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ALSO BY RICHARD SLOTKIN NONFICTION Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (1973) (Albert J. Beveridge Award—American Historical Association, National Book Award Finalist, New York Times Notable Book of the Year) So Dreadfull a Judgment: Puritan Responses to King Philip’s War, 1675–1677, with James K. Folsom (1978) The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (1985) (Little Big Horn Associates Literary Award, New York Times Notable Book of the Year) Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (1992) (National Book Award Finalist, New York Times Notable Book of the Year) Lost Battalions: The Great War and the Crisis of American Nationality (2005) No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, 1864 (2009) FICTION The Crater (1980) (New York Times Notable Book of the Year) The Return of Henry Starr (1988) Abe: A Novel of the Young Lincoln (2000) (Michael Shaara Award for Civil War Fiction, Salon Best Book, New York Times Notable Book of the Year) THE LONG ROAD TO ANTIETAM HOW THE CIVIL WAR BECAME A REVOLUTION RICHARD SLOTKIN LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION a division of W. W. NORTON & COMPANY | NEW YORK LONDON For Iris CONTENTS LIST OF MAPS INTRODUCTION A NOTE ON MILITARY TERMINOLOGY PART ONE TURNING POINT: MILITARY STALEMATE AND STRATEGIC INITIATIVES JULY 1862 CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 2 CHAPTER 3 Lincoln’s Strategy: Emancipation and the McClellan Problem McClellan’s Strategy: Irresistible Force President Davis’s Strategic Offensive PART TWO THE CONFEDERATE OFFENSIVE AUGUST 1862 CHAPTER 4 CHAPTER 5 CHAPTER 6 Self-Inflicted Wounds: The Union High Command Both Ends Against the Middle: The Campaign of Second Bull Run McClellan’s Victory PART THREE THE INVASION OF MARYLAND SEPTEMBER 2–15, 1862 CHAPTER 7 CHAPTER 8 CHAPTER 9 CHAPTER 10 Lee Decides on Invasion McClellan Takes the Offensive The Battles of South Mountain The Forces Gather PART FOUR THE BATTLE OF ANTIETAM SEPTEMBER 16–18, 1862 CHAPTER 11 CHAPTER 12 CHAPTER 13 CHAPTER 14 CHAPTER 15 Preparation for Battle The Battle of Antietam: Hooker’s Fight, 6:00–9:00 The Battle of Antietam: Sumner’s Fight, 9:00–Noon The Battle of Antietam: The Edge of Disaster, Noon to Evening The Day When Nothing Happened AM PART FIVE THE REVOLUTIONARY CRISIS SEPTEMBER 22–NOVEMBER 7, 1862 CHAPTER 16 CHAPTER 17 CHAPTER 18 Lincoln’s Revolution The General and the President Dubious Battle: Everything Changed, Nothing Settled Chronology Antietam Order of Battle Notes Selected Bibliography Index LIST OF MAPS •• MAP 1: THE VIRGINIA THEATER, JULY 1–SEPT. 9, 1862 MAP 2: LEE DIVIDES HIS ARMY, SEPT. 9–13 MAP 3: SOUTH MOUNTAIN, SEPT. 14–15 MAP 4: ANTIETAM, 6:30–7:30 AM MAP 5: ANTIETAM, 7:30–9:00 AM MAP 6: ANTIETAM, 9:30–10:00 AM MAP 7: ANTIETAM, 10:30 AM–NOON MAP 8: ANTIETAM, NOON–1:00 PM MAP 9: ANTIETAM, 3:00–5:00 PM INTRODUCTION T point of the Civil War. The defeat of Lee’s army frustrated the Confederacy’s best chance to win the war on the battlefield. The Union army’s narrow victory on September 17, 1862, enabled Abraham Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, a political act that transformed the war and the future of United States by binding the defense of the Union to the destruction of slavery. Paradoxically, the victory also allowed Lincoln to fire the man who won the battle, Major General George McClellan, and thereby begin the military reorganization that would in the end produce victory for the Union. In fact, neither the military nor the political results of the battle were decisive. The military strength of the Confederacy was not substantially weakened by the defeat. The political and military benefits of emancipation would prove substantial, perhaps decisive, in the long run. But in the shorter term the costs offset the benefits. Emancipation gave the disorganized Democratic opposition an issue around which to rally: the defense of White supremacy. And although the president’s proclamation made it more difficult for the British to recognize the Confederacy, the policy of Lord Palmerston’s government was ultimately determined by a hardheaded calculation of the Confederacy’s military prospects. In short, after Antietam the outcome of the war was still uncertain and would hinge on policies not yet enacted and battles still to be fought. The significance of Antietam lies not in the battle itself but in the campaign that produced it. That campaign was the result of a radical turn in the strategies of both Union and Confederacy—a series of political and military decisions made over a four-month period in the summer and fall of 1862 that transformed the policies, principles, and purposes that had hitherto governed the conduct of the war. Before Antietam it was still possible for Americans to imagine a compromise settlement of sectional differences. After Antietam, and the Emancipation Proclamation, the only way the war could end was by the outright victory of one side over the other. Either way, the result would be a revolutionary transformation of American politics and society. The road to Antietam, however, began long before September 3, 1862, when General Lee gave orders for the invasion of Maryland. It had, in fact, begun nearly two months earlier, during the first two weeks of July, when—after six months of intense military engagement by land and naval forces all around the Confederate periphery—Presidents Lincoln and Davis were compelled to acknowledge that their existing strategies were incapable of producing decisive results, and that new and more radical policies were necessary. HE BATTLE OF ANTIETAM HAS LONG BEEN CONSIDERED THE TURNING than the mechanics of military operations. All war is a form of politics, in which force and violence substitute for the civil exercise of power. That is especially true of the American Civil War, which was not fought over territory but over fundamental questions of social order, political organization, and human rights. Through strategic planning, the leaders of the warring parties STRATEGY IS MORE define the aims and purposes of the conflict and develop a combination of political actions and military operations designed to control the action and achieve their objectives—which are always ultimately political. Of course, strategy is not everything in war or politics. It is a truism of military science that no strategic or tactical plan outlives the first actual combat. The Antietam campaign is a pluperfect illustration of that maxim, in that almost nothing about it went as its planners intended. Presidents and generals cannot control the course of events that their orders may initiate. Their purposes