Exceeding Orders

As my regular readers know, I am working on writing a biography of Ulric Dahlgren. I’ve reached an especially interesting phase of his brief but controversial life that demonstrates, in a nutshell, the paradox that was Ulric Dahlgren. On November 7, 1862, Franz Sigel ordered Dahlgren to take 100 hand-picked cavalrymen and go on a reconnaissance in force into the town of Fredericksburg. Making a ride of 50 miles, Dahlgren boldly dashed into the town on November 9, learned the enemy dispositions, skirmished with Confederate cavalry, and then, on the way out of town, burned the Aquia Creek & Fredericksburg Railroad bridges over Potomac and Accokeek Creeks. He then withdrew and made it safely back to Sigel’s headquarters, with a loss of 1 killed and 4 missing. It was a bold and daring raid that contributed accurate intelligence to Burnside as he began his movement toward Fredericksburg. However, he had not been ordered to burn the bridges. Maj. Gen. Samuel P. Heintzelman, who commanded the troops assigned to the defenses of Washington, to which Sigel’s Eleventh Corps was assigned, endorsed and forwarded Dahlgren’s report of this action, with this note: “Respectfully forwarded. A very gallant affair. The burning of the bridges was very unnecessary.”

In fact, it was not only unnecessary, it ended up harming Burnside’s efforts to take the town of Fredericksburg and then caused problems for Herman Haupt and the U. S. Military Railroads. Thus, Dahlgren’s Fredericksburg raid was a mixed bag. It was a bold dash into the town that brought back important military intelligence, but at the same time, it ultimately created problems because he exceeded his orders. This episode plainly foreshadowed the sort of scenario that not only cost him his life in 1864, it also triggered one of the Civil War’s greatest controversies, which still rages to this day.

All of this got me thinking about the ultimate issue of whether an officer who takes the initiative and exceeds his orders, and ultimately causes problems as a consequence, is a problematic officer. In Dahlgren’s case, I think that he was. I think that, in spite of his obvious courage and talent, he tended to be a bit of a cowboy. For instance, after years of evaluating the question of the so-called Dahlgren Papers found on his body when he was killed, I have come to the conclusion that it’s quite likely that he cooked up the scheme to kidnap and assassinate Davis and his cabinet on his own, that he didn’t tell anyone (although it is possible that he told–and got approval from–Stanton), and that in so doing, he was exceeding his orders. It’s the burning of the bridges at Fredericksburg on a much larger scale.

In a heirarchical organization such as an army–which depends on discipline and the very concept of subordinate officers obeying the lawful orders of their superiors–there is not a lot of room for cowboying. In fact, an insubordinate junior officer, no matter how talented, has no value to an army if that officer cannot be relied upon to obey the lawful orders of his superior. Such is the case with Nathan Bedford Forrest, whom I have demonstrated was largely useless in any capacity but independent command because he refused to serve under almost anybody else’s orders.

At the same time, officers have to have some latitude to interpret and apply their orders as dictated by circumstances. If, for instance, an objective has already been destroyed, or cannot be reached for whatever reason, that officer must then do what he can in order to comply with at least the spirit of his orders, if not the letter of them. Army doctrine teaches this; improvisation is an important part of the training of the modern military officer.

I have, therefore, been forced to face the ultimate question with respect to Ully Dahlgren: given his well-documented tendency to cowboy, I can’t help but wonder what sort of a military career he would have had if he had survived the raid on Richmond in March 1864. In a lot of ways, I think he was like George A. Custer: courageous to a fault, who threw caution to the wind, who was a charismatic leader, but who ultimately was too tragically flawed by his own boundless ambition to fulfill the promise of greatness. Like Custer, his boundless self-confidence, courage, and boundless ambition cost him his life in combat, and both died lonely and ultimately useless deaths and suffered the mutilations of their corpses as a consequence.

All of which makes me wonder just how many other officers met the same fate with their careers…..