23 thoughts on “Sharpsburg”

1. I like the quote that I think comes from Ken Burns Civil War Documentary: “McClellan brought superior force to Antietam, but he also brought himself.”

2. I always thought it kind of amusing that an Army base in Alabama is named after McCellan. But then, he was pretty inept and if you’re going to name a base in Alabama after a civil war figure, McCellan is a pretty good choice. “Fort Grant” or even worse, “Fort Sherman” likely wouldn’t have been so well received.

3. The irony is of course that McClellan wanted desparately to avoid the sort of ‘hard war’ that Lincoln eventually pursued, yet it was his own ineptitude that made such a war inevitable. Had McClellan crushed Confederate forces in front of Richmond (which he could have easily done), the war would have been over by the spring of 1862, and the far-reaching consequences of the Emancipation Proclamation would have been avoided. By the time of Anteitam, it was already baked in the cake, Lincoln had decided to issue the proclamation, and was merely waiting for a propitious moment to do so. So I suppose we are fortunate that MClellan wasn’t more talented….

   I have nothing but contempt for McClellan as a general (a vain, pompous incompetent who believed himself to be a genius), but as a human being I believe that he has gotten something of a raw deal. As a presidential candidate (running against Lincoln, a man that McClellan had nothing but disdain for), he refused to condemn the war effort, only the war aims, something that cost him dearly with the ‘peace at any price’ wing of his party. He was loyal to the men who served under him, and by all accounts a good and decent friend and honest businessman. Perhaps it is best said that he was sadly used by a fate that placed him in a station so far above his talents.

   1. Thank you. I had been saying similar things about Little Mac for a long time now (at least since the 2004 election) that while he was no shakes as a general, he behaved honorably in that he didn’t undercut Lincoln on the war when he had a lot of political pressure on him to do so.

      1. McClellan is an interesting, albeit deeply flawed man, and one whose story I honestly believe can teach us a great deal. He was the Golden Boy incarnate, success came easily to him, and for a while at least, all he touched turned to gold. When things didn’t go well for him, he reacted badly, but at the same time he had a hard core of principles that even adversity and disgrace never led him to abandon. There is something to be said for that…

         As a side point, whatever McClellan’s flaws as a field general (and they were legion), he did an exceptional job of training and organizing the Army of the Potomac. In a modern army, where the roles of support and battlefield operations are more clearly separated, he would probably have prospered.

   2. McClellan was, among other things, absolutely the right man for the job of building an army from scratch in 1861 – and in 1861, the Union needed to build an army essentially from scratch. But part of the reason he was the right man for that job was that, as you note, he was loyal to those he commanded. He loved the army he had built, loved the men who served in it, and absolutely would not send them off unprepared to be slaughtered for no good reason.

      Which left Lincoln with a superbly prepared army, barely used, to hand off to generals willing to see it slaughtered in the cause of reunification.

      McClellan + Grant = US victory. It isn’t clear to me that either alone could have done the job, and yes, McClellan gets a bum rap from history.

4. Moving to Maryland caused my whole perspective on the Civil War to change. Though we studied it thoroughly in grade school and junior high, I had only visited deep south battle fields (like Shiloh) as a kid. Antietam wasn’t anchored for me geographically, nor was Gettysburg or many of the other prominent battles. I had really never internalized how far North a lot of it was fought.

   My wife and I visited Gettysburg for the first time two summers ago. It was a great place for a battle — there are these huge monuments everywhere, which would provide ideal cover from gunfire. I’m guessing that’s why they picked it…

5. The draw at Antietam lost the war for the South. Had Lee (improbably) won, England and France would have entered the war on the Southern side and broken the blockade. Negotiated peace likely before 1864 election.

   1. The Emancipation Proclaimation freed the slaves in states at war with the Union which was effectively another country. It didn’t free the slaves from border or northern states and the south ignored it. What it did achieve was to make slavery the primary focus of the war. England had abolished slavery years earlier (and without a war, imagine that). By making slavery the primary focus of the war, Lincoln kept England and France from coming to the aid of the south. It was a masterstroke.

