School of War - Ep 153: Scott Hartwig on the Battle of Antietam

Episode Date: October 18, 2024

Scott Hartwig, author ofI Dread the Thought of the Place: The Battle of Antietam and the End of the Maryland Campaign, joins the show to discuss the single bloodiest day in American military history, the Battle of Antietam. ▪️ Times      •      01:46 Introduction      •      02:19 Why Antietam?     •      09:09 Sourcing history     •     12:45 Limited to total war     •      21:24 McClellan      •      28:00 Lee in Maryland      •      34:57 Geography      •      46:20 South Mountain to Antietam      •      55:49 The fighting     •      01:02:12 Mass and maneuver     •      01:04:44 Lee escapes Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

D-Day, Pearl Harbor, 9-11. Nun saw as many Americans killed is on September the 17th, 1862, the Battle of Antietam. This episode, about the battle, which spends a good amount of time on the political, strategic, operational context of that terrible day, comes close to what I had originally imagined as an ideal episode when we started this project. I found the conversation fascinating. Let's get into it. The war is Iraqi invasion of the war. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infantry. A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state.

We continue to face the grave situation in the ground. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing ground. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, substack and Twitter. And feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean.

Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to welcome to the show today, Scott Hartwood. Scott was the supervisory park historian at the Gettysburg National Military Park for 20 years. He's the author of a couple of books about 1862. There's To Antietam Creek, the Maryland Campaign of September 1862. And then most recently, a truly magnificent tome in literal scope and scale. It's heavy as I hold it here in my hands, but also in content.

I dread the thought of the place, the Battle of Antietam and the end of the Maryland campaign. Scott, thank you so much for joining the show. Thanks for having me on. We have done embarrassingly little on the Civil War over the 150 or so episodes of School of War so far. And so thank you for coming on to help us remedy this deficit. you obviously have spent decades focused on the war. And can I ask sort of an obvious question through which you can explain your background,

but as the man who ran Gettysburg or ran the history operation at Gettysburg for so many years, why, why Antietam? Why have your literary efforts gone to Antietam? Tell us about yourself. Yeah, that's a common question. Yeah, I spent 34 years in the National Park Service and 33 of them were at Gettysburg. one was at the Eisenhower National Historic Site, which is actually a part of the battlefield. It was Eisenhower bought a farm right adjacent to the battlefield before he became president.

And I would say the reason why Antietam is two reasons. One, I always had an interest in Antietam. And I think it stemmed from Bruce Katten's book, Mr. Lincoln's Army, and his description of the Battle of Antietam was really unforgettable. and I always had this fascination with the Antietam battlefield. And then the second part of it was Antietam wasn't Gettysburg. So, you know, I worked at Gettysburg and dealt with Gettysburg stuff all the time. And I didn't want to work on something related to Gettysburg in the evening or on weekends when I would have time to work on something.

I wanted to do something that was different. And at the time period, I initially started on this project. Antietam only had two books, one which was written in the 1880s by a veteran of the battle called the Antietam and Fredericksburg. And then the other one was James Murphy, MacLean of Banettes, which was written in the early 1960s. And about the time that I started to, you know, dabble in this project, Stephen Sears published Landscape Turn Red, which is an excellent book on the Battle of Antietam. And, but there really wasn't, a great deal of study of the Battle of Antietam that was out there.

As compared to Gettysburg, Gettysburg just had lots and lots of different books on it. It was the most well-known subject of the Civil War. So I thought Antietam would be a good subject to try to tackle. And when I first got into it, I really didn't know what I was doing. And, you know, my first efforts at it were kind of ridiculous. But I learned. I learned over time. And, you know, I found that Antietam is a very well-documented.

battle. In some respects, it is a better documented battle than the Battle of Gettysburg. Now, some people will say, oh, that can't be. I mean, Gettysburg is so well known. And there were two gentlemen, both veterans of the battle, Ezra Carmen, who was the colonel of the 13th, New Jersey in the battle, and later became essentially the government historian of the Antietam battlefield. And then John Gould, John Gould was a veteran of the 10th Maine infantry, had been the adjutant of the 10th Maine. And after the war, he was a banker in Maine. But he had a fascination with the battle.

And he also gone into this controversy because General Joseph Mansfield was killed or was mortally wounded in front of his regiment. And Gould actually helped carry him off the field partway. And he wrote about it at the time of the battle. And he wrote about it afterwards. And then in the 1880s, he published an article. about Mansfield's mortal wounding in a veteran newspaper called the National Tribune. And these other veterans wrote in in response to his article that Gould was full of it,

that Mansfield wasn't shot where Mansfield or where Gould said he was. He was shot in front of their regiment, wherever that regiment happened to be. And ultimately, Gould, who had a good sense of humor, began to question whether he'd even been in the battle. So anyway, it started Gould. on, he has a very inquisitive mind. So he began to correspond with veterans of the battle because he said, okay, all right, all you guys think that Mansfield was shot in front of your regiment. So let's gather people's recollections of what happened during the battle. So he

started writing union veterans. He interviewed every living member of the 10th main infantry about the battle and kept copious notes about the interviews with them. And then make a long story short. He ultimately ended up corresponding with veterans from every unit that fought on the north end of the battlefield in the morning of the battle, Union and Confederate. So this huge amount of correspondence from Gould, and the thing that's interesting about this correspondence is Gould's a veteran, and he's writing the veterans and asking simply for what they remember of the battle. He would also send them a piece of a very detailed map that was done at the Antietam battlefield in the the 1880s to refresh their memory on the battlefield. So he wasn't writing a book. He wasn't writing

the history of Antietam. So the veterans, because they're talking to a veteran, were very matter of fact and often most of the time, very honest with him about their experiences in the battle. And then the other part of it was Ezra Carmen was trying to create this very detailed, like hour by hour map of the battlefield. And he was also trying to mark the battlefield. So he corresponded with veterans of every infantry regiment, cavalry regiment, and artillery battery in the battle. And all of those letters to Carmen are either in Carmen's papers in New Jersey or they ended up in Carmen's papers in the Library of Congress. So what we have is this huge volume of post-war correspondence in addition to all the other sorts of things, the letters,

the diaries, the reminiscences, the newspaper articles, all that sort of stuff. And Gettysburg doesn't really have that same type of volume of primary source material and the type of primary source material because these veterans, when they're writing to Carmen and they're writing to Kool, it would be different if they knew that they were writing the history of the Battle of Antietam. Because then they might want to tell tall tales and stories and make themselves look good and so on. But they weren't. They were just marking the field. So they tended to be very objective and very straightforward. And what that meant was for me, there was just a gold mine of material to work with. I can see how that gold mine is, I mean, in certain obvious ways, there's a blessing. I could also see

ways in which it could be a curse. One, I mean, just so much, right? You can, you can kind of, I don't need to tell a professional story. And you can kind of know too much sometimes. But two, it's just the nature of memory, the nature of specifically memory about something like battle. when even if you have the advantages you just outlined that the writers that the people creating these materials are they're they're writing in circumstances where they are inclined to be as objective and no nonsenses as you might reasonably expect it's still decades later and memories just play tricks on you especially for things as intense and fast as combat so how do you how do you think about that as you as you processed all this evidence yeah you have to you can't

just take one source and say that source is what I'm going with. You have to try to. So let's say we have a veteran who writes to John Gould or Ezra Carmen and they were in the 124th, Pennsylvania, and they're telling about their experiences. Well, you really need to find every other source that you possibly can in the 124th. So it might be a letter that was written by a veteran immediately after the battle to the local newspaper or a letter that was written home to their family. Or a letter that was written home to their family or to a friend or a diary that a soldier kept. And you compare all of these different accounts that you have. And you might have the official report of the commanding officer of the regiment. So you're going to compare all of these. And you're also going to compare them.

