A Lee Letter on the “Lost Dispatch” and the Maryland Campaign of 1862 Hal Bridges
Note: The following is taken from the April 1958 issue of The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (volume 66), pp. 161–66.
A LEE LETTER ON THE “LOST DISPATCH” AND
THE MARYLAND CAMPAIGN OF 1862
Edited by HAL BRIDGES*
ONE of the most controversial ocurrences of the Civil War was the loss of General Robert E. Lee's Special Orders No. 191, the famous “Lost Dispatch,” during Lee's Maryland campaign of 1862. It has been commonly supposed that after the war Lee refrained from putting into writing his opinions regarding the lost orders and their effect upon his fruitless invasion of Maryland. His reluctance to engagein postwar military disputes is well known. Nevertheless, he did comment at some length on the Maryland campaign and the Lost Dispatch in a signed autograph letter of February 21, 1868, to his former division commander General D. H. Hill. A photostat of the letter, which is published below, is in the Daniel Harvey Hill Papers, Southern Historical Collections, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. A copy of it also appears in Lee's personal letterbook in the Library of Congress. The original has not been found.1
D. H. Hill was a key figure in the events that centered about the Lost Dispatch. Special Orders No. 191, dated September 9, 1862, and issued at Frederick, Maryland, where the Confederate army was concentrated, sent troops under Generals “Stonewall” Jackson, Lafayette McLaws, and John G. Walker on a wide sweep west and south to capture the Union garrisons at Martinsburg and Harpers Ferry. General James Longstreet's command, the reserve artillery and supply trains, and Hill's division as rearguard were sent to Boonsborough, at the western base of the portion of the Blue Ridge known as South Mountain. The mountain and General J. E. B. Stuart's cavalry to the east of it screened Lee's divided army from General George B. McClellan's oncoming Union host of more than eighty thousand men, moving slowly and cautiously along the National Road out of Washington. When Harpers Ferry, Lee's main objective, had been taken, the Confederate army was to be reunited at either Boonsborough or Hagerstown.2
Jackson occupied Martinsburg on September 12; Harpers Ferry surrendered on September 15. But meanwhile, on September 13, an official copy of Special Orders No. 191 was found by a Union private on D. H. Hill's old camp ground at Frederick and conveyed to McClellan. The copy had been issued from Lee's headquarters, and was addressed to Hill.3 Thus apprised of Lee's plans, McClellan attempted to drive across South Mountain and crush the separate portions of the Confederate army. On September 14 he launched some seventy thousand Union troops against the principal pass of South Mountain, Turner's Gap, near Boonsborough, and at the same time sent General William B. Franklin with eighteen thousand men to attack Crampton's Gap, which led to Harpers Ferry.4 Disaster threatened Lee, but the heavily outnumbered Confederates on South Mountain held back the Union troops until after night on the fourteenth,5 and Lee managed to reconcentrate and to fight the battle of Sharpsburg (September 16 and 17) before withdrawing across the Potomac into Virginia.
After the war, D. H. Hill reviewed the whole question of the lost orders and the Maryland campaign in an article entitled “The Lost Dispatch” that appeared in The Land We Love, a monthly magazine that he edited and published in Charlotte, North Carolina.6 He sent a copy of the article to Lee, who replied in his letter to Hill of February 21, 1868.