   2. My impression is that the war was lost by Fort Sumter. Foolish pride made the rest a bloody formality.

      1. Absolutely correct…a very high price for pride

   3. Not sure that I agree. Why would the Brits/French have entered the war? The Brits were getting their cotton from India by 1862/3, so the south didn’t offer them much there, while the Union DID have food (in the form of midwest-grown wheat and corn) to sell them, particularly after the capture of New Orleans and Vicksburg made shipping easier. As far as politics go, the British elites hated the union and loved the south, but the masses felt otherwise (look at the protests in Liverpool, for instance), so declaring war would have been problematic for Palmerston in best of circumstances. The french weren’t going anywhere without the brits, and in any event, they had problems of their own on the continent at the time.

      Even if the brits/french had declared war, what would it have done? The Royal Navy was hage, but it was occupied worldwide, and wasn’t going to do more than lift the blockade. That certainly would have helped, but it wasn’t by itself decisive, and the south had limited means (even with unlimited credit) to sustain itself for very long. No southern army was every forced to withdraw from a campaign from lack of supplies, and though civilian circumstances in the south would improve to some extent, the south didn’t produce enough of anything to sustain that sort of spending indefinitely. So lifting the blockade, while it might have extended the war for a bit (perhaps a year) changes very little in the long run.

      As for ground forces, just what would the Brits/French contribute? The entire british army in 1862 wouldn’t have qualified as a respectable corps in Lees army, and it would have been utterly outclassed by the forces of both the union and the south. The French had more troops to contribute, but getting them anywhere (much less supplying them) would have been problematic at best. Likely they would have become involved in the far west (“E Kirby Smithville” if you know your history of the war), but that would have hardly had much impact on the war itself. Perhaps you get a sort of rump state in Texas after the Confederacy collapses, but that won’t last, as the victorious Union armies will simply be redeployed to cope with them afterwards. Consider what happened with maximillian in Mexico, and you will see what I mean. Keep in mind that the French army wasn’t all that good (they were embarassed by the Prussians a few years later AFTER reforms in the late 1860s), and there would have been endless issues with command relationships (big problem with the Confeds anyway, and worse with multiple nationalities involved) that would have further degraded the allied force’s effectiveness.

      Sorry, unlikely that much would have changed. The war might have been longer, bloodier, uglier….relations with the Brits in particular might have been poisoned for decades (WWI might have been a bit different), but the results of the war were baked in the cake…the south lost the moment that the war began.

      1. What England and France could’ve done was offer weapons and supplies to the confederacy with help in breaking the blockade. The south had few factories and had a hard time arming themselves. They didn’t need combat troops per se but weapons could’ve been very helpful.

         1. More than weapons – which the Confederacy was generally able to acquire right through the last months of the war – was all the vital materials which the munitions industry supplanted – rolling stock, railroad engines, rail ties, and the manpower to maintain same. It wasn’t so much that the Southern rail network was substandard – it was probably better than most of Europe outside of France and the Germanies – but that they couldn’t keep it going without outside resources *while* keeping the armies in the field with enough munitions. The armies grabbed all the white skilled labor which the railroads needed for maintenance and operation, while the support industries like Tredegar Iron Works stopped cranking out rail ties to concentrate on cannon and the like.

            In the end, the armies starved because the railroads degenerated past the capacity to move enough food from overflowing granaries to the massed armies facing their Union opposites.

            1. You make an excellent point re: railroads, but what destroyed the south was that the union kept destroying the rail lines, and where they didn’t, massive underinvestment (basically rail lines that served cotton centers got money, others were left to rot….Georgia is a superb example of this) led to them wearing out through overuse. Certainly a mass of skilled rail workers (particularly individuals with experience in switch maintenance and rail refurb) would have been useful, valuable even, but decisive? nope…. As a side issue, such skilled laborers were in short supply in Britain as well. Where would they ahve come from?

         2. Actually the South got plenty of weapons during the war, they were never short of either small arms or heavier weapons (cannon). Ironically up through about 1862 (1863 in the west), the south actually had MORE cannon per soldier than the union did. In terms of material aid, shoes and uniforms would have been more useful to the south than more arms.

      2. Breaking the blockade would have been immensely helpful. The Confederacy didn’t just face a general shortage of manpower and resources, but an absolutely critical shortage of certain critical resources (e.g. repeating rifles, copper once the Tennessee mines fell to the Union). If the rebels can buy what they just plain can’t make for themselves, that helps an awful lot in stretching what they do have a bit farther. And courtesy of the earlier embargo, the Confederates did have a way to pay for what they needed.

