Mr Lincoln's Army (55 page)

The soldiers themselves were slow to realize
just what they had achieved. All through the eighteenth of September, when the
two armies waited in each other's presence for a renewal of the fighting, the
battle had seemed unfinished. The Federals held part of the Rebel position, but
only part of it; every offensive had been stopped just short of the goal, and
the soldiers who had been driven back from the Dunker church, the Piper farm,
and the edge of Sharpsburg knew perfectly well that their enemies had not been
routed. It was only after Lee's army went back to Virginia that the Army of the
Potomac began to see that it had gained more than it had lost. Meade probably
expressed the general feeling when he wrote, three days after the battle, that
the retreat of the Confederates proved that "we had hit them much harder
than they had us, and that in reality our battle was a victory."
⁴

A victory, indisputably, even if a negative
one. Lee had invaded the North with high hopes; he had been compelled to fight
along the Antietam, and after the fight he had had to go back into Virginia. At
enormous cost the Army of the Potomac had won a strategic victory. The invader
had been thrown back; or, if not precisely thrown back, he had been fought to a
standstill and then had been allowed to
go
back,
his late hosts very glad to see the last of him. However qualified this triumph
might be, at least the invasion was over. There would be a new campaign now,
and it would take place south of the Potomac.

McClellan was looking ahead to it. A week
after the battle, when the last of the dead had been buried, he was making his
plans: possess Harper's Ferry with a strong force, then reorganize the army
thoroughly, get an abundance of new equipment and supplies, make proper
replacements for the fallen generals, get those rookie regiments into better
shape, and—all of this done—start south afresh. Privately he was jubilant. He
had been cautious at first, writing his wife only that "the general result
was in our favor"; but as the days passed his very need for inner
reassurance made him see it in brighter colors. He wrote about the stacks of
captured battle flags that had been brought to him and told his wife gaily:
"You should see my soldiers
now!
You
never saw anything like their enthusiasm. It surpassed anything you ever
imagined." He had no doubt that his enemies in Washington would keep
trying to get rid of him, and they might succeed, but that hardly mattered:
"I feel now that this last short campaign is a sufficient legacy for our
child, so far as honor is concerned." It seems that at last, as he thought
it all over, he could see himself measuring up to some private, invisible
yardstick. He wrote rather pathetically—for this was the commander of a great
army, not a schoolboy mulling over his part in last week's football
game—"Those in whose judgment I rely tell me that I fought the battle
splendidly and that it was a masterpiece of art."

Masterpiece of art it assuredly was not:
rather, a dreary succession of missed opportunities. Not once had the
commanding general put out his hand to pull his battle plan together and to
undo the mistakes of his subordinates. The battle had been left to fight
itself, and the general was a spectator; and in the end it had been a victory
by the narrowest of margins—tactically, a victory only in the sense that the
army had fought hard and then had not retreated afterward. Meade had said the
most that could be said: we hurt them a little more than they hurt us.

Yet it was finally, and irrevocably,
the
decisive battle of the war, affecting the whole course of
American history ever since.

For this stalemated battle—this great
whirlwind of flame and torn earth and shaking sound, which seemed to consume
everything and to create nothing—brought about the Emancipation Proclamation
and put the country on a new course from which there could be no turning back.
Here at last was the sounding forth of the bugle that would never call retreat.

All summer Lincoln had been waiting for a
victory. Here it was, now: an uncertain victory, looking very much like no
victory at all, but for all that, and with all of its imperfections, a victory,
the all-important victory which he had to have if the war was to be won. One
week later he issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, and the war
was transformed.

Like the battle itself, the Proclamation at
first seemed an achievement of doubtful value. It was just words, promising
much but doing nothing. They were not even bold, straightforward words, it
seemed. Perversely, they ordained freedom in precisely those places where the
Union armies could not make freedom a fact and left slavery untouched
elsewhere. They infuriated all sympathizers with secession—Gideon Welles noted
glumly that "this step will band the south together"—and they left
the abolitionists unsatisfied. They seemed to be neither hot nor cold, a futile
attempt to find a middle course in a struggle which had no middle course—and in
the end they had more power than a great army with banners.

