Original subtitles

Private Edwin Tennison,

killed in action at Malvern Hill,

July 1st, 1862.

During the Civil War, photographers followed the armies everywhere

to make proud portraits for the boys to send home

and to capture as much of the action as cumbersome equipment

and slow shutter speeds allowed.

Near the battle of Fair Oaks, Virginia, Captain George Armstrong Custer

paused to have his picture taken

with J. B. Washington,

a close friend and classmate from West Point--

and now a Confederate Lieutenant

who had just that morning been captured by federal pickets.

As 1862 dragged on,

the character of the war was changing,

and much of the country was changing with it.

By 1862, more than a million farm workers

had enlisted in the Union army,

and travelers in the Midwest saw more women at work in the fields than men.

The year, which had begun so promisingly for the North,

had now gone awry.

U. S. Grant's triumphs at Donelson and Shiloh

were being overshadowed by disasters in the east.

In Virginia, Union General George McClellan's army sat outside Richmond,

its commander in possession of vastly greater forces,

but without the will to fight.

Meanwhile, the Confederacy

was beginning to appreciate the brilliance of a new commander,

Robert E. Lee,

who would soon establish a reputation

as one of the greatest military leaders of all time.

And there was still more trouble for the Union:

at Blackburn, England, a public meeting declared

that it was impossible for the North to vanquish the South

and called for a negotiated settlement of the war.

With Europe poised to recognize the Confederacy,

the unthinkable looked increasingly likely--

the Union was going to lose the war.

"We must change our tactics or lose the game,"

Abraham Lincoln wrote in 1862.

To Lincoln, it was clear now that it was no longer possible

to restore the old Union:

a new one had to be embraced.

By summer, he knew what tactic was needed to win the war--

emancipation--

but doubted whether he would ever have the political

or military opportunity to use it.

"I find it hard to maintain my lively faith in the triumph

"of the nation and the law,"

New York lawyer George Templeton Strong confided to his diary.

"These are the darkest days we have seen since Bull Run."

What no one knew was that the year would soon see

the bloodiest day of the war,

and then the brightest.

It could have been a very ugly, filthy war

with no redeeming characteristics at all,

and it was the battle for emancipation

and the people who pushed it forward--

the slaves, the free black people, the abolitionists,

and a lot of ordinary citizens--

it was they who ennobled what otherwise would have been

meaningless carnage into something higher.

Outside Richmond, George McClellan continued to call

anxiously for more troops,

though his 110,000- man force

already greatly outnumbered Joseph Johnston's army.

Meanwhile, west of the Blue Ridge in the Shenandoah Valley,

General Thomas J. Jackson

was keeping three federal armies busy.

"Always mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy,

"and when you strike and overcome him,

"never let up in the pursuit.

"Never fight against heavy odds if you can hurl your force

"on only a part of your enemy and crush it.

"A small army may thus destroy a large one,

"and repeated victory will make it invincible."

General T. J. Jackson

He was a true eccentric:

he believed that if he had pepper in his food,

it would make his left leg ache;

he would never mail a letter

that would be in transit on a Sunday;

he was a strict observer of the Sabbath,

and yet so many of his battles were fought on Sundays

that the soldiers began to believe that he would fight on Sunday

because the Lord would be even more with him.

Jackson was a pious, blue-eyed killer,

utterly untroubled by the likelihood of death.

It was a man's "entire duty," he said,

"to pray and fight."

"He would have a man shot at the drop of a hat,

"and he'd drop it himself."

Sam Watkins.

He had a strange quality of overlooking suffering.

There was a... during one of the battles, he had a young courier,

and Jackson looked around for him, and he wasn't there,

and he said, "Where is Lieutenant So-and-so?"

And they said, "He was killed, General."

Jackson said, "Very commendable, very commendable,"

and then put him out of his mind.

"All old Jackson gave us was a musket, 100 rounds, and a gum blanket,

"and he drove us like hell."

His men did not love him. He was too grim, too remote,

and he demanded too much.

Some thought him mad.

He believed that only by keeping one hand in the air

could he stop himself from going out of balance,

and he sucked constantly on lemons, even in the midst of battle.

Others worried that his religious fervor would cloud his judgment.

His command, Jackson said, was "an army of the living God,

"as well as of its country."

But his men were willing to endure the 36-mile-a-day marches he demanded

because he brought them victories.

It was Jackson's duty in the Shenandoah to unsettle the Union

and keep Washington from reinforcing McClellan.

Operating in the midst of three federal armies,

each with more men than his own force of 17,000,

Jackson lashed out at one army and then another.

Armed with a detailed map that stretched 8½ feet,

he surprised them every time--

at Winchester, Front Royal,

Cross Keys, Port Republic,

and a half-dozen other places.

After routing Nathaniel Banks' army at the battle of Winchester,

Jackson chased it all the way to the Potomac.

"Stop, men," Banks shouted to his retreating troops.

"Don't you love your country?"

"Yes, by God," said one,

"and I'm trying to get back to it just as fast as I can."

Jackson's Valley Campaign was a triumph.

In just over a month, his men marched almost 400 miles,

inflicted 7,000 casualties,

seized huge quantities of badly needed supplies,

and kept almost 40,000 federal troops off the peninsula.

"He who does not see the hand of God in this

"is blind, sir, blind."

