Michigan at Antietam by Jack Dempsey

Author:Jack Dempsey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2015-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

AFTERMATH

A Proclamation and Its Price

The Battle of Antietam had ended. The Maryland Campaign had ended. The invasion of the Union had ended. The Union army, though bloodied, had gained many trophies. On September 27, George A. Custer wrote to a friend, “Enclosed I send you a small strip of silk which I tore from a rebel flag at the battle of Antietam.”704 Edwin Sumner’s report sought commendations for Williams and Richardson, “who were distinguished for their zeal and devotion.”705 Sumner informed Williams that “he had mentioned my name and had recommended me for promotion.”706

On September 30, General-in-Chief Halleck congratulated McClellan on South Mountain and Antietam, terming them “hard-fought battles, but well-earned and decided victories”:

The valor and endurance of your army in the several conflicts which terminated in the expulsion of the enemy from the loyal State of Maryland are creditable alike to the troops and to the officers who commanded them. A grateful country, while mourning the lamented dead, will not be unmindful of the honors due the living.707

Willcox issued a congratulatory order to his men reflecting “his entire satisfaction with the manner in which they fought in the bloody battles of South Mountain and Sharpsburg.”708 Hard-fought, they were; bloody, no one could contest. Williams had visited the Sunken Road at battle’s end and witnessed how the Confederate bodies “lay as thick as autumn leaves along a narrow lane cut below the natural surface, into which they seemed to have tumbled.”709 Many lives had ended, but the war went on. Northern attempts to develop a winning strategy also continued.

On July 17, 1862, President Lincoln signed the Second Confiscation Act.710 This “Act to Suppress Insurrection, to Punish Treason and Rebellion”711 had taken nearly the entire seven-month Congressional session before passage. No member stood more staunchly in favor of the bill than Michigan senator Jacob Merritt Howard. In lengthy remarks on April 18, admitting that the legislation “is one of novelty in this country,” Howard defended it on constitutional, legal and historical grounds given the “novel times.” He adjured his colleagues “to come up to the work” required to save the nation.712 As ultimately passed on July 12, the measure directly emancipated slaves within Union lines of those engaged “in any rebellion or insurrection” against the United States and authorized the president to proclaim emancipation of the enslaved in seceded territory beyond military control.713 When the final vote came—after the president had objected to an aspect of the bill adopted the day before714—Howard took the floor to announce that he would, despite concerns, vote yes. Far better this than a veto:

Language scarcely enables me to express the feelings of deprecation with which I contemplate that contingency. I foresee that should it happen, it would create a most serious embarrassment in the prosecution of the existing war; that it would tend greatly to divide opinion and so to arrange parties in the free States that it would be extremely difficult, not to say impossible, that all the energies of the loyal people of the United States shall be used for the suppression of this rebellion.

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