The Commanders

by Robert M. Utley

  Ord’s desperate need for money to sustain his family led him to New York and ultimately a position of surveyor with the Mexican Central Railroad. Docking in Vera Cruz, he was met by the minister of war, Gerónimo Treviño, and his wife, the former Roberta Ord. Ord was feted in Mexico City and pursued his new calling in the Mexican wilderness. In the summer of 1883 he boarded a steamer for New York to deal with company business. While at sea he and other passengers and crew were struck by yellow fever. In Havana, Cuba, Ord was transferred to a hospital, where he died on July 22, 1883. Interred in Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington, D.C., his body was reburied in 1900 in Arlington National Cemetery.

  Edward Ord led a checkered military career. As an antebellum subaltern in the West, he distinguished himself as an Indian fighter. During the Civil War, he achieved outstanding performance in the Vicksburg and Appomattox campaigns and as commander of the Army of the James. In the Shenandoah Valley and other operations, however, he displayed a want of judgment and intolerance for inconvenience unbecoming a general. As a department commander in the postwar West, he proved mediocre or worse. The Department of the Platte offered few problems during his tenure. The Department of California demanded attention to Apache Indian hostilities in Arizona, but Ord exercised little influence over subordinate officers. His stature as a department commander rests almost entirely on his five years heading the Department of Texas, 1875–80.

  In Texas border troubles constituted Ord’s only serious challenge. He handled those principally through his subordinates, Shafter and Mackenzie. Both were competent, and he supported both in their violation of Mexican territory. He deserves credit for gaining popularity with the people of Texas, for his work with the Texas congressional delegation, and above all for cementing consequential friendship with General Gerónimo Treviño. The cross-border operations launched under his orders, (especially the one led by Mackenzie), combined with the cooperation of General Treviño, led to resolution of the border issue.

  Ord’s eccentricity, however, made his years turbulent. His repeated violation of the chain of command by writing directly to General Sherman, bypassing General Sheridan, kept his headquarters in constant confusion. It also stamped Ord as a maverick general. Sheridan’s opinion of Ord as spasmodic, scheming, obstinate, insubordinate, indiscreet, and unpredictable may have exaggerated his flaws but contained some elements of truth. As commander of the Department of Texas, and therefore as a department commander, General Ord emerges as a mediocrity.

  Brigadier General John Pope, commanding Department of the Northwest, 1862–1865; Department of the Missouri, 1870–1883.

  Brady Collection, U.S. Signal Corps (photo BA-230), National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  JOHN POPE

  John Pope presents something of an enigma. Until he reached the age of forty, when he began his service against western Indians, he displayed a blazing volcanic temperament. After assuming command of a department in 1862, his volatility subsided. History largely remembers the volcanic John Pope: the arrogant, bombastic, vain, ambitious, opinionated, insubordinate, mendacious, scheming self-promoter. Less well known are the twenty-one years (1862–83) when he commanded a western department and briefly a division. He lost none of his verbosity but commanded effectively and thoughtfully. Perhaps symbolic of the transformation, in 1870 he replaced his large black beard with a neat mustache.

  John Pope was born on March 16, 1822, in Louisville, Kentucky. His father and mother were both well educated and transmitted their love of books and learning to young John. Nathaniel Pope represented the new Territory of Illinois in Congress, then served nineteen years as the only federal judge in Illinois. With his firm political alliances, Judge Pope easily secured for his son an appointment to West Point Military Academy. Entering in 1838, John Pope graduated in 1842, seventeenth in his class of fifty-six, a ranking that allowed him to select his branch of service. He chose the elite Corps of Topographical Engineers.1

  Lieutenant Pope’s first postings were in the East, from Florida to Maine. His assignments were uncongenial mainly because he lobbied with politicians to get himself assigned to congenial locations. This angered the chief of the Topographical Corps, Colonel John J. Abert, but the colonel’s increasingly ominous reprimands failed to quell Pope’s blatant insubordination. He continued to do as he pleased, despite the growing peril to his career. The Mexican War temporarily saved Pope from Abert’s wrath. One of seven topographical officers assigned to General Zachary Taylor’s army, Pope distinguished himself through his topographical competence and his battlefield bravery, both at the Battle of Monterey and at the Battle of Buena Vista. The two battles earned him brevets of first lieutenant and captain.