Hill's purpose in writing the article was to refute an accusation by Edward Albert Pollard, who in his book The Lost Cause had declared that Hill had lost Special Orders No. 191 by throwing the paper to the ground “in a moment of passion.”7 Hill branded this charge as completely untrue. If it were true, he declared, he deserved to be shot; yet Lee, “who ought to have known the facts, as well as Mr. E. A. Pollard,” had never brought him to trial for such an act, and President Jefferson Davis had later promoted him to lieutenant general.8
Continuing his refutation of Pollard, Hill pointed out that the missing copy of Special Orders No. 191 might have been lost in Lee's office, or by Lee's courier. It was “very improbable,” he argued, that Lee should have sent a copy directly to him, as at the time he was under Jackson's command, and received all orders through Jackson. The copy of the orders that Jackson had sent him he had carefully preserved. But he had no recollection of receiving a copy from Lee. Furthermore, he had the certificate of his adjutant, Major J. W. Ratchford, that no copy from Lee had been received in divisional headquarters.9
As to the effect of the Lost Dispatch on the Maryland campaign, Hill maintained that the accurate information that McClellan had gained from the lost copy of Special Orders No. 191 was that Lee had divided his forces in order to capture Martinsburg and Harpers Ferry. But McClellan must have learned this much anyway, from the sound of the artillery at Harpers Ferry and from information brought him by his scouts. Moreover, the lost orders conveyed additional information that was inaccurate, and that had “mystified and deceived” McClellan. The orders had led him to belive that Longstreet on September 14 was at Boonsborough, when in fact Longstreet, accompanied by Lee, had marched his troops thirteen miles further north to Hagerstown.10 McClellan must also have thought that on September 14 Jackson was at Boonsborough, to which point the orders directed him to return after taking Martinsburg. But Jackson, “in violation of Lee's order” had gone on to Harpers Ferry, and on September 14 was directing the attack on the Harpers Ferry garrison.11 When McClellan on September 14 attacked Turner's Gap, he moved slowly and cautiously because he thought he was fighting the troops of Longstreet and Jackson as well as those of Hill; but actually through most of that day Turner's Gap was defended only by Hill's battle-depleted division of some five thousand men. Longstreet did not get back from Hagerstown to help defend the pass until after 3 P.M. Had McClellan not been deceived by the Lost Dispatch he would immediately have brushed aside Hill's little force, cut Lee's army in two, and captured his reserve artillery and supplies. McClellan's misinformation, wrote Hill, “saved Lee from destruction; and in the inscrutable Providence of God the loss of the dispatch prolonged the Confederate struggle for two more years.”12
Lee, after reading this argument, was moved13 to take issue with Hill in the letter of February 21, 1868, which follows:
Lexington Va: 21 Feb. 1868
Genl D. H. Hill
Charlotte N.C.My dear Sir
I am obliged to you for the opportunity you have afforded me of reading your article on the “Lost Dispatch.” I have not read Mr. Pollards account & therefore do not know what he says; but at the time the order fell into Genl McClellans hands, I considered it a great calamity & subsequent reflection has not caused me to change my opinion.
Your division having joined the Army after the 2nd battle of Manassas, was placed in front in its subsequent movement, & was the first to cross the Potomac. When the whole army was ready to cross, Genl Jackson was sent to the front and directed to take command of the advanced troops; and when it became necessary to dislodge the Federal troops occupying Martinsburg & Harpers Ferry, he was by verbal instructions placed in command of the expedition. The special order of 9th Sept: which you quote, was intended to guide the several divisions in the general movement of the Army. In it your division was designated as the rear guard, & it was proper in my opinion that a copy of the order should have been sent to you by the Adjt Genl; and as you were by it withdrawn from Genl Jacksons command, it was also right for you to have been served with a copy from his office.
