Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War by Jeffrey Hummel

Author:Jeffrey Hummel [Hummel, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Court
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Antietam and Emancipation

President Lincoln was not the only one awaiting the verdict of battle. When Robert E. Lee’s army invaded Maryland at the beginning of September in 1862, the French and British governments were on the verge of offering to mediate between the Union and the Confederacy. Napoleon III, ruler of France, was particularly desirous of a permanent division to facilitate intervention he planned in Mexico. If the Union refused mediation, these foreign powers would recognize the Confederate government. All that held them back was the pending news about the Southern offensive.

General Lee’s motives for moving north went beyond his continuing desire to deliver a knock-out blow to the Union army. He also wanted to relieve war-ravaged Virginia and was hoping finally to bring Maryland into the Confederacy. But his invasion took him to the border state’s western counties, where Union sentiment was strong. Not only did the local inhabitants fail to rally to the Rebel banner, but Lee’s campaign on Northern territory was plagued by the same logistical burdens that Union commanders had already encountered in the South.

Lee alleviated these burdens partially by dispersing his forces and keeping them on the move, so that they could live off the land. They dutifully paid Confederate currency for all provisions in order not to undermine the campaign’s political objectives too severely; the ragged Army of Northern Virginia was used to living sparsely anyway. The often barefoot southern soldiers, for instance, cleaned out all the shoe stores in western Maryland. One veteran described his fellows as “a set of ragamuffins.” “It seemed as if every cornfield in Maryland had been robbed of its scarecrows,” he recalled. “None had any under-clothing. My costume consisted of a ragged pair of trousers, a stained, dirty jacket; an old slouch hat, the brim pinned up with a thorn; a begrimed blanket over my shoulder, a grease-smeared cotton haversack full of apples and corn, a cartridge box full, and a musket. I was barefooted and had a stonebruise on each foot.” None of his comrades were much better dressed. “There was no one there who would not have been ‘run in’ by the police had he appeared on the streets of any populous city, and would have been fined next day for undue exposure.”10

Without a decisive victory, however, the Maryland invasion could amount to nothing more than a large-scale raid. At this critical juncture, the Army of Northern Virginia suffered a stroke of bad luck. A Union corporal stumbled upon a lost copy of Lee’s orders wrapped around three cigars. Passed along to General McClellan, whose Army of the Potomac was nearly three times larger, the orders revealed the location of every Confederate unit. Lee was barely able to call the units back together at Sharpsburg, near the Virginia border, before the Federal onslaught fell. The Rebel lines behind Antietam Creek came close to giving way but ultimately held through attack after attack. It was the bloodiest single day of the entire war, with over 23,000 dead and wounded, about evenly divided between the two sides.

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