  The postwar years focused public interest on the West, especially the southwestern lands acquired from Mexico. The topographical engineers played a dominant role in the West. With the issue of a railroad route to the Pacific hotly debated, Brevet Captain Pope was eager to be sent west with his colleagues. Colonel Abert assigned him to Minnesota instead, where he spent two years making a nuisance of himself and writing pleading letters to politicians. Eventually Abert ordered Pope to New Mexico Territory in 1851 as chief topographical officer.

  Pope’s first assignment was survey work on the Santa Fe Trail. In his reports he belittled the maps of Captain John C. Frémont, an Abert protégé, and undertook a lengthy treatise on the proper placement of military posts, couched in language that proclaimed himself an expert. Colonel Abert erupted with a severe reprimand, but it had no effect on Pope. With the support of the department commander, he won the post of chief of the topographical survey of the 32nd parallel route for a Pacific Railway. Thereafter he became enamored with the potential of drilling artesian wells on the Texas Staked Plains and won congressional backing to experiment with this technology, which in the end failed.

  Yielding to the plight of officers denied promotion for lack of seniority. Congress had enacted legislation that elevated Pope to captain on July 1, 1856, by virtue of fourteen years of continuous service. His artesian project occupied him until 1859, when he was assigned to Cincinnati to design lighthouses for the Great Lakes.

  CIVIL WAR

  Captain Pope’s station in Cincinnati afforded a convenient platform from which to cultivate political connections and led to marriage into a wealthy and prominent family. As the secession winter of 1860–61 unfolded, Pope appointed himself an authority on the crisis. He penned long letters to his fellow Illinoisan Abraham Lincoln, now president-elect living in Springfield. With characteristic prolixity, Pope told Lincoln what he had to do, in both military and civil matters. Rather than openly resenting Pope’s audacity, Lincoln invited him to journey to Washington, D.C., aboard the train bearing him to the inaugural. Pope also lectured bombastically on current events. In one lecture, reported in the newspapers, he denounced the still-incumbent President James Buchanan. Publicly maligning his commander-in-chief earned Pope summons to a court-martial, which the president generously rescinded.

  After Fort Sumter fell in April 1861, Pope lobbied vigorously for preferment. When the governor of Illinois appointed him mustering officer for the state regiments being formed, he carried out this duty efficiently and pushed hard for high rank. In May, through political friends, he gained appointment as brigadier general of volunteers, but this was not enough. He wanted President Lincoln to grant him a brigadier’s commission in the Regular Army. Lincoln declined, stoking Pope’s fury and fueling a letter directly to the president accusing him of lying.

  Pope’s indiscretion could have led to a court-martial, but he was saved by his commander, Major General George B. McClellan, who saved him with orders to proceed to Alton, Illinois, and take command of the six Illinois regiments that he had mustered into the service. The move embroiled Pope in the chaos of Missouri, overrun with guerrilla bands and Confederate partisans. With competence and ingenuity, he achieved a fine record there. At the same time, he wante
d senators to see him as a true son of Illinois. He therefore lobbied to bring all Illinois regiments into one command, so large that it would perforce require a major general to command it--and a Regular Army major general at that.

  As Pope worked toward this implausible goal, he found himself under the command of Major General John C. Frémont, who imposed martial law and badly mismanaged the Missouri operations. Sensing that Frémont’s days were numbered, Pope campaigned to replace him. Instead, on November 19, 1861, Major General Henry Halleck took command of the Department of Missouri. Pope worked well under Halleck during the balance of the fighting in Missouri. He commanded the Union forces in the Battle of Blackwater River on December 19, 1861, a victory that helped clear the southwestern part of the state and opened the way for the decisive Battle of Pea Ridge in April 1862.2

  While Pope continued his efforts to secure a Regular Army rank of brigadier general and disparaged President Lincoln for not granting it, developments in Halleck’s command opened the way for a singular triumph. General Ulysses S. Grant took the Confederate forts Henry and Donelson, prompting a Confederate withdrawal south from Columbus, Kentucky, and fortification of an island in the Mississippi River to prevent Union use of the river. Wanting the river cleared as far south as Memphis, Tennessee, Halleck offered Pope command of an expedition on February 18, 1862, charged with taking Island No. 10 and the nearby town of New Madrid, Missouri, and thus opening the river to Union shipping. Island No. 10 lay upstream from New Madrid but was actually south of town because of the huge southward loop in the river called Kentucky Bend.

