Second Bull Run

I also forgot to mention that the brigade became known as the Iron Brigade during the Antietam campaign, after their action at South Mountain

Just a word on behalf of poor John Pope. Yes, particularly in his younger days he was self-centered and a bit of a blowhard, and yes he was utterly over his head at Second Manassas. All that said, however, the man had a number of admirable characteristics. After reading Return to Bull Run — which I agree is an outstanding book — I was intrigued by Pope and read Cozzens’s biography, General John Pope: A Life for the Nation, which I highly recommend.

Pope’s post-Manassas Bull Run career confirms that, while Pope could be extremely annoying at times, he mellowed over time, and he was a man of substantial talent in other respects, provided he was kept away from the battlefield. Grant and others recognized that he was a highly competent administrator, rewarding him with substantial commands in the West, punctuated by diligent and conscientious service as District commander of the Third District (Alabama, Georgia and Florida) during Reconstruction.

He also proved a highly perceptive and sympathetic analyst of the “Indian problem”, recognizing that the cycle of treaty, followed by renewed White incursion, gave the Indians little choice but to fight. As early as 1865, he perceptively described the cycle of tragedy and foresaw its “dreadful” end:

“Lately large reinforcements have been organized which are now moving against the Indians in the hope to restore peace, but in my judgment with little prospect of doing so. The first demand of the Indian is that the white man shall not come into his country. How can we promise this, with any purpose of fulfilling the obligation, unless we prohibit emigration west or south of the Missouri River? So far from being prepared to make such an engagement with the Indian, the government is every day stimulating emigration and its resulting wrong to the Indian. Where under such circumstances is the Indian to go, and what is to become of him?

“My duties require me to protect the emigration, the mails, and the settlements against hostile acts of the Indians. I have no power under the laws of the United States to do this except by force. As the Indians are more and more driven to desperation, the end is sure and dreadful to contemplate.”

In 1887, after his retirement as Major General in 1886, he wrote sadly:

“There is no rest for the Indian on this continent except in the grave to which he is being driven with accelerated speed every day. I used to think something in accordance with the ordinary dictates of humanity might be devised for him and carried into execution by the government but that hope has long been abandoned and death alone appears to offer relief from an outrage which will be a stain on this government and this people forever.”

One must admire a man who was capable of expressing such sentiments.

General:

Pope does deserve better. I do not necessarily agree that he in particular was in over his head in Virginia–after all, what Union general wasn’t before 1864? To be sure, there were many unpleasant aspects of Pope’s personality. But more weight should be given to the fact that the summer of 1862 was perhaps the most complicated time politically, militarily, and personally of the war for the North. I also think Pope is a victim of the fact that we are too quick to blame the generals in the East for military failure; but where is the problem? The generals change both in name and character, from the conservative McClellan to the radical Pope to the squishy Burnside to the aggressive Hooker to the cautious Meade, but there are two constants: inability to achieve decisive success and the character of the civilian leadership. Moreover, it should be noted that, in general, Union military success was usually in equal measure to how far a particular theater was from Washington. This is not, of course, to say that the Union generals did not make errors and create their own friction. They all did, but the “what fools they were” school of Civil War historiography provides an inadequate picture of the war.

But back to Pope. In order to get the job of commanding the Army of Virginia and do it effectively, he really had no choice but to conspicuously demonstrate his sympathy with the anti-McClellan crowd in Washington. In the process, however, he antagonized much of the officer corps and effectively commit himself to conducting operations aggressively, even though caution would have served him better. Sometimes what you got to do to get the job compromises your ability to do the job when you got it. Moreover, he was saddled with subordinates (Sigel, McDowell, Banks, Porter, Heintzelman) who were questionable for varying reasons, facing an Army of Northern Virginia that was truly at its peak, and had a somewhat unclear mission. Was concentrating the Armies of Virginia and Potomac the paramount priority (certainly McClellan and his associates believed this to be the case), or was seizing and creating opportunities to fight and beat the Confederates as Pope promised? And at a critical point in the campaign, when Pope needed guidance on this point and the ability to exchange information with his superiors, his communications were cut. But despite this, he skillfully thwarted Lee’s maneuvers (aided at first by the orders seized at Verdiersville, luck that the Union created by authorizing Buford’s raid) along the Rapidan and Rappahannock, conceived a sound plan for dealing with Jackson’s raid on Manassas Junction, and I think generally made the best decisions he could based on what he knew. True, he left Thoroughfare Gap open to Longstreet, dismissed evidence of Longstreet’s arrival, and developed his plans on 29-30 August based on faulty perceptions of the situation. But leaving Thoroughfare Gap relatively open was not necessarily fatal, and the latter is at least understandable. The officers advising Pope of Longstreet’s presence the morning of 30 August were Porter and Reynolds, both of whom were part of the McClellan crowd and Pope’s suspicion of this clique had been reinforced in recent days by Porter’s actions and warnings from the ever-noxious Kearny. Even then, were it not for McDowell’s awful blunder on the afternoon of 30 August, it seems unlikely that Longstreet’s assault would have achieved as much as it did. And even then, Pope was still able to get back across Bull Run and link up with the two corps of the Army of the Potomac that (after much unseemly foot-dragging by McClellan, another factor that must be taken into account) had finally marched out from the Washington defenses. In the process, Pope inflicted a significant beating on Jackson’s command and Longstreet’s that in the cold light of attritional analysis (which makes it possible to even see a silver lining in the Fredericksburg debacle), was worth something to the Union cause.

One of Pope’s problems in history and memory, as I argue in a footnote in McClellan’s War, is that the Radical Republicans did not make the kind of effort to rehabilitate him that they would for Fremont and Hooker–in part because they found a new hero in the latter. As Hennessy pointed out in his incomparable book, Second Manassas was, next to Gettysburg, perhaps the most controversial campaign during the decades after the war. I do not think it is fair to say that Second Manassas has not generated recent interest or does not receive respect; I just think Hennessy did such an outstanding job that there has been no point revisiting it in a major way–although Joseph Harsh does so superbly in Confederate Tide Rising.

ESR

“Second Bull Run was probably Lee’s greatest victory; there was no other instance where an army ceased to exist as a consequence of a battlefield defeat (other than through surrender, such as at Vicksburg). Yet, Pope’s army was that soundly beaten.”

I think you’re over the top here. Pope’s army did cease to exist as an administrative unit becuase it was merged with the AotP. But the Corps that had composed it continued intact. Hooker was given command of what had been McDowell’s Corps and it played a prominent role at Antietam. Under Reynolds, this Corps would go on to Fredricksburg, Chancellorville, and Gettysburg.

Banks Corps also served at Antietam under Mansfield, after that under Slocum. Sigel’s Corps was quite beat up at Manassas, but during the Antiteam campaign it rested and strengthened in northern Virginia. Command later switched to Howard. These two were renumbered as the 11th and 12th and would be at Chancelloreville and Gettsburg then went west to Chattanooga. They were then combined to form the 20th and served in the Atlanta campaign, the March to the Sea, etc.