"There is no doubt

"that Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army.

"They are making, it appears, a navy,

"and they have made what is more than either:

"they have made a nation.

"We may anticipate with certainty the success

"of the Southern States."

William E. Gladstone.

Confederate gospel held that Britain and France

could not survive without Southern cotton.

Before long, one or both would surely intervene on behalf of the Confederacy

to end the Union blockade.

To put more pressure on Europe,

the Confederates cut cotton production 90%.

Two-and-a-half million bales were burned or left to rot on Confederate wharves

to keep it out of English hands.

Now, in addition to directing a war at home,

Lincoln had to find a way to keep Europe

from coming in on the side of the South.

And increasingly, in the North, there was pressure for emancipation,

and it came from unlikely people

in unlikely places.

On May 1st, 1862,

Lincoln named General Benjamin F. Butler

Military Governor of occupied New Orleans.

Butler went right to work.

He hanged a man suspected of having desecrated the American flag.

He closed a Secessionist newspaper;

confiscated the property of citizens

who refused to swear allegiance to the Union,

and was given the scornful nickname "Spoons"

for allegedly pocketing silverware.

New Orleans women routinely insulted his troops.

When a woman in the French Quarter leaned from a window

to dump her chamber pot on the head of Admiral Farragut,

Butler issued General Order Number 28.

"As officers and soldiers of the United States

"have been subject to repeated insults

"from the women calling themselves

" 'Ladies of New Orleans,'

"it is ordered that, hereafter,

"when any female shall,

"by word, gesture, or movement, insult

"or show contempt for any officer or soldier

"of the United States,

"she shall be regarded and held

"liable to be treated as a woman of the town

"plying her avocation."

General Benjamin Butler.

Southerners were outraged and called Butler "The Beast."

A New Orleans entrepreneur sold chamber pots

featuring Butler's portrait inside the bowl.

In Charleston, South Carolina,

a private citizen offered a $10,000 reward

for the capture of "Beast" Ben Butler--

dead or alive.

But the harassment of his men stopped.

With the Union Army so near,

unrest on Louisiana plantations increased.

When desperate slave owners began complaining of rebellious blacks,

Butler declared the planters disloyal to the Union,

then took away their slaves.

"Go to the Yankees," one slave-holder told his slaves.

"They are kings here now."

"I have been reading so much about the Yankees,

"I was very anxious to see them.

"The whites would tell their colored people not to go to the Yankees,

"for they would harness them to carts

"and make them pull the carts around in place of horses.

"I asked grandmother one day if this was true.

"She replied, 'certainly not',

"that the white people did not want slaves to go over to the Yankees

"and told them these things to frighten them.

"I wanted to see those wonderful Yankees so much,

"as I heard my parents say that the Yankees

"was going to set all the slaves free."

Susan King Taylor.

The slaves understood

that that war was about slavery before it was a war.

They made a nuisance for the army, and they also made an issue

hat the army had to deal with.

And if the army had to deal with it,

the War Department had to deal with it.

If the War Department had to deal with it,

Congress had to deal with it.

That means that every fugitive slave

who made a nuisance of himself

to the local commander

eventually made a figure of himself

to the Congress of the United States.

Congress, controlled by Republicans,

now forbade the army to return slaves to their masters,

and in June, it outlawed slavery in the territories,

finally reversing the old Dred Scott decision.

"Only the damnedest of damned abolitionists dreamed

"of such things a year ago.

"John Brown's soul is marching on,

"with the people after it."

George Templeton Strong.

"The slavery question perplexes the president almost as much as ever,

"and yet I think he's about to emerge

"from the obscurities where he has been groping

"into somewhat clearer light.

"So, you see, the man moves."

Salmon P Chase.

"July 4th, 1862.

"I would do it if I were not afraid

"that half the officers would fling down their arms

"and three more states would rise."

Lincoln continued to back a plan

to pay $400 for every slave freed

and then encourage the freed men

to sail off to a colony in Africa or Central America.

The abolitionist Wendell Phillips called Abraham Lincoln

a first-rate second-rate man.

I lose patience with the argument that

because of someone's time,

his limitations are therefore excusable or even praiseworthy.

It is not true

that it was impossible in that time and place

to look any higher.

Think of Wendell Phillips, who,

commenting on Abraham Lincoln's proposal

to colonize black people out of the country,

was sarcastic. He said, "Colonize the blacks?

"A man might as well colonize his own hands,

"or when the robber is in his house,

"he might as well colonize his revolver."

"Emancipation is the demand of civilization,

"that is a principle;

"all else is intrigue."

Ralph Waldo Emerson.

On the Virginia peninsula, the rains came,

inundating the bottomlands.

Along the roads outside Richmond, George McClellan's force was divided in two

by the flooded Chickahominy River.

The rebels saw their chance and attacked the smaller force on May 31st.

In the fierce fighting that followed, the Confederates did best

near a crossroads called Seven Pines.

The Union soldiers were most successful at Fair Oaks.

When the battle of Fair Oaks was over, the North had lost 5,000 men;

the South, 6,000,

and it hadn't changed a thing.

Joseph Johnston, the overall Confederate commander,

was himself severely wounded and carried from the field.

"The shot that struck me down was the best ever fired for the Confederacy,

"for I possessed in no degree the confidence of the government,

"and now a man who does enjoy it will succeed me

"and be able to accomplish what I never could."

