On
September 5, 1862
, General
Lee crossed his army over the
Potomac
into
Western Maryland.
It had taken him four months to drive
Lincoln
's armies out of
Virginia
and the effort
had left his soldiers staggering. He needed to get them into the
Shenandoah Valley,
the only place within a radius of
sixty miles from his position, after the fierce battle at
Manassas,
where they could find subsistence,
rest, and reorganize. But, in turning his army back from the environs of
Washington,
it was
impossible for him to lead it directly across the
Blue
Ridge
into the Valley.
Lincoln
's
armies would consolidate under McClellan's command again and move toward
Richmond,
and he would
have to hurry his soldiers across the wasteland of
Northern
Virginia
to intercept them. Only one strategy would keep the enemy
away from
Richmond
while he marched his army to the Valley and that was to move there indirectly,
through
Maryland.
Twelve
days after General Lee's army entered
Maryland
,
the Battle of Antietam was fought on Constitution Day. In the space of twelve
hours, over five thousand soldiers, blue and gray, lost their lives in action
and another twenty thousand were wounded. Soon after, General Lee's soldiers
were safely in the
Shenandoah Valley
, camped
along the Opequon, where they remained until the end of October.
Since
the end of the Civil War, generations of historians, as well as popular Civil
War writers, have offered the view that the Battle of Antietam happened by
accident, that in entering Maryland General Lee had planned to carry the war
into Pennsylvania, drawing McClellan after him, but someone—perhaps one of
General Lee's division commanders, D.H. Hill—had negligently lost a copy of Lee'smovement order, which allowed McClellan to
thwart Lee's plans and force him into battle at Sharpsburg. Yet, in light of
all the available evidence, it seems reasonably clear that the Battle
of Antietam happened by General Lee's design—a design that he formulated, in
collaboration with Stonewall Jackson, while they were camped at Frederick,
Maryland.
1. General Lee's Purpose in Using
Special Order 191 as a
Ruse.
In
1867, the then editor of the Richmond Examiner, E.A. Pollard, published a book
entitled, The Lost Cause.[1] In it, Pollard claimed that the loss of General Lee's movement order—Special
Order 191 found by a Union soldier in a field at Frederick Maryland on
September 13, 1862—happened because Confederate Major General Daniel Harvey Hill,
"in a moment of passion had thrown the paper to the ground."[2] Incensed by Pollard’s slur on his military reputation, D.H. Hill published in a
popular magazine called The Land We Love, in February 1868, an article
entitled The Lost Dispatch.[3] In his article, Hill categorically denied having anything to do with the loss
of Special Order 191. In support of his denial he offered the indisputable fact
that he had in his possession a copy of the subject order, written in Stonewall
Jackson's hand.[4]Jackson,
Hill wrote,
"did not trust it to be copied by his adjutant, and with care, I carried
it in my pocket and did not trust it among my office papers."[5]
Rejecting
Pollard's supposition that General Lee's headquarters staff had prepared a copy
of Special Order 191 for his attention, sending it to his camp by courier, Hill
offered the affidavit of his adjutant, William Ratchford, in which Ratchford
swore no such order arrived at Hill's headquarters.[6] In support of Ratchford’s statement, Hill offered the fact that, upon crossing
the
Potomac
into
Maryland
at Cheek's Ford, his division advanced
to
Frederick
under
Jackson
's
command; as a consequence, Hill wrote, "we drew all of our supplies and
received all our orders for the next several days through
Jackson.
"Under such circumstance, Hill explained,
"Official etiquette required [Special Order 191] to be sent to me through
Jackson.
"[7] "It [is] utterly incomprehensible that all orders should come through the
proper channels, except this one, the most important of all," he wrote.
Having
rebutted Pollard's charge that he was responsible for the loss of Lee's order,
Hill went on to explain how the finding of the order induced McClellan to act
in a manner beneficial to Lee. The text of the order specified that, as of
September 13th, the “main body” of the Confederate Army, with all its supply,
artillery, and ammunition trains, would be waiting behind South Mountain at
Boonesboro for the detached commands of Jackson, McLaws, and Walker to return
from the Virginia side of the Potomac, where they had gone four days before on
a mission.[8] Yet, in fact, on September 13th, the only rebel infantry force occupying
Boonesboro was D.H. Hill's lone division of five brigades. Proceeding the march
of Hill's division to the
SouthMountain,
General Lee, in
the company of Longstreet's command,[9] had camped at Boonesboro the night of September 10th as the order specified; but,
on the following morning, he had gone with Longstreet's command to
Hagerstown
, thirteen
miles to the northwest, ostensibly to gain possession of the town's supplies.
The army's trains accompanied the march of these troops, and, reaching the
vicinity of Hagerstown, the reserve artillery and ammunition trains, with much
of the supply trains, were turned on to the roads leading to Williamsport and,
by September 13th, they were crossing the Potomac, moving around toward
Sheperdstown.[10]
When
McClellan read the Lost Order, he naturally assumed that he would encounter a
dangerously strong body of Lee’s troops
as he passed over
SouthMountain.
As a
consequence of this thinking, he delayed attacking in earnest the position D.H.
Hill's division was defending—Turner's Gap on the road to Boonesboro—until he
had concentrated almost four of his five corps in front of the mountain pass.
