Sometimes it takes a setback to produce victory, a nasty punch in the nose that restores focus and the will to win. It can even be a simple matter of attaining purity of purpose through suffering.
Still, if sounds unpleasant, that’s because it is. Such was the American Civil War’s bloodiest single day, the Battle of Antietam, presented here in a book that is equal parts morality play and combat story.
If the war wasn’t obviously about emancipating slaves, author Stephen Sears notes, clearly that issue hung on many minds. Southern diarist Mary Chesnut noted that while her side fought against “foreign invaders,” and thus was “righteous,” the North latched onto black freedom as a way of making their occupation appear “noble.”
Over in the North, President Abraham Lincoln insisted his mission was re-unifying the United States, either with or without freeing anybody. But he would note the possibility of a Higher purpose at work, too:
“I am almost ready to say this is probably true – that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By His mere quiet power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.”
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| Lincoln urged McClellan many times to take the offensive, Sears notes. "I beg to assure you that I have never written you, or spoken to you, in greater kindness of feeling than now, nor with a fuller purpose to sustain you," Lincoln wrote him on April 9, 1862. "But you must act." |
With matters still in flux regarding final goals, Antietam would take on special purpose. Fought near Sharpsburg, Maryland on September 17, 1862, while the war was well underway and desperate enough already, the battle resulted in over 24,000 casualties and a realization that nothing less than a nation’s soul was at stake.
To George McClellan, commander in chief of the Union Army of the Potomac, the war proved an internal struggle between a sense of august personal destiny and a desire for victory at not too dear a price. According to Sears, McClellan’s unwillingness to push either his troops or himself was a fatal flaw, connected to McClellan’s lukewarm attitude toward freeing the slaves as well as an overall hesitancy:
Battle evokes the cruelest probing of the general in command: young men will die and be maimed, win or lose; the hard choice must be made whether to risk attack when opportunity offers, which may (or may not) save many more lives in the long run than will be lost that day. For George McClellan, too often the risk looked too great.
You may well treasure Landscape Turned Red as I do for the way it combines a probing focus on both the strategic aspects of the war and its impact on individuals with a wider “what-it-all-meant” moral dimension. Or you could find it grueling and repetitive in places, not only for its focus on carnage but the way it makes the same point again and again of McClellan being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
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| George McClellan's ability to rally his army was a thing of wonder. "They believed in him, and so did I; and had I stood in the ranks, I should have shouted with the lustiest of them…” wrote author Nathaniel Hawthorne of the man many called "the Young Napoleon." Image from https://www.thegreatcoursesdaily.com/american-civil-war-the-rise-of-george-b-mcclellan/. |
I
have seen people criticize Sears for being anti-McClellan. He does have his
favorite leaders, and McClellan is not one of them. But he not only makes a
good case against the man some called “Tardy George,” he does so in a way that
gives his story more of a personal dimension.
McClellan’s ineptitude was a thing of wonder. It was bad enough he operated under the ridiculous delusion that the Confederate Army had a gigantic advantage in manpower (it was in fact vice-versa.) But when he was handed General Robert E. Lee’s playbook close to the eve of battle, a dispatch order detailing how spread apart Lee’s Rebs were, McClellan’s incompetence was even more brazenly exposed.
He vowed to “catch them in their own trap if my men are equal to the emergency.” Landscape Turned Red details just how equal McClellan’s troops were to events. It was the general who fell apart.
The war had reached a crisis point for both sides, Sears notes. For the North, mid-term elections were closing fast and peace sentiment was high in key recruitment states like New York. The South, strategically cut in half by Union advances in the West and suffering enormous supply and equipment problems (many of its soldiers marched barefoot), pondered invading the North to impress France and Great Britain enough to join their cause. Europe needed its cotton.
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| Lee's advance on Maryland carried the additional threat of enveloping Washington, D. C. McClellan thus moved tentatively against him, concerned as was Lincoln by the potential threat to the nation's capital. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Antietam. |
It was a reckless strategy, but Robert E. Lee was a bold man. He “had the calculating instincts of a riverboat gambler,” Sears writes. And he knew McClellan. So he marched into Maryland, a Union state with a reputation for Confederate sympathies, hoping to sow unrest.
Not much happened that way, Sears notes:
Marylanders moved to enlist in the Southern cause may have had second thoughts when they took a good look at the condition of the army they would be joining. The total of new recruits probably did not exceed 200.
But putting McClellan on his heels was the real goal, and in this Lee’s strategy was on point. Since he thought he faced a Confederate Army some five times its actual size, McClellan was an unwilling combatant even when Order 191 revealed how Lee’s army was in fact divided into five parts. Tentatively he moved toward Lee, then let two critical days pass before launching an attack across the Antietam Creek. By this time, Lee’s forces were nearly reassembled.