and intentions will be crossed by those of their opponents and complicated by the motives and commitments of the people who do the actual fighting and the civilian societies that support or fail to support the war effort. Nevertheless, in modern warfare the role of a nation’s political and military leadership is central. The ideas and intentions of these individuals shape the decision whether, when, and how to go to war or organize a campaign; their commands set the action in motion, determine its initial lines of operation, and set the conditions under which the conflict will begin. In studying the thoughts and actions of presidents and generals we gain insight into the motives and values that make wars and help to determine their course. While it is easy to see how politics shapes strategy through the whole course of a war, it is harder to trace the connection between politics and the tactical decisions that shape war at the operational level. Thus most histories of the Antietam campaign treat the political decisions of the rival presidents and the operational decisions of their generals as if these occurred in separate spheres of thought and action—overlapping at the edges, but essentially different. Historians generally acknowledge that the outcome of the Battle of Antietam was given a vital political significance when Lincoln used the Union’s narrow victory as the occasion to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. But in fact political concerns and priorities shaped the operational decision making of both presidents, and of their army commanders, at every stage of the campaign; and the interaction of politics with military operations drove leaders on each side to adopt increasingly radical and even revolutionary policies. The Long Road to Antietam differs from previous studies of the campaign in that it offers a narrative that integrates military and political developments and shows how each played with and against the other as events unfolded. This book also differs from its predecessors in seeing the Civil War as a genuinely revolutionary crisis in American history. I think we cannot appreciate the character and significance of the strategic decisions taken by Lincoln and Davis unless we understand that they were not acting as the heads of stable national governments, defending well-established constitutional systems, but as leaders of embattled political movements whose regimes were vulnerable to the play of uncontrollable social and political forces. Both presidents would have to deal with the threat of new secessions by disaffected state governments and the threat of popular uprisings against their governments. Events would pressure both Lincoln and Davis to stretch their constitutional authority to or beyond the breaking point, to intensify the scope of combat operations beyond all precedent, and to inflict loss and suffering on civilian populations as an instrument of policy. Lincoln’s decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation was the culmination of this movement: to defeat the Confederacy’s political revolution he would inaugurate a social revolution, with class and race consequences far more like those of, say, the French or Russian revolutions than the Napoleonic Wars. The Proclamation was an unprecedented assertion of presidential and Federal power, which altered forever the constitutional balance of powers. Although it freed only those slaves held in Rebel territory, its application would legally annihilate several billion dollars in property. It would revolutionize the economy, social order, and politics of one-half of the country; and that transformation would be nationalized in the longer term, as freed slaves left the South and racial issues became a critical factor in the social, cultural, and political life of the entire nation. The Civil War may have ended as (in Eric Foner’s phrase) an “unfinished revolution”—but revolution it certainly was. But before he could put his new strategy into effect, Lincoln would have to overcome the most severe challenge of military to civilian authority in American history. Almost from the start of hostilities there had been movements in Washington to transfer the president’s effective power as commander in chief to a professional soldier, who would be legally appointed to a temporary and limited dictatorship. That movement had found a focus and an active agent in General George B. McClellan, commander of the armies entrusted with the defense of the capital; and it would rise to the level of a explicit threat during the summer and fall of 1862. The fact that, in the end, McClellan never acted to seize control has led most historians to discount the seriousness of the threat he represented. But historical actors, ignorant of the outcome, have to act with the full range of potential outcomes in mind. If we want to understand the quality and the content of decision making by Davis, Lincoln, and their military advisers, we need to know more than how things actually turned out. Any historical crisis has more potential outcomes than will actually be realized. Many of these possibilities have been codified in those lists of “might-have-beens” that historians and history buffs love to compile. The Antietam campaign is rife with such moments, most of them having to do with purely military events. What would have happened if McClellan had not accidentally learned Lee’s plans through the finding of the lost order, or had moved with greater speed to attack? What if Lee had chosen retreat instead of battle? Some of these are questions of real importance and will be addressed in this book. Beyond the tactical might-have-beens are deeper questions, arising from the political crisis with which the presidents and their generals had to deal. Davis would be disappointed in his belief that a Confederate invasion would produce a political revolution in the Border States and an electoral revulsion against the administration. Was that failure inevitable, or were the decisions of Davis and Lee based on a realistic assessment of their chances to win the war on the battlefield in September 1862? In the end, the conflict between Lincoln and McClellan would not end in a military takeover. But Lincoln lacked the advantage of hindsight, and this book assesses the potential menace of the McClellan problem as Lincoln would have seen it. History would have taught Lincoln that the political disruption of a revolutionary crisis, and the social violence of civil war, almost inevitably create the potential for the overthrow or abdication of civil authority in favor of a military dictatorship that promises to restore order. The Senate of Rome had surrendered republican