Marylanders should reclaim those rights by rallying to the Confederate side.

But the Marylanders refused. Most of those bent on fighting for the South had already gone to Virginia and enlisted with the Confederacy; Marylanders still at home looked askance at Lee’s invading army—whose appearance, in any case, gave little reason to anticipate victory for the Southern cause. “
When I say that they were hungry, I convey no impression of the gaunt starvation that looked from their cavernous eyes,” a Maryland woman recalled. “All day they crowded to the doors of our houses, with always the same drawling complaint: ‘I’ve been a-marchin’ an’ a-fightin’ for six weeks stiddy, and I ain’t had n-a-r-thin’ to eat ’cept green apples an’ green cawn, an’ I wish you’d please to gimme a bit to eat.’ ” Far from bolstering Lee’s ranks, the intrusion into Maryland bled him, as thousands of his famished men succumbed to their bellies and dropped out of the line of march. Lee could do little to prevent their leaving. “
My army is ruined by straggling,” he confessed to a subordinate.

Those who stayed in line were the faithful and the resolute. The knowledge that they were outnumbered by the Federals didn’t bother them, for their experience had convinced them that they could beat twice their weight in Yankees. They might have been worried by one thing they did not know: that the enemy commander—George McClellan, to whom Lincoln had turned again, in desperation after Pope’s debacle—was
privy to Lee’s battle plan. Lee had sent coordinating directives to his principal lieutenants; one of the copies went astray and was found, wrapped around some cigars, by a Union corporal, who passed it up the chain of command. McClellan could scarcely credit his good fortune. “
Here is a paper with which if I cannot defeat Bobbie Lee, I will be willing to go home,” he declared privately. To Lincoln he wrote: “
I have all the plans of the rebels and will catch them in their own trap if my men are equal to the emergency.” Lincoln responded: “
God bless you, and all with you. Destroy the rebel army, if possible.”

Lee’s army had spread out as it crossed the Potomac, and McClellan moved to strike before the Confederates regrouped. But Lee, sensing uncharacteristic decisiveness in McClellan, ordered his commanders to coalesce, at Sharpsburg near Antietam Creek. Confederate general
John Walker got the order at Harpers Ferry. “
The thought of General Lee’s perilous position, with the Potomac River in his rear, confronting, with his small force, McClellan’s vast army, haunted me through the long hours of the night’s march,” Walker remembered. “I expected to find General Lee anxious and careworn.” Lee surprised him. “He was calm, dignified, and even cheerful. If he had had a well-equipped army of a hundred thousand veterans at his back, he could not have appeared more composed and confident.”

Lee’s confidence may have been real, but it was also for effect. The disparity in forces was daunting, at any rate to
James Longstreet, another of Lee’s generals. “
The blue uniforms of the Federals appeared among the trees that crowned the heights on the eastern bank of the Antietam,” Longstreet recalled. “The number increased, and larger and larger grew the field of blue until it seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see, and from the tops of the mountains down to the edges of the stream gathered the great army of McClellan.”

That army attacked in earnest on the morning of September 17. Union general
Joseph Hooker led his troops to the edge of a large cornfield. The rays of the rising sun glinted off the bayonets of Confederates otherwise concealed among the stalks. Hooker ordered his cannons loaded with canister, and the gunners opened fire. The effect was immediate and devastating. “
Every stalk of corn in the northern and greater part of the field was cut as closely as could have been done with a knife,” Hooker reported afterward, “and the slain lay in rows precisely as they had stood in their ranks a few moments before.”

But the Confederates fought back with stubborn, savage effect, till
the battlefield became a scene of unparalleled violence. “
To those who have not been witnesses of a great battle like this,” Confederate John Walker wrote later, “where more than a hundred thousand men, armed with all the appliances of modern science and skill, are engaged in the work of slaughtering each other, it is impossible by the power of words to convey an adequate idea of its terrible sublimity. The constant booming of cannon, the ceaseless rattle and roar of musketry, the glimpses of galloping horsemen and marching infantry, now seen, now lost in the smoke, adding weirdness to terror, all together make up a combination of sights and sounds wholly indescribable.”

James Longstreet perceived the fighting as something almost beyond human control. “
The line swayed forward and back like a rope exposed to rushing currents,” the Confederate general recalled. “A force too heavy to be withstood would strike and drive in a weak point till we could collect a few fragments, and in turn force back the advance till our lost ground was recovered.” The determination of the two sides was formidable. “The Federals fought with wonderful bravery, and the Confederates clung to their ground with heroic courage as hour after hour they were mown down like grass.”

All day the fighting raged and the carnage mounted. Neither side could win but neither would admit defeat. When darkness caused the shooting to stop, neither had the heart to count the
casualties. The eventual tally would show two thousand Union soldiers dead and nearly ten thousand wounded, and similar numbers on the
Confederate side. A terrible night of groans and death rattles gave way to an appalling dawn of visible suffering. “
No tongue can tell, no mind can conceive, no pen portray the horrible sights I witnessed,” a Pennsylvania soldier recorded of that awful morning.

Lee expected the battle to resume that day. “
We awaited without apprehension a renewal of the attack,” he reported afterward. But McClellan’s caution again set in. “
I concluded that the success of an attack on the 18th was not certain,” McClellan explained. Unwilling to accept anything less than certainty, he regrouped and rested his forces.

Lee thereupon canceled the Maryland operation, grateful for the opportunity to escape with his diminished army intact. “
As we could not look for a material increase of strength, and the enemy’s force could be largely and rapidly augmented,” he explained, “it was not thought prudent to wait until he should be ready again to offer battle.” On the night of September 18 Lee led his army back to Virginia.

