winter air. My eyes met those of the youngest, a Negro girl of perhaps five or six, as they passed. I wanted to turn away (such was the sorrow of her countenance), yet I could not… for I knew where she was being taken.
Night had fallen. I had followed the Negro girl (I know not how) to a large barn—the inside lit by torches and hanging oil lamps. I watched from the darkness as she and the others were made to stand in a line, their eyes firmly fixed on the ground. I watched as a vampire took its place behind each of the slaves. Her eyes found mine as a pair of fangs descended behind her, and a pair of clawed hands grabbed her tiny neck.
“Justice… ,” she said, staring at me.
The fangs tore into her.
Her screams joined my own as I woke.
Abe convened his Cabinet the next morning.
“Gentlemen,” I began, “we have spoken a great deal about the true nature of this war; about our true enemy. We have argued—always in the spirit of friendship—over the wisest way to meet such an enemy, and bemoaned his power to strike fear into the hearts of our men. I daresay that we have even come to share in that fear ourselves. This will not do.
“Gentlemen… let our enemy fear us.
“Let us deny him the laborers who tend the farms of his living allies; who build his garrisons and carry his gunpowder. Let us deny him the poor wretches who are themselves grown as crops to be consumed by darkness. Now, gentlemen, let us starve the devils into defeat by declaring every slave in the South free.”
Cheers went up around the table. Even Salmon Chase (who still refused to believe that vampires were real) saw the strategic genius of attacking the engine of the South. Seward, while joining the others in his approval, offered a piece of humble advice:
[He] suggested that such a proclamation be given to the country on the heels of a victory, so as not to appear an act of desperation.
“Well,” I said, “then I suppose we need a victory.”
III
On September 17th, 1862, the Union and Confederate armies collided at Antietam Creek, near the town of Sharpsburg, Maryland. The Confederate forces were commanded by General Robert E. Lee, who’d enjoyed a warm relationship with the president before the war. The Union forces were commanded by General George B. McClellan, a Democrat who despised Abraham Lincoln with every fiber of his being. Abe writes:
[McClellan] thinks me a buffoon—unfit to command a man of his superior breeding and intellect. This would not bother me in the least if only he won more battles! Instead he sits in his camp, using the Army of the Potomac as his personal bodyguard! He suffers from an excess of caution: observing when he should attack, retreating when he should stand his ground and fight. This is a sin that I cannot forgive in a general.
Lee and McClellan’s armies waited quietly in the predawn hours of that Wednesday, September 17th, unaware that they were about to embark on the bloodiest day in American military history. At first light, both sides unleashed their artillery. For nearly an hour the shells flew one after the other, many with fuses timed to make them explode over their targets, sending burning pieces of shrapnel through the bodies of any soldier unfortunate enough to be nearby. From the diary of Union soldier Christoph Niederer, * 20th New York Infantry, 6th Corps:
I had just got myself pretty comfortable when a bomb burst over me and completely deafened me. I felt a blow on my right shoulder and my jacket was covered with white stuff. I felt mechanically whether I still had my arm and thank God it was still whole. At the same time I felt something damp on my face; I wiped it off. It was bloody. Now I first saw that the man next to me, Kessler, lacked the upper part of his head, and almost all his brains had gone into the face of the man next to him, Merkel, so that he could scarcely see. Since any moment the same could happen to anyone, no one thought much about it.
When the cannons fell quiet, Union troops were given orders to fix bayonets and charge across an open cornfield toward the entrenched Confederates. But an artillery battery was waiting for them in the tall stalks, and when they neared, the rebel cannons unleashed round after round of grapeshot, * taking heads off and scattering body parts across the field. From a letter by Lieutenant Sebastian Duncan Jr., ** 13th New Jersey Infantry, 12th Corps:
Stray shot and shell began to whiz over our heads and burst around us… lying just in front of our lines was a great number of dead and wounded. One poor fellow lay just before us with one leg shot off; the other shattered and otherwise badly wounded; fairly shrieking with pain.
When the charge was over, the cornfield was a bare, smoldering ruin covered with the dead and the dying from one end to the other. The wounded were left to suffer alone as shells continued to fall—taking fresh limbs, and scattering the ones that had been taken already. The battle was barely two hours old.
More than 6,000 men would lose their lives at Antietam that day, and another 20,000 would be wounded, many of them mortally.
Lee would eventually be forced into retreat. But after using only two-thirds of his available forces to fight the battle (a fact that continues to baffle military historians), General George B. McClellan simply watched as the battered Confederate Army limped into Virginia to regroup. Had he chased them down, he could have dealt a crippling blow to the South and brought the war to a speedy end.
Abe was furious.
“Damn it!” he cried to Stanton on learning that McClellan had failed to follow the enemy’s retreat. “He has done more to cause me grief than any Confederate!”
He left for McClellan’s camp at Sharpsburg at once.
There’s a famous photograph of Abraham Lincoln and George B. McClellan sitting across from each other in the general’s tent at Sharpsburg. Both look stiff and uncomfortable. History knows that Abe flippantly told McClellan: “If you do not want to use the army, I would very much like to borrow it.” What history has never known, however, is what happened shortly before that uncomfortable picture was taken.
Upon greeting [McClellan] in his tent and shaking the hands of his officers, I asked that we be given a moment alone. Closing the flap of his tent, I placed my hat upon a small table, straightened my coat, and stood before him. “General,” I said, “I must ask you a question.”
“Anything,” said he.
I grabbed him by the collar and pulled him close—so close that our faces were only inches apart. “May I see them?”
“What in God’s name are you talking about?”
FIG. 8-47. - ABE SITS WITH A NERVOUS GENERAL GEORGE MCCLELLAN IMMEDIATELY AFTER THEIR CONFORNATION AT SHARPSBURG. NOTE THE AXE LEANING AGAINST THE PRESIDENT’S CHAIR -- BROUGHT JUST IN CASE HIS HUNCH ABOUT MCCLELLAN HAD PROVEN RIGHT.
I pulled him closer still. “Your fangs, General! Let me have a look at them!” McClellan began to struggle against me, but his feet were no longer touching the ground. “Surely they must be in there,” I said, prying his mouth open with one hand. “For how could any living man seek to prolong the agony of war? Come! Show me those black eyes! Show me those razors and let us face each other!” I shook him violently. “Show me!”
“I—I do not understand,” he said at last.
His confusion was genuine. His fear palpable.
