This Day in Civil War History (Emancipation Paved by Bloody Antietam)

September 22, 1862—The Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation signed by Abraham Lincoln was a public document shaped with the law and international diplomacy in mind, but made, paradoxically, possible and necessary by the massive expenditure of blood five days earlier at the Battle of Antietam.

By warning the Confederacy that slaves in states under Northern control after the coming January 1 would be considered “forever free,” the President did so from what was, ostensibly, a position of strength: victory, albeit an incomplete one, on the bloodiest day in the nation’s history. That was, in actuality, an illusion: The war was dragging on for longer than anyone had expected, and the President had determined that he must strike at the institution that not only was at the heart of the Southern economy but that enabled its able-bodied males to engage en masse in rebellion against the Union.

Lincoln had wanted to emancipate the slaves a few months earlier, but Secretary of State William Seward had persuaded him that, given the Army of the Potomac’s recent string of losses, it was better to do so after a victory, when the North would be seen not as desperate but as a credible battlefield victor.

That moment had come on September 17, on the 75h anniversary of the signing of the Constitution, when thousands of young soldiers under the command of General George B. McClellan had repelled Robert E. Lee’s invasion of the North at Sharpsburg, Md. (In keeping with prior practice, the North named the battle after a prominent geographic feature, in this case Antietam Creek, while the South named the fight after the nearest town.) The result, while not as clear-cut as both sides would have liked, ensured that the national experiment in freedom would continue. 

It should not have been shocking that Union and Confederate casualties would total more than 25,000 (including at least 5,000 dead) at Antietam: In a battle pitting one overconfident commander against a timorous (if arrogant) one, amid a larger war that began with massive miscalculations on both sides, it was inevitable that so many would pay for the mistakes of leaders. The war’s great paradox on this particular week was that a battle rife with enormous blunders had ended with the signing of a document so meticulously planned that many abolitionists regarded it with all the joy of beholding a legal contract.

The chief military mistake was made by Robert E. Lee, with his initial decision to invade the North. His triumph at Second Manassas at the end of August (see this prior post of mine) solidified his belief that his soldiers were skilled and brave enough to do whatever he asked of them.

But the Army of Northern Virginia was not good enough to overcome the disadvantages of being divided in the face of the enemy and of passing through a part of Maryland filled more with German immigrants loyal to the Union that with Confederate  sympathizers. Nor could Lee’s troops overcome the impact of his famous Lost Orders, which had been found in an abandoned Rebel encampment and presented to the Union commander. Here was the intelligence coup of the war for the Union: Lee's whole strategy and plan for attack.

McClellan then proceeded to make his own critical errors—notably, taking more than a day to move his army, which allowed enough time for several units of Lee’s army return in time for battle. On the day of battle itself, McClellan, wildly overestimating his fee’s strength, kept  several major units out of the fight, and he ordered uncoordinated troop movements that failed to deliver the knockout blow.

There are a number of fine accounts of the subsequent battle, notably Stephen W. Sears’ Landscape Turned Red. But there is no substitute for actually visiting the battlefield, which, unlike other areas (including Gettysburg), remains largely undefiled by modern development. On my visit to the battleground site nearly two decades ago, I crossed the narrow, stone arch bridge that it took Union General Ambrose Burnside hours to seize because of ferocious Confederate fire. My eyes swept over The Cornfield, where, that morning, 40% of Union General John Sedgwick’s division had become casualties. I walked along the half-mile Bloody Lane, where, a century and a half ago, I could not have touched ground without stepping on a body, the result of 5,600 killed or wounded in only three hours of fighting.

McClellan had been congratulated (none doing more so than himself) as the victor, but he squandered his chance, before and during the battle, to eliminate Lee’s army as a fighting force, just as he would do so again, over the next six weeks after the bloody engagement, in allowing the Army of Northern Virginia to slip back to the Richmond region to replenish itself. Yet he felt eminently qualified to offer his President not merely military, but also political advice. Before the battle, he had sent Lincoln a memo noting that his soldiers would fight for the Union but not for emancipation.

By this time, Lincoln was having none of it, from McClellan or, indeed, anyone else. As far back as June, he had taken into his confidence his loyal Vice-President, Hannibal Hamlin, and read him what would become the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. (The abolitionist-minded Veep was delighted.) A month later, before his Cabinet, Lincoln had taken Seward’s advice about not issuing the proclamation when it could be misinterpreted as an act of desperation.

There had been a million reasons, in the first year of the conflict, why Lincoln had not moved decisively against the “peculiar institution” that had made the rebellion inevitable, especially the need to keep in the Union fold the border slaveholding states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri, as well as his recognition that under the Constitution, he had no authority to interfere with slavery where it already existed.