You're going to compare them with the other side, the Confederate accounts. So if you're looking at a union soldier, you're going to look at the Confederate account. So you try to have as many accounts as you can to try to arrive at what happened. But also knowing that, you know, in some respects, we will never know all of the details of a battle like Antietam. It's just, it's just, as you say, with memory, there are certain things people just didn't remember. They didn't record. And or they remembered them in, in the wrong way. I was listening to a podcast recently about, we're talking about this Marine Corps veteran, Carl Marlantis, who wrote, read book about, yeah.

And he writes about this subject explicitly. But yeah, please, please. Yeah. And he and this other soldier were in a foxhole in a battle in a firefight in Vietnam. And I think Marlantis told the story about how afterward when they talked about it, they both had completely different perspectives on the combat. And here they were in the same foxhole. So that's a good example of, I think, what you encounter and have to take into account for

when you're writing something like a book about a battle that isn't as well documented in some respects as, say, a battle in Vietnam. And you also don't have the people who participate in a method that you could talk to. Yeah, Marlantis wrote a great novel about Vietnam called Matterhorn and a very good selection of essays called What Is It Like to Go to War, both of which I recommend. And this is one of his big themes and the sort of theme of how to be honest with yourself. And I would say to listeners, I mean, you don't you don't have to be a combat veteran to kind of understand the issue here. Like, I think of, you know, when you try to tell stories from your own childhood, the younger you get, maybe maybe even not that young. Maybe I'm lying to myself even as I make that qualification. Are you actually conveying the memory? Did you start to tell the story in a certain way when you were a little older and then that telling of the story, solidified in your mind based, you know, like this is evolution that our self-understanding goes through. Anyway, I don't want to get too, too bog down and I wanted to actually talk about the Battle of Antita, but it is a really interesting. Yes, it is. issues. Well, let's, why don't we, let's start big. And then, you know, we have limited time here to go through what was an incredibly packed and significant and awful day. But why don't we start

really big and give listeners some context? You say in the book, and I confess, I've not looked at your first book, though, I would like to, which is about the campaign, that this Maryland campaign occurs in the context of a sort of transition of character of the Civil War, from something more limited in 1861 to something, well, less limited. where sort of animal passions and more emotion and more aggressive war aims are coming to the fore in 1862. Talk a bit about that and sort of set the stage for us. Yeah, so 1862 is what people would refer to. And 1861 and a part of 1862 are what you would call a limited war.

And there's a lot of reasons for this limited war. And what I mean by a limited war is that the war aim of the Lincoln administration is to preserve the union. It's to bring the 11 states that have seceded from the union back into the union and stitch the union back together again. And so while if you were to ask Lincoln what brought on the war, Lincoln would probably tell you slavery had brought on the war, the issue of slavery.

It obviously brought on the war, and particularly the extension of slavery into the territories. But Lincoln had very deliberate reasons for not wanting to make slavery a central issue or war aim of the Union May 261 in early 1862. So the thinking is you can't lose Kentucky and you can't lose Missouri. So if you take any sort of at that time period considered radical action on slavery, you could potentially lose either of those states. They're border states. They haven't really gone with the Union and they haven't really gone with the Confederacy. And they have a fairly big population. You cannot lose those states if you're Lincoln.

So any radical movement on slavery, Lincoln is concerned he could lose those states to the Confederacy. He's not as concerned about Maryland, which is also a slave state, because there's such a strong federal army presence in the state of Maryland that they can pretty much suppress anything that might happen there. But Kentucky and Missouri are a big issue. And the other part of it is, and that, you know, we could all remember back to the war in Iraq where people were talking about, you know, I create more insurgents. Right? You don't want to create more insurgents if you do thus and such. Well, that was the same sort of thinking in the early period of the American Civil War. You don't want to create more rebels. And that thinking was that there was a group of hot edds, you know, the big powerful slaveholders and those who really wanted to cede for their own purposes. But they didn't really have the support of the majority of the southern population. So if you treat the majority of the southern population very gently, and mainly go after their armies that are in the field, the thinking was you can suppress this rebellion and also if you capture their capital,

which is Richmond, the key point. And that's what George B. McClellan, who commands the army at Antietam and commands the army in 1861 and early 1862, he thinks that if you capture Richmond, the rebellion's going to topple. Now, there's a lot of evidence that this is wishful thinking because, you know, the armies of the Confederacy are an expression of their will in this war.

And they have a lot of armies and they're big armies and they fight hard and they fight well. And as the war progresses, everywhere the Union Army goes in Southern Territory, enslaved people are leaving enslavement and running away to the Union Army. So then Union Army commanders are saying, what are we supposed to do? I mean, what are we supposed to do with these people? I mean, are we supposed to give them back to the slave owners who are using them? They're renting them out to the Confederate government to build fortifications. And they're also, they're also helping them because they are their labor force.

So they are their economy. And so there's this whole like, you know, tug of war year over what to do with the enslaved people. And they're going to pass these confiscation acts about attempting to try to deal with enslaved people and give army officers advice on how or instructions on how to deal with them because ultimately you don't want to return enslaved people back to the people who are enslaving them because they're helping the Confederate war effort. And one of the union officers is an attorney before the war, Benjamin Butler, creates this nomenclature for these people that they are contraband. So this is contraband of war. So when they come into in his lines, he's going to keep

them. And he's going to pay them and put them to work doing things. And as the as this, as the war progresses in 61 and 62, and we start getting these big battles like Shiloh, in particular in April of 1862, an incredibly violent bloody battle, but there's fighting it in the whirlins and along the North Carolina coast. And it's really obvious that this South is in deadly earnest in this war. Lincoln begins to see that he cannot continue this war as a limited war. He's going to lose the war if he does that. He has to up being. And a lot of the soldiers in the armies are beginning to see this as well.

Because for many of these men, as they're coming into the South, it's their first experience with enslaved people and encountering slavery. And there are many in the army who don't care one way or the other. But there's a lot of them who are beginning to say, hey, wait a second, what are we doing here? I mean, we're treating these people with kid gloves. They're fighting us. They're killing our soldiers. And ultimately by July of 1862, Lincoln comes to the conclusion that he has to take action on emancipation. He's tried to get compensated emancipation with the slaveholders in Kentucky and Missouri, and he has failed.

