This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [111]
Yet it closed a great door in the face of the southern Confederacy. It locked the Confederacy in with the anachronism that was the Confederacy’s dreadful, fatal burden. Europe could not intervene now; the Civil War had been turned into something that no British statesman could touch. The South would be limited to its own resources, which were visibly inadequate. It could never get the help it needed from outside. Almost indiscernibly, but with grim finality, it had been isolated.
Beyond this, the stakes of the war had suddenly become incalculable. If the war should be won, the nation would for all time be wedded to the idea that all of its people must (as the proclamation said) be forever free. Free society and racism were defined as incompatibles. The race problem would have to be faced now, because by no imaginable subterfuge could it be dodged, and in time — in one generation, or in two, or in ten — it would have to be solved. People were committed to it now, the compact signed in the blood and fire of a war that went closer to the heart and the bone than any other experience in national history. An ideal that might be humanly unattainable had been riveted in so that it could never, in all the years to come, be abandoned.
The immediate effects of the proclamation were curious. First of them was the fact that it quietly cut the ground out from under the feet of General McClellan.
Not long after the document was signed and issued, McClellan met with a few officers in his headquarters tent. He wanted advice: what should he do about the proclamation? Democratic politicians and high army officers, he said, had been urging him to come out in open opposition to it. Should he do so, or should he keep silent? The proclamation seemed to him to be unwise and unsound, although he suspected that if he denounced it publicly some people might look upon his act as a species of military usurpation; still, he had been assured that the Army of the Potomac was so loyal to him that it would, to a man, enforce any decision he might make regarding war policy. What did these friends think he ought to do?
The friends spoke up promptly and sensibly. McClellan had been listening to dangerous nonsense, he must on no account let himself be made leader of the opposition, the people who were egging him on were his worst enemies; and anyone who supposed that this army would support open defiance of civil authority was imagining a vain thing, and skirting the edge of treason as well.… With all of this McClellan at length agreed. He concluded at last to issue a short address to his troops, reminding them that, however they might feel as citizens, they were bound as soldiers to accept and obey the decrees of the government.1
His address neither disturbed nor excited anyone very much; and anyway, McClellan’s position by now was nearly hopeless. The war was calling for hard men, and he had no hardness. He could not, under any imaginable circumstances, move out to hound an enemy into the last ditch with no thought for anything but the knockout punch. He was not hounding anyone after Antietam. Through the rest of September and all of October he was waiting north of the Potomac, reorganizing and refitting, giving Lee the chance to do the same. (The Confederate army that had hardly numbered thirty thousand men when it retreated across the Potomac would contain seventy-five thousand men when next it went into battle; Lee used the time McClellan