A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (58 page)

After the cornfield and the woods came a sunken road, which, over the course a terrible morning, was christened the Bloody Lane. For several hours along an eight-hundred-yard-long dirt track, a small but well-entrenched Confederate force was able to beat back each Federal charge. (The Irish Brigade lost half its men in less than twenty minutes; Brigade General Thomas Meagher, “the Prince of New York,” survived by being too drunk to ride.) But eventually they were overwhelmed and surrounded. “We were shooting them like sheep in a pen,” recalled a private from New York.
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The break in the Confederate line offered McClellan a clear way through; he could have destroyed Lee’s center and then turned to crush each wing. Yet McClellan never called forward his reserves.

In the afternoon, the hardest part of the fighting was at Rohrbach Bridge, which spanned Antietam Creek and led directly toward the Confederate brigades under General “Old Pete” Longstreet. Ambrose Burnside, who had led the Union capture of Roanoke in February, now commanded McClellan’s IX Corps, which included both the 9th New York and the 79th Highlanders. The bridge in question was only 12 feet wide but 125 feet long. Burnside divided his corps, sending some, including the 9th, to ford the river farther down; the rest, including the 79th, he ordered to charge across the bridge. The Confederates easily repulsed each assault until the 79th ended up having to trample over the bodies of their comrades in order to reach the other side.

For three hours, various regiments made disjointed attempts to fight their way across Burnside’s Bridge, as it became known. “We had a heavy struggle crossing Antietam Creek,” George Herbert told his brother Jack. He had been in charge of the battery that was covering the ford and had watched as his friends waded through waist-deep water while bullets and shells picked them off one by one. The 9th was the first to reach the far bank. As soon as they were reunited, they were ordered to storm the Confederate position on the other side of a plowed field. It was three in the afternoon. “When the order to get up was given, I turned over quickly to look at Col. Kimball, who had given the order, thinking he had suddenly become insane,” wrote the regiment’s historian. “I was lying on my back … watching the shells explode and speculating as to how long I could hold up my finger before it would be shot off, for the very air seemed full of bullets.”
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The men around him were similarly battle-crazed. One wrote how “the whole landscape for an instant turned slightly red.”
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The regiment managed to stagger on until they were within fifty yards of the Confederates. The two sides stared at each other and then roared into hand-to-hand combat. It was the Confederates who turned and fled toward Sharpsburg. The officers leading the 9th struggled to restrain their troops from chasing after them and finally resorted to taking out their revolvers and threatening to shoot.
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But at 4:30
P.M.,
the Union victors were blindsided by a fresh attack from Confederate reinforcements. The last of Lee’s divided forces had arrived at the battlefield, and the 9th had no choice but to retreat. Some of the men cried as they stumbled back down the hill. McClellan had failed to send reinforcements. When a courier from Burnside arrived with a plea for men and guns, McClellan replied: “Tell General Burnside this is the battle of the war.… Tell him if he cannot hold his ground, then the bridge, to the last man!—always the bridge! If the Bridge is lost, all is lost!” Burnside held the bridge but little else.
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“Antietam was a fearful struggle,” wrote Ebenezer Wells. During the night of the seventeenth he had led his team of wagons to a hill; “the thickest of the fight had been just there. The road ran parallel with a stone wall which formed a good breastwork for the Southerners, and it was a heavy slaughter for our men.… It was a moonlit night, and I went to speak to a man sitting across the wall. I wondered what he stayed for.” Wells addressed a few words to him, only to realize that he was dead. “He must have been killed instantly, as he was in a nearly upright position as though in the act of climbing over. The bodies were piled up in heaps all about us.”
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Nearly six thousand men lay dying or dead in ditches and creeks, around fences and knolls, under trees, and across blackened fields. Another seventeen thousand were either waiting for medical attention or receiving what passed for care under hideous conditions.
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Remarkably, Henry MacIver was alive. He had been dragged from the field and carried to a nearby house. By the time he was seen to, he had almost drowned in his own blood. To prevent him from choking to death, the doctor put a silver tube down his throat.

McClellan was so dazed by the scale of the battle that he did nothing to impede Lee’s retreat across the Potomac into Virginia. The shocking number of casualties on September 17 would make Antietam the single costliest day of the war. Twenty-five thousand men were killed, wounded, or missing. McClellan had lost nearly 15 percent of his men; Lee, almost a quarter. The Confederate general might have been defeated once and for all, with his army destroyed, if McClellan’s attacks had been better coordinated. McClellan had shown that he could take a strong hand and throw it away. Yet Antietam was still a victory of sorts for the North because Lee’s invasion had been halted. Although McClellan made the fatal mistake of allowing Lee to escape, he had pricked the aura of invincibility that had grown around the Confederates since the Seven Days’ Battles. He had proved that the Army of Northern Virginia could be stopped.

