Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

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.
I released him, suddenly ashamed that I had allowed my temper to run wild. “No,” I said. “No, I can see that you do not.” I straightened my coat again and reached for the tent flap.
“Come,” I said. “Let us give Gardner * his photograph and be done with each other.”
Abe relieved McClellan of his command a month later.
After leaving the camp at Sharpsburg, Abe surveyed the aftermath of the battle for himself. The sight of mangled, rigid bodies strewn across Antietam Creek was enough to bring the emotionally weary president to tears.
I wept, for each of these boys was Willie. Each of them had left a father cursed as I am cursed; a mother weeping as Mary weeps.
Abe sat on the ground beside the corpse of one Union soldier for nearly an hour. He was told that the boy had been struck in the head by cannon fire.
His head was split open at the back, and most of his skull and brains were gone—the result being that his face and scalp lay flat on the ground like an empty bag of grain. The sight of him repulsed me, yet I could not avert my eyes. This boy—this nameless boy—had risen that September morning, unaware that he would never see another. He had dressed and eaten. He had run bravely into battle. And then he had been gone—every moment of his life reduced to a single misfortune. All of his experiences, past and future, emptied onto some strange field far from home.
FIG. 27-C - A GROUP OF FREED SLAVES COLLECTS CONFEDERATE BODIES IN COLD HARBOR, VIRGINIA AFTER THE WAR IN 1865. NOTE THE FANGS VISIBLE IN THE SKULL TO THE KNEELING MAN’S LEFT.
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