Their real effect was first seen afar off, in
London, where they gave this war in America a new aspect, so that statesmen
found to their surprise that it was something with which they could not
interfere.

In October the Emperor of France formally
proposed that England, France, and Russia step in and bring about a six
months' armistice—which, in its practical effect, would mean (and was meant to
mean) independence for the Confederacy. Britain's Foreign Minister recommended
acceptance of the proposal. But the British Cabinet rejected it, for a
pro-Confederate in England now was an apologist for slavery, whether he liked
it or not. By mid-January, American Minister Adams was writing in his diary:
"It is quite clear that the current is now setting very strongly with us
among the body of the people," and a little later Jefferson Davis himself
recognized that the chance for intervention was dead and withdrew those famous
emissaries, Mason and Slidell. By June, when it seemed in Britain most certain
that the Confederacy must win—Hooker had been beaten at Chancellorsville, Lee
was north of the border again, the Northern cause had never looked worse—public
opinion had completely hardened and recognition was impossible.

In substance, then, the Proclamation meant
that Europe was not going to decide how the American Civil War came out. It
would be fought out at home.

And it would be fought to the bitter end. The
chance for compromise was killed.

Until
now there had always been the prospect that sooner or later the war might
simply end, with neither side victorious. Reunion, continuation of slavery,
some adjustment, perhaps, on the thorny issue of states' rights: the whole body
of Northern sentiment on which the Copperhead movement was based had exactly
that in mind, and there was plenty of feeling along the same line in the South.
But the Proclamation made that impossible. The war had been given a deeper
meaning and had become something that could not be adjusted. The deep, tangled
issues underneath the war—slavery, the permanence of the Union, the dawning
concept that a powerful central government might protect the people's freedom
rather than endanger it—all of these, now, must be settled, not evaded; and
settled by violence, violence having been unleashed.

It might still be argued that they could far
better be settled in some other way, but the argument was no longer relevant.
The war now was a war to preserve the Union
and
to end slavery—two causes in one, the combination
carrying its own consequences. It could not stop until one side or the other
was made incapable of fighting any longer; hence, by the standards of that day,
it was going to be an all-out war—hard, ruthless, vicious, with Sheridan
carrying devastation across the Shenandoah and Sherman swinging a torch across
Georgia and Grant pitilessly grinding two armies to powder so that the Confederacy,
if it would not die in any other way, might die of sheer exhaustion.
(Exhaustion of spirit, of people, of resources, of culture: a bleeding-white
from which the country would be generations recovering. ) The war must
ultimately go that way henceforward. It had come through its period of
uncertainty, the period in which it might lead to anything. Now it could lead
only to this. It could no longer be fought on simple enthusiasm like a
swords-and-roses romance of knightly legend. From now on it would be all grim.

Which meant, finally, that McClellan's part
in it was finished. The men who wanted to be rid of him at all costs—who would
even have been glad to see him beaten, because that would give grounds for
dismissal—could act against him now, not because he had been beaten but
precisely because he had won. His victory meant the last thing on earth he
would have wished it to mean: sweeping triumph, not merely for the
abolitionists whom he hated and considered traitors, but for the implacable
spirit of force that was to take control of the nation's destiny. He had let
himself be made a political symbol: symbol of the belief in a limited war for
limited objectives, a war consciously aimed at something less than destruction
of the Southland's way of life, a war that would not bring about profound
alteration in the national government. The battle he won meant that the cause
he symbolized was not to prevail, and so the symbol itself would have to
vanish.