A few days later, when both armies had deserted the battlefield, the Marquess of Hartington went to inspect the site in order to give a report to his younger brother, Lord Edward Cavendish, who was serving in one of the regiments sent out to defend Canada during the height of the
Trent
affair. Hartington had been in the United States for nearly a month, avoiding his expensive mistress, Catherine Walters (whom he affectionately called Skittles). Now, he walked over the silent terrain in appalled wonder. “In about seven or eight acres of wood,” he reported to his father, the Duke of Devonshire, “there is not a tree which is not full of bullets and bits of shell. It is impossible to understand how anyone could live in such a fire as there must have been there.”
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Lord Hartington’s impression of Washington after the Battle of Antietam was that it resembled a vast camp. “You see hardly anything but soldiers and baggage-wagons, and stores moving up to the troops.… Washington is now completely surrounded by [forts], I think there are between forty and fifty,” he wrote on September 29, 1862. “No drink is allowed to be sold, and, though the place is full of soldiers, it is very quiet.” He admired the bearing of the volunteers and thought it “a great pity that such fine material should be thrown away, as they very likely may be, by having utterly incompetent officers.”
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Naturally, he was entertained by Seward, Lincoln, and a host of Washington dignitaries who had become friends with his other brother, Frederick, during the latter’s visit in 1859. By now the Americans were used to titled foreigners in their midst. Seward reminisced at length about his stay in England and the titled personages he had met. Lincoln was civil “and also told us stories. I said I supposed we had come at a bad time to see the country, and he said, ‘Well!’ He guessed we couldn’t do them much harm.” Secretary of War Stanton revolted Hartington for being a “most atrocious snob,” worse even than Seward. General McClellan, he thought, was quiet and modest in comparison, but Hartington was surprised by the general’s hatred of abolitionists.
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Lincoln regarded Antietam as the victory he had been waiting for in order to issue his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. “I think the time has come now,” he told the cabinet after the announcement on September 22. “I wish it were a better time. I wish that we were in a better condition.” But, he continued, “I must do the best I can and bear the responsibility of taking the course which I feel I ought to take.” The proclamation declared that on January 1, 1863, all slaves in the rebellious parts of the country would be “forever free.”
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Lincoln also included the prospect of compensated emancipation for slave owners—and emigration for freed blacks—in order to soften the objections of both Democratic voters and the border states. Seward had his reservations but supported the president. On September 26, he told his daughter that he hoped the proclamation had not been issued prematurely.
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—

Francis Dawson learned about the Emancipation Proclamation from his prison guard. His bravery had earned him a commission as a first lieutenant of artillery. “The cup of my happiness was full,” he wrote in his memoir. “My new uniform was a gray tunic with scarlet cuffs and scarlet collar; an Austrian knot of gold braid on each arm … gray trousers with broad red stripes.”
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The Englishman had acquired legions of admirers. “I am very highly thought of here; pardon the apparent egotism of the remark,” he wrote candidly to his mother. “I have a troop of wealthy and influential friends here who will do anything for me. Mr. Raines of whom I have spoken to you before has even expressed a wish to adopt me as a son.”
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His popularity was fortunate, since he had not actually received any pay and inflation was already turning ordinary articles into priceless objects. He was dismayed to discover that a plain calico shirt cost twenty Confederate dollars.

Dawson went to Richmond to receive his orders and, while there, had his portrait taken; “if I am killed it shall be sent to you,” he promised his mother. From anyone else such words might have been mere bravado, but Dawson was serious. He astonished the chief of ordnance, Colonel Gorgas, by informing him that he did not wish to be relegated to the rear. The colonel complied. “He gave me a letter to General Longstreet, requesting that, if any particularly hazardous service should fall within the line of my duty, it might be given to me.”
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Gorgas had assigned him as brigade ordnance officer under Colonel Manning, in Longstreet’s division.
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But during his first assignment in early September, Dawson was captured along with the wagons he was taking to Longstreet’s camp. By morning the prisoners were in Pennsylvania on their way to Harrisburg. Dawson’s fresh-looking uniform and general foreignness once again attracted attention. The Union officers escorting the train took such a liking to him that he was able to borrow one of their blankets and a spare toothbrush. But by the journey’s end, Dawson had discovered that it was possible to be too popular. When they reached Harrisburg, one of the officers insisted on showing him around the town. The commandant thought this was a doubtful idea, but the captain was adamant. Supper in the town’s principal hotel passed without incident. Unfortunately, this only emboldened the U.S. officer:

After supper [Dawson recalled], we walked out to the front of the hotel, where my companion slapped me on the shoulder and said in a loud voice: “Here is a real live Rebel officer! The first man that says a word to him I will knock his damned head off!” This was not a very pacific speech to make to a crowd of fanatical Pennsylvanians, who had just heard that the battle of Sharpsburg [Antietam] had begun.
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From the hotel they went to a music hall. They entered as the performers were leading the audience in a rendition of “The Union and McClellan forever.” Undaunted, the captain escorted Dawson down the aisle to the front row, calmly ignoring the growls and murmurs from the crowd. “By this time,” he noticed, “my companion was decidedly exhilarated.” Dawson had no choice but to wait and see what suicidal escapade the captain would think up next. About half an hour later, the officer jumped from his seat and shouted at the top of his voice that he would beat any man who laid on a finger on his friend. His action unleashed the crowd. Just before Dawson lost consciousness, he heard shots being fired. When he recovered, he learned that the commandant had come looking for them. The captain had emerged barely alive. It transpired that he had a notorious drinking problem.

Dawson was almost relieved when he reached the relative safety of Fort Delaware. The grim fort turned prison was situated in the middle of the Delaware River on a swamp-infested island known locally as Pea Patch. The only other inhabitants beside the inmates and guards were malaria-carrying mosquitoes and rats. As an officer, Dawson was housed inside the fort rather than in one of the wooden barracks outside. “The Time dragged heavily,” he wrote. Ninety unwashed men were crammed into a thirty-foot room and never allowed out except for meals, which were short and sparse. After three weeks he was paroled and shipped back to Richmond.

He arrived in the city on October 6. “I can hardly realize now,” he wrote, “that the time, counted by days and weeks, was really so short. And yet, it must have been so.” There was an air of anxiety in Richmond that he had not felt before. All leave had been canceled, and uniformed men were thronging the streets. The hotels were full and there was nowhere for him to stay. The wounded from Antietam filled every spare bed and couch in the city. More than ten thousand soldiers were being treated in Richmond’s hospitals. Having heard that there was a shortage of nurses, Mary Sophia Hill temporarily left Sam and went to help at Chimborazo, which had grown so quickly since its establishment in 1861 that in a few more months it would be the largest military hospital in the world.