The Spymistress by Jennifer Chiaverini

Author:Jennifer Chiaverini
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-08-27T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

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SEPTEMBER 1862-JANUARY 1863

A

ugust ended with all of Richmond—and indeed, all the South—celebrating Robert E. Lee’s triumph at the Second Battle of Manassas, and September began with General Lee pressing his advantage. After trouncing Union major general John Pope’s army on the familiar fields where so much blood had already been spilled, General Lee led his army across the Potomac River at White’s Ford near Leesburg and into Union territory. As terrified Pennsylvanians evacuated government archives, treasure, and personnel from offices in Harrisburg and Philadelphia, the Confederate army captured food and horses, and searched with less success for recruits among sympathetic Marylanders.

By September 7, General Lee’s forces were marching into Fredericksburg, with General McClellan in pursuit. The people of Richmond waited anxiously for news, hearing only frustratingly vague rumors about fighting around South Mountain and Harpers Ferry. Then, in the middle of the month, word came of fierce and terrible fighting that had broken out the misty morning of September 17, of an enormous clash of armies on the ridges above the village of Sharpsburg and along Antietam Creek. Both sides consolidated their forces overnight and resumed the bloody battle in the morning, but ultimately General Lee was forced to withdraw his troops back across the Potomac, his brief invasion of the North thwarted.

In the days that followed, as the Union claimed victory and the Confederacy declared the battle a draw, rumors about a curious incident preceding the Battle of Sharpsburg began to circulate throughout the capital. It was said that a Union soldier crossing a campground recently vacated by the rebels had discovered three cigars wrapped in a piece of paper lying forgotten on the ground. Astoundingly, the document turned out to be a copy of General Lee’s battle plan for Maryland, which the soldier promptly turned over to his commanding officers. Already possessing superior numbers, General McClellan—informed of Lee’s plan to divide the Army of Northern Virginia and armed with foreknowledge of the Confederate troop movements—had been handed the opportunity to soundly defeat General Lee’s divided army.

Arguments about what might have been if not for that crucial mistake quickly fell silent as wounded soldiers returning to Richmond described in stark, horrifying detail what they had witnessed along the banks of the Antietam. Their stories of carnage left Lizzie dazed and shocked and sickened—thousands upon thousands killed and maimed, hillsides dotted with prostrate corpses clad in blue, sunken roads filled with bodies in butternut and gray mowed down like grain before the scythe. Men frozen in the final acts of their brief lives—a hand gripping a sword hilt as a lieutenant rallied his men, teeth clenched in a last grimace around the bitten end of a cartridge as a corporal reloaded his weapon, brains and blood splattered on broken green leaves of corn. Bodies bloated in death, fallen alone, in pairs, behind fallen logs and tangled in thickets, eyes staring blankly up at the sky or down into the thick mud.

Lizzie could scarcely comprehend the estimates in the papers of the numbers of dead and wounded.

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