Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

E. Lee and the simple inadequacy of John Pope. Even before taking command of the Army of Northern Virginia, Lee had become convinced of the necessity of moving the center of campaigning north of the Potomac, into Maryland and Pennsylvania. The thin-soiled dispersion of agriculture everywhere in Virginia except the Shenandoah Valley could not feed his army indefinitely, and as soon as he was installed at the head of the Army of Northern Virginia, he began pressing Jefferson Davis to allow him to strike northward, through Maryland, to the Susquehanna, where he could “change the character of the war.”

First, though, he would have to deal with John Pope’s Army of Virginia. After the Malvern Hill fight, Lee decided to gamble on the likelihood of McClellan’s inactivity and catch Pope before he could be further reinforced. “I want Pope to be suppressed,” Lee wrote in a rare burst of contempt. “The course indicated in his orders … cannot be permitted.” Lee and Stonewall Jackson bounded back up into northern Virginia, and on August 30, 1862, Jackson and Lee trapped the hapless Pope between them on the old Bull Run battlefield. The second battle of Bull Run was an even greater disaster for the Union than the first one: Pope’s army of 60,000 men suffered 16,000 casualties and was left a hopeless wreck. Meanwhile, the triumphant Lee was now free to lunge across the Potomac into Maryland, hoping to parlay his victories into a massive pro-secession uprising among slaveholding Marylanders and perhaps reach far enough across the Mason-Dixon Line into Pennsylvania to disrupt the North’s vital east-west railroad junction on the Susquehanna River at Harrisburg.58

With Pope utterly discredited and the now defunct Army of Virginia in pieces, Lincoln had no choice but to put McClellan back in charge, transfer Pope’s command back into the structure of the Army of the Potomac, and order them to pursue Lee into Maryland. The soldiers in the ranks were elated, and the unhappy Pope had to listen as “tired fellows, as the news passed down the column, jumped to their feet, and sent up such a hurrah as the Army of the Potomac had never heard before. Shout upon shout went out into the stillness of the night; and as it was taken up along the road and repeated by regiment, brigade, division and corps, we could hear the roar dying away in the distance.”59

Few generals ever get a second chance to redeem themselves, and McClellan’s gratitude to Lincoln spurred him on after Lee with unaccustomed vigor—gratitude, that is, plus the unlooked-for gift of a copy of Lee’s campaign orders (Special Orders No. 191) for the Maryland campaign, which a private and a corporal in the 27th Indiana discovered in the grass near Frederick, Maryland, on September 13, 1862. The lost orders were in McClellan’s hands by noon that day, and he was elated: “Now I know what to do!” They revealed that Lee’s army was actually dangerously dispersed along Maryland’s roads and could easily be destroyed piece by piece if McClellan hopped to it. For once, McClellan did just that. The Federals surprised Confederate screening forces at South Mountain on September 14, and three days later McClellan had pinned Lee’s army in between the Potomac and one of the Potomac’s little tributary streams, the Antietam Creek, near the town of Sharpsburg, Maryland.60

The subsequent battle of Antietam ought to have been McClellan’s win-it-all opportunity to redeem his reputation. Once again, his slowness and his discomfort with the headlong offensive were his undoing. In a terrible, bitter all-day battle on September 17—a battle that cost a total of 23,000 casualties from both armies—McClellan launched a series of poorly coordinated attacks on Lee’s army that not only failed to deliver the sledgehammer blow that might have flattened the Confederates but even failed to prevent Confederate reinforcements from arriving from Harpers Ferry. At the end of the day, Lee’s men were only barely holding on to their positions, but McClellan showed no disposition to send in a final knockout assault, even though he had at least 15,000 fresh troops in reserve. Instead, Lee was allowed to creep back across the Potomac into Virginia. A Confederate band that tried to cheer up Lee’s troops at the river crossings by playing “Maryland, My Maryland” was hooted down until they struck up “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny.”61 McClellan, meanwhile, went into camp to lick his wounds, and there he stayed, through September and into October. Lincoln tried in vain to move him, even visiting McClellan personally to urge him to pursue Lee. McClellan waited until the end of October before putting his columns back onto the roads southward. By then, Lincoln had already nerved himself to fire his truculent general. The president waited until the day after the New York and New Jersey congressional elections, to mute the political damage, and then on November 5, 1862, Lincoln dismissed McClellan.

The reactions were bad, especially in the Army of the Potomac, where loyal McClellanite officers whispered plots for a coup into the general’s ear. “Nay, there was considerable swearing indulged in, and threats of marching on Washington, should McClellan but take the lead,” remembered Captain Amos Judson of the 83rd Pennsylvania.62 But whatever else McClellan was, he was not a traitor, and even if he had once talked foolishly about dictatorships, he silenced the gossip in his headquarters and rode away from the army he had built, never to return.

The slaughter at Antietam had not been without its merits. Although in military terms the battle had been something of a draw, Lincoln was prepared to treat Lee’s withdrawal afterward as evidence of a Union victory. On the strength of that victory, just six days after Antietam, Lincoln issued the preliminary announcement of a dramatic shift in war policy: as of January 1, 1863, “all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State… in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free,” and the United