They are wedded to slavery. They're not interested in compensated emancipation. And Lincoln finally decides he has to act. Act. And the way he'll act is he'll use his war powers as the president, and he'll issue an emancipation proclamation, clearing all the slaves in the states and rebellion to be free. And he decides this in July of 62, after McClellan has been defeated in his effort to take Richmond on the Virginia Peninsula. And the war at that point is not going well for the union. So members of Lincoln's cabinet advise him, you need a military victory to issue this proclamation

from a position of strength. So that's where we get to when the beginning of the Maryland campaign, when the Maryland campaign begins, is that Lincoln is compelled to place McClellan in command of the Army. McClellan has made it very clear that he does not agree with an emancipation policy. He thinks it will dissolve the arnance. He's totally opposed to it. So the irony of the Maryland campaign is that Lincoln needs George McClellan,

who doesn't believe in a policy of emancipation, he's not pro-slavery. I want to make that clear about McClellan. He is not pro-slavery. He just does not agree with an emancipation policy. But Lincoln needs that general to deliver him a military victory so he can issue his emancipation proclamation and transform the war. So that's where we are at the beginning of the Maryland campaign. So the war is still this limited war by the officials. claim, the official aims of the union government, with the U.S. government, but it's on the precipice of big change. Can I ask you a question about McClellan and about the links between his politics and, for

lack of a better phrase, his warfighting style, to the extent that, you know, people remember McClellan, they remember that, you know, he's a cautious, deliberate general as a result. He's the spectacular success seems to elude him and not to, not to spoil the end of the story here, but, you know, famously, he puts Lee in a very bad spot by the end of the Battle of Antietam, but then fails to pursue and destroy Lee's army. What link is there between his caution, his more moderate politics, his more moderate conception of war aims, his desire in certain respects to win while leaving the South intact in certain ways, perhaps leaving the institution of slavery intact? Maybe that goes too far, and you'll tell me that goes too far. On the one hand, and the

the fact that he lacks such aggression on the battlefield, I could imagine, for example, I'm sure this is documented, and I don't really know what I'm talking about here, but just knowing how politicians think and how people in Washington think, I could imagine Lincoln and his aid getting the word that McClellan failed to destroy Lee in the aftermath of sort of gaining the upper hand at Antietam and suspecting, suspecting that McClellan's politics played a role in that. Would such a, would such a surmise be completely unfair and unwarranted? Like, help me understand the links between these two things, if any, maybe there aren't links? No, it is very complicated, but what you just said there at the end actually did happen.

There was a staff officer in the war department who said to someone else in the war department because the other person was saying, you know, why didn't we, we should have destroyed the Confederate Army at Antietam or after Antietam? and this other officer whose brother was a staff officer of George McClellan's, who was also kind of a political advisor to McClellan. But this brother of his says that there's not a war department person that that's not the goal in this war. Right.

Right. The goal in this war is to, you know, kind of stitch everything back together again with slavery intact and, you know, go back to the way we were before. I don't actually think McClellan thought that. I don't think McClellan thought that way. I think McClellan was very conservative in his views. He was like many northern conservatives and or even some southerners like a Robert E. Lee, who his comment on slavery was that, you know, God in his own good time will find some way to deal with this issue. And you're like, well, maybe the war is God's right. Anyway, that's kind of the way McClellan viewed this. He thought that somehow, some way, he did believe that slavery probably was going to ultimately die in America. But a lot of people had predicted slavery's demise and thought that slavery was going to collapse. And slavery in America was incredibly resilient. It was incredibly resilient. And it was unbelievably difficult to. destroy it in this country. And I think people like McClellan didn't really understand that. So, yes, his politics may have played some role in the way he executed things in the war, but I think it was more... McClellan believed in keeping his casualties low, and he liked a war

of position where you protected your troops with entrenchments, you work up close to the enemy's center of gravity, which he believed was Richmond, and then you use your heavy siege artillery to demolish the enemy position and make their position completely untenable. So he doesn't do as well when he gets out into the open field. Although, you know, for all the criticism we have of McClellan, and I've certainly criticized him plenty, in the Maryland campaign, he moves pretty aggressively across the state. He has quite a few brand-new regimens. He has quite a few brand-new regiments in his army that have no military constraints at all. But he moves pretty aggressively across the state when he finds special orders of Lee on September 13th. He takes action.

Immediately plans an offensive. He makes the offensive. The offensive is successful. He defeats Lee at the Battle of South Mountain. He attacks Lee on September 17th at Antietam. And yes, Lee does get away. But another thing you have to keep in mind about McClellan that permeates everything he does that also has a great deal to do with his caution is McClellan consistently believes he's outnumbered. And he does sincerely believe he took a great risk in the Battle of Antietam in attacking because he was outnumbered in the battle. So we look at him. We're like, oh, we know what the Confederates had. They had 40,000 men. And that's not what McClellan thought. McClellan thought that the Confederates had at least equal numbers

and probably superior numbers to what he had. And it's one of these cases of, we can see this throughout history of, you know, headquarters, the commanding general and the headquarters get this idea of what they think the reality is, but the enemy has superior numbers. So they then consequently seek that intelligence that reinforces that view. And they denigrate the intelligence that challenges the view. And I see this over and over again when McClellan is in command of the Army, the Potomac, is that anything that elevates the enemy's numbers is embraced.

He also has a civilian, Alan Pinkerton, who is doing his primary intelligence collection about the Confederate Army doing that work for him. And Pinkerton is not very good at the job. But I also think that Pinkerton is sending the McClellan reports that are reinforcing what McClellan wants him to believe. It's kind of like, you know, in some ways, use a modern analogy when we were looking for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So we sought out the evidence and ultimately you can find it, but there was a lot of evidence that they didn't have the weapons of mass destruction any longer, but that evidence was inconvenient. And so it's the same

thing with McClellan, I think. And that also explains why after the Battle of Antietam, he was very cautious. But he didn't, if you want to make one major, criticism of George McClellan. It was that his intelligence gathering was awful. And so, for example, after the Battle of Antietam, he had prisoners from every division in Lee's army, either wounded or unwounded. So it did not take rocket science to figure out that what you want to do is you want to question your POWs and you'll get the Confederate Order of Battle. And then the second thing you can find out from the POWs is kind of the physical condition of the army, how regularly being fed, you know, are getting supplies and equipment, things like that.

Right. I mean, Lee's Army was in bad shape. But they don't do anything like that. They don't do anything like that. So even after the battle is over, Lee McClellan still really doesn't understand what the order of battle of the Confederate Army is. And he believes the Confederate Army is pretty strong. Yeah.

So one of the really interesting aspects of this encounter in the Maryland campaign more broadly is just a very dramatic contrast in style between McClellan and Lee, who, of course, famously is a man of maneuver and risk and so forth. Maybe this is a good way to transition into the Maryland campaign and just to align some complexity as McClellan is not making dramatic progress down closer in central Virginia. There is the second battle of Bull Run, doesn't go well for the union, and Lee invades Maryland.

What is Lee up to? Why does he invade Maryland? How does he conceive of the operation? and talk a bit about Lee's style. Yeah, Lee invades Maryland because it's his best play. As Lee assesses the strategic situation of the Confederacy, it's his best play. And Lee understands that Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, is going to endorse this. Because Lee had been Davis's military advisor in 1861 and on in 1862 before Jefferson Davis places in command of the Army at the beginning of

June 1862 when Joseph Johnson got wounded in the Battle of Seven Pines. So Lee and Davis certainly have had a lot of discussions about strategy. If this happens, what will we do? What options should we take? And what Lee sees after the Battle of Second Manassas, he's driven two Union armies, the Army of Virginia and the Army of the Potomac into the fortifications of Washington, D.C. Now, they're not demoralized. the army is not like completely demoralized and on the edge of collapse. Its morale is down. It's been definitely hurt. And it's very disorganized, the Union Army.