But it did not escape his notice how much slavery had buoyed the war effort of the Confederacy. “For as many slaves who ran away,” notes historian Allen Guelzo in his analysis of Emancipation in today’s Wall Street Journal, “many thousands more were being used as manual laborers, teamsters and camp followers to help the Confederate war effort. They might tip the military balance in the Confederacy's favor.”

That brought the President to a crucial juncture in his thinking. “I must save this government if possible,” he wrote Maryland Senator Reverdy Johnson in the summer of 1862. “What I cannot do, of course I will not do; but it may as well be understood, once for all, that I shall not surrender this game leaving any available card unplayed.”  

The last “available card” was emancipation. In his Cabinet meeting of September 22, Lincoln told his principal advisers that he had made up his mind, and that there wasn’t going to be any further discussion about it, either among themselves or with Congressional Democrats, whom he had come to see as obstructionist.(The only surviving draft of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in Lincoln's handwriting, by the way, is now touring New York State, including a stop at the Schaumburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem through September 24. See this New York Times Artsblog post.)

The document Lincoln signed that day, which thrilled abolitionists and outraged Confederates, noted at its beginning that the war was being fought with the purpose of “practically restoring” the Union, then went on to note that he would send Congress proposals for compensation for slaveholders and African colonization of freed slaves. Lincoln was not only laying out this ground with an eye on the border states with this doctrine of military necessity, but also on the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Roger Taney, author of the infamous opinion in the Dred Scott case, stood ready to rule as an unconstitutional infringement on private property any attempt to strike at slavery. Nor did Lincoln want any chance that, with any possible resolution of the war by either himself or a predecessor, that the freed slaves would be returned to their owners, as had happened at the end of the War of 1812. An argument for emancipation based on his war powers as President was the most likely to be sustained at the polls and in the courts, he felt.

In the year after Lincoln issued his proclamation, much changed on the political and military fronts. The proposals for slaveholder compensation and colonization went nowhere on Capitol Hill, disabusing the President of any notion that anything other than the most radical means necessary would be required to root out slavery. In the Western theater of operations, the victories of Ulysses S. Grant put more slaveholding territory directly under Union control, ensuring that plantations would not have the labor required to sustain them—and swelling the ranks of Union armies with African-American troops. Moreover, Great Britain and France, which had been itching to recognize the Confederacy as a means of cutting down to size the new colossus on the North American continent, had second thoughts about supporting a government propped up by slavery. For the first time, a document with no practical effect when it was first signed now posed a mortal threat to slavery.

Two decades before, in 1841, with Lincoln’s depression reaching near-suicidal levels, the ambitious Springfield lawyer feared that his life would end without him having accomplished anything. After the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, however, he told longtime confidante Joshua Speed that this feeling had at last passed. He had taken a long time to free the slaves, but now there was no going back, and he would press for their freedom with ever-greater tenacity until his life ended at the hand of someone other than his himself two and a half years from this point. The onetime religious skeptic believed that he had become an instrument of divine providence in eliminating the greatest defect of the American government. Lincoln had indeed now done something "to make any human being remember that he had lived."

Flashback, July 1916: Somme Stalemate Saps War Spirit

As it completed its second full year, World War I bore all the marks of an unprecedented gash across the landscape of civilization. The Battle of the Somme, the Allied campaign to change the grim arithmetic of casualties and futility, only worsened matters. With 1.5 million shells fired, the biggest artillery bombardment the world had ever seen (even heard in the South of England) as a week-long rologue, British and French soldiers rushed forth into battle on July 1, 1916, only to be cut down by the waiting German guns—60,000 British casualties in those 24 hours alone, including 20,000 dead, the greatest loss of life in the nation’s military history.

Could it get any worse? No, but it could remain remarkably bad throughout the month and well into autumn, as the Somme would soon feature commanders who used Napoleonic tactics rendered obsolete by modern weaponry; common soldiers left physically and psychically wounded in ways little understood at the time; and writers who sought to make sense of it all. When the fight ended four months later, the British incurred more than 400,000 casualties, while their French allies lost 200,000 and the Germans half a million. Together with the Battle of Verdun (discussed in this prior post of mine), the Somme came to symbolize the horror of trench warfare.

(Believe it or not, the image accompanying this post comes from a British propaganda film meant to drum up homefront spirit during the fight, The Battle of the Somme. Well, I guess this image of a badly wounded soldier could have been worse—if it showed the rats that the soldiers had to contend with, not to mention the gas masks frequently worn there.)