powers to Caesar and his imperial successors. The English Revolution of 1640–52, which overthrew the monarchy and established a Parliamentary government, had ended in the dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell. The French Republic established by the Revolution of 1789 had given way in 1799 to the dictatorship of General Napoleon Bonaparte; and history repeated itself sixty years later when the Second Republic, formed in 1849, was overthrown by Napoleon III in 1852. Ten years after that debacle it was hardly inconceivable that the same fate might overtake the American republic. What Lincoln also knew was that from the moment McClellan first assumed high command, in July 1861, the general had incessantly schemed and conspired and politicked to gain control of the administration. In August and September the president would come to believe that McClellan was deliberately sabotaging the war effort, and that the ideas espoused at army headquarters were increasingly disloyal and by some accounts treasonous. The threat of what Lincoln’s aide John Hay called “the McClellan conspiracy” was serious, and a central theme of this study will be to show how Lincoln’s decision making at every stage of the Antietam campaign was distorted by his need to deal with that threat. Lincoln’s conflict with McClellan was far more dangerous to constitutional government than the later clash between President Truman and General MacArthur during the Korean War. Truman enjoyed the presumption that the president has unquestioned constitutional authority as commander in chief to direct military policy—a presumption Lincoln did not enjoy in 1862. Moreover, the LincolnMcClellan conflict occurred in the midst of civil war and revolution, when the authority of constitutional government itself was under challenge; and McClellan’s army was not half a world away but was entrusted with defense of the president, his government, and the capital of the nation. Even a failed or abortive coup attempt by a few disgruntled officers would have done severe, perhaps irreparable, harm to the Union cause, and set a dangerous precedent for the future of constitutional government. In the end Lincoln would succeed in transforming Federal strategy and putting the Union on the path to both victory and emancipation; and he would settle the question of civilian supremacy over the military in terms that would serve Harry Truman nearly a century later. Ironically, his initial attempt to both deal with McClellan and prepare the ground for the Emancipation Proclamation would give Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee their best opportunity to win the war in a single campaign. THE STRATEGIC SETTING: MILITARY OPERATIONS IN THE WAR’S FIRST YEAR The secession of the Southern state was a political revolution—a fundamental disruption of national government, which challenged all existing constitutional relations. So too, in its way, was the decision of President Lincoln’s government to suppress the secession movement by force of arms. The governments of states in the upper South denied his right to use force against the rebellious states and joined the secession. The constitutional authority for his action was held questionable by many Northern leaders as well as partisans of the new Confederacy; while even staunch Unionists like Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas and Republican editor Horace Greeley questioned whether it was feasible, wise, or safe for a republican government to undertake so vast a political suppression. The revolutionary character of the moment was obscured by the fact that both sides justified their actions by an appeal to conservative values. Each claimed to be acting on perfectly legal constitutional grounds, with the aim of preserving republican institutions and social order in their traditional form. They backed these rhetorical claims with policies that reflected the preponderance of genuinely conservative inclinations. The Confederate constitution retained the essential elements and wording of the Federal constitution, and its departures for the most part simply made explicit long-standing Southern interpretations of the original text. Unionists and Confederates also chose “conservative” presidents to lead them. Jefferson Davis had been among the more reluctant secessionists and was one of the few who defended secession as a constitutionally protected remedy rather than an assertion of the natural right of revolution. Among Republicans Lincoln was considered moderate to conservative on the slavery question, willing to give guarantees of protection to the institution in the states where it already existed. He was adamant on only two points: the specific insistence that slavery be banned from any new territory acquired by the United States; and the general principle that slavery be recognized as both a moral and a political wrong, and set on a path to “ultimate extinction” by peaceful means, at some indeterminate future date. The strategies initially adopted by Lincoln and Davis reflected their wish that the conflict be resolved by some kind of compromise that would preserve the values and social order each man valued. They hoped that hostilities could be brought to an early end by the combination of successful but limited military actions with efforts to conciliate and compromise political differences. A few substantial and impressive victories might teach the North the futility of invasion and conquest or convince the South that the costs of resistance would be unbearable. If such successes were coupled with political measures designed to show that a peace settlement would not endanger vital interests, they might yield some kind of compromise peace. So in defining the Confederacy’s war aims, Davis denied any intention to invade the territory or threaten the political integrity of those states that remained in the Union. Davis was willing to give assurances that an independent Confederacy would not endanger vital Northern interests, for example by offering to sign a treaty guaranteeing the free passage of the Mississippi for the produce of farmers in the Ohio and upper Mississippi River valleys. Faced with the costs of a long and bloody war, reasonable men at the North might make peace if, as Davis said, “All we ask is to be left alone.”1 Since the North’s primary war aim was to restore the Union by force of arms. Lincoln had no choice but to assume the offensive. His strategy envisioned powerful military offensives on several fronts, designed to inflict demoralizing defeats on Southern armies, coupled with a blockade that would inflict significant but not ruinous damage on Southern economic interests. However, these