The Turning point of the war- 3 cigars and the Lost Order
By: Wendell Small
The month of September 1862 began as the low point of the American Civil War for the North. The South was superior on the battlefield and demonstrating a spirit of resistance which boded the separation of the former United States into two rival nations. Before the month of September ended, the eventual defeat of the South became inevitable.
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| Second Battle of Bull Run Map |
In New York and Indiana, potential Copperhead plots and sabotage terrorized both official and public opinion. Confederate armies in Kentucky under Braxton Bragg had taken Lexington and were threatening Louisville and Cincinnati, where martial law was proclaimed. A third major Confederate army under Earl Van Dorn, somewhere in Mississippi, conjured up additional nightmares for the frightened, who visualized this army over-running the western areas of the Union. In Maryland, where memories of the April 1861 riots in Baltimore against Federal soldiers were still clear and bitter, there was widespread apprehension of a rebel uprising attended by the loss of the state and the isolation of Washington.
Among the European powers, sentiment was building toward mediation in the war and recognition of the Confederacy, if not toward actual intervention on its behalf. The British were provoked to these attitudes by the shortage of cotton for their textile mills, resulting in unemployment and deprivation for hundreds of thousands of workers; by a preference of the British nobility for the aristocratic, Anglo-Saxon South over the heterogeneous, "mongrelized" North; by the desire of the British Government to see two rival pygmies instead of a single united giant on the Canadian frontier; and by general national anger toward supposedly hostile Northern actions such as the blockade and the removal by a Yankee warship of two Confederate agents from a British mail steamer, the Trent. Recognition of the Confederacy by Her Majesty's Government and a negotiated peace on the basis of Southern independence loomed as a startling reality to the North in the shambles of its defeated army. Britain would have been followed by Napoleon III of France, who had the assurance of Confederate support and eventual recognition of any French conquests in Mexico in return for his recognition of the Confederacy effectively revoking the Monroe Doctrine.
The South responded to news of the great victory at Second Bull Run with a demand that the war now be carried into Yankee territory. Newspapers in every Southern city spoke for their readers when they clamored for an immediate invasion of the North. Sentiments similar to those stirring the average Southern citizen also motivated the leaders of the Confederacy. Lee agreed that Southern military success had put the Confederacy in a position to state its political objectives leading to an honorable peace, but he still felt that one more victory over the Federal troops and this one a victory north of the Potomac would so clearly prove the strength of the Confederate position that the North must accede to any demand for peace. Such a victory might well affect the coming Congressional elections in the North as well as influence the wavering British and French Governments to recognize Southern independence. An offer of peace after a great victory would be considered a magnanimous gesture by a victorious power rather than a sign of weakness by a frightened bureaucracy.
To achieve these political ends, Lee had to gain another battlefield victory over the Federals. By taking the initiative, Lee could draw his opponents, far less skillful than he, whoever they might be, into a war of maneuver in which he could win on a field and at a time of his choosing. Lee also intended to seize or to destroy the Pennsylvania Railroad bridge over the Susquehanna River at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, severing the connecting artery between Washington and the West.
With a victorious, battle-tested army under successful veteran commanders, Lee would be able to defeat the Federals. Lee also would be able to destroy the railroad bridge at Harrisburg if he reached it without having drawn the Federals into battle or to seize the bridge if he reached it after a victorious battle.
Although his army was relatively small, Lee divided it into several parts, with the Federal garrisons at Harper's Ferry and Martinsburg in the Shenandoah Valley as targets for three units. Two other units were to proceed toward Boonsboro and Hagerstown. In his Special Orders 191 of 9 September 1862, Lee drew up his order of march and made his troop dispositions. Each of the key commanders mentioned in the order was sent copy of the order. James ("Pete") Longstreet carefully read his copy and chewed it. John G. Walker pinned his copy to the inside of his jacket. Thomas J. ("Stonewall") Jackson meticulously burned his copy.
There was a certain confusion in Jackson's mind as to whether Daniel Harvey Hill was still under his command or directly under Lee. To be certain that Hill received a copy of Special Orders 191, Jackson, in his own hand, sent Hill a copy. Hill admitted receiving this copy. Unfortunately, Lee, considering Hill no longer under Jackson but directly under himself, also sent Hill a copy. Hill claimed that he never received this copy.
On Saturday, 13 September, the hastily reorganized Federal Army of the Potomac under the command of George B. McClellan moved into Frederick and set up camp on the outskirts of the town. Colonel Silas Colgrove, the commander of the 27th Indiana Volunteers, Third Brigade, First Division, Twelfth Army Corps, ordered his men to stack arms in the same area which had previously been occupied by the men under the command of Daniel Harvey Hill.
While resting in this area, Private Barton W. Mitchell and Sergeant John M. Bloss, both of the 27th Indiana, found a copy of Lee's Special Orders 191 in a paper wrapped around three cigars. The order was authenticated by Colonel Samuel E. Pitman, First Division Adjutant-General, who recognized the signature of Lee's Assistant Adjutant-General as that of Colonel Robert H. Chilton, with whom Pitman had served in Detroit. The order then was brought to McClellan, who set off to destroy Lee in detail.
