The sun was setting on the bloodiest day in American history, a record that would stand far into the future, outstripping even the casualties of June 6, 1944, in Normandy. For this timeline, the numbers — twenty-three thousand casualties in one day — would not be topped until the final assault of the Shadow over two hundred years in the future, at which time life on the planet, in this timeline, would come to an end and there would be no one around to count the billions of dead.
On the following day, Lee began to withdraw his forces back to Virginia, and McClellan failed to press the battle against his retreating foe, resting his bloodied and weary · army. Lee’s wagon train carrying his wounded stretched for over fourteen miles.
It was not a victory. Abraham Lincoln knew that as he sat at his desk in the Oval Office and read the tersely worded dispatches from Sharpsburg. There had been no victories since the Rebels fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor in 1861. A few minor skirmishes here and there won, of course, but every major battle had been a Union defeat.
And the Europeans were waiting on the sidelines like vultures, staring across the Atlantic, waiting for the opportunity to wade in. It was about economics and cotton for them and a chance to get their feet back on the continent. Lincoln knew that. And he knew that he had to change the playing field. Take it all to a higher level to keep the Europeans at bay.
And the dead and wounded laid out in the cold numbers in the telegrams — the numbers were staggering. And if his experience with such dispatches was to be trusted, they were understated. The truth would not be revealed for weeks, but already the newsmen were saying it was the bloodiest day of the war so far.
It was also not a defeat, though. Lee was retreating. And, truth be told the North could accept high casualties more than the South could.
Lincoln put down the telegraphs and leaned back in his chair, stretching his long legs out so that the tips of his worn boots appeared on the other side of the desk bottom. He heard a door open to his left and he twisted his head. He got to his feet as he recognized his wife’s diminutive form. Just two inches above five feet, Mary had clear blue eyes and light brown hair that was now beginning to show hints of gray. They’d met when she was twenty-one, living with her sister in Springfield. She was beautiful, but it had been her sharp wit that had captivated Lincoln on their first meeting.
She was from high society and he, as he liked to tell friends when recounting the tale of their courtship, was a poor nobody. Their courtship lasted three years. There were aspects to it that Lincoln never related when speaking of the past. The first time she’d come to him after hearing the voices. The time he broke off the engagement in dismay. Only to be drawn back to her by a force greater than his fear. In a way, they were the perfect match, as she had an unshakeable belief in his abilities and his gentle demeanor allowed him to tolerate what others politely called her excitability.
Their early years of marriage had been difficult because his circumstances brought her down quite a few notches in the social circles. The war had not made things easier. As Southerners claimed she was a traitor. Since her family came from Kentucky; Union papers assailed her attempts to bring the White House up to what she considered an acceptable level for the leader of a great country.
“Mary.” Lincoln strode across the room. “Are you all right?” He wrapped her in his large arms and led her over to a couch.
“I hear them,” Mary Todd Lincoln whispered. “I hear them.”
Lincoln placed a hand on the back her neck, massaging. “The voices?”
“Yes.”
Lincoln closed his eyes and counted to ten before speaking, a habit he had begun early in their courtship and maintained ever since. “And what are they telling you?”
Mary turned her clear blue eyes toward her husband. It had been those eyes that he had first noticed so many years ago in Illinois, looking at her across a room full of people. They had been a magnet that had drawn him to her and kept him at her side all these hard years. This past year had not been easy, especially with the death of their son Willie earlier in the year. Mary had always heard voices, but the strange tiring was that Lincoln had learned to separate out the different types she heard, because some of them were very accurate about the future. Some he knew came from a part of her brain that she could not be accountable for. She had told him the first time they spoke that she knew he was bound for greatness. Then she had been told he would be president, at a time when he had never even considered running for any office and was just trying to eke out a living as a lawyer in Springfield. Such a bold, and apparently outrageous, prediction coming true had certainly made him take her much more seriously.
“You should sign the proclamation,” Mary said. “That’s what they tell me.”
Lincoln frowned. He had penned the preliminary proclamation in the spring but kept quiet about it, showing it only to Mary. In July, he had finally read it to Secretary of War Seward and Secretary Wells. Both men had been shocked speechless for over a minute, and then Seward had voiced his protest, while Wells seemed too confused to say anything.
Slavery was a difficult issue that had to be handled delicately. In the early days of the war, large numbers of slaves had fled to Union lines. Technically, according to the law of the time, even though the two sides were at war, those slaves should have been returned under the Fugitive Slave Law on the books in the federal government. Lincoln had managed to dodge that issue by getting the Fugitive Slave Law annulled. Then he’d gotten a law passed allowing the federal government to compensate owners who freed their slaves — this allowed all the slaves in the District of Columbia to be freed in April of this year.
Then he managed to pressure Congress into passing a law forbidding slavery in U.S. territories, which flew in the face of the infamous Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court. Despite all this, the core issue of slavery was still being skirted by the Union, thus Lincoln had sat down and written the proclamation.
The curious thing about the proclamation was that it freed slaves only in specifically named states-all parts of the Confederacy. Those border states that the Union was trying to keep in the fold were not affected.
“It’s a dangerous thing, Mary,” Lincoln said.
“Everything’s dangerous. But the time is now. Call this battle a victory” — she raised a hand to stifle his protest — “Lee is retreating, is he not? So many men died. I’ve seen the papers. And we both know the truth will be far worse than what the reporters scribble in their dispatches. Don’t let them die in vain. Sign the proclamation.” She put her hand on his ann. “And it will keep the Europeans at bay. It will raise the war to an entirely new level. A moral level at which they cannot get involved on the side of the Southerners. It will identify any who side with the South as siding with slavery.”
Lincoln stared at his wife, surprised that he was surprised. She had had so many great ideas over the years, but it still amazed him at times the way her mind worked. He had just been thinking along the same lines but she had cut right to the core of the matter. He walked over to his desk and pulled out the document that had so disconcerted his two secretaries. He set it on top of the desk. He considered it some of his best writing.
“And change the name,” Mary added.
‘’To what?”
“Call it the Emancipation Proclamation.”
A million dead in the Zulu nation. And that was just the estimate. No one knew the real number. A rough estimate could be made of those killed in battle, but the hundreds of thousands who died after the battles of starvation and disease could only be guessed. There were so many dead that one could not travel without feeling the presence of ghosts all about. The mfecane, the warfare and forced migrations that was being enforced by the king on his people, was destroying both the land and the people.