"His name might be 'Audacity'. He will take more chances and take them quicker,

"than any other general in this country, north or south."

Now for the first time in the war,

Robert E. Lee was placed at the head of a major army.

"I prefer Lee to Johnston.

"Lee is too cautious and weak under grave responsibility:

"personally brave and energetic to a fault, he is

"yet wanting in moral firmness when pressed by

"heavy responsibility."

George McClellan.

McClellan completely misjudged the new Confederate commander.

Robert E. Lee was a fighter.

Wanting to get at the Union men who had dared invade his state,

Lee renamed his force The Army of Northern Virginia,

seized the initiative, and never let it go.

First, Lee sent his cavalry chief,

Jeb Stuart, to reconnoiter McClellan's forces.

Stuart now led 1,200 troopers on a pounding,

three-day, 150-mile ride

around McClellan's huge army.

His men burned federal camps, cut down telegraph poles,

took prisoners and horses and mules,

and slowed only to accept bouquets and kisses from women along the way.

In vain pursuit was Stuart's own father-in-law,

who had stayed loyal to the Union and become a general--

a decision, Stuart said he would "regret but once,

"and that will be continuously."

Throughout the whole campaign,

Lee carefully observed McClellan's tentative advance up the peninsula.

As McClellan was preparing at last to lay siege to Richmond,

Lee surprised him first, at Mechanicsville on June 26th.

It was a daring move.

Defying all military convention, Lee divided his tiny force

and then attacked the huge Union army,

gambling that McClellan would be too cautious to move into Richmond.

Lee's assault didn't work.

He lost 1,500 men at Mechanicsville,

but he would not let up.

Determined to drive McClellan out of Virginia, Lee kept on the attack.

And so it went.

For seven days, the two armies clashed.

From Gaine's Mill...

from Savage's Station...

to Frayser's Farm...

and Malvern Hill,

where federal gunners stopped the Confederates

who came at them up the long slope.

"Our ears had been filled all night

"with agonizing cries before the fog was lifted.

"But now our eyes saw

"that 5,000 dead or wounded men were on the ground.

"A third of them were dead or dying,

"but enough of them were alive and moving to give the field

"a singular crawling effect."

"Each of the battles of those seven days

"brought a harvest of wounded to our hospital.

"I used to veil myself closely as I walked to and from my hotel,

"that I might shut out the dreadful sights.

"Once I did see one of those dreadful wagons.

"In it, a stiff arm was raised, and it

"shook as it was driven down the street,

"as though the dead owner appealed to heaven for vengeance."

All but one of the battles of the seven days were Union victories,

yet McClellan treated them as defeats,

continuing to back down until he reached the safety of federal gunboats

of at Harrison's Landing on the James River.

Union officers urged a counterattack.

Lee had lost 20,000 men.

McClellan refused.

One officer suggested his commander was motivated

either by "cowardice or treason."

In just one week, Lee had completely unnerved the Union general

and demonstrated for the first time the strengths

that would make him a legend--

surprise, audacity,

and an eerie ability to read his opponent's mind.

In just seven days,

McClellan had been totally out-generaled.

"I am tired of the sickening sight of the battlefield,

"with its mangled corpses and poor suffering wounded.

"Victory has no charms for me when purchased at such cost."

On July 7th, an exasperated Lincoln

sailed down to see his commanding general.

He had not lost, McClellan insisted;

he had merely failed to win.

He needed 50,000 more men, or perhaps 100,000.

No such numbers were available, Lincoln told him.

If McClellan did not feel he could resume the offensive,

his men would be withdrawn from the peninsula.

"If I gave McClellan all the men he asks for,

"they couldn't find room to lie down.

"They'd have to sleep standing up.

"Sending men to that army is like shoveling fleas across a barnyard--

"not half of them get there."

"September 3.

"Today we took a steamer and went up the Potomac past Washington

"and landed at Georgetown.

"It is hard to have reached the point we started from last March,

"and Richmond is still the rebel capital."

Elisha Hunt Rhodes.

Union guns battered Fort Pulaski, Georgia into surrendering

and choked off the Savannah River to Southern ships.

There was fighting at Foyt's Plantation, North Carolina,

St. Andrew's Bay, Florida,

Wartrace, Tennessee,

and at Albuquerque in far-off New Mexico Territory.

"Sea Islands, Georgia.

"Here I am, surrounded by troopers, missionaries,

"contrabands, cotton fields, and serpents,

"in a summer climate,

"disgusted with all things military

"and fighting off malaria with whiskey and tobacco.

"No man seems to realize that here in this little island,

"all around us,

"has begun the solution of the tremendous nigger question.

"Some 10,000 former slaves are thrown upon the hands

"of the unfortunate government.

"They are the forerunners of hundreds of thousands more."

Lieutenant Charles Francis Adams.

Stationed in places like Hilton Head and Beaufort,

New Englanders got their first taste of the tropics.

None of the 2nd Massachusetts

had ever seen a palm tree before.

When Union forces took parts of the South Carolina coast,

plantation owners fled,

leaving behind empty houses and 10,000 slaves.

Missionaries, teachers and other volunteers

soon arrived to help the newly-liberated.

"We have come to do antislavery work," one teacher wrote.

"We think it noble work, and we will do it nobly."

