George Smalley: Reporting from Battle of Antietam

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At daybreak on the morning of September 18, 1862, a dusty and bedraggled horseman rode up to the telegraph office in Frederick, Maryland. His name was George W. Smalley, and he was the chief war correspondent for the New York Tribune. He had been awake for more than 24 hours–he would not sleep for another 12–and he had just ridden all night from the battlefield near Sharpsburg, where the Union Army of the Potomac and the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia had spent the previous day splashing the cornfields and woodlands around Antietam Creek with scarlet rivers of blood.

Smalley, a comparative neophyte as a reporter, had seen more of the battle than any other correspondent. Having attached himself, unknown and uninvited, to Brig. Gen. Joseph Hooker’s headquarters staff the day before, the 29-year-old Harvard Law School graduate had witnessed the near-suicidal fighting around the cornfield and North Woods on the Union right. Then, after Hooker’s wounding, he had ridden over to the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac’s commanding general, George B. McClellan, and followed Brig. Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s dilatory crossing of the bridge that would henceforth bear his name at the other end of the battlefield.

With the end of the battle, Smalley met with the other members of his reporting team (he almost came to blows with one correspondent who had not followed his example of recklessly exposing himself to fire) before setting off to find a telegraph office to send back his account of the battle to the home office in New York.

The telegraph operator in Frederick agreed to transmit a short account, and Smalley sat down in the office to write his story. He handed his copy to the telegrapher a page at a time, unaware that the operator was sending his story, not to New York, but directly to the War Department in Washington, where near-frantic members of Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet were waiting breathlessly for any news from the front. McClellan, in his typically dramatic fashion, had sent back a message the day before, informing Chief of Staff Henry Halleck, ‘We are in the midst of the most terrible battle of the war–perhaps of history.’ Then the lines had fallen silent. (McClellan for once had outrun the telegraph service, and written messages were following a roundabout path from Hagerstown, Md., to Harrisburg, Pa., Baltimore and Washington.)

Suddenly, the line at the War Department began to chatter, and sometime before noon a tense President Lincoln began to read Smalley’s exclusive report from the battlefield. ‘Fierce and desperate battle between two hundred thousand men has raged since daylight, yet night closes on an uncertain field,’ it began. ‘It is the greatest fight since Waterloo–all over the field contested with an obstinacy equal even to Waterloo. If not wholly a victory tonight, I believe it is the prelude to a victory tomorrow. But what can be foretold of the future of a fight in which from five in the morning till seven at night the best troops of the continent have fought without decisive result?’

After several paragraphs of background–Lincoln must have chafed at being told what he already knew, instead of what he desperately wanted to learn–Smalley resumed his eyewitness account of the battle. ‘The battle began with the dawn,’ he wrote. ‘Morning found both armies just as they had slept, almost close enough to look into each other’s eyes. The left of [Brig. Gen. George] Meade’s reserves and the right of [Brig. Gen. James] Rickett’s line became engaged at nearly the same moment, one with artillery, the other with infantry. A battery was almost immediately pushed forward beyond the central woods, over a ploughed field near the top of the slope where the cornfield began. On this open field, in the corn beyond, and in the woods which stretched forward into the broad fields like a promontory into the ocean, were the hardest and deadliest struggles of the day.

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Tags: 19th Century, America's Civil War, American Civil War, Historical Conflicts, Historical Figures, Journalists, People, Social History

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