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| A couple of weeks after the battle, McClellan (on right) met with President Lincoln. By November, the president had had enough of McClellan's caution and relieved him of command. McClellan would run against Lincoln as the Democrat candidate for president in 1864. Image from https://medium.com/otdsyb/gen-george-b-mcclellan-relieved-of-command-c9cf3999c90. |
In
researching Landscape Turned Red, Sears drew upon first-hand testimony
of battlefield survivors, many of them previously unpublished:
[Confederate Col. Joseph] Walker noticed that when he gave the order to advance, only a few men of the 12th Georgia, battle-tested veterans of the [Shenandoah] Valley and the Peninsula and Second Bull Run, responded. The rest remained on the ground behind the ledge. He rode up for a closer look and found only dead men; the regiment had taken 100 men into battle and barely 40 were left.
In the 1st Texas Regiment, four out of every five soldiers were dead or wounded within 20 minutes of fighting around the Cornfield. On the Northern side, some regiments were wiped out even faster.
A Pennsylvanian recalled “…a Reckless don’t care disposition Seemed to take possession of me. Then was two of our Company Shot down near me and Even their Shrieks and yells did not affect me in the least. This is the way I felt and I have heard other Soldiers Say the Same…”
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| Pioneering photographer Mathew Brady had many images taken of the dead where they lay after the battle, including this one with Dunker Church in the background. They were then widely exhibited. "If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards and along streets, he has done something very like it," noted The New York Times. Image from https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/antietam-federal-flank-attack-dunker-church. |
Why was the carnage at Antietam so intense? Sears identifies one factor: As bad at strategy as McClellan was, he was even worse at tactics. Instead of sending his troops at the Confederates in one fell swoop, he sent them in piecemeal, allowing the Rebel artillery and leadership to concentrate in different areas at different times.
So while Joseph Hooker led his corps into the maelstrom of the Cornfield and toward Dunker Church, two landmarks of that fatal day, all was quiet at what became known as Burnside Bridge a few miles away. By the time Ambrose Burnside was given his orders to cross, Hooker’s forces were exhausted and Burnside was on his own.
It played out in the end like a rudimentary kung fu movie, with each attacking corps waiting its turn while the defender was given time to shake his head and regroup.
Sears notes a hands-off quality to McClellan’s command, too:
Like Lee, it was McClellan’s policy to delegate battlefield responsibility to his lieutenants; unlike Lee, he was proving quite unable to exercise the essential command corollary – incisive overall control. The Army of the Potomac was being maneuvered in disjointed, slow-motion fits and starts.
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| The attack across Antietam Creek from the Lower or Rohrback Bridge, soon to be known as Burnside Bridge, became a bone of contention in later years between Burnside and McClellan regarding when the attack order came. "Clearly General Burnside failed to rise to the occasion at Antietam," Sears notes, "equally clearly, no other Union officer on the field that day was so badly served by the general commanding." Image from https://scienceviews.com/parks/burnsidebridge.html |
Burnside at the bridge was delayed by McClellan’s failure to give firm direction while Southern artillery focused on the Cornfield; by the time Burnside had that direction, Lee was able to reinforce the crossing point and thus buy himself valuable hours.
Why did McClellan hesitate so fatally? A key reason were those hordes of Confederates he imagined, but he was also besotted by the notion of winning a cleaner sort of peace than was realistic by 1862. He imagined a victory that brought together North and South on terms similar to what had existed before, including a resumption of slavery in some form.
But the war around him had other ideas. Whether or not they were abolitionists themselves, many of McClellan’s soldiers understood they were actors in a deeper sort of crisis. “But I am no better to die for liberty than any one else,” one New Yorker wrote his family on the eve of battle. “If I lose my life, I shall be missed by but few; but if the Union be lost, it will be missed by many.”
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| Author Stephen Sears. He began his career at American Heritage, where he worked with a legendary figure among Civil War historians, Bruce Catton. Image from https://www.hmhbooks.com/author/Stephen-Sears/2229795. |
In
the end, Lee won the day but the North, without McClellan, won the war. Shortly
after Antietam, President Lincoln announced to his cabinet that he would
produce a document freeing all the slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation did
not do a thing for enslaved blacks in the South, or even in slave states like
Maryland that remained loyal to the Union. But it set a decisive tone for the
rest of the war.
Landscape Turned Red devotes more attention to the North than the South; it’s not a comprehensive account so much as a vivid and sweeping one in its many pointillistic details which coalesces on war as a means of propitiation and purification.
History books usually don’t read like novels; they are built to serve a different end. But Landscape Turned Red is a thrilling, at times numbing adventure yarn about a nation finding its way…and it’s not only all true, but continues to matter right up to the present day.
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