"McClellan could have crushed my little squad in ten minutes but for the
caution inspired in him by the belief that [Lee's main body] was there,"
Hill wrote.[11] After
reading the Lost Order, McClellan had another good reason to cautiously
approach the South Mountain, Hill offered—he had to worry that Jackson had
returned from Martinsburg, where Lee's lost order specified he was sent, and
was lurking somewhere on the other side of the mountain.[12]
On both
these points, D.H. Hill's position is plainly correct. The text of Special
Order 191 unambiguously specifies that Longstreet's command, with the army
trains, was to camp at Boonesboro, and that Stonewall Jackson's command was to
cross the Potomac and "take possession of the Baltimore & Ohio
Railroad at Martinsburg capturing the garrison there," and then return to
Maryland to join Lee's "main body," either at Boonesboro or
Hagerstown.[13] As Hill put it in The Lost Dispatch, "the apprehension that
[Jackson]
had returned
from Martinsburg, as directed by Lee's order, and which he had time to do, made
McClellan still more guarded in his approaches."[14]
At the
time The Lost Dispatch was published, D. H. Hill sent a copy to
General Lee, who was then acting as President of Washington College in
Lexington,Virginia.[15] Lee soon found himself drawn into conversation about Hill's article with
various persons connected to the college faculty.[16] After these conversations occurred, Lee wrote a personal letter to D.H. Hill,
on
February 21, 1868
.[17]
In his
letter, professing to have no knowledge of how the order was lost,[18] General Lee rejected Hill’s position that the Army’s custom and practice did
not require Lee's headquarters staff to
send a copy of the order directly to D.H. Hill. Lee wrote, without offering any
objective basis—"[I]t was proper in my opinion that a copy of the order
should be sent to you by the adjt General."[19]
Hill
had written in italics: "In going to Harper's Ferry from Martinsburg
instead of returning to Boonesboro,
Jackson
acted on his own responsibility and in violation of Lee's order."[20] To this, General Lee replied that
Jackson
was "by verbal instructions" placed in command of the expedition
"to dislodge the Federal troops occupying Martinsburg and Harper's
Ferry."[21] As verification of his statement, General Lee offered a quotation from
Jackson
's official report
of his operations: "In obedience to instructions from the Commg Genl, and
for the purpose of capturing the Federal forces and stores then at Martinsburg
and Harper's Ferry, my command left the vicinity of
FrederickCity
on the 10th".[22] Lee’s response, though, ignores the plain text of the order. No doubt Jackson
did receive verbal instructions from General Lee to go to Harper's Ferry—at the
time they were known to have conferred together in private[23]—but
the indisputable fact remains that Jackson was in possession of a written order
(albeit in his own hand) which specified that he march his command to
Martinsburg, not to Harper's Ferry.[24] And, indisputably, a penciled copy of that particular order came into
George McClellan's possession.[25]
General
Lee claimed in his letter to Hill that the loss of the order was "a great
calamity" to his campaign, writing that he had "supposed there would
have been time for [the execution of Jackson's verbal orders] and for the army
to have been reunited before Genl. McClellan could cross the
SouthMountains
."[26]
Why did
he suppose this? His letter offers as his reason that "Genl. Stuart who
was on the line of the Monocacy reported that Genl McClellan had reached
Rockville
and was
advancing very slowly with an extended front, covering the roads to Washington
and Baltimore."But the question, as Hill saw it, was not how slow
McClellan was moving before he read the lost order, but how slow he was moving
after he read it. What possible basis did General Lee possess to think
McClellan's advance from Frederick would be so slow that Harper's Ferry
could be overrun (or the garrison induced to surrender), and Lee's detached
columns reconcentrated in Maryland before McClellan's army came into the
Cumberland Valley? Lee's letter to Hill does not say.
In
opposition to Lee’s claim that he supposed he would have time to reconcentrate
before McClellan engaged him, must be put what he knew on September 9. On
September 9th, at
Frederick,
he was informed by Stuart that McClellan's army was beginning to march westward
from
Rockville
on a broad front. The right wing under Burnside's command—
Reno's
and Hooker's corps—marching on the
National Road
so as
to block an enemy advance that might materialize in the direction of
Baltimore
. McClellan's
left wing, composed of Franklin's corps, supported by Couch's division, was
marching west on the roads close to the Potomac so as to block an enemy advance
in the direction of Washington. And his center, composed of Sumner's corps, the
12th corps, and Fitz John Porter's corps, was marching on the
Georgetown
turnpike leading to
Urbana
and
Frederick,
twenty-five
miles away. From this, Lee knew that McClellan was expecting to be attacked as
his front advanced, and Lee knew that as long as McClellan thought that, he would proceed cautiously. Once,
though, McClellan realized that the enemy was retreating instead of advancing,
Lee could expect that McClellan’s defensive-minded advance would shift to an
offensive-minded one, the velocity of the march accelerating. For, to the mind
of any competent general in McClellan’s shoes, an enemy in flight posed hardly
the same threat as an enemy operating on the offensive.[27]
Given
the depleted ranks of his army and the sorry condition of his supplies, General
Lee, even as aggressive as he was, must have known he could not avoid
retreating from
Frederick
.
To make a stand on the line of the Monocacy, he would have needed twice, if not
three times, the strength he possessed. To keep McClellan's vast array out of
his rear, he would have had to extend his front to cover the National Road on
his left and the mouth of the Monocacy on his right—a length of front entirely
beyond the capacity of his army to acheive.
Knowing,
then, that retreat from
Frederick
was mandatory, General Lee must have canvased his map, probably in the company
of
Jackson,
looking for an available location in
Maryland
where natural barriers would make the turning of his flanks impossible.
Plainly, he saw that that place was behind the
Antietam
at
Sharpsburg
—where
he would have only a three mile front to defend, the shoulders of which would
be pressed against the folds of the
Potomac.
But to fight a general battle in this position, the rebel army required a
secure line of retreat to
Winchester,
in the
Shenandoah Valley,
and the Union
garrison at Harper's Ferry—10,000 soldiers and 1,200 cavalrymen—posed an
unacceptable threat to it.
For
this reason, General Lee gave
Jackson
verbal instructions to capture Harper's Ferry and rejoin the rest of the army
in
Maryland
.
Making the decision to send
Jackson
however, to neutralize the Martinsburg and Harper's Ferry garrisons, did not
solve the problem created by the direction the Union Army's advance would take,
once word reached McClellan that the enemy was retreating. Once McClellan
reached Frederick and found it abandoned by the enemy, he would certainly learn
that the enemy had crossed the Potomac into Virginia and this fact would induce
him to rush his army directly toward Harper's Ferry in order to get a powerful
force quickly into the Shenandoah Valley, to pursue or break up the enemy's
retreat in the direction of Winchester.[28] The three rebel divisions remaining with Lee behind
SouthMountain
—D.R.
Jones's, John Hood's, and D.H. Hill's—could hardly be expected to paralyze the
advance of McClellan's five corps toward Harper's Ferry. Something else was
required to have any chance of doing that. All of this General Lee ignored in
his letter to Hill.
Lee's
letter does offer an argument of sorts for the proposition that McClellan's
reaction to reading the lost order placed the Rebel Army in grave peril. The
letter quotes a message McClellan had written to William Franklin at 6:20 p.m.,
on September 13th (Franklin was then encamped at Buckystown); but McClellan's
message proves, not disproves, Hill's case that reading the lost order induced
him to do exactly the opposite of what he would have done if the order had not
been found.
McClellan
wrote
Franklin
:
"I have now full information as to movements and intentions of the enemy.
Jackson
has crossed the
Upper Potomac
to capture the garrison at Martinsburg, and
cut off Miles's retreat towards the west. A division on the south side of the
Potomac(Walker's)
was to carry
LoudounHeights,
and cut off his
retreat in that direction. McLaws, with his own division and the division of
R.H. Anderson, was to move by Boonesboro and Rohrersville to carry
MarylandHeights
. . . . Longstreet was to move to
Boonesboro, and there halt with the reserve trains, D.H. Hill to form the rear
guard, Stuart's cavalry to bring up stragglers etc."[29]
Clearly,
George McClellan could read Lee's English correctly; as a result, he formulated
a plan of action which placed his main body in front of where Lee's lost
order placed the rebel main body.[30] But while his main body was composed of thirty brigades he did not know that
Lee's was composed of only fourteen.[31] Thinking Lee and Jackson intended to attack him from the direction of
Boonesboro, McClellan assigned but three divisions to advance against the two
rebel divisions, under McLaws's command, which had marched to
MarylandHeights,
ostensibly "to endeavor to capture Harper's Ferry."[32] The rest he massed in front of Turner’s Gap.
