George McClellan Not Abraham Lincoln Really Freed The American Slaves

On September 22, 1862, the American president, Abraham Lincoln, signed an executive order, commonly known as The Emancipation Proclamation, in which he freed most, but not all, of the slaves in the United States. What is not commonly realized is that the proclamation only had staying power because on September 16 through September 18, 1862 the commander of the Union Army of the Potomac, George McClellan had failed to destroy the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia commanded by Robert Lee at the battle of Antietam Creek near Sharpsburg, Maryland. Instead of wiping the Confederate States of America off the map, thus removing or least delaying any need to free the slaves, McClellan wiped slavery off the map by allowing the Confederacy to exist for over two more years.

In September 1862, Robert Lee was in command of an exhausted and poorly equipped army that had been ground down by months of almost constant fighting. Strategically the South was not exactly losing the war at this point, but the North was not exactly wining it. So the Confederate president Jefferson Davis and General Lee hatched a long shot plan to tip events in their favor. Lee would take his army out of Virginia and head north into Maryland, a slave state still in the Union, in a desperate attempt to inflict one more defeat on Union forces. The political goal was to convince Marylanders that the new born Confederate State of America was a winner, and encourage Maryland to secede leaving the American capital, Washington, isolated within the Confederacy.

Davis also had the European powers, especially Great Britain and France in mind. Both countries had recognized that a “state of belligerency” existed in the United States, a polite phrase for civil war, but were far from ready either to support the North or recognize any southern claim of independence. A clear and convincing victory by Lee’s army and the secession of Maryland might result in European diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy along with financial and military support. With elections in the North only two months away, all this might cause support for Lincoln’s policies to evaporate, and lead to a stunning Republican and pro war Democrat defeat in the elections. This is what a long shot looks like, but Lee was ready to take it because he was convinced that his beaten up army was up to the task, and could whip George B. McClellan anytime, any place.

On September 4, 1862, Lee took his army of 55,000 men camped along the Rappahannock River into western Maryland, that sliver between Virginia and Pennsylvania, under the nose of the Yankees. McClellan, almost in a panic when Lee went off the map, and knowing that Lee would be up to no good, sent out patrols looking for the Confederate Army, but at first had little success. That’s because Lee, was moving fast west of South Mountain, an extension of the Appalachians, planning to slip his army through several wide passes known as gaps, and reassemble it at a place that would give his worn out soldiers a geographic advantage over the far more numerous, well fed, and better equipped Union soldiers. The plan began to unravel almost from the start.

First, many of his soldiers simply were not up to a long and arduous march, so that by the time Lee gathered up his army for a fight east of the mountains it had been whittled down to around 45,000 sick and hungry men. Beyond that, McClellan had obtained a copy of Lee’s general orders outlining his plans, and initially was moving against Lee confidently and aggressively, at least by McClellan’s standards. And to make things even more difficult for himself, Lee had broken his army into four pieces, and sent them on a variety of errands, making any assemblage time consuming and ponderous. The problem was that McClellan had forced Lee’s hand and he was out of time. So Lee looked around for the best spot for a battle that was near-by, and figured it would be Sharpsburg, a little farm town on Antietam Creek a mile or so from the Potomac River.

Lee was a good judge of real estate and all things considered had picked a pretty good place for a fight. But not good enough because by September 16, while Lee was still frantically gathering up his army to do battle, McClellan was in front of him with an army numbering around 100,000 men. It looked as if the Army of Northern Virginia and the Confederate States of America along with it had come to the end of the trail. McClellan would be able to destroy Lee’s army, march on an undefended Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital, and, quite possibly, the rebellion would collapse. Then George B. McClellan lost his nerve.

McClellan didn’t attack until the next day. He just sat there watching while Confederate soldiers dribbled and staggered in all day long, and Lee shored up his defenses. Finally, on the next day he attacked, but held about one-third of his soldiers in reserve and would never use them. He launched three poorly coordinated assaults on the Confederate army, any one of which could have devastated it if relentlessly pursued, but none ever was. Near the end of the day, the last piece of Lee’s dispersed army arrived in the nick time to shore up the collapsing right flank, and McClellan called off the attack. Not that the fighting wasn’t terrible because it was, and September 17, 1862 would prove to be the bloodiest day in American history including the Normandy invasion on June 6, 1944.

That evening Lee gazed upon a grim view. The army had been nearly shot to pieces, and reduced to about 35,000 soldiers barely capable of fighting an enemy over twice its size. Retreat across the Potomac at night to safety in Virginia was not possible, and so all Lee could do was prepare for McClellan’s inevitable attack in the morning when he would finish the job, but the inevitable never came. Incredibly, McClellan did not renew the attack, and the day after watched passively as Lee withdrew his battered army back to Virginia. Far from breaking the Confederate army, the beating seemed to harden it, turning it into a terrifying weapon that would come perilously close to crushing the Union army and achieving Southern independence, but all that lay in the future. In the present, an exasperated Lincoln stuck with McClellan for a while longer, but finally fired him on November 7, 1862 after the general had failed to pursue and engage Lee’s army despite unrelenting pressure from Washington.

But on the other matter, Lincoln acted almost immediately. Claiming the battle of Antietam was a great Union victory, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. To understand his thinking and purpose, we need to look at what the Union army encountered when it entered the South in May 1861. It encountered slavery, or to be specific, slaves being used by the Confederate army. In Virginia, a Union general, Benjamin Butler got the ball rolling by seizing such slaves, and declaring them to be “contraband” freed them. The effect was “electric”, and before long, thousand of slaves were pouring across Union lines shouting,” I’se contraband.” And soon, many of Lincoln’s generals were asking, “As we move into the South, what we do with the slaves when we encounter them?” With the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln’s answer was that if the southern states fail to return to the Union by January 1, 1863, the government’s policy is to free them.

So if George B. McClellan had annihilated Lee’s army at Antietam, and the Confederacy had collapsed as a result, there might not have been any need for an Emancipation Proclamation. But he didn’t, thus ensuring that the war would go on and on, eradicating slavery as it went.