Oh, yes—and the futility and basic absurdity of such warfare, for the battle was waged not on as site of military significance, but at the spot on the map where British forces adjoined their French allies.

Reading these last two paragraphs reminds me of nothing so much as America’s Civil War. But Britain’s leaders, let alone those of the other nations in this conflict across the Atlantic, seemed to have learned nothing from the conflict that had occurred across the Atlantic a half-century before, and so they were doomed to suffer similar outward convulsions and internal divisions.

That enormous single-day loss of life, for instance, will remind Americans of the bloodiest 24 hours in their own history, the Battle of Antietam—except that the Somme was even worse. The number of British dead, wounded and missing in action for this one day was more than double the combined Union-Confederate toll for the legendary Civil War battle.

Although the depth of the carnage is reminiscent of Antietam, the manner in which the first day of the Somme unfolded resembles nothing so much as the third day of Gettysburg. An offensive-minded commander (for the British, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig; for the Confederates, Robert E. Lee) preceded an order to attack with an unprecedented artillery barrage—in the case of Gettysburg, a morning shelling that was the greatest seen in the Western Hemisphere to that point; at the Somme, a week-long bombardment. Far from softening the defender up as intended, the bombardment was largely ineffective (e.g., British medium-range fire fell consistently short of its target, and 30% of the shells were duds). 

And so, khaki-clad British troops—many the product of the “New Army” swelled by recruitment posters featuring military hero Lord Kitchener, sunk by a submarine only the month before—marched into sunlight in perfect order along a 15-mile front, across open fields, like so many sitting ducks, under the watchful gaze of three ranks of Kaiser Wilhelm’s troops safely entrenched, on higher ground, in dugouts. 

Only minutes before the fateful assault, an operation to disrupt the German defenses occurred in the form of two huge mines, containing more than 100,000 pounds of explosives. The advancing “Tommies” could then, the thinking went, exploit the resulting confusion around the two craters to avoid the enfilade fire that would surely come from the Germans.

Civil War buffs will recall a similar plan involving Ulysses S. Grant’s Union forces in the summer 1864 Petersburg campaign. The resulting “Battle of the Crater” resulted in 4,000 Union casualties. On the other hand, the mining operation meant to ease the capture of La Boiselle Salient led to nearly 12,000 combined casualties in Britain’s 8^th and 34^th Divisions. British planners had not reckoned with the possibility that German intelligence, piecing together newspaper articles, soldiers’ indiscreet talk and reports from spies, would figure out that the twin explosions would in effect provide advance warning of the follow-up assault by the Tommies.

Over the years, Haig has been excoriated so soundly and repeatedly that in some quarters, a reaction has even occurred in his favor. A number of his partisans say he learned from his mistakes, with some claiming that he came around to see the value of new weaponry. One historian, William Philpott, even nominated him as Britain’s greatest general.

But Haig’s lack of imagination—his inability to grasp how tactics had to evolve in the face of new technology—is nowhere better illustrated than this passage from a 1926 when he still saw a future for horses in combat:

“I believe that the value of the horse and the opportunity for the horse in the future are likely to be as great as ever. Aeroplanes and tanks are only accessories to the men and the horse, and I feel sure that as time goes on you will find just as much use for the horse—the well-bred horse—as you have ever done in the past.”

Even a relatively sympathetic historian such as Peter Hart—who argued, in The Somme: The Darkest Hour on the Western Front, that “Haig’s way was excruciatingly painful but it was the only realistic way at the time”—ends up acknowledging the myopia of the general and his subordinates:

“There seemed to be no limit to the number of times that it had to be demonstrated to them that isolated attacks on a narrow front would not succeed without overpowering artillery to devastate everything in both that and the adjoining sectors. The British rarely seemed to realise that an attack to 'improve' a tactical position did not do so unless it succeeded. Too often there was no proper analysis of how many guns and shells needed to be fired to subdue a given frontage and depth of trench lines. And there seemed to be no limit to their optimism that the German Army and the entire German Empire stood ready to collapse if there was just one more push towards Bapaume.”

The Somme was also remarkable for the authors who lived long enough to recapture the experience of the campaign, in one fashion or another, in their writing, including:

*Alan Seeger, an American who, before being killed on July 4, 1916, wrote “I Have a Rendezvous With Death,” a poem taken to heart by the young John F. Kennedy;

*J.R.R. Tolkien, whose grittily realistic battle scenes from his Lord of the Rings trilogy reflect his service in the Somme;

*Robert Graves, whose bitter 1929 antiwar memoir Goodbye to All That narrated his participation in the attack on the High Wood three weeks into the campaign, where he suffered a wound so grievous that his parents were mistakenly informed of his death;

*Wilfred Owen, trapped underground at the Somme, was transferred for treatment of his shell shock to Craiglockhart War Hospital, where he began to write the verses that made him the most acclaimed British poet of the Great War;

*Siegfried Sassoon, Owen’s fellow shell shock victim at Craiglockhart—and who, unlike his friend, survived the war;

* Ford Maddox Ford, who translated his experience with shell shock into the novel sequence Parade’s End.