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| Barton W. Mitchell marker |
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| Picture of Barton W. Mitchell |
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| Sergeant John M. Bloss |
McClellan, dilatory by nature and convinced by his faulty intelligence that Lee had an army about 50 percent larger than the Army of the Potomac, was not likely to have attacked Lee. Even with Lee's orders before him - orders dividing Lee's army - McClellan inched cautiously, but swiftly for him, forward.
Lee, stunned by the relatively swift advance by McClellan, did his best to reassemble quickly his scattered units to present a united front to the Federals, and on Wednesday, 17 September 1862, the Battle of Antietam took place. Lee, forced to fight on the defensive for the first time during the war and incapable of maneuver, was able to stop the Federal attack only with great difficulty and great losses. On 19 September, Lee withdrew into Virginia, and the North was free of the invader.
The railroad bridge at Harrisburg was not cut, and the North was able to maintain its fundamental east-west link. Maryland, eager to follow a winner, not only did not secede but even went so far as to increase its effort on behalf of the Union. With Maryland remaining loyal, Washington was neither surrounded nor isolated, and the fear of invasion among Northern states proved to be groundless.
The Copperhead movement gradually lost strength as the war progressed. Even at the polls this movement proved to be weak as Lincoln's Republicans hung on in the Congressional elections of 1862 enough to remain in power.
Lincoln, who had resolved upon the Emancipation Proclamation as a military, political, and psychological measure necessary to insure the ultimate conquest of the Confederacy by the Union, leaped upon Antietam as the victory which he needed to give meaning to the Proclamation. Even though the Proclamation was a political gesture, in victory it seemed more idealistic - and realistic - than if it had followed a defeat on Northern territory. After a Union defeat the Proclamation would have seemed to be nothing more than the empty oratory of a beaten demagogue rather than the noble gesture of a confident leader.
The recognition which the South had expected from abroad was contingent upon a Confederate victory, and the Southern retreat from Maryland was no such victory. The retreat led to second thoughts; second thoughts, to inaction; inaction, to continued nonrecognition - right through to the end of the war. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, moreover, swayed foreign public opinion to the North, which now seemed to stand for the oppressed rather than as the oppressor of a popular revolt.
Finally, Southern hopes which had been raised to the heights with the victory at Second Bull Run and with the transfer of fighting from Southern to Northern soil changed to utter frustration in less than three weeks. Although the spirit of the South was as resolute after Antietam as before, a gnawing doubt now marched side by side with this spirit.
Lee unequivocally blamed the failure of the invasion of Maryland on the lost order. At the very least, if McClellan had not obtained a copy of Lee's orders, Lee could have reunited his army long before the dilatory McClellan would have moved, and Lee could have re-equipped it with some of the hoard from Harpers Ferry and given his 10,000 or more stragglers time to rejoin his army. Thus refurbished, Lee could have gone on to Harrisburg, destroyed the bridge, and sought out McClellan.
The cumulative effects of a victory by Lee over McClellan in Maryland would have been devastating to the North. Lee could have moved on to Harrisburg and could have menaced Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington.
Washington, isolated by a secessionist Maryland could hardly have remained the capital. Previously prepared evacuation plans might have moved the Government to Philadelphia or New York while Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, graciously doling out merciful terms to a stunned city, rode triumphantly down Pennsylvania Avenue.
Lincoln, with defeat on the battlefield and at the polls a haunting reality, would hardly have dared to propose the Emancipation Proclamation. An independent Confederacy, badly in need of a labor force, might have maintained the institution of slavery until the increased use of the machine made slavery an expensive economic anachronism.
If secession had succeeded, Great Britain could have obtained the cotton that its textile mills needed and eventually could have established a successful partnership with the Confederate States of America. The South, led by an aristocracy with a lineage as proud if not as old as Britain's nobility could have been accepted as a peer and an ally by its British cousins.
The Yankees by the very similarity of their economic interests could never be a partner or an ally of the British but must always be a rival against whom war might very well erupt. Finally, although the Union had an Anglo-Saxon heritage, it was a melting pot with many social customs alien to the British, who found Southern Anglo-Saxon homogeneity more palatable.
Napoleon III, having recognized the Confederacy, would have received a carte blanche from the South to pursue his conquest of Mexico. The North, defeated and confused, would have been able to do very little to prevent Napoleon from succeeding.
Tradition and a considerable body of opinion have held that Gettysburg, not Antietam, is the more nearly decisive battle and the turning point of the Civil War. However, the relative positions of the North and South at both these junctures in history clearly seem to point up September 1862 as a period far more critical for the North and far more favorable for the South than July 1863.
As a final historical note, although the circumstances of how the Orders came to be Lost are still debated today, and the responsibility for the loss has never been accurately fixed on any individual, no one knows what happened to the cigars.