I do not know on what ground you charge Genl Jackson with a violation of orders by going from Martinsburg to Harpers Ferry. In his official report he says, “In obedience to instructions from the Commg Genl, & for the purpose of capturing the Federal forces & stores then at Martinsburg & Harpers Ferry, my command left the vicinity of Frederick City on the 10th, & passing rapidly through Middletown, Boonsborough, & Williamsport, recrossed the Potomac into Virginia at Lights ford, on the 11th. x x x x x x x [Lee's ellipsis marks] “The Commg Genl having directed Major Genl McLaws to arrive with his own & Genl R. H. Andersons divisions to take possession of the Md: Heights overlooking Harpers Ferry, & Br Genl J. G. Walker, pursuing a different route, to cross the Potomac & move up that river on the Virginia side & occupy the Loudoun Heights, both for the purpose of co-operating with me, it became necessary before making the attack to ascertain whether they were in position. x x x x x x” [Lee's ellipsis marks] “Leaving Genl Hill (A.P.) to receive the surrender of the Federal troops, & take the requisite steps for securing the captured stores, I moved, in obedience to orders from the Commg Genl, to rejoin him in Maryland, with the remaining divisions of my command.”14
These extracts are sufficient to show the manner in which Genl Jackson viewed his orders & the measures he took to execute them. When they were issued (9th Sept.) I supposed there would have been time for their accomplishment & for the army to have been reunited before Genl McClellan could cross the South Mountains. Genl Stuart who was on the line of the Monocacy15 with the cavalry masking our movements & watching those of the Federal army, reported that Genl McClellan had reached Rockville & was advancing very slowly with an extended front, covering the roads to Washington & to Baltimore. Early on the morning of the 14th I recd at Hagerstown a dispatch from him stating that he had fallen back to the South Mountains; that Genl McClellan was pressing forward on the roads to Boonsborough & Rohersville gaps,16 & that he had learned from a citizen of Maryland, that he was in possession of the order directing the movement of our troops.17 Nor did he seem to have been “mystified & deceived” by it; for on the 13th of Sept., the day on which it is said to have reached him, he wrote to Genl Franklin Commg the left wing of the Federal Army, that he had “full information as to the movements & intentions of the enemy”; and after reciting the substance of the orders informing him of the arrangements he had made to force a passage through Boonsborough gap, he continues: “Couch has been ordered to concentrate his division & join you as rapidly as possible. Without waiting for the whole of that division to join, you will move at daybreak in the mor[nin]g by Jefferson & Burkettsville upon the road to Rohersville x x x x x x [Lee's ellipsis marks] Having gained the pass, your duty will be first to cut off, destroy, or capture McLaws Command & relieve Col: Miles. If you effect this you will order him to join you at once with all his disposable troops, first destroying the bridges over the Potomac, if not already done, and, leaving a sufficient garrison to prevent the enemy from passing the ford, you will then return by Rohersville on the direct road to Boonsboro', if the main column has not succeeded in its attack. If it has succeeded, take the road to Rohersville, to Sharpsburg & Williamsport, in order either to cut off the retreat of Hill & Longstreet towards the Potomac, or prevent the repassage of Jackson.”18
I do not know how the order was lost, nor until I saw Genl McClellans published report after the termination of the war did I know certainly that it was the copy addressed to you. From what I have stated you will see that I do not concur with you in the opinion that its having fallen into Genl McClellan's hands was a “benefit” but on the contrary, “an injury to the Confederate arms.”
Wishing you all happiness & prosperity I am very respyy our obt Servt
R E LEE
Dr. Bridges is an associate professor of history at the University of Colorado. This article is a product of research conducted with the financial support of the Council on Research and Creative Work of the University of Colorado, and the American Philosophical Society.
1 Lee's letterbook, November 29, 1866, to September 12, 1870, is Letterbook 4 in the Robert E. Lee Papers, Division of Manucripts, Library of Congress. For permission to examine these papers I wish to thank Mrs. William Hunter De Butts, Washington, D.C. For kind assistance in searching for the original of Lee's letter and for any additional correspondence between Lee and Hill on the Maryland campaign (also not found), I am indebted to Professor Allen W. Moger, Dr. James W. Patton, and Mr. William J. Van Schreeven.
2 The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C., 1880–1901), Series I, Vol. XIX, Part II, pp. 603–604. Hereafter cited as Official Records.
3 Silas Colgrove, “The Finding of Lee's Lost Order” in Robert U. Johnson and Clarence C. Buel, eds., Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (New York, 1887), II, 603.
4 Official Records, Series I, Vol. XIX, Part I, pp. 45–46.
5 Crampton's Gap, defended by troops under Lafayette Mclaws, was taken by Franklin's men, but Franklin, becoming overcautious as night approached, failed to continue the attack. For full details of the defense of South Mountain, see Douglas Southall Freeman, Lee's Lieutenants: A Study in Command (New York, 1942–1944), II, Capters X and XI.
6 D. H. Hill, “The Lost Dispatch,” The Land We Love, IV (February 1868), 270–284. Hereafter cited as Hill, “Lost Dispatch.”
7 Hill, “Lost Dispatch,” IV, 273; Edward Albert Pollard, The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates (New York, 1867), p. 314.