John Walker recalled the retreat. “
I was among the last to cross the Potomac,” he remembered. “As I rode into the river I passed General Lee, sitting on his horse in the stream, watching the crossing of the wagons and artillery. Returning my greeting, he inquired as to what was still behind. There was nothing but wagons containing my wounded, and a battery of artillery, all of which were near at hand, and I told him so. ‘Thank God!’ I heard him say as I rode on.”

L
incoln was sorely disappointed that McClellan hadn’t destroyed Lee’s army. He thought the opportunity might still exist. “
The President directs that you cross the Potomac and give battle to the enemy or drive him south,” Halleck told McClellan. “Your army must move now while the roads are good.”

But McClellan refused, and Lincoln was compelled to take from the partial victory what he could. He gathered his cabinet and presented once more the document he had labored over at the telegraph office. “
The time has come now,” he said. “I wish it were a better time. I wish that we were in a better condition. The action of the army against the rebels has not been quite what I should have liked.” Yet he had decided to go ahead.

On September 22, speaking as “
Commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy,” Lincoln proclaimed broad
emancipation as of January 1, 1863. “All persons held as slaves within any state, or designated part of any state, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free,” the president said.

The proclamation failed to satisfy the immediate
abolitionists, as it didn’t touch slavery in the border states. But to everyone else, Northerners and Southerners alike, it marked a watershed in American history. Lincoln, at the stroke of his pen, transformed the nature and meaning of the war. The conflict had been about union; now it was about liberty as well. Expedience and conscience had heretofore clashed in the Northern soul; henceforth they aligned. Until this point Grant and the rest of the Union army had fought to preserve the status quo; from this point forward they fought to overturn it and create a new one.

28

T
HE
U
NION CAPTURE OF
C
ORINTH PUT
G
RANT ATHWART CRUCIAL
lines of Confederate communication, and the Confederates naturally sought to drive him off. In the second week of September 1862 Confederate general
Sterling Price descended on Iuka, Mississippi, twenty miles east of Corinth, on the
Memphis & Charleston Railroad. The outmanned Union colonel at Iuka withdrew without a fight. Grant wasn’t worried about his own position; he told Julia: “
I am concentrated and strong. Will give the rebels a tremendous thrashing if they come.” But he
did
worry that Price and perhaps the other Confederate commander in the area,
Earl Van Dorn, would drive north to join
Braxton Bragg, whose Kentucky campaign was alarming Lincoln and the administration almost as much as Lee’s Maryland thrust was. “Have you heard anything from Covington?” Grant asked Julia of the town where his parents lived. “They must be badly frightened.”

For the most part, though, he remained optimistic. The Confederates’ ambitions would betray them, he told Julia. “You will see the greatest fall in a few weeks of rebel hopes that was ever known. They have made a bold effort, and with wonderful success, but it is a spasmodic effort without anything behind to fall back on. When they do begin to fall all resources are at an end and the rebellion will soon show a rapid decline.” As for his own position: “
There is a large force hovering around us for the last ten days, and the grand denouement must take place soon.”

The Confederates kept hovering, prompting Grant to go after them. He devised a plan to corner Price at Iuka, with Union generals
Edward Ord approaching from the northwest and
William Rosecrans from the southwest; the Tennessee River, behind Price, would prevent an escape
east. Yet the plan required careful timing, in that if Grant pulled troops from
Corinth too soon, the other Confederate general, Van Dorn, might jump him there.

Midday on September 18 Ord moved into position. He made contact with Price’s advance column and in a spirited encounter drove the Confederates back. Rosecrans was supposed to be coming but sent a message saying he had been delayed. He would arrive in time the next afternoon to attack, he promised. Grant was doubtful, as the roads were bad. “
Besides,” he remarked later, “troops after a forced march of twenty miles are not in a good condition for fighting the moment they get through. It might do in marching to relieve a beleaguered garrison, but not to make an assault.” Grant nonetheless told Ord to listen for the sounds of fighting and to strike against Price at Iuka as soon as Rosecrans did.

Rosecrans indeed required longer to reach the outskirts of Iuka than he had predicted, and when he got there his troops were roughly handled by the Confederates. The wind blew the noise of the firing away from Ord, who didn’t learn of the battle until hours after it ended. Grant got the news after the fact too and directed Ord to make up for Rosecrans’s failure. “
You must engage the enemy as early as possible in the morning,” he said.

But Price was gone by then. Recognizing Grant’s trap, he had slipped away in the dark. Grant rode at once to Iuka and discovered that Rosecrans, pleading the fatigue of his men, had not even sent his cavalry in pursuit. Grant ordered a chase and joined Rosecrans for a few miles before turning back toward Corinth. Rosecrans halted soon after Grant departed and Price got clean away.

G
rant didn’t have time to dwell on his disappointment. With Van Dorn at large and Price again afield, Grant’s position was vulnerable. The neighborhood was more dangerous than it had ever been. “
We were in a country where nearly all the people, except the negroes, were hostile to us and friendly to the cause we were trying to suppress,” he recollected. “It was easy, therefore, for the enemy to get early information of our every move. We, on the contrary, had to go after our information in force, and then often returned without it.”

For ten days the rebels circled and feinted, leaving Grant unsure where they might strike. By the beginning of October he thought he knew. “
It is now clear that Corinth is the point, and that from the west or
southwest,” he informed Halleck. Four Confederate commands—under Price, Van Dorn,
Albert Rust and
John Villepigue—had come together. Grant meanwhile had been weakened by having some of his forces transferred to Kentucky to join the pursuit of
Bragg. “My position is precarious but hope to get out of it all right,” he told Halleck.