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by James McPherson Oxford Univ. Press, 2002 203 pp.; $26 |
As the dispirited Army of the Potomac moved north from Washington, D.C. in early September 1862, few who marched in its ranks or served in the government on whose behalf it fought were confident it could accomplish the mission before it. After more than a year of stinging defeats, ill-conceived maneuvers, and interminable inaction, that army's harried, defensive posture contrasted sharply with the bold confidence of the Army of Northern Virginia under Robert E. Lee.
Lee surmised the Union army was "much weakened and demoralized," but he also knew that unless his own army soon won several decisive victories, the North would eventually wear down the Confederacy and win the war. So, Lee struck swiftly through Union-occupied Maryland, wagering that he might thereby tip the balance and hasten French and British recognition of the Confederacy. If his military exploits could effect that diplomatic coup, both the war and the union might quickly come to an end.
Much, then, was riding on the fortunes of the Army of the Potomac as it rolled into Frederick, Maryland, on the morning of September 10. As the 27th Indiana Regiment stopped for rest outside town, Corporal Barton Mitchell noticed a large envelope lying in the grass. Picking it up, he discovered it to be a sheet of paper wrapped around three cigars; on the wrapper was a handwritten heading, "Headquarters, Army of Northern Virginia, Special Orders, No. 191." The document was dated September 9.
Corporal Mitchell held in his hand a typically cunning and complex set of battle plans drawn up by General Lee. Of the seven copies of this secret document, six found their way to Confederate commanders scattered north and west of Washington, while the seventh inexplicably came to rest in that field outside Frederick.
"The odds against the occurrence of such a chain of events must have been a million to one," writes James McPherson in his elegant study, Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam. "Yet they happened." And because they did, the course of the war and the structure of American society were changed unalterably. As a member of Lee's staff at Antietam later remarked, "the loss of this battle order constitutes one of the pivots on which turned the event of the war."
In the short term, the fortuitous discovery proved crucial in the hasty round of Union planning that stole the element of surprise from Lee. In receiving Lee's plans, General George McClellan, the mercurial commander of the Northern Army, "was granted a windfall such as few generals in history have enjoyed." Only seven days after Corporal Mitchell's discovery, the battle was joined at Sharpsburg on the banks of Antietam Creek. Here, in a hellish day of conflict, the opposing armies struck at each other ruthlessly and relentlessly. They fought at close quarters at a bridge over the creek, in a sunken road that took the name of Bloody Lane, and across a field that "was ever after known as the Cornfield." In his report of action in that field, Union General Joseph Hooker wrote, "In the time I am writing, every stalk of corn in the northern and greater part of the field was cut as closely as with a knife, and the slain lay in rows precisely as they had stood in their ranks a few minutes before. It was never my fortune to witness a more bloody, dismal battlefield."
Nor has America ever witnessed a more bloody, dismal day. "Despite the ghastly events of September 11, 2001," writes McPherson in his book's opening sentence, "another day 139 years earlier remains the bloodiest single day in American history." The 6,300 to 6,500 soldiers killed or mortally wounded that day were more than twice the number killed on September 11 and more than died in all the other wars fought by America in the 19th century combined; that includes the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, and all the Indian Wars.
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