And so what Lee sees is I could try to invest Washington, D.C., besiege it. Well, he doesn't have an army big enough to do that. And he also doesn't have. He cannot supply his army. So that's a no-go. He can't do that. The other option that he had was to fallback in. the northern Virginia because his army is very poorly supplied after he wins his victory at

Manassas. A lot of his troops are, their equipment is wearing out, their clothing's wearing out, they're not, they're definitely not getting regularations of food supplies. So it's causing a lot of straggling in this army. So what he could do, if he could fall back farther towards Fredericksburg, Virginia, Warrington, Virginia, he'd be closer to rail communications. He could refit his army. He'd be on the flank of any sort of union advance down towards Fredericksburg and the overland approach to Richmond. And so from a more passive defensive view, that's a good, that's a good move. Lee discounts that immediately. Lee never ever gives up the initiative when he has it. So he has the initiative. He's going to, he's going

to exploit the initiative. So what are the advantages of going into Maryland? Well, the advantages of going into Maryland are first, you're going to upset the Union war effort. because now you've got a Confederate Army in Maryland. Lee, one of the things about Lee that you hear a lot of times is that Lee only thought regionally. He thought of Virginia, that theater, that's the only thing he really cared about. And I just don't think that's true at all. I think Lee had a very good strategic view of the war, and I think he had a better grasp on the politics of the war in a lot of ways than Jefferson Davis. it. So Lee sees the way the Confederates are going to win this war is to convince the northern

voter, and that means white males in the north, because they're the people who can vote, to convince the white northern voter, but the war simply is unwinnable, or the cost of winning the war is going to be too high. So his army marches into Maryland, and he hopes to get into Pennsylvania in this campaign. And what he's sending the signal is, you cannot conquer us. You cannot to feed us. Look at what we can do. Look at where we can go. We can go anywhere we want to go. All we want to do is be left alone. Just leave us low. So he's trying to influence the northern voter. And we have an election coming up, the congressional elections of fall of 1862. So he hopes that he can do some damage to the Republican Party, which is Lincoln's party in that

election. One of the things you'll read oftentimes about the Maryland campaign is that the Confederates were hoping for European recognition. And there were a number of people in the Confederate government who are hoping for that. Lee wasn't one of them. Lee did not think they were going to get European recognition. England and France had both abolished slavery. He did not think that they would recognize the Confederacy. And he also didn't think that they should count on something like that. He said to his son at one point, we must look to our own resources. So the other point about going in the Maryland is what you want to do if you're Lee is you want to fight the Union Army before it's reorganized. So don't let the Army reorganize itself, get all these new recruits because in July of 1862,

they put out a call for 300,000 volunteers in the north. And regiments who have been raised in response to that call are pouring into Washington, D.C. So you want to fight the Union Army before it can absorb those recruits and train those recruits. So if you move the Army in the Maryland and into Pennsylvania, you're going to force the Union Army he's come out of the fortifications of Washington into the open. That's what Lee wants. He wants to draw them as far away from Washington as he possibly can and what he calls out into the open somewhere in Western Maryland

or even in Pennsylvania and fight them in a battle and defeat them in that battle. And that battle will lead the political consequences for the Confederacy that Lee sees as leading towards potential victory for the Confederacy. for the Confederacy is they don't need to conquer any territory. They just need to control what they have and be left alone. So have the union leave them alone and grant them their independence. So that's why Lee is making an offensive movement in the hopes that he can convince the northern people that the war is unwinnable. The Lincoln administration is not the administration that's

going to win this war. They're leading you down the wrong road. There's all his blood and destruction. and so on, and we'll leave you alone, North, if you leave us alone. So Lee sees a lot of benefits into going into Maryland and very few benefits into falling back towards Warrens and Virginia or attempting to besiege Washington, D.C. And so he goes up to Frederick, Maryland, and then he goes west in this really kind of complicated, at least for me, for the non-specialist, sort of initially difficult to understand set of maneuvers, which have among their objectives. Harpers Ferry, which actually succeeds in capturing.

Talk a bit about how we get to Antietam and the specific context for Antietam. And talk a bit about, this is a little self-indulgent because I grew up in this part of the world and these questions have always fascinated me. But the military geography at the campaign level and how that affects what's going on here. Because you obviously have the Blue Ridge, you have other smaller chains of high terrain fronting that. And then you have these big rivers that cut east-west into which these very significant streams like Antietam, for example, which can get, you know, they can be significant.

They can be in deep ravines. They can be uncrossable. They can certainly be uncrossable under fire. Like, how does all of this affect the lead up to Antietam? Yeah, well, the geography is a really good point that you raise because the geography dictates why Lee goes to Frederick, Maryland. So if you look at the Gettysburg campaign, where does Lee enter Maryland? He enters Maryland west of the Blue Ridge.

So he had two options in September of 16th. he could enter Maryland east of the Blue Ridge or it could enter Maryland west of the Blue Ridge. And Stonewall Jackson, who was one of his wing commanders, advocated entering Maryland west of the Blue Ridge. And Lee dismissed that idea because part of his objective, as I just mentioned, was to draw the Union Army out of Washington, D.C. And he was afraid if he entered Maryland west of the Blue Ridge, that might not draw them out of the Capitol. but if he marched to Frederick east of the Blue Ridge, that would pose a threat to Pennsylvania, Baltimore, and Maryland, and Washington, D.C. And that was a threat that Lee was certain Lincoln could not let stay there. He had to send the army out against it. So that's why he chooses to go east of the Blue Ridge. Of course, he has to cross the Potalamic River. So that's the major water obstacle in this part of the country between Maryland and Virginia. And he's got two, well, two mountain ranges and then one small range of hills. So when you go west of Frederick, there's a range of hills called Catawton Mountain,

which is really a series of hills, Catocton Mountain. And then you'll grow over Catocton Mountain and you go, I don't know what it is, maybe eight miles west of Cotcton Mountain. You'll reach South Mountain. Now, South Mountain is a much more significant mountain range. It runs up all the way to Harrisburg in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania, and it gets up over to 2,000 feet. So it's a significant mountain range. And then when you go south of that, then you're going to have the Blue Ridge Mountains. So west of south mountain,

the country kind of levels out more. It's very undulating until you get back to the Potomac River again, which is behind Sharpsford, Maryland. So when Lee crosses the Potomac and marches to Frederick, Maryland, he's monitoring the situation. He knew that in, in the, in the the Shenandoah Valley in the lower end of the valley. And when we say the lower end of the valley, a lot of times people think the southern end of the valley. In the Civil War terminology, the lower end of the valley is the northern end of the valley. So at the lower end of the valley, there were two union garrisons that were not insignificant. There was one at Martinsburg of about 2,500 men. And there was one at Harper's Ferry. That was about 10,000 men. And Lee anticipated

that these two garrisons would be, they would be withdrawn when he occupied Frederick. So Lee thought these, there was a Harper's Ferry garrison, there's a Martinsburg, there's a Martinsburg, Virginia garrison, and Lee thought these two garrisons would be withdrawn because they could potentially be cut off when he occupied Frederick. And they weren't, because the Union General of Chief Henry Halleck ordered both of those garrisons to stay in place because Halleck thought that they would create a problem for the Confederates. And they would. Because when Lee left Frederick, his intention was the crossover Catocton, South Mountain, march to Hagerstown, and march into Pennsylvania. And when he did that,

he would have a new line of communications, which would run down the Shenandoor Valley, which he can't have to union garrisons on his line of communications. So this creates a problem for Lee, but in typical Lee fashion, Lee doesn't see this as a problem. Lee sees this as an opportunity. So he thinks the Union Army, the main Union Army in Washington is very disorganized, and he is going to be able to divide his army into several pieces, and he will send three separate columns to encircle the two Union garrisons. Hopefully he'll drive the Martinsburg Garrison and Harpers Ferry. He'll encircle all the Union forces of Harpers Ferry. He'll capture them, all war material, all the artillery, the troops, the big embarrassment to the Lincoln administration,

And he will have ample time, he thinks, to reunite his army in Hagerstown and then continue the campaign up into Pennsylvania. Now, initially, he had one other force. He has three forces that are going to circle Harper's Ferry and another force, which consisted of General Longstreet's Command and General D.H. Hill's division with Army headquarters, Lee, which stop at Boonsboro, Maryland, which is just on the western side of South Mountain. So Lee draws up plans called Special Order's Number 191. They're drawn up. They're issued to all of the commanders named in the orders. And that is the plan to capture Harper's Ferry. They're distributed to everybody in the Army.