offensive measures would be combined with a civil policy designed to reassure Southerners that their states could negotiate a return to “the Union as it was,” with their rights and civil standing unimpaired. Central to this conservative policy was Lincoln’s declared intent to leave slavery untouched in those states where it now existed. His stance was principled: the Constitution he hoped to preserve recognized and protected slave property. It was also politic: by declaring his intention to respect the rights of slaveholders, Lincoln was able to hold or win the allegiance of the slaveholding Border States of Maryland, Delaware, and Kentucky (which had remained in the Union). It also allowed him to make a plausible appeal to whatever peace or pro-union sentiment existed in the Confederacy. In his first message to Congress, on December 3, 1861, he therefore declared that his policy would be to leave slavery alone, so that the war would not degenerate into “a remorseless revolutionary contest.”2 Lincoln and Davis understood that a compromise settlement would be extraordinarily difficult to achieve, given the depth and intensity of their disagreement on the fundamental issues: the right of any state to secede from the Union, and the question whether slavery should be perpetuated and extended or put on a path to “ultimate extinction.” Davis would accept no peace that did not concede Southern independence; Lincoln would reach no settlement that did not achieve the restoration of the Union and repudiation of the supposed “right of secession.” Both therefore hoped that early and decisive victories on the battlefield would degrade, if not break, the enemy’s political will to resist and bring them to make peace on acceptable terms. The civil and military leadership of Union and Confederacy tried from the first to develop viable strategies for putting these nascent forces in play. It was clear that the Confederacy would have to stand on the defensive; clear as well that the Federals would have to take the offensive if they hoped to compel the South’s return to the Union. But it was not at all obvious just how a strategic offensive might be conducted, or whether an armed reconquest of the South was even possible. Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, general in chief of the Federal army and an officer of vast military knowledge and experience, doubted whether the North could muster and equip enough land forces to successfully invade and occupy the South. At the outset, the only element on which Lincoln and Scott agreed was the necessity of establishing a naval blockade of Southern ports, which Lincoln declared on April 19, five days after the surrender of Fort Sumter. The press derided Scott’s hope that the economic strangulation inflicted by a blockade—“Scott’s Anaconda”—would bring the South to terms. Military operations during the first phase of the conflict, which lasted from April 14 to the late summer of 1861, were sporadic, opportunistic, and badly organized. The firing on Fort Sumter on April 14, 1861, and Lincoln’s call for troops, had brought out the militias of states North and South, and waves of recruits for newly formed volunteer regiments. But it was slow and frustrating work to form these gangs of enthusiasts into effective military units. The Regular Army of the United States was too small to provide a core combat force or an adequate supply of officers for either side. The state militias were generally neglected, poorly armed, and officered by local magnates and politicos. It would take each side months to recruit, equip, and concentrate enough regiments to form effective field armies; and their training was so poor that it was difficult if not impossible for commanders to maneuver troop combinations larger than a brigade of four or five regiments. A premature attempt to take the offensive ended in disaster at the First Battle of Bull Run, on July 21, 1861. Ill-trained Federal troops were unable to mount organized attacks or conduct an orderly retreat when repulsed. The Federal army, commanded by General Irvin McDowell, simply fell apart, but managed to escape because the badly trained Rebel army was too disorganized by victory to pursue. While each side was forming its field armies, the rival governments contended for control of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and the western counties of Virginia, where slavery existed but Union sentiment remained strong. The struggle was made with a mixture of political chicanery, semilegal subversion, and small-scale actions by hastily gathered military forces, the proportions differing in each state. In Missouri Unionists in effect staged a military coup against the secessionist governor and legislature and won control of the northern half of the state. In Maryland, Lincoln mixed appeals to Unionist politicians with the military occupation of Annapolis, Baltimore, and the rail lines to Washington, and the threat to arrest secessionist legislators. In the end, the Maryland legislature rejected secession. In Kentucky the struggle was mostly political, though both sides smuggled arms to their supporters and both concentrated military forces on the state’s borders anticipating invasion. The standoff lasted until September 1861, when, under threat of invasion, the Unionist legislature declared for the North. Only in western Virginia did success hinge entirely on action by regular military forces. In June 1861 a small Union army under General George McClellan crossed the Ohio River into the mountains and, in a campaign of maneuver punctuated by two small but decisive battles, drove Confederate forces out of the region. McClellan’s success stood out sharply, juxtaposed with the Bull Run disaster and the disorder everywhere else, and led Lincoln to summon him to Washington. McClellan took command of the Federal forces there on July 26 and became the president’s most influential military adviser. In consultation with Lincoln and General Scott, he developed a general plan of operations, dated August 2, which laid down the general course of action Union armies would follow in their strategic offensive. Many of the plan’s specific proposals would prove impractical, and McClellan’s ideas would undergo numerous changes before they were finally put into effect. Nevertheless, certain general lines of operation laid down in McClellan’s plan would become the basis of Federal strategy. The naval blockade, which had already been instituted, would be pressed by staging a series of amphibious operations to capture and hold key positions along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. These beachheads would serve as supply bases for the blockading