8 Hill, “Lost Dispatch,” IV, 273.
9 Hill, “Lost Dispatch,” IV, 274.
10 Hill, “Lost Dispatch,” IV, 275–277. Lee modified his orginal plan to hold Longstreet at Boonsborough in order to investigate a rumor, which proved to be false, that Federal troops from Pennsylvania were about to attack Hagerstown. Freeman, Lee's Lieutenants, II, 166.
11 Hill, “Lost Dispatch,” IV, 277–278. Hill's assertion that Jackson violated Lee's order was based solely on Special Orders 191, which in fact did not direct Jackson to go on to Harpers Ferry. But Lee points out in his letter to Hill that Jackson was “by verbal instructions” placed in command of the expedition against Martinsburg and Harpers Ferry. On February 5, 1868, Lee emphatically declared in two separate conversations with friends that he had given Jackson oral instructions to move on to Harpers Ferry. Freeman, Lee's Lieutenants, II, Appendix I, pp. 715–723.
12 Hill, “Lost Dispatch,” IV, 277–278.
13 For Lee's indigant reaction to Hill's article, and his further comment on his strategy in Maryland and the loss of Special Orders 191, see Freeman, Lee's Lieutenants, II, Appendix I.
14 The extracts from Jackson's report quoted by Lee are in Official Records, Series I, Vol. XIX, Part I, pp.953, 955.
15 The Monocacy River, just east of Frederick, Maryland.
16 That is, to Turner's and Crampton's Gaps. Throughout his letter, Lee spells Rohrersville without the “r” after the “h.”
17 This sentence clearly establishes early morning of September 14 as the time when Lee learned from Stuart that McClellan possessed a copy of Special Orders No. 191. Freeman notes that sources used by him leave the time “in doubt,” and reasons that Lee received the news of the lost orders “the night of September 13–14,” possibly around 10 P.M. Freeman, Lee's Lieutenants, II, 722–723.
18 Official Records, Series I, Vol. XIX, Part I, pp. 45–46.
Fishwick Notes
1 Even in Virginia, such a newspaper as the Richmond State Journal was opposed to Lee after 1865. Of the Congressmen who attacked him, none was more vitriolic than Simon Cameron, whose excesses are noted in the March 25, 1868, issue of the Lexington (Virginia) Gazette.
2 Hibbard’s letter and clipping are in the Lee Archives at Washington and Lee University. Lee never answered such assaults as this, but went quietly about his appointed task of constructive effort and reconciliation. With ample cause did “Vindex” write a letter to the editor of the Louisville Courier on March 13, 1868, asking, “Why cannot these jackals let the old lion rest in peace?”
3 John S. Wise, The End of an Era (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1900), p. 434.
4 The New York Herald stated that citizens of the North “have recounted and recorded his triumphs as their own”; the Halifax (Nova Scotia) Morning Chronicle was even more laudatory in tone. Accounts from both papers are reprinted in Stanley F. Horn’s Robert E. Lee Reader (Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1949), p. 508 f.
5 James P. Holcombe, “Address at Washington and Lee University, January 19, 1871,” reprinted in J. W. Jones’ Personal Reminiscences of Gen. Robert E. Lee (New York, D. Appleton and Co., 1874), pp. 487–509.
6 In John William Jones’ Personal Reminiscences, Anecdotes, and Letters of General Robert E. Lee (New York, D. Appleton, 1874), p. 249, this letter from Lee to a prospective translator is quoted: “It has been my desire to write a history of the campaigns in Virginia; but I have not been able to commence it, and it is so uncertain that I shall be able to accomplish my purpose, that I think it unnecessary to make any arrangements for its translation into a foreign language . . .” The letter, dated April 16, 1866, is quoted in Douglas S. Freeman’s R. E. Lee, IV, p. 261.
7 In 1867 she had published her Diary of a Southern Refugee During the War (New York, E. J. Hale & Son, 1867), which had won a wide audience.