And on September 10th, the Army starts to march out of Frederick, Maryland to execute this campaign. And on the day, the first day of the operation, Lee modifies the plan. because he learns that there is a union force, a state militia, Pennsylvania or Pennsylvania State militia, that is threatening to move down into Hagerstown. He can't allow that to happen. He cannot allow any union force to occupy Hagerstown. It's not true, but Lee can't let that happen. And the other thing he learns is that the millers in Hagerstown are hauling their flour away

because they don't want it to fall in Confederate hands. and Lee needs that flower, to feed his army. So Lee divides his army into a fifth piece. Longstreet's command will march St. Heggersdown, D.Hill will stay at Boonesboro, and the other three columns will go after Harpers Ferry. So it's a very complicated operation. Lee anticipates all the pieces will be in place by September the 12th, and give you some perspective on this,

if you were an infantryman at Stonewall Jackson's command, he has three infantry divisions. Jackson has to march in two days, about 54 miles, and his forces have to climb Catocton Mountain and South Mountain and cross the Potomac River. In order to get into place outside of Arpysvary. So Lee is extremely ambitious in his timetable for this operation. But the operation is actually really well managed by the Confederates. They march hard. They drive the Martinsburg, Gare.

in the Arcus Ferry, and they have got the garrison surrounded, and they've captured all the key terrain by September 13th, not September 12th. So they've got the garrison bottled up, but the garrison has not surrendered. And that, of course, then puts Lee in a situation where now the Union Army he knows is approaching, because he, by September 7th, he was informed by his cavalry screen committed by the Confederate General Jeb Stewart, but the Army of the Potomac had left Washington and was marching across Maryland towards them. This is, of course, this is what Lee wants. Lee wants that army come out of Washington, D.C. But now it becomes to become a little bit more complicated because now the Union Army is approaching the harpestuary operation

hasn't wrapped up and then to throw another giant monkey wrench into the whole works. On the morning of September the 13th, Lee does not know this, but on the morning of September the 13th, As the Union Army of the Potomac is closing up on the city of Frederick, they arrived there on September 12th, but the main body of the Army is arriving on the 13th. The soldiers of the 27th, Indiana, cross Monocacy, the Monocacy River, just south of Frederick. They march into this meadow where D.H. Hills, part of D.H. Hill's division had been encamped. They halted in the middle. They're in line of battle. They find out that the Confederates have evacuated Frederick. Soldiers have said, okay.

stack your rifles, everybody stacks their rifles as they stack their rifles. Three of the NCOs look down in the grass in front of them and they see an envelope laying there in the grass. So they pick the envelope up. They open it up and they look inside. There's three cigars with a piece of paper wrapped around it. They're lucky day. They got cigars. And then the one NCO looks at the piece of paper. At the very top it says s.0.191, special orders number 191. It's it is the headquarters copy of the orders to the Army that we're going to D.H. Hill of all the specialers, of the Hubpers Ferry operation. So that NCO takes it to his company commander, who takes it to his regimental commander, who takes it to core headquarters. And at core headquarters, 12th core

headquarters, there is a debate at the headquarters over, this might just be a ruse. It's this genuine. We don't know if it's genuine. And supposedly Samuel Pittman, who is a staff officer for the 12th Corps, had been a clerk at a bank in Detroit, Michigan before the war. Richard Chilton, I guess Richard, Robert Chilton, essentially Lee's chief of staff, who had written out the orders. So his signatures at the bottom of the orders. So Pittman looks at the orders and he goes, that's Chilton's signature. Because Chilton had been an Army paymaster in Detroit before the war and had done the

the government's banking business at the bank, then Pittman worked that. So Pittman's like, this is a genuine order. That's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's the order, the act, and court commander, that we believe this order to be genuine. And then McClellan's going to spend the afternoon after he receives the order, groundtruthing, whether the Confederates did follow this, this order of March. There is a lot of evidence that they were, but he also has some evidence that they didn't, because there's a report of Confederates crossing the Patelic River up near Falling Waters, Maryland, and there's reports of Confederates in Hagerstown. Neither of those are in.

Right, the order was changed as well. But ultimately, McClellan determines that the orders are genuine. And by 6 p.m., on September 13th, he starts to issue orders for a general offensive of his army on September 14th. So that kind of brings us up to the beginning of the real combat operations. And so Antietam itself, I mean, there's the town of Sharpsburg and then this creek which runs, I have a terrible confession, which even though I grew up in this part of the world, I've never actually been, which is a horrible thing to confess. But I'm looking at it, looking at it on the map right now. You have the town of Sharisburg. You have this very significant creek, which anyone who lives in this part of Maryland or Virginia will be familiar with the kind of feature this is, which is a real obstacle to, to, to, to. movement to the west from the mountains in the direction of Sharpsburg, which is the way the

McClellan is coming. And right, you end up with McClellan east of the creek. Lee consolidating his forces west of the creek. And then McClellan in McClellan fashion kind of gives Lee time to get his act together, correct? I mean, how does how does the battle talk us through that pause and the actual onset of hostilities on the day itself? Yeah, so how this all ends up happening is, On September 14th, the two armies fight the Battle of South Mountain. So that's McClellan's offensive. It's a two-pronged defensive. He strikes the Confederates at Fox and Turner's Gap, which is Turner's Gap is where the

National Road crosses over South Mountain. Fox's Gap is where Edward Braddock crossed South Mountain and Braddock's expedition in 1754, I think of Morris. Amazing. And then he also attacks a Confederate position at Cranthens Gap, five miles south of Turner's Gap. And the result of the Battle of South Mountain is a union victory. So they break through at Crantham's Gap. They seize the key terrain at Turner's and Fox's gap.

And Lee decides on the night of September 14th, the Maryland campaign is over. So Longstreet and D.Hill's forces are going to retreat to Virginia via Sharpsburg. The Harpers Ferry operation, he orders the Harpers Ferry operation to be stopped. and for all of those forces to march northward Shepardstown to reunite the army on the Virginia side of the Potomac River. So that is Lee's plan, night of September 14th. Then he learns that the Confederals have broken through a Cranpton's gap, and that traps Lafayette McClough's force, which was two divisions against the Potomac River. And Lee feels he has to do something to help McClough by drawing the main body of the Union Army away from McClure. So he decides that he will have Longstreet and D.H.L. make a temporary halt at a small village called Piedesville, which is on the east side of Antietam Creek.