Direction, not speed,
is the key to understanding Lee's ruse with the lost order. If he had not read
the lost order, a reasonable general in McClellan's circumstances would have
directed his main body on Rohrersville, instead of Boonesboro, with the plan of
relieving Miles at Harper's Ferry and then pressing after the enemy wherever
found. Through the 11th and 12th McClellan had received many reports that told
him the enemy was apparently making a headlong retreat across the river: From
Harper's Ferry, Colonel Miles telegraphed that a heavy column of troops was
passing through the Cumberland Valley in the direction of Hagerstown;[33] from Pennsylvania Governor Andrew Curtin came the advice that "Jackson is
crossing at Williamsport and probably the whole army will be drawn from
Maryland."[34] Even
Lincoln,
wiring McClellan that the enemy was crossing the
Potomac,
pleaded with McClellan at the time—"Please do not let him get off without
being hurt."[35] In reaction to these reports, on the 12th at
, McClellan wired
Lincoln
's general-in-chief, Henry Halleck,
"My columns are pushing on rapidly to
Frederick.
From all I gather, secesh is
skedalleling, and I don't think I can catch him unless he is really moving into
Pennsylvania. . .[36] I
begin to think he is making off to get out of the scrape by recrossing the river
at Williamsport. . . I shall endeavor to cut off his retreat. My movements
tomorrow will be dependant upon information received during the night."[37] By this time, the advance guard of McClellan's right wing had entered
Frederick.
Under
the circumstances known to McClellan the evening of the 12th, there was only
one way his army could possibly have caught the enemy in retreat: Its main
body—at least three, if not four, of its five corps—must march on the morrow in
the direction of Crampton's Gap in the South Mountain, pass into the narrow
enclave called Pleasant Valley and move in the direction of the Potomac; the
remainder of the army to march west on the National Road to guard the main
body's left flank and rear from possible attack coming from the direction of
Turner's Gap, six miles to the north of Crampton's. Once on the Virginia side
of the river, McClellan's columns would then march into the Shenandoah Valley
and converge on the enemy's line of retreat toward Winchester, with the rear
guard of the army, passing Turner's Gap into the Cumberland Valley, closing up
by passing the Potomac at Shepherdstown.
On the
13th, however, having reached
Frederick
and read Lee's lost order, McClellan did exactly the opposite of this. As
General Lee's letter to Hill only partially quotes, he messaged to
Franklin,
at
"The whole of
Burnside's command march. . . followed by Sumner, the 12th Corps and Sykes
(division of Porter's corps) upon Boonesboro to carry that position. . . .
Without waiting for the whole of [Couch's] division to join you, you will move
at day-break by Jefferson and Burkittsville upon the road to Rohrersville. . .
in order to cut off the retreat of or destroy McLaws's command. . . If you
effect this. . .[38] you will then return to Boonesboro if the main column has not succeeded in its
attack. If it has succeeded, take the road to
Sharpsburg
and
Williamsport,
in order to cut off the retreat
of Hill and Longstreet towards the
Potomac,
or
to prevent the repassage of
Jackson.
My general idea is to cut the enemy in two."[39]
But for
his choice of deployment, George McClellan might have achieved his objective of
cutting the enemy in two. Instead, by late evening on the 14th, he found
himself only in possession of the
SouthMountain
gaps, and the next
morning—Harper's Ferry having surrendered—his main body took possession of
Boonesboro and cautiously began to follow the enemy toward
Sharpsburg
. Induced by Lee's lost order not
only to direct the weight of his forces away from Crampton's Gap—the gateway to
Pleasant Valley and the Potomac crossing at Harper's Ferry—but also to delay
launching an overpowering attack on D.H. Hill's position at Turner's Gap,
McClellan gave Lee time to clear his rear of the enemy and concentrate for
battle behind the Antietam. Time Lee would not have had, but for the lost
order.
2. How
Lee's Order Was "Lost"
According
to the historical evidence, sometime close to
on
September
13, 1862,
a Union soldier, Private (perhaps Corporal) Barton
Mitchell of the 27th Indiana Regiment, Gordon's Brigade, 12th Corps, was
engaged in stacking arms with his comrades at
Frederick,
when he discovered Lee's lost
order lying on the ground. The first public description of this occurrence was
given by Silas Colgrove, the 27th
Indiana's
war time colonel, to the editors of the Century Magazine, in 1886.[40] Colgrove wrote: "Within a few minutes of halting, the order was brought to
me by First Sergeant John M. Bloss and Private B.W. Mitchell, of Company F, who
stated that it was found by Private Mitchell near where they stacked arms. When
I received the order it was wrapped around three cigars, and Private Mitchell
stated that it was in that condition when found by him."[41] According to his letter to the Century editors, Colgrove carried the found order
directly to the headquarters of the 12th Corps's temporary commander, Alpheus
S. Williams, and handed it to Williams's adjutant, Colonel Samuel E. Pittman.
Pittman showed it to Williams who signed a message to McClellan—"I enclose
a special order. . . which was found on the field. . . It is a document of
interest."[42] By Williams's choice of language one may reasonably assume his message to
McClellan, along with the found order, was placed in an envelope. Pittman then
had a courier carry the documents to McClellan's headquarters and hand them to
McClellan's adjutant, Seth Williams.[43] When Lee's lost order was handed to McClellan he reportedly exclaimed in the
presence of civilians—"Now I know what to do."[44]
How
General Lee's order was lost has been most often explained as happening by
accident; as the prolific civil war writer, Stephen W. Sears, most recently put
it: "Far and away the most likely explanation for the loss of order 191 is
also the simplest—that it was accidentally dropped by a courier from Lee's
headquarters while on his way to deliver it to D.H. Hill."[45] However, when the totality of the available evidence is marshalled, it
is impossible to ignore the probability that Special Order 191 was
intentionally lost by General Lee, in order to induce McClellan to throw the
weight of his army against South Mountain's Turner's Gap instead of Crampton's.
Besides
the practical situation General Lee's army was in, the relevant circumstances
that establish the probable truth of the matter are these: staff procedure, the
cigars, weather, the stationer's stamp, Lee's reaction to notice of the order's
loss, and, finally, the issue of identifying the writer of McClellan's copy.
From the proof of these facts the conclusion necessarily follows that it is
more likely than not true that the order was dropped near Private Barton
Mitchell's side, by a civilian passing casually through the field the men of
the 27th Indiana Regiment were settling in to on
September 13, 1862
.
A.
