This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [110]
Lee’s men had taken a dreadful pounding and they had astounding losses — more than ten thousand men between dawn and dusk, a good fourth of all the men he had on the field — but they had not quite been driven out of Sharpsburg and the high ground. McClellan had lost even more heavily, with more than two thousand men killed in action and nearly ten thousand wounded, of whom upward of a thousand would die; but he had men to spare. Two corps had hardly been engaged at all, and reinforcements were coming up. By every dictate of military logic, Lee would have to cross the Potomac and get back to Virginia as soon as darkness came; if he stayed where he was one more day, the Army of the Potomac could pulverize him.7
But Lee did not retreat. He pulled his frayed lines together, brought up stragglers, and next morning, with fewer than thirty thousand infantrymen in his command, he calmly waited for McClellan to renew the fighting. (Of all the daring gamblers who ever wore an American military uniform, Lee unquestionably was the coolest.) His bluff worked. McClellan pondered, waited for reinforcements, laid plans for an all-out offensive for tomorrow, or day after tomorrow, or some other time, and let the entire day of September 18 slip by, two exhausted armies facing each other under a blistering sun, the heavy stench of death fouling the air, nervous sputters of picket-line firing rippling from end to end of the lines now and then, nothing of any consequence happening.
That night Lee ordered a retreat. Even McClellan was likely to attack if he was given time enough, and the Army of Northern Virginia just could not afford a finish fight here, with the river at its back. These twenty-four hours of silent defiance had restored Confederate morale, and as the tired Confederates crossed the river and tramped back into Virginia they felt that they had somehow won a victory. McClellan let them go unmolested. His men, like Lee’s, felt proud of what they had done, but they were not disposed to claim a sweeping triumph. The most they were prepared to say was voiced by one of McClellan’s division commanders, the tough and grizzled George Gordon Meade: “We hurt them a little more than they hurt us.”
But the soldiers could not see all of it. Incomplete and imperfect as it had been, Antietam was a decisive Union victory. It had broken the great southern counteroffensive, it had given Lincoln the opening he needed, and it would change the character of the entire war, turning it openly and irrevocably into a war against slavery. As the long gray columns crossed the river and started plodding down the Virginia roads, the South’s high tide had begun to ebb.
Chapter Seven
I SEE NO END
1. The Best There Was in the Ranch
PRESIDENT LINCOLN had the Cabinet in, and he made a ceremony of the business. Here was the paper, ready to be signed, dignitaries looking as impressive as might be; fifty miles up the Potomac there was the stricken field of Antietam, the autumn air tainted with death, every house and barn for miles around serving as a hospital, a bruised army in bivouac nearby. What was being done at the White House had been ratified in advance by what had been done around the Dunker church and in the cornfields and woods, along the sunken road and by the crossings of the sluggish little creek. Twenty-five thousand Americans, North and South, had been shot in order that Lincoln might sign the Emancipation Proclamation.
Looked at objectively, this proclamation was nothing much. It was not, technically, a proclamation at all but an official warning that if the rebellion did not cease by the end of 1862 a proclamation would be issued. It declared slavery extinct in precisely the areas where the Federal government at the moment lacked all power to enforce