Read Upon the Altar of the Nation for Free Online

his military assessment was correct.
    In terms of morale, Lee’s audacity stood as the antithesis of McClellan’s caution. President Davis praised the Army of Northern Virginia for heroic deeds “which have covered our flag with imperishable fame.” But in strategic terms, Antietam represented a stunning Northern achievement, in spite of the North’s ineffective command. By forcing Lee to retreat south, the Union ensured that Virginia, and not Maryland or Washington, would remain the center of war in the eastern theater. Just as portentously, the retreat from Antietam meant that European nation-states would not rush to recognize the Confederacy. Most historians agree that Antietam was not only the bloodiest single day in American history but also the single most significant battle in the Civil War.
    In the West, meanwhile, General Sherman was learning his second lesson—to abandon the West Point Code and take the war to civilians. In October 1862, while on duty in Memphis, Tennessee, Sherman sustained a series of guerrilla attacks on his gunboats. In retaliation, he destroyed the town of Randolph, Tennessee, and issued orders to expel ten families for every boat fired upon. When the next attack came, Sherman immediately expelled ten of the city’s residents and destroyed all houses, farms, and crops along a fifteen-mile stretch of the Mississippi south of Memphis. When a Memphis woman objected, Sherman replied that God Himself had destroyed entire populations for far lesser crimes. Until Confederate leaders returned to their true faith, he declared, the destruction would continue. Then, ominously, he added that she (and he) were seeing “how rapidly war corrupts the best feelings of the human heart.” 11

PART IV JUSTIFICATION
    THE EMANCIPATION WAR
    OCTOBER 1862 TO MAY 1863

CHAPTER 20
    FREDERICKSBURG: “SO FOOLHARDY AN ADVENTURE”
    L incoln’s decision to wage total war meant that he was prepared to obliterate prior rules and that, in turn, meant that more and more attention inevitably had to be given over to the question of noncombatant immunity. Lincoln’s executive order permitting commanders “to seize and use any property, real or personal” that would further the war effort, issued on July 22, 1862, together with General Orders Nos. 5,7, II, and 13, allowed the Army of the Potomac to “subsist upon the country.” The army could also hold rebel civilians responsible for attacks on army personnel in their region. Any civilian who refused to swear an oath of allegiance to the United States—in essence every white Southerner—would be liable to be turned out of their homes and sent within rebel lines.
    With these orders, issued at the highest level, the war now descended directly upon the homes, farms, and lives of Southern civilians. Clearly any war on civilian populations rendered questions of just conduct acute in the minds of those responsible for setting orders in motion and the soldiers who would carry them out. Where were the answers? Incredibly, there existed no English-language handbook on the code of war. When asked how soldiers had been guided in the Mexican War, Winfield Scott had to concede that they operated only from an “unwritten code.” In December 1862, with emancipation and total war looming, Lincoln commissioned a board to draw up, for the first time, a code of just conduct in time of war. The only civilian on the board, Francis Lieber, turned out to be the chief architect and author of the resulting code.
    Lieber had personal and intellectual interests in the project that made him ideally suited for the task at hand. Despite spending sixteen years teaching in South Carolina before moving north to the Columbia Law faculty, Lieber had no sympathy with either secession or slavery. His experience as a young German soldier fighting at Waterloo convinced him that states required strong central governments to rein in secessionist impulses. In his view, the Union must be preserved. But