Staff Procedure
The
officers whose positions placed them at General Lee's headquarters during the
Antietam Campaign fall into three distinct categories: the general staff of the
army, General Lee's personal staff, and those officers attached to his
headquarters who were field agents of the Adjutant and Inspector General's
Office at
Richmond.
The members of Lee's general staff—the chiefs of the various departments of his
army such as artillery, commissary, quartermaster etc—were not involved in the
preparation, record keeping and transmission of movement orders addressed to
commanders of infantry units. The members of Lee's personal staff and that of
the Adjutant General's attached staff had mixed involvement with the
promulgation of such orders. The names of the officers who composed Lee's
personal staff at the time are in order of descending rank: A.L. Long, Lee's
military secretary, Walter Taylor, aide and sometime adjutant, and aides
Charles Marshall and Charles A. Venable. The members of the attached Adjutant
General's staff were Robert Chilton, Assistant Adjutant General, and his aides,
A.P. Mason and T.M.R. Talcott.
The
Regulations for the Army of the Confederate States specify the following with
regard to "special orders." Such orders "relate to the march of
some particular corps" and "are not published to the whole
command." An "important special order must be read and approved by
the officer whose order it is, before it is issued by a staff officer."
Such orders are generally put "through the office of the Adjutant or Adjutant
and Inspector General of the Command" and they "are transmitted
through all intermediate commanders in the order of rank." In contrast to
"special" orders, "general" orders "announce. . .
whatever may be important to make known to the whole command."[46] "During marches and active operations, all orders will be either sent
direct to the troops, or the respective commanders will be informed when to
send to headquarters for them." "Copies of all orders of the
commanders of armies. . . will be forwarded at their dates, or as soon
thereafter as practicable, in separate series, on full sheets of letter paper
to the Adjutant and Inspector General's (General Samuel E. Cooper's)
office" in Richmond."[47]
In the
case of Lee's lost order, conformance with the substance of the regulations quoted
above was accomplished by General Lee's personal and attached staff officers in
the following manner. First, on September 9th, A.P. Mason wrote a document that
he entitled "Special Order 191," which contains the first two
paragraphs of the eventual full text of order 191. This two paragraph document
contains the actual signature of Robert H. Chilton and was addressed to the
Adjutant General's office in
Richmond
.[48] The obvious function of this document was to establish the fact that, on
September 9th, General Lee had ordered his long time aide, Walter Taylor, to
leave the army and travel to Virginia, ostensibly on a mission to persuade
President Davis, who was then at Gordonsville attempting to come up to the
army, to go back to Richmond.[49] Second, at some unverifiable moment in time, A.P. Mason wrote the complete
official record copy of Special Order 191—the full text is ten paragraphs—into
Robert Chilton's bound letterbook. At the signature line of this document, A.P.
Mason wrote "Adjutant General."[50]
Last, someone,
perhaps, Charles Marshall, beginning with the third paragraph, wrote a copy of
order 191 in ink. This document is plainly signed by Robert H. Chilton. This
document was enclosed with a letter, written in
Marshall
's hand, dated September 12th, and
addressed by General Lee to President Davis. It was delivered by courier to
Davis
. When
Davis
fled
Richmond
in 1865, the
letter and enclosure traveled with him to
Georgia
where it was left for some
time in a trunk.[51] These three documents—A.P. Mason's two paragraph copy, the eight paragaph copy
(Special Order 190), and Chilton's letterbook copy—constitute the only known
copies of Special Order 191 created by the ordinary procedures of General Lee's
personal staff or the Adjutant General's attached staff.
There
is little evidence that any copy of Special Order 191[52] was delivered to the subordinate commanders who supposedly received
it—Longstreet,
Jackson
,
McLaws,
Walker
and D.H. Hill. Longstreet's chief of staff, Moxley Sorrel, wrote, "[The
order] was so full that when a copy came in my possession I wondered what could
be done with it in event of my falling into the enemy's hands."[53] Longstreet, in an article published in 1886, in the Century Magazine, said
about the lost order only this—"Ordinarily, upon getting possession of
such an order, the adversary would take it as a ruse de guerre, but it
seems that General McClellan gave it his confidence."[54] In his autobiography published in 1896, Longstreet added this, "The copy
sent to me was carefully read, then used as some persons use a little cut of
tobacco, to be assured that others could not have the benefit of its
contents."[55] John Walker, whose division by the order was sent to
LoudounHeights
,
wrote, in an article in the Century Magazine,[56] that he received verbal orders while at
Frederick
on the 9th, "to return to the mouth of the Monocacy and destroy the
aqueduct of the
Chesapeake &
OhioCanal
.
. . Retracing our steps toward the Potomac, at 10:00 p.m. of the 9th my
division arrived at the aqueduct [and] about 3:00 a.m. on the 10th went into
bivouac about two miles west of the Monocacy. Late in the afternoon a courier
from General Lee delivered me a copy of [order 191] directing me to cooperate
with Jackson and McLaws in the capture of Harper's Ferry." Finally, of the
four commanders, only Lafayette McLaws makes reference in his official report
to order 191, saying merely that he moved his command "in compliance"
with its requirements.[57] From these meager snippets of unsworn testimony, which constitute all that
exists in the record, it is a strain to draw more than that communications were
transmitted which gave to each commander an understanding of the role he was to
play in the movement about to commence. And two of the four, Longstreet and
Jackson, received their instructions from Lee directly.
As for
Lee's staff officers, they tell us nothing about their personal
involvement in the creation and transmission of Special Order 191 to the field
commanders. The evidence shows that, of the officers on Lee's personal staff,
Charles Marshall wrote most of Lee’s letters while at
Frederick
and
Hagerstown
. After the war,
Marshall
made frequent public appearances
where he gave addresses on the subject of General Lee's operations, and he
prepared a manuscript which, after his death, became a published book in 1927.
Yet he never said or wrote anything which revealed his direct knowledge about
the matter.
In a
letter sent to D.H. Hill, in November 1867,
Marshall
wrote, "How the order was lost
I am wholly unable to conjecture. . . I can only say that the army then not
being organized into corps, it was a frequent occurrence to communicate general orders for movements of the whole army to divisions commanders. . . Such orders
were usually copied by the staff, one getting copied into the Confidential
Book, to be copied into the general order book post factum. They were sent out
by orderlies who were required in cases of moment to bring back envelopes or
some other receipt from the officers to whom they were sent."[58] In Marshall's manuscript, published as a book twenty years after his death by
British major general, Frederick Maurice, we are offered only this snippet:
". . . as yet unexplained, a copy of the general order directing movement
of the whole army. . . fell into the hands of General McClellan."[59] Telling us that a custom existed, in the creation and transmission of orders,
tells us nothing we don't already know from reading the Confederate Army's
Regulations concerning the promulgation of orders.[60]Marshall
tells
us nothing about who, among Lee's staff officers, actually supervised the
recording and transmission of the order to the field.[61]
Frederick
Maurice became the editor of
Marshall
's
manuscript, in 1927, because he had two years before published a book about
General Lee.[62] Reading Maurice's book about Lee,
Marshall
's
eldest son, a
New York
lawyer named H. Snowdon Marshall, wrote to Maurice in
England
and
offered his father's manuscript. In his letter
Marshall's
son said: "When I read your
book I heard my father talking again, and it seems to me that you divined a
trait in General Lee, which had a tendency to obscure the truth of history. . .
