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blindsided by a fresh attack from Confederate reinforcements. The last of Lee’s divided forces had arrived at the battlefield, and the 9th had no choice but to retreat. Some of the men cried as they stumbled back down the hill. McClellan had failed to send reinforcements. When a courier from Burnside arrived with a plea for men and guns, McClellan replied: “Tell General Burnside this is the battle of the war.… Tell him if he cannot hold his ground, then the bridge, to the last man!—always the bridge! If the Bridge is lost, all is lost!” Burnside held the bridge but little else.29

“Antietam was a fearful struggle,” wrote Ebenezer Wells. During the night of the seventeenth he had led his team of wagons to a hill; “the thickest of the fight had been just there. The road ran parallel with a stone wall which formed a good breastwork for the Southerners, and it was a heavy slaughter for our men.… It was a moonlit night, and I went to speak to a man sitting across the wall. I wondered what he stayed for.” Wells addressed a few words to him, only to realize that he was dead. “He must have been killed instantly, as he was in a nearly upright position as though in the act of climbing over. The bodies were piled up in heaps all about us.”30 Nearly six thousand men lay dying or dead in ditches and creeks, around fences and knolls, under trees, and across blackened fields. Another seventeen thousand were either waiting for medical attention or receiving what passed for care under hideous conditions.31 Remarkably, Henry MacIver was alive. He had been dragged from the field and carried to a nearby house. By the time he was seen to, he had almost drowned in his own blood. To prevent him from choking to death, the doctor put a silver tube down his throat.

McClellan was so dazed by the scale of the battle that he did nothing to impede Lee’s retreat across the Potomac into Virginia. The shocking number of casualties on September 17 would make Antietam the single costliest day of the war. Twenty-five thousand men were killed, wounded, or missing. McClellan had lost nearly 15 percent of his men; Lee, almost a quarter. The Confederate general might have been defeated once and for all, with his army destroyed, if McClellan’s attacks had been better coordinated. McClellan had shown that he could take a strong hand and throw it away. Yet Antietam was still a victory of sorts for the North because Lee’s invasion had been halted. Although McClellan made the fatal mistake of allowing Lee to escape, he had pricked the aura of invincibility that had grown around the Confederates since the Seven Days’ Battles. He had proved that the Army of Northern Virginia could be stopped.

A few days later, when both armies had deserted the battlefield, the Marquess of Hartington went to inspect the site in order to give a report to his younger brother, Lord Edward Cavendish, who was serving in one of the regiments sent out to defend Canada during the height of the Trent affair. Hartington had been in the United States for nearly a month, avoiding his expensive mistress, Catherine Walters (whom he affectionately called Skittles). Now, he walked over the silent terrain in appalled wonder. “In about seven or eight acres of wood,” he reported to his father, the Duke of Devonshire, “there is not a tree which is not full of bullets and bits of shell. It is impossible to understand how anyone could live in such a fire as there must have been there.”32

Lord Hartington’s impression of Washington after the Battle of Antietam was that it resembled a vast camp. “You see hardly anything but soldiers and baggage-wagons, and stores moving up to the troops.… Washington is now completely surrounded by [forts], I think there are between forty and fifty,” he wrote on September 29, 1862. “No drink is allowed to be sold, and, though the place is full of soldiers, it is very quiet.” He admired the bearing of the volunteers and thought it “a great pity that such fine material should be thrown away, as they very likely may be, by having utterly incompetent officers.”33 Naturally, he