RATING:
Mathew Brady portrait of Brigadier General John Pope, probably taken in 1861. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Bright, politically well connected, educated in the military art, brave, enterprising, and inventive, John Pope was also arrogant, abrasive, and, as a young officer, hyper-ambitious, with a remarkable facility for offending subordinates, colleagues, and superiors alike. His success against fixed fortifications on the Mississippi River was of great strategic significance, but his subsequent failure to weld the Army of Virginia into an effective fighting force and to work collaboratively with other generals contributed to his ignominious defeat at the Second Battle of Bull Run (a Union disaster that dwarfed the comeuppance of the First Battle of Bull Run) and cost him his command in the Eastern Theater.
Principal Battles
PRE–CIVIL WAR
U.S.-Mexican War, 1846–1848
CIVIL WAR
INDIAN WARS, 1862–1867
RECONSTRUCTION
INDIAN WARS
A story buzzed throughout the Union army in 1862 that Major General John Pope made it a practice to preface all his written orders with the phrase “Headquarters in the Saddle.” In response to this extraordinary piece of pomposity, some wag—no one knows who for sure—remarked that this precisely described the general’s chief weakness: He had his headquarters where his hindquarters should be.
Repeat any story often enough, and a lot of people will simply assume it’s true. That this particular article of apocrypha was so readily taken for gospel in the case of Pope speaks volumes about his personality: haughty, bombastic, abrasive, and contemptuous. John Pope of the Union army vies with Jubal Early of the Confedeerate army for the dubious honor of being deemed the least loved general of the Civil War, and his unpopularity greatly magnified his flaws as a commander.
Not that there weren’t plenty of flaws to magnify. Nevertheless, like George B. McClellan, whom he unofficially displaced if not replaced, Pope showed so much early promise that there was every reason to believe—albeit briefly—that he was the man to bring the Civil War to a quick and victorious end.
John Pope was born on March 16, 1822, in Louisville, Kentucky, but the family soon moved to Kaskaskia, Illinois, and John was raised there. Nathaniel Pope, his father, was a federal judge, a good friend of Abraham Lincoln, and an early and prominent member of the Republican Party. He was also an inveterate land speculator, and although he and his cultured wife, Lucretia, gave their son a far better education than what other children in the neighborhood received, they could not afford to send John to college when the time came because the family’s land investments all collapsed. Not to be thwarted, Nathaniel drew on his political connections, calling on Mary Todd Lincoln’s brother-in-law, Ninian Wirt Edwards, son of the late Senator Ninian Edwards of Illinois, to help secure young John an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The sixteen-year-old enrolled in the Class of 1842 on March 20, 1838.
John Pope entered the academy with an especially complex chip on his shoulder. He had imbibed from his parents a sense of cultural superiority and social entitlement as well as the righteousness of committed abolitionism. Yet he was too poor to attend a civilian college. Moreover, while he had been educated well beyond the level of the typical Kaskaskia boy, he found himself at West Point suddenly surrounded by seaboard-raised cadets who were much more sophisticated and better prepared than he. At the same time, his father made no secret of his own expectations, which were for John to graduate first in his class. This combination of forces both stressed and drove Cadet Pope, who struggled, but struggled effectively, and while he won no close friends among his classmates, he did manage to claw his way to seventeenth place in a class of fifty-six, even earning the number-one slot among his peers in horsemanship. Although fellow 1842 graduate James Longstreet, future I Corps commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, pronounced him (despite a tendency to stoutness) a “handsome, dashing fellow” and a “splendid cavalryman,” Pope shunned the cavalry and embraced what his respectable class standing qualified him for, a commission in the Corps of Engineers.
Although the engineers were the intellectual elite of the U.S. Army, Pope would regret his choice of service branch almost immediately. Assigned as an engineer to a post at Palatka in northeastern Florida, Second Lieutenant Pope grew bored and restless with life on a backwater outpost. He found himself picking fights with everyone, including his commanding officer, Captain Joseph E. Johnston, destined to become the highest-ranking U.S. Army officer to defect to the Confederacy. After a year in Florida, Pope could stand it no longer, secured leave, and traveled on his own dime to Washington to lobby directly for a new assignment. Habitually bickering with your commanding officer was bad enough, but breaking the chain of command by seeking a transfer not through ordinary channels but in the corridors of capital power was unforgivable. He did get his transfer, but at the price of the enmity of his Florida superiors and peers. To make matters worse, his new assignment, at Savannah, Georgia, pleased him no more than Florida did. Pope understood that leaping over others to get what he wanted had hurt him, but he simply didn’t care. What he had done had gotten him transferred, and so, finding Savannah disagreeable, he repeated his earlier tactic, once again willfully breaching protocol. On October 23, 1844, the army sent Pope to Maine.