I am almost bewildered at the startling accuracy with which you found your path
through this camouflage of suppression of actual facts. I think [my father] had
in mind the feeling that to print indisputable facts which had been edited out
of the reports by General Lee would be a disloyalty."[63] Clearly, if any one besides
Taylor
would have known who supervised the transmission of Special Order 191 to the
field, it was Charles Marshall. Yet, the language he used in his letter to D.H.
Hill makes plain he did not know.that person's identity.
The
other staff officers, too, refused to reveal who was responsible. Walter
Taylor, who most certainly would have known, had Lee not ordered him away from
Frederick
on the 9th, (two paragraph version)
published two books in his life time. In the first, published in 1878, he
wrote, "It was the custom to send copies of such orders, to the commanders
of separate corps or divisions only."[64] "It is impossible to explain how a copy addressed to D.H. Hill was thus
carelessly handled or lost."[65] In a footnote, though,
Taylor
pointed the finger at Charles Venable, writing—Venable always contended
"One copy was sent directly to Hill from headquarters."[66] A.L. Long, writing in his biography of Lee, in 1886, repeated this same one
line quotation which he attributed to Venable.[67] For Charles Venable's part, nothing can be found in the historical record that
acknowledges this hearsay testimony as his own.[68]
As for
Robert Chilton, who signed the two copies of the order that were transmitted to
Richmond,
he
offers, unknowingly or not, information that reveals the probable truth of the
situation. In 1874, in writing a reply to an inquiring letter received from
Jefferson Davis, he wrote speaking of Hill: "Not having as I have told you
kept a journal, I could but give my recollection, viz. that they were sent to
all division commanders, entrusted with special duties, his at the Monocacy,
that couriers were required to bring back envelopes or other evidences of
delivery, failure in doing this to lead to a duplicate order to ensure its
receipt. . . but I could not of course say positively that I had sent any
particular courier to him after such a lapse of time."[69] Chilton's statement does speak to his knowledge of a courier being sent with
the order to Hill, but he puts Hill at the Monocacy when, in fact, it was John
Walker who was at the Monocacy and Walker acknowledges the receipt of his
marching orders by courier. Twelve years after the event, it seems obvious that
Chilton had apparently confused Hill with
Walker.[70] Corroborating this is the evidence which shows General Lee was prone to give
verbal instructions directly to his subordinate commanders—he admits this,
Longstreet and Walker directly confirm it—and, thus, it is reasonable to
conclude that Walker, as the only officer of the five officers involved to be
actually detached from the main body of the army on the 9th, should have
received his marching orders by courier.
What
can reasonably be deduced, therefore, from the known evidence of General Lee's
staff procedure, is that two copies, each containing partial text of Special Order
191, were written in pen, and that Robert H. Chilton signed his name to them.
Despite the fact that one or more of Lee’s staff officers should have known whether a copy of the general movement part of the order was actually sent to D.H. Hill's headquarters, they offer us
nothing which reasonably can be relied on as evidence establishing this was
done.
B.
Other Circumstances
If the
evidence is limited to proof of General Lee's staff procedure, the question of
whether the lost order was intentionally given to McClellan might reasonably be
in doubt, but there is evidence of undisputed facts which shifts the balance of
probability clearly in favor of a finding of intent. First, there is the fact
Colonel Colgrove, in 1886, stated that when he received the lost order from
Mitchell and Bloss it was "wrapped around three cigars." Colgrove's
credibility, here, is not diminished by any evidence of personal motive—he had
nothing to gain by fabricating the fact of the cigars. Bloss, who did have
something to gain—status as the actual finder of the order—repeatedly
corroborated Colgrove's statement in later years. McClellan's copy of the lost
order, as examined in the Library of Congress, clearly shows creases where it
had been folded for many years into a shape 3" X 5." Three cigars can
easily be laid side by side upon the surface of the folded paper and tied by a
string. Laid on the ground in this configuration, what Barton Mitchell would
have seen is the cigars and, if they looked unspoiled by the weather, how
likely would it have been for a reasonable person in his shoes not to
stoop to pick them up? The existence of the cigars could reasonably have had no
other purpose than to function as the means of attracting the Union soldier's
attention to the object lying near his feet. There simply can be no other
rational explanation: The suggestion that a courier, traveling the short
distance from Lee's headquarters camp to D.H. Hill's, would have connected
cigars somehow to the paper he was carrying to Hill smacks of incredibility.
Second,
there is the fact that the fields around
Frederick
were inundated with rain from a storm all day on September 11th, lasting at
least into the night. Heros Von Borcke, JEB Stuart's chief of staff at the
time, wrote in 1866 of September 11th: "On the morning of the 11th we
received marching orders. . . . A steadily falling rain, which gave us some
discomfort in the saddle, added much to the dejection of spirits with which we
got in readiness to move away from
Urbana.
"[71] According to a Union soldier, "steady rain" fell the evening of the 11th;
"The storm stretched from
Frederick
to
Washington.
"[72] And Alfred Pleasonton, McClellan's cavalry commander is reported as saying,
"I entered
Frederick
(on the 12th) about
"
and "the roads were muddy from the previous day's rain.[73] If one assumes, as all civil war writers have, that the lost order was written
and sent by courier to Hill on September 9th, or at the latest the morning of
the 10th, the paper and cigars must have been lying in the field where they
were found for at least three, if not four, nights and three and a half days.
McClellan's copy of the order—as it exists today in the Library of
Congress—shows a small splotch on its surface; hardly sufficient evidence to
infer the fact that the paper had been exposed to the weather for such a length
of time, much less that it had been lying on the grass of a farm field during a
twelve hour rain storm.
Magnifying
the incredulity of arguing otherwise, is the fact that, on the 12th, the corps
of the Union Army pressed Stuart's cavalry divisions back from Sugar Loaf
Mountain, on the left of McClellan's advance from Urbana, and back from New
Market on the right—the advance guard of the 9th corps, in the early afternoon
of the 12th, tramped across the Monocacy on the National Road and skirmished with
Stuart's cavalry into the streets of Frederick. These troops went into camp in
the fields skirting the suburbs of the town and, by evening, were joined by the
divisions of Sumner's corps, which crossed the Monocacy between the Urbana
Turnpike and the National Road, and went into camp in the fields adjacent to
the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad spur which runs into Frederick on the south
side of the National Road.[74] Given the muddy condition of the fields and the tramping of men and horses, the
movement of artillery and wagons, it is hardly reasonable to think Lee's lost
order could have survived in the condition it now exists. Therefore, the
evidence leads to the inescapable conclusion that the order could not have been
"lost" in the field until sometime after D.H. Hill's division
was long gone from
Frederick
.[75] Which means necessarily that it was not lost by a courier sent from Lee's
headquarters to Hill's.
