Crisis At The Antietam (August 1958 | Volume: 9, Issue: 5)

Crisis At The Antietam

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Authors: Bruce Catton

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August 1958 | Volume 9, Issue 5

A whitewashed Dunker chrch without a steeple, a forty-acre field of corn that swayed, head-high and green, in the September sun, an eroded country lane that rambled along a hillside behind a weathered snake-rail fence, and an arched stone bridge that crossed a lazy, copper-brown little creek—these unimpressive features of a quiet Maryland landscape made the setting in which one of the greatest moments of crisis in American history came to a solution on the bloody day of September 17, 1862.

The crisis involved nothing less than the continued existence as one nation of the United States, an existence which was in a fair way to come to an end in the middle of that wartime September and which got past its hour of greatest danger because of the tremendous shock of battle. In all the American Civil War, no single day was bloodier or more costly than that one day of battle on the hills and fields overlooking Antietam Creek in western Maryland; nor did any single combat in that war go so far toward putting this American crisis on the road toward solution.

Things had not been going well for the Union cause in the summer of 1862. The great drive to capture Richmond, in which the picturesque young General George B. McClellan led the Army of the Potomac down to the very suburbs of the Confederate capital, had failed in the smoke and clamor of the famous Seven Days’ Battles—seven days in which Robert E. Lee, outnumbered anil seemingly doomed to defeat, had led McClellan into confusion, had roundly whipped his army, and had driven general and troops to an uneasy refuge at Harrison’s Landing, a steaming mud Hat far down the James River, many miles from the goal which had been so nearly within reach.

President Abraham Lincoln’s government had scrambled frantically to retrieve the situation, without luck. A new Federal army, styled the Army of Virginia, had been organized and put under command of General John Pope and sent clown overland to get the Confederates under control; but Lee and his famous lieutenant, Stonewall Jackson, had run rings around General Pope and—on the famous field of Hull Run, less than thirty miles from Washington—had shattered his army in a defeat so ignominious that Pope himself was shelved and sent to Minnesota to fight Indians for the rest of the war, while the remnants of his army crept back to Washington to be united with McClellan’s Army of the Potomac, brought back from the fames River to help defend the national capital.

So as September began, the cause of the Union looked very dark. In the West things were no better, with Confederates led by Braxton Bragg marching north into Kentucky. On the home front there was much gloom; the high hopes of spring (when people believed the war would be won in another inoiuh or so) had been replaced by bewilderment and discouragement, and the most influential