         And while the Royal Navy neither could nor would entirely blockade the Union, one expects there would have been some restriction on the North’s maritime trade, to the detriment of the Union’s military economy.

         The other way foreign intervention helps is by posing a small threat along a big undefended border. A notional British Expeditionary Force is probably no better that a Condederate corps, but it’s a corps-equivalent that can march into Detroit or down the Hudson, sail across Lake Erie into Pennsylvania, or land by sea in Connecticut, Delaware, or New Jersey. The French equivalent, depending on local politics, can probably stage out of Mexico and threaten the Union in the Far West. And a brigade-sized landing on the Pacific Coast, or march from Vancouver, wouldn’t be out of the question.

         Unless Lincoln’s staff can divine exactly which of these options the Brits and Frogs will chose, that’s an awful lot of Union corps no longer available for operations against the Confederacy.

         1. Your suggestion that the south would take advantage of a blockade lifted by the Royal navy (not necessarily a sure thing…the union could raid shipping quite easily, and insurance rates would effectively blockade MOST – not all – southern ports even if the union didn’t stop them physically from being open) by importing materials that the union had otherwise cut off is absolutely correct, but it is ultimately quite limited. Importing material costs money, and though the south certainly would have had more credit (likely a LOT of credit), ultimately credit must be paid for and the south had little to pay with. By 1862, the demand for cotton had plummeted (remember, the earlier blockade of southern cotton was self-imposed) as India came online in force, and by 1863, the brits were paying less for cotton than they had prior to the war. The south couldn’t even feed itself, so exporting food was out of the question, and most of their other agricultural production was limited in value at best. Ironically, this lack of productivity was a major cause of the war in the first place….put simply, the south was hugely in debt to nortern banks, despite their gigantic pre-war exports of cotton.

            As for blockading the union, you forget that the Royal Navy would be blockading their own food supply, as a very significant portion of Britain (and Europe’s) wheat and corn came from the US. Certainly they could have survived without it, but the economic consequences (not to mention the political ones, as the biggest consumers of northern wheat were in the midlands) would have given any british government pause. The Union would have had options too in this event, using raiders to go after british shipping, and since the british were far, far more dependent on merchant shipping than the US (most of our merchant shipping was driven from the sea by 1863 by the CSA navy in any case), even a marginally effective effort by the union would be devastating to the brits.

            Invading the US sounds good, but ultimately isn’t terribly practical. The brits had enough shipping to move say 5,000 men and supplies over transatlantic distances, but this sized force (which wouldn’t even qualify as a small corps) would offer very little more than a transitory threat even if it could be concentrated and sustained. As a sort of seaborne cavalry raid, it would be an annoyance, but little more than that, and the threat of losing those troops (not to mention the shipping that supported them) would be a powerful disincentive. Brigade sized landings would be more likely, but in any conceivable target area, the Union already had plentiful militias in place, and corps sized reserves within easy reach. Also, keep in mind that most American ports (vital for any sort of operational) were well protected with shore defenses, and as the USN learned dealing with the CSA ports, these defenses were quite formidable against the state of the art in naval weaponry. Landings in Mexico or the Pacific are practical, but they are also irrelevant. The CSA survived quite nicely in the trans-missisippi even after things fell apart in the east, before the Union sent real forces (now freed up from battles against Lee, et. al.) to “mop up”. Consider what happened in Mexico where the French actually did send troops to prop up Maximillian…the Union sent a corps under Sheridan into Texas accompanied by a stiff note to the French regarding the Monroe doctrine. The French got the message, left in disgrace (big surprise there), and Maximillian was hung. Even if the French did establish themselves in Texas in some force, this isolated bridgehead could be dealt with at our leisure once the real war was over with.