Pope, who had flaunted his Northern abolitionism under the proslavery noses of Captain Johnston and the other Southerners in Florida and Georgia, was pleased with his transfer to the northern fringes of free New England, but he would undoubtedly have soon enough found the backwoods of Maine as tedious as the environment of his first two assignments had he not been rescued, like so many others of his military generation, by the U.S.-Mexican War. He was transferred into Zachary Taylor’s Northern Army as a lieutenant of engineers and fought in the Battle of Monterrey on September 21–24, 1846, distinguishing himself in Taylor’s conquest of the city, which culminated in vicious hand-to-hand street combat. Major General Joseph Mansfield, Pope’s commanding officer, reported that the lieutenant had “executed his duties with great coolness and self-possession and deserves my highest praise,” while another officer, Lieutenant Colonel John Garland, observed that he had “deported himself as a gallant soldier under the heaviest fire of the enemy.” Brevetted to the rank of captain, Pope was elevated to the staff of General Taylor and served in this capacity at the Battle of Buena Vista on February 22 and 23, 1847.
Pope had every expectation of rapid promotion after the war. Not only had he performed gallantly under fire, he was, through his father, connected with any number of influential politicians. To his dismay, however, he was assigned after the war to dreary engineering duty in the West, his brevet promotion having, as a matter of routine, reverted to his prewar rank of second lieutenant. It was 1853 when he finally made first lieutenant and another three years passed before he attained the regular army rank of captain. Nevertheless, strenuous duty on the western frontier agreed with him better than eastern backwater assignments. Unlike other rising-star alumni of the U.S.-Mexican War, such as George B. McClellan, Ulysses S. Grant, and William T. Sherman, who, amid the dearth of military opportunity, resigned their commissions during the 1850s, Pope stuck it out. In the fall of 1859, he was reassigned to the exciting western gateway city of Cincinnati, Ohio. Here he picked up the thread of his earlier social pretensions, which he had dropped during seventeen years spent far from cities and towns. He met, wooed, and wed Congressman Valentine Horton’s pretty daughter, Clara, on September 15, 1859, then watched, with his fellow countrymen, as the Union careened ever faster toward dissolution.
He did not watch quietly. On January 27, 1861, Pope wrote a seven-page letter to President-elect Lincoln not so much advising as instructing him on how to treat secession. He really didn’t need seven pages, just the space for two words: Be merciless. Pope was uncompromising in his judgment that the secessionists were traitors and should be treated as such. Rather more deviously, he suggested to Lincoln that the army had more than its share of these traitors. It was true enough that many officers would soon resign to join the Confederate forces, but Pope was less interested in them than in undermining and casting doubt on those who remained in the U.S. Army with high rank. He was determined to leap over as many of them as he could and rise in their place. Lincoln’s response to the letter does not survive—unless we consider his response to have been his invitation to Pope to accompany him on his inaugural train journey from Springfield, Illinois, to Washington.
En route with Lincoln, Pope talked, he talked a lot, and not just in confidence to the president-elect. His rant against outgoing president James Buchanan, whose inaction during the secession crisis had certainly accelerated the drift toward war, was picked up by a reporter for the Cincinnati Gazette and was both so sensational and so long that it was also rushed to publication independently in pamphlet form. By the time Lincoln’s train rolled into Washington, Pope’s remarks had circulated through army high command. As he descended to the platform, Pope was served with papers summoning him to a general court-martial. The charge was flagrant violation of the Fifth Article of War, which barred officers from criticizing a sitting president, who was, after all, their commander in chief. Fortunately for Pope, Buchanan had even less desire to have his actions put on trial than Pope had to be tried. The outgoing president put a stop to the process by countermanding the court-martial order. With this, the matter was instantly dropped. But there were still any number of officers gunning for the arrogant, impudent, and advancement-hungry Pope. He had won this round by default, but they were determined to hand him a noose, and they were confident that Pope would, sooner or later, give them ample rope.