"My dear wife,

"This day I can address you, thank God,

"as a free man.

"I had a little trouble getting away, but

"as the Lord led the children of Israel to the land of Canaan,

"so he led me to a land where freedom will reign

"in spite of earth and hell.

"My dear,

"I trust the time will come when we will meet again.

"and if we don't meet on earth,

"we will meet in heaven, where Jesus reigns.

"Dear wife, I must close.

"Rest yourself contented.

"I am free.

"Your affectionate husband.

"Kiss Daniel for me."

John Boston.

At Deer Isle, Maine, people were afraid to go to the post office,

where the casualty lists were posted.

"New Berne, North Carolina. March 20th, 1862.

"To Mr. John Webster, Jr., Deer Isle, Maine.

"Dear sir...

"It is with pain that I have to announce to you

"the death of your brother, Charles Gray.

"By his good conduct and bravery while with me,

"he had risen to the rank of corporal,

"and had he lived, I should have promoted him again.

"He was shot through the body at the battle of New Berne.

"His last words were, 'We will never give up.'

"He is buried here.

"His effects I shall send home at the earliest opportunity.

"Yours truly, E. A. P. Brewster,

"Captain, Commanding Company A,

"23rd Massachusetts."

Deer Isle had lost its first soldier.

A parcel containing Charles Gray's personal effects arrived in the mail--

his hat, promotion papers attesting to his valor,

and a cartridge box in which someone had placed

the mangled bullet that killed him.

His mother refused to look at it.

The men of the reduced fishing fleet struggled to harvest a catch.

Wives tended kitchen gardens and scraped linen

for the lint from which army bandages were made.

More bad news arrived:

Private Alex Henderson had died of disease at Fort Jackson, Louisiana,

leaving a widow and several children.

At Clarksville, Tennessee, tensions between the town

and the occupying Union army ran high.

Federal troops vandalized Stewart College,

wrecking laboratories and stealing books,

then set up headquarters there.

Soldiers burst in on a Church service,

arrested the preacher, commandeered horses,

and forced reluctant parishioners

to take a loyalty oath.

As much as possible, the residents stayed at home.

The answer to a-- a southerner would give you

as to why are you fighting if you were a northerner,

he would say, "I'm fighting 'cause you're down here."

He was being invaded, and he fought, as he thought, to defend his home.

Lincoln had the much more difficult job of sending men out to

shoot up somebody else's home,

and he had to unite them before he could do that.

And his way of doing it was double: one was to say that the--

the republic must be preserved, not split in two, that was one;

and the other one he gave them as a cause--

the freeing of the slaves.

On the morning of July 22nd, 1862,

the president called a cabinet meeting.

What he said took everyone by surprise.

After long thought, he told them,

he had decided to emancipate the slaves.

It was a stunning moment.

It was against everything Lincoln had promised

all the Republicans and indeed the country--

that he would not become an abolitionist.

He would not strike at slavery where it existed.

And here, suddenly, he was changing the character of the war.

But Secretary of State Seward worried that until the army had won a real victory,

emancipation would seem like the last shriek on the retreat.

Lincoln agreed to wait for a victory.

It's hard to separate one issue from another.

Obviously, Lincoln had to win the war.

He had to keep his respectability

as president of a country that would not allow itself to be defeated

by a group of rebels.

So that was always an issue,

and it was especially an issue, of course, in 1862.

He could not let himself be made a fool

and the union be made a fool

by standing up for principles that could not be vindicated on the battlefield.

I have read a fiery gospel

Writ in burnished rolls of steel

"As ye deal with my contemners

"So with you, My grace shall deal"

Let the Hero born of woman

Crush the serpent with His heel

Since God is

Marching on

Desperate for a victory, Lincoln removed McClellan

and put tall, bombastic John Pope in command.

Pope so often bragged that his headquarters were in the saddle,

people began to say he had his headquarters

where his hindquarters should have been.

Lincoln was warned at the start that

Pope was not to be trusted with telling the truth.

And Lincoln said, "I've known the Popes back in Illinois,

"known all of them. They're all liars and braggarts.

"but I don't know of any particular reason why a liar and a braggart

"shouldn't make a good general."

Pope wasted no time,

charging into northern Virginia after the rebel armies,

but he was in trouble from the start.

First, Stonewall Jackson fought him to a standoff at Cedar Mountain.

Jeb Stuart hit him next,

raiding his headquarters and getting away with $35,000 in cash

and the Union commander's dress coat.

Then the rebels simply disappeared.

It took Pope two days to find them,

dug in along an abandoned railroad

overlooking the old Bull Run battlefield.

On August 29th, Pope attacked,

promising to "Bag the whole crowd."

But the Confederates held,

Jackson's men hurling rocks when ammunition ran low.

At 2:00 the next afternoon,

Confederate General James Longstreet

sent five divisions storming into the Union flank.

It was another Union disaster.

Twenty-five thousand men were killed, wounded, or missing

at Second Bull Run,

five times the figure that had so horrified the country

the first time North and South fought there.

Lincoln sent Pope west to Minnesota

to deal with an uprising among the Sioux

and reluctantly put George McClellan back in command.

"We must use the we have," Lincoln said.

McClellan told his wife

he had been called upon to save the country once again.

"We would ask the North Carolinians if they had any tar,

"and call them 'tar heels.'