fleet and allow Union forces to seize or control access to Southern seaports. The invasion of the South would follow three primary lines of advance. On the Virginia front, the Army of the Potomac under McClellan’s direct command would advance against the Rebel capital of Richmond. An army commanded by General Don Carlos Buell, then forming around Louisville, Kentucky, would advance against Rebel forces based on Nashville in middle Tennessee—then turn east to capture Chattanooga, cutting the shortest rail link between Virginia and the Confederate West and liberating the pro-Union population there. A third army, or rather a group of armies and a fleet of navy gunboats, commanded by General Henry W. Halleck, would begin an offensive to recover the Mississippi River Valley—an army under General John Pope operating on the west bank of the river while another under U.S. Grant advanced on the eastern side.3 Lincoln pressed his generals to begin operations in the late summer and fall of 1861. However, none of the army commanders were willing to do so. All three believed it was unwise to risk a major battle before their forces were fully trained, organized and equipped. Halleck and Buell also needed time to arrange for transport and the supplies that would allow them to operate in the vast spaces of the western theater. Their objections were well founded: offensive operations were far more demanding and difficult than the defensive for raw troops and untried army staffs to organize and conduct. However, as we will see, McClellan’s resistance was also driven by less reasonable factors. The result was that, until January 1862, it was impossible for Lincoln to put any strategic concept into effect. However, the preparations made in the latter half of 1861 allowed Union forces to open a multipronged strategic offensive all around the Confederate periphery, starting in the winter of 1861– 62 and culminating on July 1, 1862. The opening gambits were a series of joint operations by the army and navy to seize key positions along the Atlantic coast. On November 7, 1861, they captured Port Royal, South Carolina, and soon gained control of the Sea Islands off the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina. Three months later, on February 1, a force under Brigadier General Ambrose Burnside entered the North Carolina sounds. It captured the Confederate force defending Roanoke Island on February 7, destroying the small defensive fleet. With complete naval superiority, Burnside would spend the next four months capturing the major towns along the coast, from Elizabeth City southward to Beaufort. The threat of invasions emanating from these Atlantic enclaves tied substantial numbers of Southern troops to local defense and limited the numbers that could be concentrated in the field armies. While these operations went forward, another amphibious expedition, the largest of all, was organized to capture New Orleans. A fleet of mortar boats was sent in March 1862 to reinforce the navy’s West Gulf Squadron and provide the big guns that would reduce the Confederate forts defending the city. A division of Union infantry was specially recruited and sent south to provide an initial garrison once the place was taken. While the coastal operations were under way, Halleck’s and Buell’s armies were on the move in Missouri and Kentucky. The Confederates had a field army under General Albert Sidney Johnston facing Buell and defending Nashville, and two fortified posts, Forts Henry and Donelson, blocking a southward advance by U. S. Grant’s army of Halleck’s command via the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers. Grant’s infantry, supported by navy gunboats, captured Fort Henry on February 6. Grant then made a rapid cross-country march to surround Fort Donelson, which surrendered on February 16 after a hard fight. Grant’s victories compromised the Confederate defensive line and forced Johnston’s army to retreat. Buell took Nashville on February 25 and marched with painful slowness to join forces with Grant, whose army was isolated in an advanced position on the Tennessee River, at Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee. Before Buell could get there, the Confederates under Johnston pulled their forces together and staged a surprise attack on Grant’s army. Grant managed to salvage a victory in the ensuing Battle of Shiloh (April 7–8), at horrendous cost to both armies. The armies of Grant and Buell were then combined under Halleck’s command and, after another painfully slow advance, captured the vital railroad junction of Corinth, Mississippi, on May 30. While Halleck was moving against Corinth, Union naval forces under Admirals David Farragut and David Porter undertook a futile bombardment of Confederate forts below New Orleans from April 18 to April 24. On April 25 the fleet ran past the forts and it captured New Orleans on April 30, isolating the forts and forcing their surrender. The Union now had possession of the largest city and greatest seaport in the South, and it seemed possible for the navy to drive north and join forces with Halleck, clearing the Mississippi River in the process. Operations under McClellan on the Virginia front took much longer to develop, for reasons that bear further discussion. But on March 17 the navy began transporting McClellan’s Army of the Potomac, 120,000 strong, to Fort Monroe on the Virginia Peninsula—the tongue of land between the York and James rivers. The first skirmishes occurred on April 5, as McClellan moved against a Confederate trench line that spanned the Peninsula southeast from Yorktown. (Grant’s fight at Shiloh came two days later.) Fort Monroe was only fifty miles from Richmond, but McClellan advanced with excruciating slowness. It took from April 5 to June 2 for his army to reach the Richmond suburbs— while fifteen hundred miles southwest Halleck’s army crawled at a similar turtle’s pace toward Corinth. Now McClellan was in position for a decisive battle, with an army of over 100,000. The War Department considered that McClellan’s prospects, when combined with the achievement of Halleck’s western armies and the navy’s successes at New Orleans and the Carolinas, gave such assurance of victory that it suspended recruitment to save money. Then a series of bold Confederate countermoves, beginning in May and ending July 1, reversed the course of events. On the Richmond front, General Robert E. Lee assumed command of Confederate forces on June 2. Rather than stand a siege by McClellan’s superior infantry force and heavy artillery, Lee decided to seize the initiative and attack. He was aided by the operations of General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley. With