In this small sample of soldiers, the number of shell-shock victims from the Somme looms large. But they were only a handful compared with the total number of those afflicted with this disease, later called combat fatigue and post-traumatic stress syndrome. A 2011 article on the BBC Web site by Joanna Bourke, a professor of history at Birkbeck College, estimates that by the end of WWI, the British Army had dealt with 80,000 cases of this. Altogether, war neuroses represented one-seventh of all personnel discharged for disabilities from the British Army.

An article by neuropathologist Daniel Perl in the scientific journal The Lancet Neurology, then summarized in a New York Times Magazine article last month by Robert F. Worth, offers the hypothesis that blasts in modern warfare can leave scars on the brain. TNT, first used by the German Army in 1902, was employed on a far greater scale in WWI, leading to development of shell shock.

The Allies learned hard lessons about fighting at the Somme, lessons they were able to apply in outlasting the Kaiser’s military machine (with American help) over the next two years of the war. But it came too late for the men who fought at the Somme in July 1916. Peter Simkins, a historian at the Imperial War Museum, noted, in an interview for the Great War documentary on PBS, that veterans of the Somme were primed to go “over the top” in taking enemy positions, but it was all for nought then:

"But it's sustaining the impetus of the advance once they've gone over the top that's important. If they've got the wrong weapons with which to fight, if they're carrying rifles and bayonets and they're up against machine guns, the formula is wrong.”

This Day in Civil War History (Irish Brigade’s Hopeless Valor at Fredericksburg)

December 13, 1862—It was the Union Army’s version of the Charge of the Light Brigade, a valorous but hopeless assault upon an enemy in an impregnable position. But despite a display of courage so conspicuous that it won the respect of Confederate commanders, the “Irish Brigade” was cut to pieces at the Battle of Fredericksburg, as the North closed out its year with its worst showing yet against Robert E. Lee.

Union commander Ambrose Burnside is now known to posterity largely for a flamboyant tonsorial style that led to a linguistic coinage: “sideburn.” Even here, however, he gets no respect, because the usage turns his name inside out.

As it happened, he was as luckless in the art of war as he was in other aspects of life, and his ill fortune spelled doom for the Army of the Potomac in general and its recruits of Irish descent in particular. As a young soldier just out of West Point, he was a poor player at card games. A few years later, it is said, his prospective bride refused to go through with the ceremony right at the altar.

A rifle promoted by Burnside would be used extensively by the North during the Civil War. It had not come early enough for the soldier-turned-civilian however, who had been forced to find a new line of work when the War Department in the 1850s canceled a contract for the weaponry. Two years after Fredericksburg, another potential Burnside brainstorm—digging a tunnel toward the Confederates at the Siege of Petersburg, dynamiting it, then overwhelming the enemy in the resulting confusion—boomeranged on the Union at the Battle of the Crater, bringing his military career to an end.

In November 1862, however, when Lincoln had resolved to replace slow-moving George McClellan as head of the Army of the Potomac, Burnside was the only Union corps commander who had had any success at any level operating independently, when he secured a foothold on the North Carolina coast early in the war. He had pleaded with Lincoln—twice—that he was unworthy to lead an entire army when the President asked him to take over the reins from McClellan. At Fredericksburg, he now demonstrated what he was talking about.

In contrast to McClellan, Burnside moved with dispatch in getting his troops toward Richmond. But bad luck came to the fore for him again. With the success of his plan depending on crossing the Rappahannock River unopposed, he now found that the civilian bridges had been wrecked earlier in the war. He could not get pontoon bridges built fast enough before Lee's Army of Northern Virginia got there first.

On the morning of the 13^th, Burnside gave the order to attack, despite serious reservations on the part of his other generals over any offensive against what Lee had turned into a well-fortified position. The battle commenced around noon. A few hours in, a couple of charges at Marye’s Heights, a commanding position with plenty of artillery under James Longstreet, had ended in disaster. Now it was the turn of the Irish Brigade.

The unit, composed largely of Irish emigrants fleeing famine and political repression in their homeland over the past two decades, had nitially contained three regiments--the 63rd, 69th, and 88th New York--but the 28th Massachusetts and 116th Pennsylvania were added later in the year.