And then I think as he studies his maps as the Army's on the move, he decides a far better position is on the west side of Antietam Creek near Sharpsburg. So he changes the orders to Longstreet and Hill. They're going to halt at Sharpsburg. It's still a temporary move. It's just to draw the Union Army away. The campaign is over. But then on the morning of September 15th, as Longstreet and Hills troops are crossing the middle bridge over Antietam Creek

and taking up positions on the heights east of Sharpsburg, Lee gets a courier from Stonewall Jackson. And the courier says, Harper's Ferry is going to be surrendered today. And I will join you at Sharpsburg. At Sharpsburg, not at Shepardstown, at Sharpsburg. So Jackson is saying, you know, game's still on. We can still pull this thing off. So Lee makes a really, really bold decision that with about 15,000 men of Longstreet and

D.HL's command, he's going to place them in positions where they're very exposed, deliberately exposed, so that it looks like he has more men than he really does. and he's going to try to bluff McClellan long enough for the forces of Harper's Ferry, which is two-thirds of his army, to march from Harper's Ferry, 17 miles, and join him at Sharpsburg. So the question you have to ask yourself is, what on earth was he thinking? Why is it so important that you fight this battle at Sharpsburg? And I think the answer to that is, we don't know the answer, because Lee didn't write down. Here's my reasons why I did it.

He didn't do that. I think the reason for it is that Lee is setting the tone here. McClellan is not deciding to fight a a battle at Sharpsburg. Lee is deciding to fight a battle at Sharpsburg. And the reason he wants to fight the battle is for the reasons that we already outlined why he went into Maryland. There's so much more to gain by fighting a battle in Maryland. If he can defeat McClellan's attack against him, he knows McClellan will attack him. If he can defeat that attack, Well, McClellan's a cautious guy. What might he do? Well, he might fall back to South Mountain. If he falls back to South Mountain, you still have the opportunity for this campaign to continue in Maryland and all of the political benefits that might accrue to you from that happening. So that's why I think Lee takes this big risk in fighting this battle at Sharpsburg against McClellan. Now, Astin McClellan, you know, he gets hammered really hard for being very cautious. and approaching Lee, why didn't he attack him on September 15th? Well, the reality is he couldn't

have attacked him on September 15th. It took him all day to move his 60,000 men that he had with him at this point over South Mountain. There's only two roads. There's the National Road and there's the old Sharksburg Road. There's two roads. And there's a colossal traffic jam on September the 15th. So it takes McClellan all day to get his army up to the east. Bank of Antietam Creek. Now, where McClellan does waste time is on the morning of September 16th. He does a lot of reconnoitering. It also was very foggy on the morning of the 16th. And I think McClellan, there was a hope that in McClellan's headquarters that Lee was going to retreat during the night. In fact, one of his staff officers told a New York City, a newspaper

reporter, that Lee was too good a general to fight a battle with the river at his back. And it turns out that he will fight a battle with the river. river at his back. And then by the time the light came up and the fog had dissipated, it's afternoon. And then ultimately, McClellan does make a move. But when he makes the move, it's a very tentative move. It's the cross the First Army Corps over Antietam Creek. It's essentially a reconnaissance in force. He wants to see if the rebel army is still there and if they're full of fight. And the reconnaissance is led by Joe Hooker and the First Army Corps of the Army to Batelmic, and Hooker finds out, yeah, they're here, and there's going to be a big fight,

and if you don't reinforce me, they're going to gobble me up. So then McClellan sends another Army Corps across the creek, and if you read McClellan's report, he explains to you what his plan was for the battle. It was to open the battle with the First Corps, reinforce it with the 12th Corps. If things were going well, he would send the Second Corps across the Creek to reinforce that battle. This would be a major effort against the Army. Confederate left flank. And then he would make a demonstration against the Confederate right flank at the lower bridge with the Union 9th Corps. And then he had the 5th Corps in reserve, and he would receive the 6th Corps on the morning of the battle, because they're marching up

from Cranthons Gap. And then they could attack the center. Now, that doesn't sound like a bad plan. You look at it. The only problem with the plan was that no one in the Army, other than McClellan, knew what it was. Because it wasn't shared with anybody. And my conclusion is McClellan actually fought this battle like a chess player. He made a move of the first core and then they find the Confederates are there. He makes a second move. He sends a 12th core across the Crete. And he knows there's going to be a battle in the morning and he's going to wait to see how that battle progresses. Now, the tactics of how McClellan's fighting this battle make perfect sense when you realize McClellan thinks he's outnumbered in the battle.

So when is Lee going to make this big counterattack against you? So you keep your best troops on the other side of Antietam Creek, the best defensive ground. But then when things start to go well with the first and the 12th Corps, then he reinforces them with part of the second core. And that escalates the battle a little bit more. And then he orders the 9th Corps to begin its demonstration. Then, of course, as the battle progresses, and there's a disaster that occurs between 9 o'clock and 9.30 in the morning when Sedgwick's division is destroyed in the West Woods. and utterly demoralizing Edwin Sumner, who becomes the highest-ranking officer

on the northern end of the battlefield. And Sumner is genuinely fearing that the Confederates are going to drive the whole right wing of the Union Army and the Antietam Creek. And then that starts to change the way McClellan is viewing the battle. He sends his primary reserve that he has,

which is the Sixth Corps, he sends them to his right flank. And then he starts to really look at the ninth core operation and a different view. It's not a, it's not a, it's not a, it's not a demonstration to try to draw Confederate attention away. It becomes a vital cog in his plan to try to drive in the Confederate right flank to help to prevent leave from reinforcing his left and destroying the right wing of the army. So the battle kind of evolves to me in the way it develops. It's not, it's not each thing that you see in the battle is part of a plan that McClellan has.

He may have an idea in his mind how he wants to fight the battle, but he's really always waiting to see how Lee reacts to the different moves that he makes. Talk a bit about the nature of the fighting. This is still, and may it ever be, the bloodiest day in American military history, right? More killed than at D-Day, more killed than at Pearl Harbor, to switch out of a military context, more killed than at on 9-11. I mean, you get that because you're counting both sides, but nevertheless. Yeah.

You know, the terrain, the sort of varied terrain, the fighting is like you have the deep creek bed and the attempts to cross the creek later in the day with Burnside. You've got the cornfields. You've got the woods. And these just become places of just profound, disorienting slaughter. Just talk about the fighting. Yeah, the way to think about the Antietam battlefield for those who have never been there before is to imagine big ocean waves.

That's kind of the way the landscape is. This undulating landscape, except on the very northern part of the battlefield where it is a little bit more level. It's a highly cultivated landscape. So the farms, which are about 150, 180 acres, typically, every farm is a big cornfield. Every farm is an orchard. Every farm has plowed fields. Every farm has lots and lots of rail fences and sometimes stone fences, but rail fences are easier to build and cheaper to build. every farm is a woodlot.