"They would reply that they were just out, as they had

"let us Virginians have all they had to make us stick in the last fight,

"and call us sore backs,

"as they'd knocked all the skin off our backs

"running over us to get into battle.

"And so it would go, but all in the best of humor,

"knowing that all did their duty."

John Casler, 33rd Regiment, Virginia Infantry,

Stonewall's Brigade.

You must remember they were all from the same state.

They had followed the same flag.

The battles they had fought in, were...

the names were stitched on that flag.

And there was a great deal of unit pride

and I'm sure there was a great deal of sadness over the losses that they suffered.

But there was a closeness among those men

that came from years of being exposed to

the most horrendous warfare that I know of.

"Dear father,

"the next morning we had our second battle.

"It was rather strange music to hear the balls

"scream within an inch of my head.

"I had a bullet strike me on top of the head just as I was going to fire

"and a piece of shell struck my foot.

"A ball hit my finger, and another hit my thumb.

"The firing increased tenfold, and then it sounded like the rolls of thunder,

"and all the time every man shouting as loud as he could.

"I got rather more excited than I wish to again."

"I saw the body of a man killed the previous day this morning,

"and a horrible sight it was.

"Such sights do not affect me as they once did.

"I cannot describe the change, nor do I know when it took place.

"Yet I know there is a change,

"for I look on the carcass of a man now

"with pretty much the same feeling as I would do

"were it a horse or a hog."

"Sunday, a soldier of Company A died and was buried.

"Everything went on as if nothing had happened,

"for death is so common that little sentiment is wasted.

"It is not like death at home."

Elisha Hunt Rhodes.

Falling back from the Bull Run battlefield,

Union troops skirmished briefly with rebel forces at Falls Church, Virginia,

where the men stopped long enough to scribble their names on the chapel walls.

"In great contests," Abraham Lincoln wrote as the summer waned,

"each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God.

"Both may be, but one must be, wrong.

"God cannot be for and against

"the same thing at the same time."

"August 20th, 1862.

"An open letter to the president:

"We think you are unduly influenced

"by the counsels of certain fossil politicians

"hailing from border slave states.

"We ask you to consider that slavery is everywhere

"the inciting cause and sustaining base of treason.

"It seems to us the most obvious truth

"that whatever strengthens or fortifies slavery

"drives home the wedge intended to divide the Union."

Horace Greeley.

"August 22nd.

"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union

"and is not either to save or to destroy slavery.

"If I could save the Union

"without freeing any slave, I would do it.

"If I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it.

"And if I could save it by freeing some

"and leaving others alone,

"I would also do that."

"It seems to me that time is fast approaching

"when some joint offer of mediation by England, France, and Russia

"might be made with some prospect of success

"to the combatants in North America.

"The proposal would naturally be made to both North and South.

"If both accepted,

"we should recommend an armistice and cessation of blockades,

"with a view to negotiation on the basis of separation."

Prime Minister Palmerston

Lincoln had to have a victory.

"September 3rd, 1862.

"The present seems to be the most propitious time

"since the commencement of the war

"for the Confederate army to enter Maryland."

Robert E. Lee.

The brilliant Southern victories of spring and summer

had brought Lee's army international renown.

"One more successful campaign," he wrote Jefferson Davis,

"would force Europe to recognize the Confederacy."

Now, for the first time,

Lee led 40,000 soldiers across the Potomac

and onto Union soil.

"This body of men moving along with no order,

"their guns carried in every fashion,

"no two dressed alike,

"their officers hardly distinguishable from the privates--

"were these the men that had driven back again and again

"our splendid legions?

"They were the dirtiest men I ever saw,

"a most ragged, lean, and hungry set of wolves.

"Yet there was a dash about them that the Northern men lacked."

Lee's target was the federal rail center at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Hoping Marylanders would rise up against the Union,

he instructed his men to sing

Maryland, My Maryland, as they marched.

It didn't work.

Most residents of the small towns

stayed fearfully behind closed doors.

Then, on September 13th, in a meadow near Frederick,

a Union soldier found three cigars

wrapped in a piece of paper.

It was a copy of Lee's battle plans, accidentally left behind.

McClellan now knew Lee had divided his army,

sending one part off to seize Harpers Ferry.

McClellan had in his hands

the instrument with which to destroy Lee.

Still, he did nothing

for eighteen crucial hours.

On September 15th, Lee and his Confederates

took up positions along the crest of a three-mile ridge

just east of the town of Sharpsburg,

and only fifty-two miles from Washington.

The Potomac was at their back:

in front ran a creek called Antietam.

"On the forenoon of the 15th,

"the blue uniforms of the federals appeared among the trees

"that crowned the heights on the eastern bank of the Antietam.

"The number increased, and larger and larger grew the field of blue

"'til it seemed to stretch as far as they eye could see.

"And from the tops of the mountains down to the edges of the stream

"gathered the great army of McClellan."

General James Longstreet.

Had McClellan hurled his army at the Confederates that day,

the war might have ended, but he did not.

"There was a single item in our advantage,"

an aide to Lee remembered,

"but it was an important one:

"McClellan had brought superior forces to Sharpsburg,"

the aide conceded,

"but he had also brought himself."

"September 16th.

"That night I lay beside the Charlestown Pike

"and watched until morning the grimy columns

"come pouring up from the pontoons.