a small command of about 15,000 men, Jackson had rampaged up and down the Shenandoah Valley from May 8 to June 9, defeating the Union forces holding the Valley, shaking the Union army’s hold on northern Virginia, and appearing to threaten Washington itself. Reinforcements that ought to have gone to McClellan were distracted into a futile pursuit of Jackson. During the first week of June, Jackson broke contact with his pursuers, and Lee ordered him to bring his Valley army to Richmond. When Jackson arrived, Lee’s force would be increased to about 95,000 men, nearly equal to McClellan’s 105,000. Moreover, Federal units were in a bad position, divided by the Chickahominy River, with four corps to the south and only one to the north defending the army’s line of supply. Lee executed a daring tactical maneuver, using a fraction of his army to hold the line south of the Chickahominy and throwing two-thirds of his infantry, including Jackson’s troops, against the lone Federal V Corps north of the river. In the Seven Days Battles that followed (June 25–July 1), Lee smashed V Corps, compromised McClellan’s supply line, and forced him to retreat to Harrison’s Landing on the James River, leaving behind his wounded, thousands of prisoners, and vast stores of equipment with which Lee would reequip his army. At the same time in the western theater, offensive operations by the Union army group under General Henry W. Halleck were stultified by poor leadership and tenuous logistics. Halleck ordered Buell’s army to take up its original mission, which had been the invasion of east Tennessee and the capture of Chattanooga. But thanks to the concentration against Corinth, Buell would have to begin his advance from a point much farther from his goal than Louisville, along lateral lines exposed to Rebel cavalry raids. Meanwhile, Grant was ordered to prepare an advance against Vicksburg, the next major bastion on the Mississippi River. However, he was unable to begin his offensive, because he had to send several divisions to protect Buell’s supply line. As a result, the Confederate field armies in the theater were able to break contact with the Federals and maneuver freely. In mid-July—with Lee’s force watching an immobilized McClellan—General Braxton Bragg, senior Confederate commander in the west, proposed a theater-wide offensive. He would shift most of his Army of Tennessee, 35,000 men strong, eastward by rail from Tupelo, Mississippi, to Chattanooga, easily outstripping Buell. Then, in conjunction with the small army in eastern Tennessee, led by General Kirby Smith, he would invade Kentucky. A victory there might compel Buell to abandon central Tennessee, and might even cause Kentuckians to reject their Unionist government and change sides. the Civil War had reached a turning point. The strategies that had governed the actions of both sides for the first year of the war had exhausted their potential for producing decisive results. There was a brief moment of equipoise, a military standoff during which Presidents Lincoln and Davis and their military advisers could assess the lessons learned in a year of warfare and consider new military and political measures that might lead on to victory. Each president would reorganize his military commands and commit them to a new and more intensive program of offensive operations. Each would also adopt a more radical political course, taking actions and adopting policies that would test the limitations of the constitutional governments he served. Although Confederate forces had managed to check the wave of Union offensives that had begun in January, the power of those offensives had taught President Davis that the South could not preserve slavery and independence by a purely defensive strategy. In the first two weeks of July 1862, Davis and General Lee began discussing the possibility of adopting a new and more radical strategy: a shift in military operations from the defensive to the offensive posture. By July 13 Davis would have authorized simultaneous counteroffensives by his three main field armies, whose ultimate goal was to disrupt and derange the political order that sustained the Union war effort. They would invade the slaveholding Border States of Maryland and Kentucky and invite their citizens to rise and throw off the yoke of Yankee oppression; and by raiding into Northern territory, they would bring home to the THUS IN JULY OF 1862 Northern people the pain and cost of war and so persuade them to reject Lincoln and the Republican Party in the upcoming midterm elections. At the same moment, the failure of the Union offensives had made it clear to Lincoln that the forces deployed had failed to weaken the Confederacy’s political will or power to resist; nor had the spirit of compromise been awakened by his assurances that slave property would be safe in a restored Union. Between June 28, when he first learned the dimensions of McClellan’s defeat, and July 12, when he returned from a deeply disturbing conference with McClellan, Lincoln made a series of decisions that would transform Federal strategy in the most fundamental way. The centerpiece of his new strategy was the political decision to declare a general emancipation of all slaves held in Confederate territory. The effect of such a proclamation would be to make a compromise peace impossible and commit the Union to a war of subjugation. It would therefore entail a thoroughgoing reorganization of the military command, a drastic increase in force size, and an ambitious expansion of the army’s strategic mission. But Lincoln could not put this new strategy into effect until he had resolved “the McClellan problem.” A NOTE ON MILITARY TERMINOLOGY F OR READERS UNFAMILIAR WITH MILITARY TERMINOLOGY, OR WITH the organization of Civil War armies, some brief definitions and descriptions may be useful. CIVIL WAR MILITARY UNITS The basic unit of Civil War military organization was the regiment, usually raised by state governments and recruited from a particular city or district. The initial strength of a regiment was 1,000–1,200 officers and men, but disease shrank that number before a unit reached the field, after which casualties and desertions took their toll. Veteran regiments in the Antietam campaign might number 150 or fewer, while “rookie” regiments mustered nearly a thousand. A regiment was supposed to be commanded by a colonel, but because of illness, wounds, or other causes, command often fell to lower-ranking officers. A brigade is a group of four or five regiments, with an attached artillery battery. Brigades were supposed to be commanded by brigadier generals, and in the Confederate armies they generally were. But the Union was slow to grant