HISTORICAL NOTE

THE BATTLE OF ANTIETAM (Sharpsburg, to southerners) is famous for being the bloodiest day in all America's history. Close to 23,000 men died in that one day. It was, in the proper sense of the word, a shambles.

Lee was a gambler, and his decision to fight in the fields about Sharpsburg was one of his biggest wagers. He feared the political consequences of a retreat without a battle, and hoped that his opponent's natural caution would make McClellan fumble and yield the outnumbered rebels a famous victory. The gamble failed. Lee's pride demanded that his army stay in place on the day after the battle, for that, by the soldiers' terms of honor, denoted that the battle was not lost, but the campaign was nevertheless a failure. The North was spared a prolonged invasion and no European country was encouraged to join the South. By keeping his army on the field Lee could claim a technical victory, but on the Thursday night the rebel army slipped away, and by Friday evening there were no rebel soldiers left in the United States other than the dead and the prisoners.

Lee's invasion failed, but it was hardly because of George McClellan, who was presented with a marvelous chance to end the war at Antietam. If he had attacked twenty-four hours earlier, he would undoubtedly have destroyed Lee's army, which was smaller than it ever would be again until the war's very end. Yet McClellan was racked by doubts and waited while Lee was reinforced. And if, when he did at last summon the courage to attack, McClellan had coordinated his assaults, he would have routed Lee, but instead the Northern attacks came one at a time, and Lee was able to move his shrinking forces to meet each new assault. McClellan's plan of attack had been to engage Lee's flanks, then send the killing blow through the center when the rebel reserves had been depleted, but the fight never remotely resembled that plan. Instead the battle degenerated into a series of bloody encounters over which neither side had full control. It has been called a soldier's battle, for it was the common soldier who fought it, and fought it with an extraordinary bravery. McClellan could have resumed the fight on Thursday and, with his huge reserve, which had not fired a shot, he would surely have finished the business quickly enough, but he was too frightened to try. He claimed his soldiers were tired, and Lee's army was allowed to slip away to fight again. Lee's army had suffered grievously and all it had to show for its efforts were the captured guns and supplies from Harper's Ferry.

Antietam was McClellan's last battlefield command. He himself believed he had displayed the highest military artistry, but President Lincoln had taken enough of the Young Napoleon's timidity and new generals would now take over the North's army. McClellan went on to make himself a political nuisance. He ran as the Democratic candidate for president in 1864, but, fortunately for the Union, he failed to unseat Lincoln. To his dying day the Young Napoleon would defend his appalling leadership, but the truth is that with McClellan's dismissal the rebels lost one of their strongest military assets.

The story of the Lost Order is famous. No one knows how the copy was lost, and after the war, when survivors conducted endless autopsies on their campaigns, everyone involved denied any knowledge of the order. All that we know is that the two soldiers from the 27th Indiana regiment found the order wrapped around three- cigars and its discovery was enough to prod McClellan out of his customary caution. If the order had not been found, Lee would probably have reached the Susquehanna as he planned, but once his strategy had been revealed the invasion was doomed. The two soldiers who found the order, Bloss and Mitchell, were both wounded in the cornfield.

The fight in the cornfield and the battle for the sunken lane were the two bloodiest episodes in the battle, with the struggle for the Rohrbach Bridge (now named the Burnside Bridge) coming close behind. To walk the terrain today is to marvel at the bravery of men who could attack across such open country in the face of terrible fire. The battlefield is well preserved, though the East and West Woods are much shrunken from their former sizes. A road, heavily lined with regimental memorials, now runs south of the cornfield while an observation tower stands at the dogleg corner of the sunken lane. Anyone wanting to know more about the campaign and battle should read Stephen Sears's Landscape Turned Red, a book that was constantly by my side during the writing of The Bloody Ground and, to my mind, is the finest book on a single Civil War battle, maybe on any nineteenth-century battle, ever written.

Antietam was indeed a ghastly affair. The North was badly led and its men's bravest efforts were wasted, but the rebel retreat afforded President Lincoln the opportunity to proclaim a victory and, in its wake, to issue his Emancipation Proclamation. The war, which had been ostensibly about states' rights, was now firmly a moral campaign to

abolish slavery. But to proclaim the slaves free was one thing, to liberate them was another, and the road to Richmond would prove to be hard and long. Lee had been rebuffed at Antietam, but he was far from beaten. Starbuck will march again.