"It was a weird, uncanny sight

"and drove sleep from my eyes.

"It was something demon- like; a scene from an inferno.

"They were silent as ghosts,

"ruthless and rushing in their speed,

"ragged, earth-colored, disheveled, and devilish.

"The shuffle of their badly-shod feet on the hard surface of the pike

"was so rapid as to be continuous, like the hiss

"of a great serpent.

"The spectral, ghostly picture

"will never be erased from my memory."

Captain Edward Hastings Ripley.

"As night grew nearer,

"whispers of a great battle to be fought the next day grew louder,

"and we shuddered at the prospect,

"for the battles had come to mean to us, as they never had before,

"blood, wounds, and death."

The battle that began the next day was really three battles:

The first began at 6 a.m. on Lee's left,

where a federal force charged along the Hagerstown Pike

to attack Stonewall Jackson's men

hidden in woods beyond a big cornfield.

The Union objective was a plateau edged with artillery

on which stood a small whitewashed church,

built by a German Baptist Pacifist sect, the Dunkards,

for whom even a steeple was thought immodest.

The Union field commander was Major General Joe Hooker,

a profane and hard- drinking Massachusetts soldier

known as Fighting Joe.

As Hooker cautiously advanced,

he noticed the glint of bayonets in the cornfield

and ordered four batteries to fire into it.

The rebels countercharged.

The battle surged back and forth across the cornfield fifteen times.

In a matter of minutes, the 12th Massachusetts

lost 224 of 334 men.

Hooker himself was carried from the field, shot through the foot.

"The men are loading and firing with

"demoniacal fury and shouting and laughing hysterically,

"and the whole field before us is covered with rebels

"fleeing for life into the woods."

Hooker's men were closing in on the Dunkard church.

At that moment, Stonewall Jackson sent in his last reserves,

John Bell Hood's division-- fierce fighters at any time,

but now enraged at having missed breakfast,

which had promised to be their first real meal in days.

Their first volley was "Like a scythe running through our line,"

one Union survivor remembered.

And the Confederate counterattack came on.

"Every stalk of corn was cut as closely

"as could have been done with a knife,

"and the slain lay in rows,

"precisely as they had stood

"in their ranks a few moments before."

Joseph Hooker.

The Northern troops ran back through the cornfield.

Hood's men ran after them, but were stopped

by a hail of shells and federal reinforcements.

When the Confederates finally withdrew,

one officer asked Hood where his division was.

"Dead on the field," he answered.

"I have never in my soldier's life seen such a sight.

"The dead and wounded covered the ground.

"In one spot, a rebel officer and twenty men

"lay near a wreck of a battery.

"It is said Battery A, 1st Rhode Island Artillery did this work."

Elisha Hunt Rhodes.

By 10 a.m., 8,000 men lay dead or wounded.

Jackson's lines had wavered, but held.

After his part of the battle was over,

Jackson was sitting on his horse, eating a peach and his

medical director, Dr. McGuire, was there,

and...

he looked out over this field where there were dead

of both sides littered all over the place.

And as he's eating a peach he said, "God has been very kind to us this day."

The second part of the battle of Antietam began at the center of Lee's line,

a sunken country road

that now served as a ready-made rifle pit for two Confederate brigades.

Lee ordered it held at all costs.

General John B. Gordon assured him,

"These men are going to stay here, General, 'til the sun goes down

"or victory is won."

Then, the Union attacked.

"The brave Union commander, superbly mounted,

"placed himself in front,

"while his band cheered them with martial music.

"I thought, what a pity to spoil with bullets

"such a scene of martial beauty."

General John B. Gordon.

Gordon let the blue line get within a few yards,

then gave the order to fire.

The Union commander was killed instantly.

His men wavered, retreated,

then came back at the Confederates five more times.

Gordon was hit twice in the right leg, once in the left arm,

a fourth time through the shoulder.

He refused all aid, limping along the line to steady his men

as the federals kept coming.

"I was finally shot down by a fifth ball,

"which struck me squarely in the face.

"I fell forward and lay unconscious with my face in my cap,

"and might have smothered in blood

"but for a Yankee bullet hole which let the blood run out."

Still the Confederates held.

Unit after unit of Northern troops fell back

from the sheets of Southern fire.

Finally, some New Yorkers managed to find a spot

from which they could shoot down on the road's defenders.

The tide of battle turned.

The sunken road, remembered now as Bloody Lane,

rapidly filled with Southern bodies, two and three deep,

and the triumphant federals knelt on top of what one called,

"this ghastly flooring" to fire at the fleeing survivors.

The Confederate center had splintered.

One more push might have broken it apart.

General McClellan, however, decided,

"It would not be prudent" to attack again.

All day long, in hastily constructed field hospitals,

Clara Barton tended the wounded.

She worked so close to the fighting that a bullet went through her sleeve

and killed a man she was treating.

"I had to wring the blood

"from the bottom of my clothing before I could step,

"for the weight about my feet."

"I was lying on my back, supported on my elbows,

"watching the shells explode overhead and speculating

"as to how long I could hold up my finger before it would be shot off,

"when the order to get up was given.

"I turned over to look at Colonel Kimball

"thinking he had become suddenly insane."

Lieutenant Matthew J. Grohan.