general’s stars, so many Federal brigades were led by colonels. The Confederate army was more assiduous than the Federals about organizing brigades by state but was not always able to do so. Rebel brigades were known by the name of their commander (for example, Hood’s Brigade) or by an officially designated nickname (Stonewall Brigade). Union brigades were designated by number, though some earned unofficial nicknames: for example, the Iron Brigade and the Irish Brigade. A division is a group of brigades. In the Antietam campaign, Confederate divisions ranged between four and six brigades, and were typically commanded by major generals; while Union divisions had three or four brigades and were commanded by colonels and brigadiers as well as major generals. Confederate divisions were named for their commanders; Union divisions were numbered. A corps or army corps is a group of divisions. Two or more corps were sometimes combined to form a wing. During the Antietam campaign, the corps structure of Lee’s army was not yet firmly established. Although Generals Longstreet and Jackson had commanded groups of divisions for months before Antietam, Lee had often altered the composition of their commands in response to events. How and why he did so is part of the story that follows. However, Lee consistently followed the principle of corps command, which was to delegate control of large-scale tactical operations to a single trusted commander with the rank of lieutenant general. Union corps were smaller than Confederate corps and usually commanded by major generals. When Confederate corps were finally established, they would be named for their commanders, while Union corps were numbered. An army is a group of corps. Until 1864, the Federal government refused to authorize any grade higher than major general. Hence Union armies were commanded by major generals, while Confederate armies were led by generals or “full generals.” Union armies were named after rivers, Southern armies after the territories they were initially assigned to defend. Thus McClellan’s force was called the Army of the Potomac, while Lee’s was the Army of Northern Virginia. The basic artillery unit was the battery, consisting of four to six horse-drawn guns and their supporting equipment and ammunition, which was carried in wheeled limber-chests and supply wagons. Each battery was divided into two or more sections that might maneuver separately in action. Batteries were administratively organized into regiments and battalions, but in practice most were distributed to brigades and divisions as autonomous units. Lightweight, short-range batteries of smoothbore cannons (some called “Napoleons”) were attached to brigades for action with the infantry. Divisions, corps, and the army also disposed of artillery reserves, which included both smoothbores and longer-range pieces with rifled barrels, which fired heavier-weight shells. At long ranges (800– 1,800 yards), guns fired solid shot or explosive shells of various sizes, which were effective against infantry and enemy batteries. Exploding case-shot—a hollow shell packed with six large lead or iron balls—was used against infantry at ranges of 500 to 800 yards. The deadliest antipersonnel ammunition was canister, a cylinder of thin metal packed with 100–120 lead or iron balls bedded in sawdust. A cannon firing canister was like a giant shotgun, which was devastating at ranges up to 400 yards but could be effective up to 600 yards. MILITARY TERMINOLOGY Strategy is commonly used to describe large-scale military planning, from “grand strategy,” which may be international in scope, to the planning of an entire war, to the design of a military campaign for the conquest of a region or theater of operations. In this book, strategy refers to the planning of a war as a whole, in which the use of military force is systematically tied to ideas about the nation’s war aims—that is, the political objectives for which the war is being fought. Operations are the actual movements planned or actually made by armies. A campaign is a series of operations designed to achieve a significant objective, such as the capture of a major city or the destruction of an opposing army. The region in which a campaign plays out is called a theater of operations. Tactics are the movements and actions of military units when in contact with the enemy. Some of the operational and tactical maneuvers described in this book may require definition. Civil War armies fought in lines. The basic infantry weapon was the single-shot muzzle-loaded riflemusket, and the only way to deliver massed fire on the battlefield was to form the infantry in two lines, one behind the other. The range and power of rifles and artillery were such that frontal assaults against strong battle lines were generally doomed to failure. If two hundred riflemen advance directly against another line of two hundred, the attackers have no advantage in firepower, and if they stop firing and attempt a charge they are at a disadvantage. The best way to break a battle line is to attack it from the flank, by finding a gap or open area, pushing troops through it, and wheeling one’s battle line to face the end of the enemy’s line—as if crossing the top of a capital “T.” Now, instead of fronting an equal number of riflemen, the attacker faces only two defenders; and his own fire enfilades the defender’s line—rips down it from end to end. Since the attacker’s line is wider than the defender’s flank, the attacker also threatens to hit the enemy unit from the rear or cut it off from the rest of its army. The defenders have little choice but to retreat, or break and run. That same principle of the flanking maneuver applies to the movement of armies. An army’s defensive position inevitably took the form of an extended line, to defend its lines of supply and to bring its firepower into play. To drive an army from its position without attacking frontally, an attacker had to turn the defender’s flank. By making a turning maneuver around the end of the defender’s line, the attacker could reach a position from which he could either attack the endmost unit of the defending army, and “roll up” the line by striking each unit in turn from end to end; or strike at the defender’s line of supply, cutting him off from food and ammunition and compelling him to retreat. PART ONE TURNING POINT: MILITARY STALEMATE AND STRATEGIC INITIATIVES July 1862 CHAPTER 1 LINCOLN’S STRATEGY: EMANCIPATION AND THE MCCLELLAN PROBLEM APRIL 1861–FEBRUARY 1862 UNION STRATEGY AT AN IMPASSE JUNE 1–JULY 4, 1862 T Washington, and in 1862 it also brought malaria and typhoid. For their health and comfort, President Lincoln moved his family out to a Gothic