It was the bloodiest day of America’s Civil War and remains the bloodiest one-day battle in American history. This week (Sept. 17) in 1862, some 24,000 soldiers died or were wounded in the clash between Union and Confederate troops at Antietam Creek near Sharpsburg, Md.
It was also, arguably, the most consequential battle of the entire war, and the outcome turned in part on a lost package of cigars.
For when Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee issued his battle plan and had it distributed to his officers, one general carelessly wrapped his copy around several cigars, which he later lost. Just prior to the battle, a Union soldier discovered the cigars, and plan, and the latter was sent to the Union commander, Gen. George McClellan. “Now I have the means to whip Bobby Lee,” McClellan reportedly said.
Certainly knowing Lee’s strategy in advance gave McClellan a leg up, and it also didn’t hurt that McClellan’s 70,000 troops doubled Lee’s battle-weary band.
Yet, McClellan’s excessive caution, for which he was famous, allowed him to grasp a tactical draw from the jaws of certain
victory.
On two occasions during the battle McClellan hesitated to use fresh reserves to exploit a Confederate weakness, and at the battle’s close McClellan’s decision not to pursue Lee’s retreating army, which was ripe for a knockout blow, so angered President Lincoln he eventually fired McClellan (for the second time).
Still, if the battle was inconclusive from a military standpoint, it was clearly a Union victory from a strategic and political standpoint. Antietam was the first battle in which Lee’s army had been denied its main objective — in this case, carrying the war to the North, which would have proved to potential foreign supporters such as England that the South could win the war and establish a government worthy of diplomatic recognition and assistance.
Antietam also gave Lincoln the excuse he needed to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which he had decided to release only after a Union victory. Prior to Antietam, a string of disastrous Union defeats had prevented Lincoln from issuing the proclamation for fear of appearing desperate. In the proclamation’s wake, the war not only gained a higher moral purpose, but also record numbers of now-emancipated slaves joined the Union Army, thereby increasing its military strength.
In sum, Antietam was a major turning point of the war and altered forever our nation’s future. And as Lee later confirmed when he noted that the battle’s outcome was helped by McClellan’s ability to predict his army’s movements, in great part it came down to that carelessly lost cigar-encased battle plan.
How like history to arrange for an event of such consequence to hinge on an incident of such inconsequence.
Bruce Kauffmann’s e-mail address is bruce@historylessons.net