The third battle took place on the Confederate right,

where the Union army, led by General Burnside's corps,

tried to fight its way across a strongly defended stone bridge

over Antietam Creek.

Ambrose Burnside was a genial, dapper man--

his distinctive whiskers or sideburns set a fashion--

but "he shrank from responsibility," an admiring fellow officer said,

"with sincere modesty,"

and he owed his position to his old friend McClellan,

who now promised to support his assault across the bridge.

Burnside had 12,500 men

against barely 400 Georgians led by Robert Toombs.

But Confederates commanded the bluff overlooking the bridge

and poured a relentless volley of fire

down on the Union troops.

It took three hours and three bloody charges

for the federals to cross the creek

and begin fighting their way up the slope towards Sharpsburg.

Seven successive Union color bearers were hit

before the Confederates finally broke,

racing back into the town.

"Oh, how I ran.

"I was afraid of being struck in the back,

"and I frequently turned around in running so as to avoid, if possible,

"so disgraceful a wound."

Private John Dooley.

Union victory again seemed certain.

But while the Union troops cheered, the Confederate light division

was arriving from Harpers Ferry...

3,000 men, footsore from their seventeen-mile march,

but otherwise ready to fight

and commanded by General A. P. Hill,

dressed in the red shirt he liked to wear in battle.

A. P. Hill is the fighting-est division commander in Lee's army.

Hill arrived at another one of those

nick-of-the- moment things, and

it was the last one, and it succeeded

in throwing Burnside back after he finally got across the bridge.

Hill slammed into the celebrating Union troops.

Burnside begged McClellan to send up the reinforcements he had promised.

McClellan refused.

As night fell, Burnside withdrew to the stone bridge

his men had fought so hard to seize.

The battle was over.

No ground had been gained.

"Before the sunlight faded, I walked over the narrow field.

"All around lay the Confederate dead, clad in butternut.

"As I looked down on the poor pinched faces, all enmity died out.

"There was no secession in those rigid forms,

"nor in those fixed eyes staring at the sky.

"Clearly, it was not their war."

"The sun went down. The thunder died away.

"The musketry ceased.

"Bivouac fires gleamed out as if a great city

"had lighted its lamps."

It had been the bloodiest day in American history.

The Union lost 2,108 dead,

another 10,293 wounded or missing--

double the casualties of D-Day eighty-two years later.

Lee lost fewer men--

10,318 casualties--

but that was a quarter of his army.

"Why did we not attack them and drive them into the river?

"I do not understand these things.

"But then, I am only a boy."

Elisha Hunt Rhodes.

McClellan had plenty of reserves waiting outside Sharpsrburg,

but he never used them.

Lee, outnumbered three-to-one,

braced for a new attack all the next day.

It never came.

On the 18th, Lee and his army slipped back across the Potomac.

McClellan could claim a victory,

but he could have won the war.

Lee's invasion had been halted.

He had suffered terrible losses,

but his army had not been destroyed.

"The causes of the war were wide apart,

"but the manhood was the same."

Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, 20th Maine.

Held in reserve outside Sharpsburg,

the 20th Maine included farmers and lumbermen,

seamen and shopkeepers and trappers.

Its colonel was Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain,

a thirty-three-year-old professor of rhetoric, oratory,

and modern languages at Bowdoin College.

Denied a leave of absence to enlist,

he applied for a sabbatical to study in Europe,

then volunteered.

On paper, his only qualification for command

was that he was a gentleman of the highest moral,

intellectual, and literary worth.

Chamberlain was still at Sharpsburg

when Abraham Lincoln came to see the battlefield.

"We could see the deep sadness in the president's face

"and feel the burden on his heart,

"thinking of his great commission to save his people

"and knowing that he could do this no otherwise

than as he had been doing--

"by and through the manliness of these men."

Watching the president review his troops,

it seemed to Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain

that a "mystic bond, wonderful in its intensity,"

joined the men to their commander-in-chief.

The object of Lincoln's visit was to get McClellan to pursue Lee.

"I came back thinking he would move at once,

"but when I got home, he began to argue why he ought not to move.

"I peremptorily ordered him to advance.

"It was nineteen days before he put a man over the river,

"and nine days longer before he got his army across,

"and then he stopped again."

Lincoln at last had had enough of George McClellan.

The president relieved him of command permanently.

"They have made a great mistake.

"Alas, for my poor country."

"September 21st, 1862.

"Dear Sam, Jr.,

"A great many of your old friends and schoolmates

"have died or been killed.

"I will merely name

"Lem Ambercrombie,

"Jeff Montgomery,

"John Garrett,

"Lem Hatch,

"John Hill,

"Proctor Porter,

"Bill Humes,

"John White,

"Walter Maxey,

"Angus Alston.

"Old Mrs. Thomas of our neighborhood

"has lost five sons.

"Your mother, Margaret Houston."

You do have a...

a big problem when you have units

that are from states and counties and even towns,

and one of these regiments can get in a very tight spot

in a particular battle,

like in the Cornfield at Sharpsburg,

and the news may be that there are no more young men in that town.

They're all dead.

In October of 1862, at his New York gallery,

Mathew Brady opened an exhibition of photographs

entitled "The Dead of Antietam."

Nothing like them had ever been seen in America before.

"The dead of the battlefield

"come up to us very rarely, even in dreams.

"We see the lists in the morning paper at breakfast,

"but dismiss its recollection with the coffee.