            All of this also implies that a British and or French intervention would involve an actual state of war with the Union, which might not have been the case. They might have simply provided passive (credit/material) support for the CSA by recognizing them, pressuring the union for ‘peace talks’ in the hope that the Union would give in (unlikely, given the position of Lincoln’s government and its certain demise in the event of anything other than a complete victory) to gentle pressure. Given the real threat of Union retaliation (on the seas or against Canada, not to mention Mexico which the French certainly didn’t want to see disappear), it is unlikely that either of the european powers (who also had problems with the Russians, who strongly favored the Union) would consider an outright declaration of war in anything other than the most extreme circumstances.

            1. I always liked Harry Harrison’s Stars and Stripes trilogy. In it British intervention causes the South and Union to put aside their differences and invade England with a fleet of ironclads, first liberating Ireland with an army made up of Irish migrants to U.S.

               http://www.amazon.com/Stars-Stripes-Forever/dp/0345409337/ref=la_B000AP74V8_1_15?ie=UTF8&qid=1348032277&sr=1-15

6. Grant wasn’t a military genius, but he understood viscerally what McClellan did not or would not: the North had more men to sacrifice than the South did, and Grant was willing to sacrifice them. So was the appropriately-monikered William Tecumseh Sherman.

   Odd footnote: my high school AmHistory textbook, in a strange case of Bowdlerism, changed Sherman’s famous quote to “war is war”…

7. I am not exactly McClellan’s biggest fan – he had no idea what to do with cavalry, and was politically incompetent, which was a lethal quality in a military leader of his stature – but he gets way too much shit for Antietam. As Dimitri Rotov said yesterday, few other generals of his generation could have taken a collection of corps fragments which had been badly beaten three weeks previously, shift them into another state, and win multiple engagements over the course of a week against the very force which thrashed them at Second Manassas. Lincoln was a military uneducatable, he didn’t understand what Civil War-era armies in the field could do, and could not do.

   Could Grant have done what McClellan did in the Maryland Campaign? Ehhh… he did something similar in the siege of Chattanooga and battle of Missionary Ridge – it was a worse situation, but it took him twice as long to bring the victorious enemy force to battle, they co-operated by sitting in their siege lines to be attacked, and voluntarily divided their forces. And you’ll note that Lincoln didn’t throw a tantrum when Grant failed to successfully pursue and destroy the Army of Tennessee.

   When people task McClellan for being cautious at Sharpsburg, they forget that the Union had just lost over ten thousand men at Harper’s Ferry a few days previously, and had just fought a sharp uphill battle at the gaps of South Mountain, against a heavily reinforced Army of Northern Virginia which had crushed them badly a few weeks previously with two-thirds of the units present in Maryland. (McClellan had no way of knowing just how heavily attrited by desertion and straggling all those rebel regiments had become, all he knew was just how many flags were reported by the scouts, and that was a hell of a lot. His own command structure was very much ad-hoc, consisting of elements from four different field armies and dozens of raw new regiments straight out of the recruitment camps. Less than half the corps on the field had any experience with McClellan, or vice versa. The force that fought at Antietam was a confused mess of units from West Virginia, Burnside’s amphibious corps, parts of three corps of the Army of the Potomac, and two-thirds of the mayfly Army of Virginia, one of them, 12th Corps, under a brand-new commander who had never commanded in the field before, and would be killed almost as soon as he set foot on the battlefield. Ninth Corps lost its commander at Fox Gap, was composed of divisions from completely opposite sides of Virginia whom had never worked together previously, and was sort-of commanded by Burnside, who was also supposed to be a wing commander, and ended up doing neither properly.

   If you’ve ever been to the Sharpsburg battlefield, you can see why it was a difficult place to attack. The heights at Gettysburg are far less intimidating and the various fields above the Antietam are heavily broken up. Even better-led, better-coordinated forces would have still found themselves ambushed, broken up, and turned around in that uneven series of swales, heights, and woodlots. Operational strategy demands that the attacker strike from the south to drive the defender away from the ford, but the only decent approaches were from the north, pushing the defender back on his supports rather than away from them. And that’s pretty much what happened, with three and a half corps attacking disjointedly from the north, smashing up certain parts of the rebel force, and then getting crushed in turn by their reinforcements as the fight moved southwards; meanwhile, the (organizationally deranged) Ninth Corps on the left flailed about trying to find their way across the creek and through heavy woods. When they eventually got over the heights and into the rebel rear, they were so disorganized and out of control that every division was on its own hook, unsupported, and practically blind, so that a late arrival to the field was able to take them in flank in a classic field ambush which ended the day with a mortifying if not catastrophic rout of minor proportions.