So there's woodlots all over the battlefield. And the woodlots are not like you might imagine of woods with the thickets and so on. You could drive a carriage through the woodlots because the woodlots are kind of the farmer's source of timber and lumber that they have. You have the M. Teedum Creek. But it's a very, it's an artilleryman's dream

in a lot of ways because there's excellent fields of fire for artillery. So artillery's got to play a major role in the battle. And the other thing about it is that you can hide troops because of the undulating nature of the ground and the cultivation. So there's a lot of meadows and these big cornfields and so on. You can hide troops behind hillocks, behind cornfields, behind orchards, and so on. And it's very difficult to get a gauge on where exactly the enemy is. So take an example of Rufus Dawes is a major of the 6th Wisconsin infantry, and his regiment is one of the

the leading units opening the attack for the Union Army. And as they open the attack, they come under small arms fire. They come under artillery fire. Small arms fires deliver to them from skirmishers who are completely concealed. They don't see them. They see the smoke from their guns. They don't see the skirmishers. Maybe they see a guy darting around here and there. But the skirmishers are taking advantage of all this abundant cover, cornfields, orchards, buildings, etc. to deliver their fire. the artillery is far enough away. I mean, a Napoleon 12-pound artillery piece can fire a mile, that you don't really see their artillery. And Dawes in the 6th Wisconsin are going to go nearly a mile. He gets one of his company commanders get shot through the face and killed as they're going

through the David Miller farm near the famous Miller Cornfield, the Cornfield in Antietam. I don't know if they even saw the guy who shot him. So they're taking casualties even. and they hardly have seen a Confederate soldier. They go almost a mile before they come face to face. Then they see a lot of Confederates, right? But this tells you something about the nature of the battle is that soldiers can go a ways across this battlefield under fire and they don't really see anybody. But then when they do see them, the fighting is unbelievably fierce.

And it's not like we might imagine they're like hand to hand. They're 20 yards away from each other. they're typically about 100 to 150 yards away from each other is what I found most of the engagements occur at, but it does depend on the terrain. And, you know, soldiers are going to fight in compact formations, a line of battle, shoulder, shoulder, two ranks deep with a line of file closers. That's your sergeants and lie lie and lieutenants behind the main line of battle. And you fight that way because you can communicate with the soldiers and you concentrate your fire, which is really important. If you have a machine gun, That would concentrate your fire, but you don't have them.

And you bring artillery up fairly close if it's particularly smoothbore artillery to provide extra firepower. And if you're an infantry unit, you have to be formed to concentrate your fire and communicate. But if you're a formed infantry unit and you move into the open and you can be seen by artillery, they're going to mall you. So a lot of infantry units get mauled by artillery fire. But the other part of it is when these infantry units, they might be out in the open. So when Dawes is six Wisconsin comes out of the cornfield, they are in a meadow.

And as they look, 150 yards south of them behind a fence line is the Confederate line of battle. And the Confederates have a little bit of cover. But they rise up or they kneel down or they lay down behind the cover that they have. And the two sides just shoot it out with one another. And what you're going to have in those sorts of situations is the casualties melt unbelievably fast. Or another example is the 4th New York infantry as one of the first units that attacks the sunken lane in the center of the battlefield. And the first volley that they take from the Confederates in the lane, they record that they had 130 men killed and wounded in the first volley. So this gives you some idea of when you've got troops that expose themselves in these compact formations,

the losses melt really, really quickly. So that's part of the reason why Antietam is such an incredibly bloody battle. Part of the reason why Gettysburg was such an incredibly bloody battle. But battles like the wilderness or chancellorsville, these other major battles, Chichamaga, they're big bloody battles. I mean, there's a lot of casualties in these battles. They're not on the level of an Antietam. And I think part of the reason for that is there's a lot more cover in those battlefields.

And it's much harder to use artillery effectively in those battlefields, whereas Antietam, artillery was extremely effective. Yeah, I'm not sure how you'll feel about this formulation, but just to put things in more schematic terms, seems like the dilemma circa 1862 or just the 1860s or the middle of the 19th century more broadly is you still need to mass infantry if you're going to achieve effect. with it. You can't really get that much dispersion and then hope to achieve effects. But the improvement in weapons technology, whether it's better, better range and accuracy for artillery or rifling that can be employed by skirmishers and so forth or by other massed infantry, maybe who are in a better

position for that matter, that's improved to the extent that there's a real risk when you mass. So it's just a kind of impossible dilemma. You have to mass to be effective and massing's going to get you killed. Absolutely. It is the conundrum that no one is really able to overcome. I mean, they understand good commanders, infantry commanders, understand that frontal assaults are not the way to go. What you always want to try and do is maneuver and get on the flank of the enemy. So your good commanders are going to use their skirmishers to establish where the enemy is and then they're going to attempt the maneuver. But again, you can only attempt the maneuver with well-trained, well-drilled troops. And in an on the Union side, there were a number of regiments that had almost no training at all. And they were unable to maneuver. And as you say, you have to concentrate troops in order to hold ground or to take ground. And when you concentrate troops and then attempt to make an attack over open ground, you expose yourself to artillery fire and small arms fire that just cut your, cut your men down very, very rapidly.

Now, some Union soldiers mentioned in this battle that one, One of the things they noted about Confederate tactics, as they said when the Confederates attacked us, they did not move in as close to order as we are trained to do. And I don't think this was anything the Confederates were trained to do. I think it was just kind of a natural thing that occurred in their army that they tended to attack in a looser order. I remember there was a soldier in the first Minnesota who wrote about this. And he said, I think it reduces their casualties because they're not as compact as we are in a formation. So armies sometimes will take on these tactical innovations that aren't something that's in a drill manual.

And it's possible that the Confederates, I don't know that all Confederates did this, but I did encounter this with several different Union soldiers writing about the Confederates using looser formations on attack than federal infantry units did. I want to be respectful of your time, even if we've only really scratched the surface of the battle itself. Maybe you'll come back some time and we can go into greater depth. But to make a long and quite important story a bit shorter, Lee remains on the field at the end of the day. McClellan really hammers him despite some low moments for the Union Army, but then what AP Hill sort of shows up towards the end of the day. And Lee is there that night. Quickly tell us how McClellan fails. I guess you've already told us why in this since McClellan is still sort of thinking in cautious defensive terms.

He worries about how many troops Lee has. But how does Lee escape? And what is the ultimate effect of the Battle of Antietam on the war? Yeah, so the Confederates, the Confederate Army suffers 28% casualties in the battle. And the Union Army suffers 22% casualties, which is unusual in that the Union Army is the attacking army. They suffer a lower percentage of casualties than the Confederates do. And a 28% loss is just unbelievably staggering. Lee's armies hurt really badly. So one of the narratives that evolved after the war is that Lee remained at Sharpsburg in September 18th because he was just bold and audacious and he had contempt for McClawn. And I don't think that's true at all. I think that Lee remained at Antietam on September 18th for extremely practical reasons. He had one Ford across the Potomac River and it's not an easy one to get across, particularly for wagons.

That was his only escape route out of the state. So that was going to be a very slow, tedious operation getting people across the river. He has 10,000 casualties. Now, some of these are men killed in action, but he has thousands of wounded. He also has thousands and thousands of stragglers that have been shaken loose from his infantry units in the day of fighting. So he's got to get his stragglers back. and he has to assemble all the ambulatory wounded and those who can be transported, get them organized, get transportation to the field hospitals where they're at,

and move them down to Butler's Ford, get them across the river before he can move anybody in his army, any of his combat units. So he needs September 18th to try to execute that. So I think it's very practical reasons why Lee remains. he does issue orders to his subordinate commanders. He does not want a battle brought on at all. So only defend, do not do anything that is going to elicit the Federals to try to attack us. We just leave him alone.

Leave him alone. Just lay low. So that's why September 18th turns into kind of a, you know, a quiet day. And McClellan gets criticized because he doesn't attack. McClellan, again, he thinks that Lee's army is really strong. and he's waiting for reinforcements. He's going to get a division under General Darius Couch with about 7,000 men.

They're going to reinforce him. And he's got some other reinforcements that are anticipated. Andrew Humphrey's division of the 5th Corps is going to arrive. He does not want to attack until he has those two divisions up on the field. So he probably would have attacked again on September 19th.