And, in
weighing the scales, the documented reaction of Lee to news of the order's loss
cannot be ignored. Stephen Sears has written about this: "Remarkably,
there is no record of General Lee or anyone at his headquarters ever
investigating the matter, even after, some months later, it was learned that a
copy of S.O. 191 had reached enemy hands."[76]Months later? The indisputable evidence is, by General Lee's own
admission, that he was on actual notice, no later than the early morning hours
of September 14th, that McClellan had the Lost Order in his hands.[77] Yet, the knowledge of this did not induce General Lee to order his "main
body" to flee
Maryland
and rendezvous with the rest of his army in
Virginia
. Instead, he sent his trains across
the
Potomac
at
Williamsport
and marched in plain view of
Pleasonton's scouts across the
CumberlandValley
to support D.H.
Hill's defense of Turner's Gap. The inference from this is obvious: there was
nothing to investigate. He had tricked McClellan into thinking, throwing his
weight against Crampton's Gap would expose him to an attack from Lee's main
body at Turner's Gap, and now Lee had a good chance to draw McClellan into
battle at Sharpsburg.
C. Who Wrote McClellan's Copy?
Given
the totality of the circumstances shown by the evidence so far, the presumption
must be that McClellan's copy was lost no earlier than
on September 12th and no later than
on September 13th. But who wrote
it? In resolving this question, the opinion of a so-called "handwriting
expert" is not required. As a federal court has explained,[78] there is a lack of empirical evidence that such an "expert" is any
more proficient than a lay person to correctly match handwriting samples,
because such opinions constitute "nothing more than a set of subjective
observations and little different from an unsupported opinion as to the fact of
authorship of a document."[79] Leaving the matter then to lay persons to decide, the first task is to examine
the writings of those most likely to have written the text of McClellan's copy;
under the standard theory of the order's accidental loss, these persons would
be the members of Lee's personal and attached adjutant general staff; i.e.,
A.L. Long, Walter Taylor, Charles Marshall, Charles Venable, Robert Chilton,
A.P. Mason and T.M.R. Talcott.[80]
A
two-thirds majority of reviewers, who compare the handwriting of these
candidates with the writing of McClellan's copy, will probably distinguish the
latter example from the former examples easily. (See four part series: Who Wrote The Lost Order?) Since the handwriting of none
of these candidates compare favorably with the writing on McClellan's copy, the
search for its authorship must expand to include General Lee and his closest
confidants—Stonewall Jackson and JEB Stuart. Stonewall’s handwriting is plainly
not a probable match. (See Hill's copy of S.O. 191 written in Jackson's hand.)
As for General
Lee, the naysayers will point to the fact that as of September 9th,
his hands were injured, presumedly making it impossible for him to write.[81] Nonetheless, a comparison of the writing in his 1868 letter to D.H. Hill with
the writing in Mac’s copy of Special Order 191, reveals strong similarities of
writing style: For example, the peculiar writing of the “F” in Harper’s Ferry,
along with the shaping of H’s, C’s and D’s, ought to make one hesitate before
ruling Lee out. It is possible, given its appearance, that Mac’s copy was in
fact the first draft of the order, a draft made by Lee which
Jackson
copied from.
As for JEB
Stuart,[82] according to his chief of staff, Heros Von Borcke, his headquarters on the
afternoon of September 11th was located, "about a half mile from
[Frederick] at the farm of an old Irishman."[83] On the next day, the 12th, all of Stuart's cavalry, except for the rear guard
and Fitz Lee's brigade, which was on an unexplained mission in McClellan's
rear, had moved west of Frederick and occupied Braddock's Gap in the Catocin
Mountain range.[84] Stuart himself, in the company of other officers, spent most of day of the 12th
in Frederick, at the residence of William R. Ross, a well known and wealthy
lawyer who was pro-South in sympathy. Earlier, during the rebel army's stay at
Frederick, Stuart as well as other rebel officers had frequented lawyer Ross's
house as the following narrative of one of JEB Stuart's aides, W.W. Blackford,
illustrates: "In passing through Frederick I called to take leave of my
kind friends, the Rosses, at whose house my father lived while studying law in
Mr. Ross's office. . . I had called to see them several times since crossing
the
Potomac
. . . (On the 12th) [w]e had a
cavalry engagement in the streets. . . One of the ladies at Mr. Ross's at the
last moment ran out as we were taking leave under skirmish fire. . . ."[85] Heros Von Borcke writes of the
time dinner on the 12th: "General Stuart rode with his staff into
Frederick
where we had
been invited by several prominent citizens to dine."[86] Around
the
afternoon of the 12th, after the skirmish with Union cavalry in the
Frederick
streets, Stuart
vacated the place in the company of Von Brocke and went into the
MiddletownValley
.[87]
Clearly
JEB Stuart had the opportunity, after September 10th, to lose McClellan's copy
of Lee's order in the field where it was found by Private Mitchell; but when
examples of Stuart's written messages from the field are compared to
McClellan's copy,[88] the
writings do not appear to match.[89]
If
neither General Lee nor JEB Stuart wrote the Lost Order, then who could the
writer have been? The known circumstances suggest the possibility it could have
been General Lee’s eldest son, Custis Lee. In 1905, Dr. Erwin Newton, a member
of the staff of the Army Surgeon General, LaFayette Guild, wrote Walter Taylor
and said, with respect to the Sharpsburg Campaign, “I recall with pleasure the
name of Custis Lee among Lee’s staff.”[90] The statement implies that
Newtonsaw Custis at
Frederick
. During the war Custis Lee wrote a
300 page manuscript about the life of General Lee’s father, “Light Horse Harry”
Lee. The manuscript is now at the Virginia Historical Society, in
Richmond
. All of the
pages show the Platner & Porter Manufacturing Co.’s stationers stamp, as
does the Lost Order. Custis was a member of President Davis’s entourage. When
Davis
began his trip
toward
Maryland
,
someone carried ahead of him his letter to General Lee, announcing his coming.
The letter arrived on September 9th, and Lee chose Walter Taylor to
carry his reply back to
Davis
.
Did Custis deliver
Davis
’s
letter to Lee? Was he present with his father at
Frederick
? Did he supply the paper stock used
to write the Lost Order? Does his authenticated handwriting, examples created
at or near the 9th, show a probable match? The Virginia Historical
Society does not allow Custis’s manuscript pages to be copied, so they are
unavailable here. The search continues.