  Halleck had concentrated troops at Commerce, Missouri, with still more to come, but Pope did not wait. With eight thousand infantry and a contingent of cavalry and artillery, he marched the Army of the Mississippi south from Commerce on February 28. For forty miles a narrow corduroy road to New Madrid cut through flooded fields and spreading swamps. With rain and snow drenching the green infantrymen and the narrow road forcing many to march through mud and swamps, the exhausted mud-caked soldiers reached flat dry land around New Madrid on March 3.

  Pope confronted a formidable array of defense works sealing New Madrid against the Mississippi River. Two strong fortresses linked by trenches harbored five Confederate infantry regiments and twenty-one heavy cannon. Supporting the land forces were six enemy gunboats in the river behind the town. Up the river (south) Island No. 10 bristled with nineteen guns and a floating battery of nine guns.

  Unwilling to launch a frontal assault against such heavy defenses, Pope sent back to Halleck for heavy siege guns. He then dispatched a brigade south to take position at Point Pleasant, opposite Island No. 10. Shelled by enemy gunboats, the brigade pulled back out of range but then advanced when the vessels left, only to repeat the movement when the gunboats returned.

  The siege guns arrived on March 12, and Pope began to bombard New Madrid the next day. Two days of heavy shelling persuaded the enemy to withdraw. After spiking their cannon, they slipped out of their defenses under cover of a rainy night and abandoned New Madrid to Pope.

  Flag Officer Andrew H. Foote, commanding the Western Flotilla of six gunboats, was supposed to cooperate with Pope but remained at Cairo, Illinois, repairing damages sustained in the battles against forts Henry and Donelson; Foote therefore refused Pope’s pleas by contending that he was not ready. Finally, on March 15, Foote’s fleet arrived off Island No. 10. Pope wanted him to slip two or three gunboats past the island at night and proceed to New Madrid to bombard Confederate shore batteries. Pope had adopted a new scheme for getting his army across the Mississippi to attack the island: dig a canal from New Madrid to the river to ferry his units to the east bank of the river and take the island from the rear. Aside from the near impossibility of such a project in a flooded country, Pope needed Foote’s guns to neutralize Confederate shore batteries that would hamper construction. Foote refused and settled instead for a steady bombardment of the island.

  Despite the terrain obstacles, Pope’s engineers prevailed. A day before the canal’s completion on March 30, Flag Officer Foote allowed a gunboat to run the island batteries at night. It succeeded, as did a second. Pope summoned a fleet of transports to carry his army through the canal and across the river. When the gunboats destroyed the rebel shore batteries, the prospect of defending Island No. 10 against such odds subdued the Confederates, who surrendered on April 8, 1862.

  General Pope could boast—as he did—of a significant victory: opening the Mississippi to Union vessels nearly to Memphis and taking 5,000 prisoners of war, 123 cannon, and huge stores of arms and ammunition, all with only 32 casualties. He had already been promoted to major general of Volunteers, but once more he enlisted his supportive senators to influence the president to reward him with a major general’s commission in the Regular Army. Lincoln responded that such commissions “are not as plentiful as blackberries.”3

  Meanwhile General Grant had fought the Battle of Shiloh at great cost and advanced toward Corinth, Mississippi. Halleck himself assumed overall command, leaving Pope’s Army of the Mississippi to align with two other armies and form the Union line. Rain and mud slowed the approach to Corinth, but Pope got ahead of the other two armies and fought one engagement. An angry Halleck pulled him back to the line and ordered the entire force to dig in. Pope undertook his own movement with a cavalry raid south of Corinth to tear up the railroad, and on May 31, 1862, the enemy abandoned Corinth.