By one of the great ironies of history, this
cause and McClellan himself might have been triumphant if the victory along the
Antietam had been complete instead of partial. And a complete victory had been
within his grasp, over and over again. Run down the might-have-beens for a
moment:

He might have had it if there had been more
drive and determination in the forty-eight hours immediately after the finding
of the lost order. Later, he might have had it by attacking one day earlier at
the Antietam. Still later, he might have had it by co-ordinating his blows so
that they came together instead of in succession, by using instead of
husbanding the ten thousand fresh troops Longstreet was brooding about, by
driving Porter's column into Sharpsburg at the close of the action, or by
renewing the battle vigorously the next day. Lastly, all else failing, he might
have used his own unique magnetism to evoke in his soldiers a sustained
enthusiasm to sweep Lee's army off the smoking ridges and drive it into the
river. If, just once, he could have transcended his own limitations, he might
have won the kind of victory which would have ended the war in the fall of
1862. A peace made then would not have been an abolitionist's peace. It would
have been the kind of peace McClellan wanted.

But
those are might-have-beens. McClellan did what he did, not what he can be
imagined having done. And because his victory was exactly the kind of victory
it was—no bigger and no smaller—his own military career had to end. The battle
and what it brought with it left him no room to stand.

McClellan himself seems to have had some dim
inkling of this when the Proclamation first came out. The day after it was
published he told his wife that it was doubtful if he would remain in service
much longer—"the President's late proclamation, the continuation of
Stanton and Halleck in office, render it almost impossible for me to retain my
commission and self-respect at the same time." A fortnight later he told
her how a friend had been urging him that "it is my duty to submit to the
President's proclamation and quietly continue doing my duty as a
soldier"; he was not sure that this advice was sound, but he would at
least think it over very fully. What held him in the service seems to have been
a deep, mystic feeling that he and the army had become part of each other. To a
member of his staff, about this time, he said: "The Army of the Potomac is
my army as much as any army ever belonged to the man that created it. We have
grown together and fought together. We are wedded and should not be
separated."
⁵

Lincoln came up early in October to talk to
McClellan and to review the troops. The dead men were all underground by now,
and the review seems to have been successful, as such things go, although the
troops were somewhat subdued: President and general together did not quite draw
the spate of cheers and applause that had come on former occasions. One veteran
wrote that Lincoln was melancholy: "He rode around every battalion and
seemed much worn and distressed and to be looking for those who were
gone"—who were, heaven knows, numerous enough to distress a much less
sensitive person." McClellan, who was subtle enough in most ways although
never subtle enough to understand Lincoln, found the President in good spirits.
Their conversation would seem to have had a vaguely unreal quality. McClellan
recorded that "I urged him to follow a conservative course, and supposed
from the tenor of his conversation that he would do so"—a conservative
course, in the jargon of that day, meaning one which would go directly counter
to everything said or implied by the Emancipation Proclamation—and this two
weeks after the paper had been signed and published.

The
melancholy which a soldier thought he saw in the President was genuine enough.
Lincoln was at grips with the problem of just whose army it was that he had
been reviewing. Every general always says "my army" in ordinary
speech. It is no more than easy shorthand for "the army which I am now commanding."
Yet when McClellan said it, it seemed to mean more than that. Lincoln dispiritedly
told a friend just after this review that it was not the Army of the Potomac he
had been looking at—it was "General McClellan's bodyguard." From the
record it looked as if that might be the case. The amazing, hysterical
transformation that had taken place on the Virginia hillsides after the second
battle of Bull Run meant that the men had for this general a devotion which
they gave no other man; it might easily mean that he was literally
irreplaceable. That devotion had compelled the administration to reinstate
McClellan, much against its will; at that point he had been the only man alive
who could turn the mob of disorganized soldiers into an army again. That he had
done it, with his own peculiar magic, events proved. The men had
instantaneously pulled themselves up from the depths of complete demoralization
when he came back to them, and they had come up here to Sharpsburg to fight as
they had never fought before. He had made this army, he spoke of it as "my
army," and the men themselves seemed to feel exactly the same way about
it. They were boys who had gone out blithely to fight a picture-book war,
victims of a nationwide innocence, filled with a boyish yearning for impossible
romance and adventure; nothing was left of that early spirit now except their
love for McClellan. He remained as the justification of their early hopes,
their last defense against complete disillusionment. Could the war go on if he
were taken away? And yet could it be fought, in the only way now remaining, if
he stayed?