The fighting 63available man) and reinforcements had
reached the field on the 18th, yet still
McClellan refused to advance. He insisted
that his men were worn out, too few in
number to harass the rebels, and poorly
supplied. Secretary of the Navy Gideon
Welles likely mirrored Lincoln's attitude
when he wrote on 19 September that he had
no news from the army, 'except that, instead
of following up the victory, attacking and
capturing the Rebels,' McClellan was
allowing Lee to escape across the Potomac.
An obviously unhappy Welles added:
'McClellan says they are crossing, and that
Pleasonton is after them. Oh dear!'
McClellan typically lavished praise on
himself. 'I feel some little pride,' he wrote to
his wife on 20 September, 'in having, with a
beaten and demoralised army, defeated Lee so
utterly and saved the North so completely.
Well - one of these days history will I trust
do me justice in deciding that it was not my
fault that the campaign of the Peninsula was
not successful.' The next day he complained
that Lincoln and the Secretary of War had
not congratulated him sufficiently. But he
assured his wife that a higher power had
blessed his work: 'I have the satisfaction of
knowing that God has in His mercy a second
time made me the instrument for saving the
nation & am content with the honor that has
fallen to my lot.'
If McClellan erred on the side of caution
in September 1862, Robert E. Lee might haveNorthern photographers reached the battlefield
at Antietam before the Confederate dead had been
buried. Their studies of southern corpses created a
sensation in the North. An article in the New York Times
remarked that the photographs 'bring home to us
the terrible reality and earnestness of war.' The
pictures did not lay bodies 'in our door-yards and
along streets' but accomplished 'something very like
it.' This view shows Confederates, most likely from
William E. Starke's Louisiana brigade, along the
Hagerstown Pike. (Author's collection)