Thomas Meagher, an Irish revolutionary who had escaped from a British prison in Tasmania to come to the United States, had been designated by Abraham Lincoln to lead the brigade. He had led his unit through two stiff fights already, in McClellan’s Seven Days campaign and again at the Battle of Antietam. The brigade’s banner from the latter fight was still not back from being mended when they found themselves in battle again. As they received another summons to arms at Fredericksburg, Meagher showed concern for his men’s esprit de corps by urging them to wear green sprigs in their caps as substitutes for the giant banner--and as reminders of their Irish heritage.

Even as they emerged from town, the lines of the brigade were riddled with fire, with 18 falling dead. Then they had to break ranks, splash through a canal ditch, reform and move toward the heights. Meagher, with a painful knee injury incurred at Antietam, could only get the men across the canal before he was led away.

The men’s mission was, for all intents and purposes, suicidal: cross 600 yards of open field to get at the Confederates on Marye’s Heights. They already knew that other troops had failed. Waiting on the Confederate side, ironically enough, were a number of their Irish countrymen (many of Brigadier General Thomas Cobb’s troops, especially in the 24^th Georgia Infantry unit, were Irish-born).  

The strafing of the Irish Brigade’s ranks continued, but so did their courage. Amazingly, amid the murderous fire they had already endured, they made it to within 100 yards of the top when they were greeted by a barrage that, as a survivor recalled, left them “like corn before the sickle.” The soldiers had a triple motivation: not just to attain their military objective, nor even to prove their individual courage, but to demonstrate, to friend and foe alike, that their ancestry did not make them second-class citizens of the United States. Their attitude resembled that in the celebrated couplet by Alfred Lord Tennyson on the men who perished in the slaughter at the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War: “Theirs not to reason why,/Theirs but to die and die.”

Fredericksburg resembled the Charge of the Light Brigade in other respects. Though it demonstrated the courage of men placed in harm’s way in what Tennyson called “the valley of death,” it just as vividly confirmed the incompetence of their high command. A half dozen frontal assaults were made at Marye’s Heights by Union troops, to no avail. Not an inch of ground was gained in the attempts. Longstreet’s men, entrenched behind a stone wall, with artillery ranged behind them, cut everything that came their way, until Union dead were piled three deep in some places.

Even the Confederate command was moved to pity by the plight of his opponents: “I thought, as I saw the Federals come again and again to their death, that they deserved success if courage and daring could entitle soldiers to victory,” Longstreet remembered more than two decades later. Lee’s view, expressed to Longstreet at the height of battle, became one of the most quoted remarks of the entire conflict: "It is well that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it."

Casualties were perhaps more lopsided in favor of Lee than at any other time in the conflict: 12,700 men killed or wounded for the Federals versus only 5,300 for the rebels.

The futility of the whole affair drove the North mad. With great difficulty, Burnside had to be persuaded the next day not to personally lead another frontal assault. When he heard about the extent of the losses, Lincoln responded, “If there is a worse place than Hell, I am in it.”

Hell defined what the Irish Brigade endured at Fredericksburg: 545 men lost, nearly half of what they took into the battle, including 14 of its 15 field officers. One survivor predicted, “It will be a sad, sad Christmas by many an Irish hearthstone.” As a result of its three main battles fought over the past six months, the brigade had suffered at least 1,200 casualties.

And yet, something more survived. even aside from the enduring legend of the courage "Fighting 69th" (derived, it is said, from another remark by Lee, who, when told the name of the group that had made the gallant dash against his lines, and recalling their similar display in the Seven Days, said, "Ah, yes. That fighting 69th.") Irish soldiers here, as in elsewhere in the war, encountered countrymen in the units of other states, forming a new, common bond in their adopted country, opening vistas far beyond the rural villages of their homeland or the crowded cities of their new nation. If anything, the Irish community formed stronger bonds with the Roman Catholic Church than before, as chaplains became indispensable conduits between soldiers and their loved ones.

Approximately 150,000 Irish-born males enlisted in the Union Army, proving, at often hideous cost, that neither their ancestry nor the Roman Catholic faith so many professed posed any threat to the values of the second American republic coming into being as a result of the war. The postwar Fourteenth Amendment, while constructed principally with freedmen in mind, also contained, in its sweeping opening statement, a guarantee of the rights of the immigrants, such as the Irish and the Germans, who had lately fought to preserve the Union: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."

 

(The accompanying image, “Battle of Fredericksburg, Laying the Pontoon Bridge,” a chromolithograph by Thure de Thulstrup, is in the Print Department of the Boston Public Library.)