   Comparing Grant at Chattanooga with McClellan at Sharpburg, the most interesting thing is how much the two battles look like the other general’s stereotyped self fought each battle. Chattanooga was a set-piece fixed-position assault which relied on careful planning, maneuver and misdirection. McClellan’s fight over the Antietam was an opportunistic attack on the bounce from an initial series of minor victories which turned into an attritional slog of monumental violence and blunt force.

   1. Your analysis is largely masterful, and while I do not entirely share in it, you make excellent points. In particular, your description of the battlefield is most important….if you haven’t seen it, it is difficult to realize how utterly unsuitable to attack it is.

      With this in mind, McClellan did have considerably greater forces available to him than Lee did, and only his own obsession with Pinkerton’s already discredited troop estimates led him to believe otherwise. Yes, his soldliers were green compared to the Army of Northern Virginia, but he had already won battles with them earlier in this campaign. Yes, his commanders did not have his full confidence, but his most loyal supporters in fact were the ones in command of the key units for this battle. Finally, he had something that Lee did not have, and which McClellan had good reason to believe that Lee did not have….a fresh reserve which he refused to commit. This is the difference between McClellan and Grant…Grant (correctly or in correctly) would not have stopped fighting when he had reserve forces at hand. It for this reason that McClellan is so widely reviled, and in my opinion, rightly so. Remember, even Lee stayed in place the next day, McClellan still refushed to press the attack.

      You mention Chattanoga, and the difference is important. Grant picked up pieces of an army routed at Chickamagua along with reinforcements brought in by rail with very little in the way of supply (the primary reason for the long delay), and then attacked troops in what were considered impregnable defensive positions. Lee’s forces at Antietam, by contrast, were essentially caught on the march, and faced union troops that had long since been reorganized. If McClellan’s force was still scarred from the prior campaign, they were in far better shape than what Grant originally had to work with.

      Our disagreements notwithstanding, please accept my compliments on a well-reasoned and effectively presented argument.

      1. There’s a certain tendency to credit McClellan (and Union commanders in general) with more troops on the field than their opposite numbers, mostly because of differences in record-keeping. This is one of Rotov’s hobby horses, discussions of it tends to get deep into the weeds with Livermore and Fox and their later revisionists, but short version has to do with how effectives were reported. The most recent revision (Harsh’s trilogy on the campaign in particular) suggest that Lee had as much as a third more men on the field than the traditional narrative holds, and the last time McClellan had a proper count of Lee’s force at Frederick, Lee actually had, by his own count, almost exactly as many men in ranks as McClellan had in the field. (Lee’s count at Frederick was somewhere in the vicinity of 75,000. He was missing so many from the ranks because of the dreadful straggling losses over the two weeks of forced marches between that count and the battle proper – not to mention the battle losses from the fights at the Gaps and captures during the retreat behind the Antietam. Harsh made an elaborate argument that convinced me that even Lee didn’t really have a grasp of how under-manned he had become, largely because he hadn’t lain eyes on the other columns and wasn’t fully aware of how badly the ranks had thinned out.) As for McClellan’s most trusted subordinate – that would be Porter, who had been canned by Pope, and reinstated by McClellan, all within the two weeks leading up to the battle. Porter was already kind of slow on the draw – it’s what would get him arrested for courtmartial later that November – and his precarious position made him very, very conservative at Sharpsburg – he and his “last reserve of the last Army of the Republic.” Grant himself would give similar leeway to his own “Porter”, Sherman, at Chattanooga.

         And you’re right about Chattanooga for the most part. The reinforcement by rail wasn’t the problem, there, it was the presence of a Rebel blocking force closing the rail connection against logistic supply. The Army of the Cumberland was in danger of starvation initially until Hooker’s force fought a pitched battle to knock Longstreet’s forward detachment back onto Lookout Mountain and open up a proper supply line. But Grant *did* engage every single division of his army, Lee-style. But he *knew* he had an edge because of Longstreet departing for Knoxville, and that sort of sure knowledge can make even a cautious man bold.

         And thank you for the comments. I haven’t talked Civil War history for a while. ^_^

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