Revival cottage in the suburbs on the grounds of the Soldiers’ Home, a government hospital and sanitarium for ill and disabled veterans. The president would dutifully ride into town on horseback or in an open carriage in order to work in his office at the White House or to sit anxiously by the telegraph in the War Department to get the latest intelligence from the fighting fronts. For Lincoln the month was a time of frustration and forebodings of disaster. The depressive mood to which he was prone took hold. He left his meals half-eaten and remained up late into the night brooding. His dark, lean face went from gaunt to haggard. On the surface the Union cause appeared to be riding a wave of success. The North Carolina sounds and Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina were now in Federal hands, and New Orleans had been captured. The western armies under General Halleck had driven the Rebel army out of Kentucky and the western half of Tennessee and seized Corinth as a base for further advances. In Virginia, “Stonewall” Jackson’s apparent threat to Washington had been repelled, and General McClellan with the Army of the Potomac was at the gates of Richmond. There was a general consensus among both political leaders and military professionals that the victory there, which seemed imminent, would convince the Rebels to give up their attempt to gain independence. Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton was so sanguine that he ordered the recruiting offices closed as a measure of economy. Lincoln did not share that optimism. As he read the course of events, it seemed to him increasingly clear that the strategy of conciliation had failed. It had been based on the belief that the Southern people’s commitment to secession was shallow, and could be broken by the combination of swift and decisive military action, with reassurances that slavery would be protected in the states where it already existed. But the military and the political assumptions behind that strategy had demonstrably been mistaken. It had proved to be impossible for the Union to mount effective military offensives during the first nine months of war, and that interval had given the Confederacy time to build up substantial military forces and consolidate its hold on the loyalty of the populace. Although the first six months of 1862 had seen successful Federal offensives all around the Confederate periphery, none of these had been decisive. Southern armies had escaped destruction and continued to build their powers; and Southerners had accepted the losses suffered in these campaigns as sacrifices, which actually HE MONTH OF JUNE BRINGS SWELTERING HEAT AND HUMIDITY TO strengthened the public’s commitment to the Rebel cause. The slow, seemingly interminable pace of offensive operations was partly to blame. The western campaign had begun with swift victories by Grant at Forts Henry and Donelson in February 1862. But the near defeat of Grant’s army at Shiloh on April 7 had given General Halleck a fright. Halleck was not an experienced field general; rather, he was a veteran of staff appointments in the prewar army, a military bureaucrat and scholar of strategic theory whose nickname was “Old Brains.” It took Halleck and his army of over 100,000 men more than a month to cover the thirty miles between Shiloh and Corinth, because he insisted on marching only half the day, and spent the rest digging entrenchments to ward off a Confederate attack—which the Rebel army, outnumbered and weakened by battle losses, was incapable of mounting. As a result, the Rebel army—known as the Army of Tennessee and commanded by General Braxton Bragg—was able to slip away from Corinth into northern Alabama, where it spent the month of June recovering its strength and mobility. From that position the Rebels could harass and disrupt the march of General Buell’s army, which was supposed to march east from Corinth and capture Chattanooga, more than three hundred miles away. If Buell moved at Halleck’s pace it would take him ten months to reach his goal. Lincoln was also worried about the possibility that Bragg might send reinforcements over the mountains to prevent McClellan from taking Richmond. McClellan’s advance up the Virginia Peninsula, which was nearly simultaneous with Halleck’s march on Corinth, had stultified for similar reasons. McClellan mistakenly believed he was outnumbered, and therefore paused to lay siege to every Rebel defense line. He had landed on the Peninsula in the first week of April but did not close with the main Rebel army until May 31, in the Battle of Seven Pines, a little over six miles from Richmond. It would take McClellan nearly four weeks more, until June 25, to get his troops into positions from which it would be possible to assault the city. Even then, his position was an awkward one. Four of his five army corps were south of the Chickahominy River, directly fronting the Richmond defense lines. The V Corps, commanded by General Fitz-John Porter, was north of the river, separated from the rest of the army by a rain-swollen stream crossed by a few rickety bridges. Porter’s position was both vulnerable and vital. He was exposed to attack by Stonewall Jackson’s troops moving south from the Shenandoah Valley; and his was the only substantial body of troops positioned to defend the army’s line of supply, which ran back over the Chicakahominy to the small York River port of White House. Whatever his ideas about the likelihood of McClellan taking Richmond, Lincoln was becoming convinced that it was no longer possible for the Union to defeat the Confederacy in a short war. He did not share the troubled drift of his ideas with anyone. For all his affability he was an extremely secretive man who kept his deepest thoughts to himself until he was ready to act upon them. But the effects were visible in his dark mood and loss of appetite, his frequent outbursts of dissatisfaction with his generals, and his new willingness to contemplate a major restructuring of the army command. On June 23 he made a trip to West Point to consult retired lieutenant general Winfield Scott, who had been general in chief until forced into retirement by General McClellan. Scott was seventy-six, broken in health, his six-five frame swollen and crippled with arthritis, but Lincoln trusted his patriotism and his professionalism. Scott had served his country for fifty years and had already been a general in the War of 1812, and his conduct of the campaign against Mexico City in the Mexican American War of 1846–48 had earned him an international reputation as a strategist and field commander. Although Lincoln would not follow all of Scott’s recommendations, the meeting did