McPherson - Crossroads of freedom: Antietam

ALSO BY JAMES M. MCPHERSON

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The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP

Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction

Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution

What They Fought For, 18611865

Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War

For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War

Lamson of the Gettysburg: The Civil War Letters
of Lieutenant Roswell H. Lamson, U.S. Navy

PIVOTAL MOMENTS
IN AMERICAN HISTORY

Series Editors

David Hackett Fischer
James M. McPherson

James T. Patterson
Brown v. Board of Education:
A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy

Maury Klein
Rainbows End:
The Crash of 1929

Antietam

James M. McPherson

CROSSROADS OF FREEDOM

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Copyright 2002 by James M. McPherson

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McPherson, James M.
Crossroads of Freedom : Antietam
/ James M. McPherson
p. cm. (Pivotal moments in American history)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-19-513521-0 ISBN 0-19-515857-1 (signed ed.)
1. Antietam, Battle of, Md., 1862 I. Title. II. Series.

E474.65 .M48 2002 973.7336dc21 2002025252

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

To Gwynne
and to her bronze friend,
Mr. Lincoln

The KentuckyTennessee Theater, WinterSpring 1862

The Peninsula Campaign, AprilMay 1862

The Seven Days Battles, June 25July 1, 1862

Confederate Raids and Invasions in the West, SummerFall 1862

The Battle of Second Manassas (Bull Run)

Lees Invasion of Maryland, 1862

Antietam, September 17, 1862

This volume is part of a new series called Pivotal Moments in American History. Our purpose is to encourage interest in problems of historical contingency.

Scholars in many disciplines have been moving in this direction, and they have done so in different ways. A leading example is James McPhersons Battle Cry of Freedom, a general history of the Civil War that centers on the dimension of contingency, in the sense of turning points, when the war might have gone altogether differently. Another is Stephen Jay Goulds Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale Fossils and the Nature of History, which constructs a new model of natural history on historical contingency as small, unpredictable events that shaped the course of evolution. A third is my book Paul Reveres Ride, which is about contingency in yet another meaning of people making choices, and choices making a difference. The logo for this series is one of the lanterns in the Old North Church.

Ideas of contingency are drawing more attention in historical scholarship, for several reasons. They offer a way forward, beyond the old political history and the new social and cultural history, by a reunion of process and event. They also restore a lost element of narrative tension to historical writing. A concept of contingency makes history more teachable and learnable, more readable and writable, more important and even urgent in our thinking about the world, and most of all more true to itself.

James McPhersons Crossroads of Freedom is a model of what might be done with this approach. The book is about the battle of Antietam (to Southerners, Sharpsburg), a great and terrible event that made September 17, 1862, the bloodiest day in American history. Much of the book is about small events such as Lees lost Special Orders No. 191, which fell into McClellans hands at an opportune moment. James McPherson speculates about that chance happening in a fresh and thoughtful way, by asking what might have happened if McClellans Special Orders had fallen into Lees hands. Counterfactual questions are heuristically useful as what the Germans call thought experiments.

But counterfactual questions and reductive explanations are not what this book is mainly about. This is a history of contingency in a larger spirit and a different key. It takes a long view of its subject and sets the battle firmly in the context of large historical processes. This is also an idea of historical change not as a single transforming event, but as a web of contingencies.

The book is also a model in another way. In a work of large purpose, where particular details make a difference, historians must get the small things right. The quality of James McPhersons scholarship is an example to us all in that respect, more so than one might realize from a quick and easy reading. Its narrative is so fluent that a reader might miss the authors unrivaled command of the subject, his mastery of the materials, his meticulous attention to matters of substance and detail, and his uncompromising integrity in a long career of research and reflection on the American Civil War.

In all of these ways, this book is a model of large importance for the study of the past and a way forward for scholarship in the future. I hope that you, the reader, will think so too.

David Hackett Fischer

The meaning of freedom was central to the meaning of the American Civil War. Freedom, or liberty, has been a contested issue through all of American history. We all declare for liberty, said Abraham Lincoln during the war, but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. Three definitions of freedom struggled for dominance from 1861 to 1865. The Confederacy, said its President Jefferson Davis, was forced to take up arms to vindicate the political rights, the freedom, equality, and State sovereignty which were the heritage purchased by the blood of our revolutionary sires. But Lincoln insisted that an independent Confederacy would destroy the nation established by those revolutionary sires as the last best hope for the preservation of republican freedom. We must settle this question now, said Lincoln a month after the outbreak of war, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose.

Neither the Union nor Confederacy at first included the emancipation of four million slaves in its definition of the freedoms for which each side fought. Indeed, the Confederate states had seceded from the Union to escape the perceived threat posed by Lincolns election to the survival of slavery. That