Other
circumstances provide clues to the timing of the order’s creation, and the
manner of its use as a template. First, the writer of McClellan's copy, in
writing the September date of the order, wrote first the number "1,"
not the number "9." He then corrected the date, not by using an
eraser, but by interlining. Next to the marked over number "1," the
writer then wrote the number "9." This suggests that the text of
McClellan's copy was written sometime after September 9th. Second, side by side
comparison of the copy labeled 190 and
Chilton's letterbook copy (written in A.P. Mason's hand) with D.H. Hill's copy
(written in
Jackson
's
hand) and McClellan's copy, show that McClellan's copy was copied from
Jackson's
. The former two
copies use the same phrase "in intercepting the retreat" in
paragraph six; the latter two copies use the same phrase "and intercept the retreat" in paragraph six. Either the writer copied McClellan's copy
from
Jackson's,
or
Jackson
copied his from the writer’s. Last, of all the known messages, letters, and
orders that came out of Lee's headquarters during the
Antietam
campaign, none of them contains the stationer's embossed stamp that is found in
the upper left hand corner of McClellan's copy. Therefore, the paper the writer
used probably came from a non-headquarters source.
The
stationer's embossed stamp identifies the paper of McClellan's copy as
manufactured by the Platner & Porter Manufacturing Co. of
Farmington,Connecticut
.
This company was in business manufacturing such paper from 1848 to about 1880.[91] According to Jesse R. Lankford, Jr,
North
Carolina
's State Archivist, this paper was routinely
used by
North Carolina's
civil war government and reams of it can be found in the state archives. At the
Virginia Historical Society, in
Richmond,Virginia,
several hundred pages
of this paper can be found, comprising an original manuscript written by
General Lee's eldest son, Custis Lee, in 1867.[92] And Platner & Porter paper was used by Walt Whitman in his 1862 notebook as
he followed the Union Army to
Antietam.[93] Since none of the orders, dispatches and letters written by General Lee, during
the Sharpsburg Campaign, are found on Platner & Porter paper stock, the
conclusion seems reasonable to reach that the paper used to write Mac’s copy of
the lost order came from a non-headquarters source.
Finally,
there is the question of how the lost order was dropped in the field where it
was found. Since Stuart was still at
Frederick
as late as the afternoon of the 12th, it is possible that he could have dropped the order and cigars in
the field at that time, anticipating that the approaching
Ohio
troops of
Reno's
corps would find it.[94] Stephen W. Sears, in his last word on the subject, takes the position that the discovery of Special Order 191 "represented the workings of pure chance"—that
the order and the cigars "could just as easily have been overlooked as it
lay in that clover field." From this logic Sears argues that the order's
finding was as much an accident as its loss.[95] An alternative, though, that Sears's logic suggests, is that the order had to
be lost under circumstances which guaranteed it would be found.
Since
Stuart was forced from
Frederick
the afternoon of the 12th it hardly would have seemed certain to him that his
dropping of the order would result in its being found by
on the 13th. From the point of view of a
person in his shoes, the idea of dropping the order to the ground in the face
of the oncoming horde of Burnside's soldiers, horses, cattle, wagons and
artillery, would be silly. There was only one sure way of guaranteeing that the
dropping of the order would be discovered and that was to drop it in the
presence of the soldiers who were to find it.
Who the
person was by which this was done the evidence does not exactly say. But that a
civilian could easily have planted it in the vicinity of Company's F's stacking
of arms the evidence does say: for, "[t]he town jubilantly welcomed the
liberators. `Handkerchiefs are waved, flags are thrown from Union houses, and a
new life infused into the people,'. . . The troops responded with volleys of
cheering, and regimental bands blared martial music. . . `the place was alive
with girls going around the streets in squads waving flags, singing songs and
inviting the soldiers in for hot supper. . . [T]he next day (the 13th) the
people began to cook for us, bringing out as we passed, cake, pie and bread.' .
. . It was like a gigantic Fourth of July celebration. . . ."[96] And, in the excitement, someone walked by Mitchell and let fall from his hand
the folded paper of the order wrapped around cigars.
If the
issue of this had been raised at the time, a prime suspect might well have been
the Reverend Doctor, John B. Ross. Before assuming the pastorate of
Frederick
's First
Presbyterian Church, in 1856, Dr. Ross had pastored for several years in
Roanoke,Virginia,
and was personally acquainted with Stonewall Jackson. According to Henry Kyd
Douglas, one of
Jackson
's
aides,
Jackson
met privately with Ross at the church Manse the morning of September 10th.[97] In a manuscript the UNC Press used to publish I Rode With Stonewall, in
1940,
Douglas
had written—"The General
was anxious, before leaving
Frederick
,
to see the Reverend Dr. Ross, a personal friend, and I took him to the
house."[98] Two weeks after the battle of
Antietam,
Dr.
Ross resigned his position as pastor and left
Frederick
and never returned. As the church's
historians have reported it, during September 1862 "Rev. Ross was visited
by his personal friend, Stonewall Jackson. In (October) 1862, the work of
pastoring became so difficult and discouraging for Dr. Ross that he gave it
up."[99]Jackson
could have taken the draft of the order made by Lee and given it to Ross on the
10th.
3. The Truth of History Revealed?
Did
General Lee intentionally lose his order, or was it an accident as the
historians and civil war writers generally say? To answer the question, one
must rely on the evidence which has more convincing force than that opposed to
it. Here, the tactical realities of the ground, the unsworn testimony of those
witnesses most knowledgeable about the promulgation of orders, the
circumstances of the weather and the cigars, and the reasonable inferences to
be drawn from them, much less the handwriting on McClellan's copy, all converge
to point to the finding of intent as the probable truth.
While
strange discrepancies do exist in the facts, they can be reasonably reconciled
in light of the totality of known circumstances. First, because the eight
paragraph version of Special Order 191 was misnumbered 190, Robert Chilton,
when he signed it, would not necessarily have corrected it, since the order he
signed authorizing Walter Taylor to leave the army was numbered 191. Second, as
originally written, order 191 was, in fact, a "special" order as
defined by Confederate Regulations, because it dealt solely with the specific
detachment of
Taylor
from the army. In contrast, the ordernumbered 190, was by its terms a "general" order since it
dealt with the movement of the entire army. Someone presented this general
order to A.P. Mason to copy into Chilton's letterbook; in doing so, Mason was
confronted with the fact that, on September 8th, he had previously copied into
the letterbook a four paragraph order labeled "Special Order 190"
which authorized leaves of absences for four disabled officers.[101] Whether on his own initiative, or by instruction by someone, the fact is that
Mason added the text of Special Order 190 to the text of
Taylor
's detachment order. (Chilton's Letterbook) Third, years
later, when Davis queried him about the promulgation of a special order issued
at Frederick, Chilton remembered what a reasonable person would probably have
remembered—a special order was sent by courier to a commander on detached duty,
and since the name of D.H. Hill was known to be recorded on McClellan's copy of
Order 191, Chilton assumed the courier had been sent to Hill; when, in fact,
the courier had been sent to Walker on the Monacacy.