"Mr. Mathew Brady has done something to bring to us

"the terrible reality and earnestness of the war.

"If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards

"and along our streets,

"he has done something very like it."

Against the advice of his advisers,

Lincoln reinstated U. S. Grant to field command.

"I can't spare this man," Lincoln said.

"He fights."

A thousand miles to the west, Vicksburg,

high on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River,

remained Confederate.

"Vicksburg," Jefferson Davis said,

"is the nail that holds the South's two halves together."

That fall, Grant tried to take the heavily fortified city.

He failed.

The Confederacy was on this offensive over a thousand-mile front.

Mr. Gladstone, a power in the English Cabinet, is saying,

"Jeff Davis has made a navy.

"He's made an army," and, what's more important,

intimating that he's made a nation.

But the invasion of Maryland fails.

Lee is defeated, falls back.

They lose at Perryville in Kentucky.

They lose at Iuka and Corinth in Mississippi,

and even at Newtonia in Missouri

and the Confederate tide rolls back.

Lincoln, as a result of Antietam,

converted the war to a higher plane,

again the master politician.

He announces a preliminary emancipation proclamation.

Of course, it doesn't free a single slave in revolt;

it frees only as a war measure, and only frees the slaves

in states where the Confederacy is in control,

and it will take effect on the first day of January.

"On the first day of January,

"in the year of our Lord 1863,

"all persons held as slaves within any state

"or designated part of a state,

"the people whereof shall then be in rebellion

"against the United States,

"shall be then, thenceforth,

"and forever free."

Abraham Lincoln.

On September 22nd,

just five days after the battle of Antietam,

the president issued his emancipation proclamation.

"If my name ever goes into history," Lincoln said,

"it will be for this act."

The South was outraged.

Jefferson Davis called it the "most execrable measure

"recorded in the history of guilty man."

At a Washington dinner, John Hay,

the president's twenty- three-year-old secretary,

noted that "everyone seemed to feel a new sort of exhilarating life.

"The president's proclamation had freed them,

"as well as the slaves."

"It was no longer a question of the Union as it was

"that was to be re-established.

"It was the Union as it should be--

"that is to say,

"washed clean from its original sin.

"We were no longer merely the soldiers of a political controversy;

"we were now the missionaries of a great work of redemption,

"the armed liberators of millions.

"The war was ennobled.

"The object was higher."

Abroad, the proclamation had the effect Lincoln had hoped for:

neither England nor France was willing openly

to oppose a United States pledge to end slavery.

"The triumph of the Confederacy

"would be a victory of the powers of evil,

"which would give courage to the enemies of progress

"and damp the spirits of friends all over the civilized world.

"The American Civil War

"is destined to be a turning point,

"for good or evil,

"of the course of human affairs."

John Stuart Mill.

"Put not your trust in princes,

"and rest not your hopes on foreign nations.

"This war is ours.

"We must fight it out ourselves."

Jefferson Davis.

That December, Lincoln spoke to Congress.

"The dogmas of the quiet past

"are inadequate to the stormy present.

"As our case is new, so we must think anew

“and act anew.

"We must disenthrall ourselves,

"and then we shall save our country.

"Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history.

"The fiery trial through which we pass

"will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.

"We say we are for Union.

"The world will not forget that we say this.

"In giving freedom to the slave,

"we assure freedom to the free--

"honorable alike in what we give

"and what we preserve.

"We shall nobly save or meanly lose

"the last best hope of earth."

"December 31.

"Well, the year 1862 is drawing to a close,

"and as I look back, I am bewildered when I think of the

"hundreds of miles I have tramped,

"the thousands of dead and wounded that I have seen.

"But we hope for the best and feel sure that in the end,

"he Union will be restored.

"Goodbye, 1862."

Elisha Hunt Rhodes.

"We shout for joy that we live to record this righteous decree--

"free forever!

"Oh, ye millions of free and loyal men

"who have earnestly sought to free your bleeding country

"from the dreadful ravages of revolution and anarchy,

"lift up now your voices with joy and thanksgiving,

"for with freedom to the slave will come

"peace and safety to your country."

Frederick Douglass.

On December 31st, a large crowd of abolitionists,

including Harriet Tubman and Wendell Phillips,

gathered together in the music hall in Boston.

At midnight, the emancipation proclamation would take effect.

On the stage, William Lloyd Garrison

wept with joy beside Frederick Douglass.

The cheering crowd called for Harriet Beecher Stowe.

She stood in the balcony, tears in her eyes.

At a Washington, D.C., contraband camp,

former slaves testified.

One remembered the sale of his daughter.

"Now, no more of that," he said.

"They can't sell my wife and children anymore.

"Bless the Lord."

On the Sea Islands off South Carolina,

Federal agents read the proclamation aloud to former slaves

under the spreading boughs of a huge oak tree.

As the commander of a new all-black regiment

unfurled an American flag,

his men broke into song:

"It seemed the choked voice of a race

"at last unloosed," he wrote.

In the beauty of the lilies,

Christ was born across the sea

With a glory in His bosom

That transfigures you and me

As he died to make men holy,

Let us strive to make men free

While God is

Marching on

Glory, glory, Hallelujah!

Glory, glory, Hallelujah!

Glory, glory, Hallelujah!

His truth is

Marching

On!