In what I consider an example of the Hand of God at work in this war, two Federal soldiers came across a copy of Special Order 191, which a Confederate officer had wrapped around three cigars and accidentally dropped along the way. It outlined in detail General Lee's plans for the invasion and prodded the normally slow-moving and indecisive General George McClellan to vigorous pursuit, in hopes of catching Lee's army while it was divided in three parts.
After the Federals drove through stiff Confederate resistance at South Mountain (in essence, an extension into Maryland of the Blue Ridge Mountains), the dispersed Confederate forces hurried toward Sharpsburg, hoping to gather before they were overwhelmed by a Federal army three times their size. They set up in a defensive formation at Antietam Creek on September 15, barely ahead of the first Federal divisions. By evening, most of the Federal army had arrived, and the Confederates expected an all-out assault the next day, September 16. It did not come; McClellan thought that Lee had over 100,000 men instead of the 18,000 or so that were actually on hand, and waited for more reinforcements. This allowed time for more of the Confederate army to gather. At dawn on September 17, the Federals attacked.
Battle raged all day, the deadliest single day of battle in American history, some 22,000 casualties – one-third of the Confederate army, and a quarter of the Federal army.
I have walked that field several times; it is now the Antietam National Battlefield Park. The places are etched in history: the Bloody Corn Field, the Dunker's Church, the Sunken Road, Burnside's Bridge (where 400 Georgians stood off Burnside's corps of 12,500 men and 50 artillery pieces for three critical hours in the early afternoon).
I could write of the heroism of the Confederate soldiers, fighting with their backs to the Potomac against overwhelming odds. In some respects, this was their finest hour. But I must also write of the Army of the Potomac. This battle represents much of what the soldiers of this Army endured – they had superiority of numbers, equipment, and supplies, but they were failed by their generals. Some of them had been beaten repeatedly in the Shenandoah Valley campaign that spring, where Jackson with 17,000 men outwitted three Federal armies totaling 52,000 men. All of them had endured the defeats of the Seven Days' Campaign in midsummer, when they had come close enough to Richmond to see the church steeples and then been driven off. Hardly a fortnight before, their supply depot at Manassas had been pillaged and destroyed by Jackson's forces, which had slipped around behind them on the way into Maryland. And now, with a chance to win the war once and for all, their generals could not get them organized. Brigade after brigade, division after division, went into battle, fought bravely, bore heavy casualties, but every time they came close to breaking through, there were no reinforcements behind them to carry the day – even though almost a third of the Federal Army saw no action that day, not firing a single shot.
They would face two more years of this: the senseless and bloody frontal assault on Fredericksburg that winter and the “Mud March” that followed in January, the hell of the Wilderness in 1864, with Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor after that. But they would endure. They held the ground this day at Antietam Creek, they held it again the next summer at Gettysburg, they doggedly fought and battled and pressed on in spite of their generals – and they saved the Union.
I mentioned the Hand of God at work, a "chance" event that changed the complexion of the campaign. Without those three cigars and a couple of sharp-eyed soldiers, Lee's army would have been in Harrisburg and Baltimore before McClellan would have gotten started.
As a result of this battle, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
The Confederates are my people. But I acknowledge that the providence of God was not with their cause. If one would dare to guess at a meaning behind all that happened on these days in 1862 and the years that followed, one must in the end share Mr. Lincoln's conclusion stated in his Second Inaugural Address in March 1865. And all of us must still, a century and a half after, “strive on to finish the work we are in.”
Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered—that of neither has been answered fully.
The Almighty has his own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.
-----
A footnote: I would be remiss to let this day pass without mention of Ambrose Powell Hill, general in the Confederate Army. His men, the famed "Light Division" of Jackson's corps, marched the seventeen miles from Harper's Ferry in eight hours, wading across the Potomac, and saved the day, Hill at the forefront in his red battle shirt, arriving at the moment of greatest need as the center of the Confederate line was about to fall apart, near 3:30 in the afternoon.
Walter Taylor, an aide to Lee, later wrote:
It is a singular fact, worthy of record, that in the last moments of both General Jackson and General Lee, when the mind wandered, in the very shadow of death, each should have uttered a command to A.P. Hill, the beloved and trusted lieutenant -- ever ready, ever sure and reliable, always prompt to obey and give the desired support. When the strife was fiercest they were wont to call on Hill.
Another quote from this website, from Captain W. O. Dodd, who fought in the Army of Tennessee; writing of that army's defeat at Franklin (south of Nashville) in November 1864:
"It seemed then, as it seems now, that a hand stronger than armies had decreed our overthrow."
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment