Second Battle of Bull Run : An Introduction
US Civil War
“I have come to you from the West, where we have always seen the backs of our enemies – from an army whose business it has been to seek the adversary, and so beat him when found, whose policy has been attack and not defense. . . The strongest position a soldier should desire to occupy is one from which he can most easily advance against the enemy. Let us study the probable lines of retreat of our opponents, and leave our own to take care of themselves. Let us look before us and not behind. Success and glory are in the advance, shame and disaster lurk in the rear.”
U.S. Maj. Gen. John Pope, in an address to the Army of Virginia, 27 July 1862
. . . . . . . . . . .
“He ought to be suppressed if possible.”
C.S. Gen. Robert E. Lee to Stonewall Jackson on Pope, 27 July 1862
Abraham Lincoln, in the time since McClellan had been relieved of overall command and he and Secretary Stanton had taken to running matters, had learned a good deal about military strategy, often by tragic means. He saw how a Stonewall Jackson could beat several disjointed Union forces, denied the guiding hand of a single commander, in detail.
There was a lesson here, and Lincoln grasped it while Lee was making his plans to deal with McClellan only a few miles from Richmond. What was needed above all was a man to tie all the Union forces together in northern and western Virginia and make them a formidable fighting army that could advance upon the capital from the north. A visit to the side of that venerable soldier, Winfield Scott, confirmed Lincoln’s views; Scott avidly counseled such a concentration.
Consequently, on June 26, the day Lee’s battering ram began to run its course against Porter at Mechanicsville, the Departments of the Rappahannock and the Shenandoah were dissolved. The idled forces of McDowell, Banks, and Fremont were to be placed under John Pope. Here was a fresh face brought from the western theatre, where things had been going far better for the Union cause.
Pope was one of those men who had been winning some victories, particularly at prickly Island Ten, and had come out of his latest campaign there, that of Corinth, with laurels. Just about everyone, from Halleck on down, seemed to have a good word about Pope: energetic, decisive, confident; so Lincoln learned when he looked in the loyal Kentuckian’s direction. He also had the distinction of having third of the illustrious West Point class of 1842, far ahead of worthies such as James Longstreet, and had received a brevet as an engineer in the Mexican War. Surely, he was the one who could mold together these marginally organized, somewhat disheartened levies.
Pope came east, moved in with vigor and took over, but not without disturbing intentionally the general current of affairs. John C. Fremont angrily called attention to the fact that his own commission and rank (and for that matter McDowell and Banks’), were quite senior to the upstart Pope, and said he had no intention of serving under him. Moreover, Pope had operated under Fremont in Missouri in 1861, and neither had much use for the other.
The Washington authorities decided that perhaps Fremont was not so politically important after all, and when he went so far as to submit his resignation from command of his department, it was quietly accepted as an easy way of getting rid of him. It happened that a goodly percentage of Fremont’s troops, especially in Louis Blenker’s division, were of German extraction and recent immigrants, like many in Fremont’s army in Missouri the year before, so another politically appointed soldier was elevated to command them: Franz Sigel, the old subordinate of Fremont’s who had been so instrumental in enlisting the Germans. Sigel would turn out to be no more competent on eastern battlefields than he had been on western ones, but that was all in the future.
Although Banks and McDowell also ranked Pope, there was no more clamor about his appointment. The three new corps to be commanded by themselves and Sigel were to form an equally new Army of Virginia (not named for a river), along with other men scattered widely within a triangle encompassed by Fredericksburg, Harper’s Ferry, and Staunton. Pope immediately began to pull them together, as McClellan’s chances of victory to the southeast dwindled. His instructions were to advance down the rail line of the Orange and Alexandria toward Charlottesville, thus severing the Virginia Central Railroad from the Valley, and pressuring Lee to dispatch forces from Richmond. At the right moment, Pope might even descend upon the Confederate capital itself. At all times Washington was to be adequately protected.
It was the old story of McDowell helping McClellan again, except that now there would be a better chance of success because few Rebels seemed to be in the way. Pope insisted that McClellan be made to attack Lee if his army received strong resistance, for he had no intention of taking on Lee’s larger army of victorious veterans alone. And Lee was sure to send at least some of it back north if Little Mac lay dormant, as Pope was afraid he would.
Unfortunately, the loyal Kentuckian got off on the wrong foot entirely with his disgruntled soldiers, crying out as they were for effective leadership. In an address that became famous, he derided them and remarked that where he came from, in the west, Union soldiers saw only the backs of their enemies. The Army of Virginia, no matter what had happened previously, was now to look ahead and not behind, leaving such matters of supply and logistics in the background. Pope grandly announced to the press that from now on, his headquarters would be “in the saddle”.96
He then began to advocate things that had never been done to any great extent before: namely, the use of the verdant Virginia landscape to feed his army, supposedly in exchange for U.S. greenbacks; and some rather harsh measures against Southern civilians living behind enemy lines. The latter involved forced oaths of allegiance, curfews, and the like, none of which was likely to set well with the local population and its array of partisan units.
The most extreme, though, were directives which held civilians liable to pay for property destruction by guerrillas, and the deportation or arrest of anyone voicing disloyal viewpoints in public. In the end, Pope would have very little time to put his ideas into practice, but some of them were actually the wave of the future in occupied Southern lands at the hands of Sherman and others.
It was another sign of how the war was inexorably changing its character.
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All Hell: America’s Civil War – Volume I – Beginnings
Second Battle of Bull Run