Last,
it is obvious that the credibility of the key members of General Lee's personal
staff is highly suspect. In 1878, Walter Taylor was the first to write publicly
about the incident of the lost order.
Taylor,
of course, could have had no personal knowledge about the issuance of the lost
order, because he had been sent to
Virginia
by General Lee and did not return to
Maryland
until the army had already reached
Sharpsburg
.
To explain the loss of the order in his book,
Taylor
invoked a supposed statement of
Charles Venable's; by writing—"Colonal Venable. . . says in regard to this
matter: 'This is easily explained. One copy was sent directly to Hill from
headquarters. General Jackson sent him a copy.'" Eight years later, in his
book, Memoirs of General Lee, A.L. Long repeated verbatim
Taylor
's quotation of
what Venable supposedly said. Clearly, by their reliance on a hearsay statement
(in Long's case, double hearsay), it is obvious that both
Taylor
and Long did not know from personal
knowledge that a copy of order 191 was actually sent to Hill "from
headquarters." But
Taylor
thought Venable knew. Yet, inexplicitly, Charles Venable, who lived a long time
after the war, never made a public or private statement about his actual
knowledge of the matter, even though he knew
Taylor
and Long had invoked his name as the
one living witness who claimed a copy of the order was sent to Hill from
headquarters.
And
what about Charles Marshall? He never disclosed to anyone what he knew of the
order being sent to Hill. Both he and Venable wrote unpublished narratives of
their experiences as Lee's staff officers, yet both men stopped their
narratives at the point Lee moved his army into
Maryland
. These facts damage the credibility
of
Taylor
's
hearsay statement greatly, because the inference follows reasonably from the
fact of their silence that neither man could bring himself to come forward with
an account of his actual knowledge. Given the undisputed facts of the case, the
reason for this failure is obvious: they knew enough to know that, in bringing
on the battle of
Antietam,
General Lee had
probably used the order as a ruse of war.
They
had good reason to keep their mouths shut. In 1876, two years before
Taylor'sFour Years
with General Lee was published, Louis Phillipe d'Orleans, known as the
Comte de Paris, published the second volume of his work, History of the
Civil War in America. In it he expressed the prevailing public view that
the Battle of Antietam "was a defeat for the Confederates in the triple
view, of tactics, strategy, and politics. . . Th[e] error was in [Lee's]
dividing his forces to capture Harper's Ferry. Had he not done so he could have
fought upon
SouthMountain
or continued the
campaign on the upper
Potomac
. . . so much
blood shed to no purpose for the Confederate cause."[102]
d'Orleans's
1876 view was shared by Major General Frederick Maurice, in 1925, when his book Lee the Soldier was published. "I have condemned Lee's decision to
fight behind the
Antietam,"
Maurice said,
"because no general should fight a battle which is not forced upon him
unless the chances of obtaining decisive results preponderate in his
favor."[103] Another important British war theorist, J.F.C. Fuller, echoed this view when he
wrote, in 1933: "The battle of
Sharpsburg
was a totally unnecessary battle."[104] In the face of such criticism, from Marshall's and Venable's points of view,
how worse would the public perception be of Lee, if they had made known that he
intentionally used a ruse to draw McClellan into the battle? So they kept quiet
about their knowledge of the order, although
Marshall
was quick to challenge the
assumption that the battle was not "forced" on General Lee.
Writing
to the Comte de Paris, in 1877,
Marshall
made the persuasive argument that, after the Union army's defeat at
Bull Run
, General Lee had to fight somewhere:
"The country around
[Bull Run]
within a
compass of fifty miles had been stripped by both sides, and was wholly
incapable of supporting an army. What was General Lee to do?" He wrote.
"His army could not be maintained where it was. . . it was not possible to
make a direct attack upon Washington. . . if he were [to retreat] it would be
taken as an admission. . . that he had no policy but to await such attacks as
the Federals might make."[105] Therefore there was nothing left for General Lee to do but move indirectly
toward the
Shenandoah Valley
, by moving
through
Maryland
.
The
Shenandoah Valley
was the only place left in
Northern Virginia
where Lee's army could live off the
land for an extended period of time. But it could not be reached safely by
marching directly to it. The movement would be recognized by the enemy as a
retreat and it would have left roads to
Richmond
undefended. And General Lee needed to use the Valley as a sanctuary, not a
battleground, for his troops. Thus, General Lee had no reasonable choice but to
keep up the pretense of threatening an offensive against Washington by marching
to Frederick. Once there a battle had to be planned which carried with it the
reasonable probability that the enemy's capacity for combat might be weakened
enough to make him stop fighting—at least long enough for the Rebel Army to
replenish its strength for the offensive again.
Above
all else, battles are tests of military structure; the object is not merely to
kill but to disorganize. As Clausewitz has written, "Getting the better of
the enemy—that is, placing him in position where he has to break off the
engagement—cannot in itself be considered as an objective. Nothing remains,
therefore, but the direct profit gained in the process of destruction. This
gain includes not merely casualties inflicted during the action (which many
times will be equal), but also those which occur as a direct result of the
retreat. . . The really crippling losses, those the vanquished does not share
with the victor, only start with his retreat. . . Thus a victory usually only
starts to gather weight after the issue has already been decided."[106] Lee denied McClellan the real profit of battle by the fierce tenacity of his
defense, which wrecked the Union Army's organization and stopped it cold,
freezing McClellan at the
Potomac
while he
retreated unmolested into the haven of the
Shenandoah
Valley
.
Dwight
D. Eisenhower, in writing of the risk he took in leaving the Allied front
through the Ardennes forest weakly defended, in 1944, said this: "At any
moment from November 1 [1944] onward I could have passed to the defensive along
the whole front and made our lines absolutely secure from attack while we
waited for reinforcements. . . We remained on the offensive and weakened
ourselves where necessary to maintain those offensives. This plan gave the
German opportunity to launch his attack; if giving him the chance is to be
condemned by historians, their condemnation should be directed at me alone."[107] Like Eisenhower, in giving the enemy a chance, Lee took a calculated risk that resulted in the sacrifice of thousands of lives. In both cases, the
sacrifice reaped for the American commander a great battle profit—in
Eisenhower's case the ultimate overwhelming of the German resistance at the
Siegfried Line; in Lee's, the time to replenish his army’s strength to remain
on the offensive deep into 1863. General Lee's use of the lost order made this
possible, and it marks him, with Eisenhower, among
America
's greatest soldiers.