8 John Esten Cooke, The Life of Stonewall Jackson (Richmond, Ayers and Wade, 1863).
9 Quoted in John O. Beaty’s John Esten Cooke, Virginian (New York, Columbia University Press, 1922), p. 88. Cooke, almost as dashing and colorful as J. E. B. Stuart, under whom he served, satisfied his literary cravings, reading by firelight books captured from the Federal armies. He never allowed enemy forces to interfere with his meals, continuing to eat from a plate near his horse until the Yankees were within two hundred yards, whereupon he would gulp down his coffee and gallop away.
10 During the 1880’s two volumes of military reminiscences, the first by Edward S. Ellis and the second by Armistead L. Long, added to the number of details about Lee, and every volume of the 47 that the Southern Historical Society published between 1878 and 1930 provided an outlet for small, obscure Lee stories that might otherwise be lost. The Confederate Veteran, a professionally patriotic journal which specialized in Lee items, was founded in 1893. The 40 volumes which constitute the complete file of the publication contain approximately 225 Lee stories and anecdotes.
11 Talbott Sweeney, A Vindication from a Northern Standpoint of General Robert E. Lee (Richmond, J. L. Hill Co., 1890), pp. 47–48.
12 John Burton Nicholson, Jr., General Robert Edward Lee, 1807–1870, A Preliminary Bibliography. This unpublished thesis was submitted to the faculty of Washington and Lee University on May 15, 1936, and is in the Lee Archives there. A careful and detailed study, it has been of great assistance in the preparation of this article.
13 These were Macmillan’s (55:321), The Critic (10:141), and The Eclectic (108:683).
14 John Burton Nicholson, Jr., op. cit., p. 47.
15 Both volumes were published by C. Scribner’s Sons in New York. Page’s copy of the earlier biography, with revisions in the margins for a second edition, is in the Lee Archives at Washington and Lee University.
16 There is much autobiographical material in Two Little Confederates and The Burial of the Guns; there is also a biography done by Page’s brother, Rosewell Page, called Thomas Nelson Page: A Memoir of a Virginia Gentleman (1923).
18 Letter from Mrs. Robert E. Lee to Mrs. Thomas S. Burwell of Roanoke, dated August 17, 1922, in Lee Papers, Manuscript Division, Washington and Lee Library.
20 Douglas S. Freemon, R. E. Lee, I (New York, C. Scribner’s Sons, 1934), p. ix.
21 Douglas S. Freeman, letter to the author dated November 2, 1947.
22 This was the first volume on Lee which employed the techniques of “scientific historical research,” taught at American graduate schools in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The 400-page compilation, drawing from the Lee papers in the Wymberley Jones DeRenne collection, is a milestone in Lee research.
23 Stephen Vincent Benet, “R. E. Lee,” in Books, XI (October 14, 1934), p. 36.
24 Cf., Hendrick’s The Lees of Virginia (Boston, Little, Brown & Co., 1935); Gaines’ Lee: The Background of a Great Decision, August 1865 (Lexington, Washington and Lee University Bulletin, Vol. 33, No. 13), and Lee: The Final Achievement (1865–1870) (New York, New York Southern Society, 1933); Winston’s Robert E. Lee (New York, W. Morrow and Co., 1934); Eckenrode’s James Longstreet, Lee’s War Horse (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1936); Davidson’s Lee in the Mountains and Other Poems (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1938); Meredith’s The Face of Robert E. Lee (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947; and Horn’s Robert E. Lee Reader (Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1949).
25 A full report of the committee, as well as a sketch of the proposed memorial, was printed in the July, 1949, number of the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, pp. 301–306.
26 Quoted by Burton J. Hendrick, op. cit., p. 433.
27 Edwin A. Alderman, Virginia, An Address Delivered in Response to the Toast “Virginia” Given by Citizens of Petersburg, Virginia (Charlottesville, Michie Co., 1909), p. 10.
28 In 1914 Charles Alfred Graves, a law professor at the University of Virginia, published a pamphlet called The Forged Letter of Robert E. Lee (Richmond, Richmond Press, Inc., 1914) which demonstrates that Lee did not make this famous pronouncement on duty. The line is so much a part of the Lee legend, however, and is so much in keeping with Lee’s personality, that Graves’ discovery has brought with it little disillusionment for Lee’s admirers.