Had he known how badly hurt Lee was, I think he probably would have attacked on the 18th. But amongst union subordinate commanders who left any sort of a contemporary, you know, account of their feelings, they all supported McClellan. They all thought this was madness to attack again. Our armies in rough shape. He did kind of canvas some of his commanders. And, you know, the mood was, boy, we got hurt pretty bad yesterday.

These guys need a chance to kind of reorganize and recouped themselves and so on. So that, of course, gives Lee the opportunity on the night of the 18th to retreat, which he does. He sees no benefit whatsoever in staying in Maryland. His army is in extremely bad shape. He's just got probably 20,000 stragglers close to that associated with his army. And his troops are dead on their feet. His officers are dead on their feet. These guys haven't slept in a while.

They haven't had regulations. and he retreats down to the Potomac River, they get across the river during the night and the early morning, and McClellan does send a force to follow them up. He sends the Fifth Army Corps. Now, I would not call us a pursuit because what McClellan is really happy with is he's got the Confederates out of Maryland. That was his objective. Get the Confederates out of Maryland, and then I can rest and refit my army and train all these new recruits and do all that sort of stuff. But the Fifth Corps advances up to the Potalic River, and on the 19th, there is a skirmish that occurs at Butler's Fort, near Shepherdsdown, Virginia. And the fifth corps is commanded by Fitzjohn Porter, and on the 19th, Fitzjohn Porter conducts a textbook river crossing assault.

He crosses the river late in the day. He captures some of the Confederate artillery that was there. He routes the two Confederate brigades with a rear guard there. they capture some equipment and so on. And they fall back across the Patelic River. And Porter decides that the next day, they'll send a stronger reconnaissance and force to kind of determine which direction the Confederates went in.

He's going to cross the Potelic again. Now, meanwhile, Lee learns that there's been a disaster at Butler's Ford. His chief of artillery informs him that all the reserve artillery that was left at the Ford, all of it has been captured, which wasn't true. this guy's name was William Nelson Pendleton. He had kind of lost his nerve and he exaggerates the extent of the disaster. But Lee decides we have to drive these Yankees back.

We cannot allow them to get across the river. And then becomes this effort to try to find a unit that can execute a counterattack. And this is where the fatigue in the Confederate Army really becomes evident because the only unit that really was capable of mounting this counterattack in the Army of Northern Virginia. At this moment in time, was AP Hill's division. And fortunately for Lee, AP Hill managed this counterattack brilliantly. Fitzjohn Porter, who did really well in the 19th, does poorly on the 20th. He does not designate a commander of the forces. He sends across the creek. There's two separate commands. And they get driven back by AP Hill. And one of the regiments, the 118th, Pennsylvania, gets mauled and loses over 200 casualties.

these. But it's a small skirmish in the scheme of the Maryland campaign, but it has major ramifications because what it does is it solidifies in McClellan's mind that the Confederate Army is a very dangerous beast. They're very strong. Look at the way they drove Fitzjohn-Courters' reconnaissance across the Crete back across the Fademic River. We're not tangling with them. We're going to rest and recuperate our army. And for Lee, it gives us a great. Lee the opportunity to rest and recuperate his army at the lower end of the Shenandoor Valley, rather than having to fall back much farther. That's very important for Lee because he has a lot of wounded in the area and he has a lot of stragglers in the area. And if McClellan had been able

to cross the river and capture those men, what the Federals would have done is paroled them. And when you get a parole, that means you don't have to fight anymore until the conditions of your parole are met. So you can go home if you want to. Now, the government might not let you, but what it does is if you parole like 10,000 men, if you're McClellan, wounded and stragglers, it's going to be all the resources of the Confederacy to try to get those 10,000 men back to the army. So Lee does not want to lose all these people that he has that are loose in the lower end of the

Shun and Royal Valley. So recovering his army at the lower end of the valley is very important for Lee. So ultimately, if we want to summarize this Maryland campaign, you know, it's a horrifically terrible battle at Antietam. The Confederates achieve a big success at Harpers Ferry. They capture 12,500 Union prisoners. It's the biggest, biggest capture of U.S. soldiers until Corrigador in World War II. So it's a big win for the Confederates. But Lee doesn't achieve any of his strategic goals, really. The congressional elections don't. go well for the Republicans, but it's not a washout. Republicans still control. They still

majority in Congress. The defeat at the Shrepsburg for Lee, his retreat across the river, well, that is going to give Lincoln the opportunity to issue his Emancipation Proclamation. And the Emancipation Proclamation is going to turn what was a operational victory for McClellan, meaning operationally, McLeod's mission was to drive the Confederates out of Maryland. Does he achieve that? Yes, he does. He drives the Confederates out of Maryland. They're gone.

So the threat to Washington, D.C. and the Pennsylvania and the Maryland is passed, right? So that's an operational victory. That's not a strategic victory. That does not advance the likelihood of union victory in this war at all. When Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation on September 22nd, it's a great example. example of a leader seizing the moment. So Lincoln seizes this moment. Yes, the Battle of Antietam is essentially a drawn battle, right? It's not really a clear-cut union victory. Yes, the Confederates retreat back in the Virginia, but man, it's, you know, McClellan, a lot of people think maybe

McClawn could have destroyed later, and that didn't matter. So, but Lincoln says it's enough. And I'm going to, I'm going to declare it a victory. It's enough of a victory. Now I'm going to issue the emancipation proclamation. So why is the emancipation proclamation a strategic victory? Because you know, a lot of its tractors looked at it and they said it's ridiculous. It frees all the slaves behind Confederate lines in the states of rebellion, but it doesn't free any of the slaves, like in Kentucky and Missouri and parts of Louisiana that are under union control and parts of even Virginia that are under union control, then free any of those slaves. So how can this be of success. Well, it's a strategic victory. It makes AMT them a strategic victory for the following reasons.

One is, you've now taken the moral high ground if you are the union. This is no longer just a war to save the union. This is a war to abolish slavery. And being on the moral high ground is a very important thing as the war goes on for the union to be on that moral high ground. The second thing that it's going to do is that what is the foundation of the Confederate economy, the Southern economy? It is their enslaved labor force. That is the foundation of their economy. It is not their railroads and a few factories they have and so on. It is their enslaved labor force. It is the whole source of their wealth and their income. And now that we have an emancipation proclamation when Union armies advance into Confederate territory, what are the enslaved people going to do? They are

going to run to the Union Army because when they get there, they're free. So now, if you're the Confederacy, you have to keep manpower back to protect your labor force from running away. That's a strategic win for the Union. And the last is Lincoln pretty much guaranteed that England and France were not going to recognize the Confederacy. So he takes that European intervention off the table. And when we look at those three things, in the course of the war, that's a strategic win for the union. Now, the other thing we have to be very clear-eyed about, it doesn't mean they're going to win the war. It doesn't mean that slavery is going to end.

There's going to be a whole lot more fighting and a lot more tough stuff to go through to achieve victory in this war. But it does change the direction of where the country is going to go if the union does win this war. Scott Hartwig, author most recently of I Dread the Thought of the Place, The Battle of Antietam, and the end of the Maryland campaign. We've talked strategy, we've talked tactics, we've talked everything in between. This was a great introduction to that period, and I recommend your books to listeners. Thank you so much for joining the show. Thanks for having me, Aaron. This is a nebulous media production.

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