  Pope’s role in the Corinth campaign was largely to operate beyond Halleck’s instructions, quarrel with fellow generals, and cultivate the press, but the nation and his own troops knew him now as an aggressive fighter. On June 19, on leave with his family, he received a telegram from the secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, summoning him to Washington. In the capital the secretary informed Pope that he had been selected to command a newly styled Army of Virginia. Its purpose was to unite the two corps unsuccessfully fighting Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley with the corps of General Irvin McDowell to the east, in northern Virginia. The new army’s mission was to protect Washington, D.C., defend the valley, and disrupt the vital railroad link to the valley. Unknown to Pope, Stanton and the president had another purpose: they sought a general who would fight, in contrast to General McClellan on the Virginia Peninsula. Pope tried to decline the offer, contending that he would be commanding generals who ranked him and that he wished to retain his army command in the West, but Lincoln decreed that Pope would remain in the East.

  Pope’s corps commanders not only ranked him but were inept if not incompetent. Franz Sigel, Nathaniel Banks, and Irvin McDowell had all proved their shortcomings on the battlefield. Sigel was a general because he was German and Banks because he was a political power in Massachusetts. Only McDowell, despite his frigid personality, served Pope well. Pope’s nemesis, however, was General McClellan, almost inert on the Peninsula because he vastly overrated his opposition and could not have the reinforcements that he demanded. Each detested the other. Pope regarded McClellan as a fool, and McClellan resented Pope’s intrusion into his domain.

  On July 14, 1862, before leaving Washington, D.C., to take the field himself, Pope issued a proclamation to his army that produced a furious backlash. He had come from the West, he wrote, where the armies had always seen the backs of the enemy and where the aim was attack and not defense. He wanted no talk of lines of retreat, bases of supply, or holding strong positions. His men should study the enemy’s lines of retreat. They should regard strong positions as those from which to advance. Look before, not behind, he admonished.

  This critique of the eastern armies by a westerner, whose armies were largely from the western states, earned Pope a largely hostile response from an army waiting to follow him into battle. It also produced an angry reaction in the newspapers. General McClellan and his Army of the Potomac were especially wrathful at the implication of their inferiority, but Pope’s greatest problem was the alienation of his own Army of Virginia. Poorly equipped and supplied, demorali
zed by Stonewall Jackson, and badly commanded, that army now had to submit to an alien general who seemed to hold it in contempt.

  General Robert E. Lee drew units from the lines facing McClellan east of Richmond and amassed a defense force centered on Gordonsville to screen the Virginia Central Railway, which connected to the Shenandoah Valley. General Halleck, now general-in-chief, instructed McClellan to abandon the Peninsula and join Pope to confront Lee. While waiting for McClellan at Culpepper, Pope was to mark time by keeping Lee engaged but not bringing on battle.

  On August 7, however, Lee took the initiative, sending Stonewall Jackson with the left wing of the army to strike Pope’s scattered units. Pope learned of Jackson’s advance and confronted him at Cedar Mountain. Jackson pushed back his assailants but was in turn pushed back by the arrival of another Union division. On August 12 Jackson withdrew to Gordonsville, where Lee reinforced him with General James Longstreet’s right wing.

  On August 3 Halleck had directed McClellan to disengage on the Peninsula and begin his march to join Pope. McClellan, adroit at delay and loath to have any association with Pope, began a sluggish movement on August 14. Freed by McClellan’s withdrawal, Lee hastened to destroy Pope before McClellan could arrive. Lee sought to steal around Pope’s right flank through Thoroughfare Gap and move rapidly east to cut the Orange and Alexandria Railway, the Union supply route. Jackson succeeded and captured the huge Union supply depot at Manassas Junction on August 27. Learning that Longstreet had broken through Thoroughfare Gap and was on the way to join him, Jackson took up defensive positions around the site of the first Battle of Manassas. It remained for Pope’s army, and any units arriving from McClellan, to break through the rebel lines and restore communication with Washington.