The talking stopped when Fort Sumter fell on April 13, 1861. Pope immediately called on Governor Richard Yates of Illinois, who commissioned him brigadier general of Illinois volunteers, in which capacity he was sent to Missouri at the head of a brigade for service under Major General John Frémont. If anything, Frémont was an even more ardent abolitionist than Pope and, without presidential authorization or authority of any kind, really, proclaimed martial law in Missouri, confiscated the property of prominent secessionists, and, most egregiously of all, issued a blanket emancipation of the state’s slaves. Lincoln, who feared these actions would propel Missouri and the other still-loyal border states (at the time, Delaware, Kentucky, and Maryland) into the Confederate camp, demanded that Frémont rescind the order. When the general refused, Lincoln removed him from command in Missouri on November 2, 1861, and his troops were organized in the Department of Missouri under Henry Wager Halleck, who thus became Pope’s new commanding officer. On February 23, 1862, Halleck assigned Pope command of the Army of the Mississippi and tasked him to lead it in an expedition against the key Confederate Mississippi River defenses at New Madrid, Missouri, and at Island No. 10. The Anaconda Plan of Winfield Scott, much derided in the North, was taken very seriously in the South. Aware of the grave danger posed by a Union invasion along the Mississippi, the Confederates rapidly erected and manned a series of fortifications along the river, including Fort Pillow, forty miles north of Memphis, and formidable fortifications at Columbus, Kentucky. These positions were coordinated with batteries on nearby Island No. 10, which commanded the approach to the New Madrid Bend in the Mississippi. Union forces under Ulysses S. Grant took two important defensive positions on the bend, Forts Henry and Donelson, early in February, thereby cutting off the fortifications at Columbus from the main body of the Confederate army. Confederate general P. G. T. Beauregard accordingly ordered Columbus to be evacuated, and the garrison withdrew to Island No. 10. In the meantime, Confederate positions on and around the island were greatly strengthened, so that by the middle of March, there were five rebel batteries on shore above the island, five batteries on Island No. 10 itself, and a floating battery moored in the river at the island’s western tip. At New Madrid, Forts Thompson and Bankhead were erected, and the tiny Confederate navy was also pressed into service. Six gun-boats were stationed between Fort Pillow and Island No. 10.
Pope swung into action as soon as he was named to command the Army of the Mississippi. Conventional practice at this time was for an army to go into winter quarters—in this case, the hamlet of Commerce, Missouri—and commence no major operation until spring. Pope, however, quickly got his twenty-five thousand men on the march. Too fast, really, for when he and his army arrived at New Madrid on March 3, Pope discovered that he had outrun the arrival of heavy artillery and the availability of Union gunboats under U.S. Navy Flag Officer Andrew H. Foote. The artillery would reach his position on March 12, but the gunboats would take longer, though, when they came, they would be supplemented by fourteen mortar rafts.
Aware that his winter march had stunned the Confederates, Pope decided not to await the arrival of the siege guns and gunboats before beginning the operation. He prudently held off on a full-out frontal assault against the New Madrid forts, but he did dispatch a brigade under Colonel Joseph B. Plummer to occupy Point Pleasant, on the right bank of the Mississippi, just opposite Island No. 10. Confederate gunboats opened fire on Plummer, but without much effect, and Point Pleasant was occupied by March 6. Six days later, with the arrival of Pope’s siege guns, the river was rendered impassable to Confederate gunboats, thereby preventing Confederate reinforcement of New Madrid. On March 13, Pope directed his guns against the New Madrid fortifications, forcing their abandonment on the night of March 13–14. Some Confederate troops withdrew south to Fort Pillow.
At this point, the restless and irascible Pope fell to arguing with the equally stubborn Foote over how to take Island No. 10. Pope wanted to build on his winning momentum with a major attack, while Foote proposed beating Island No. 10 into submission through unrelenting bombardment. Pope asked Foote to order two or three gunboats to run the gantlet of the Confederate batteries, so as to get below the island, which would cover Pope as he crossed the river from above in a bid to capture the entire garrison. Foote, who was still painfully convalescing from wounds he had received supporting Grant’s operations against Forts Donelson and Henry, protested that this was far too risky. The two commanders argued for two solid weeks, during which the island was assaulted exclusively and ineffectively by long-range bombardment. At last, Foote declared his final refusal to send his gunboats in a run past Island No. 10.
Although exasperated, Pope was not out of ideas. Acting on a somewhat desperate suggestion from a subordinate officer, he ordered a canal to be excavated as a shortcut across the New Madrid Bend that would allow Union vessels to bypass the Confederate batteries entirely. Finished in just two weeks, the canal proved too shallow for the heavy gunboats, but it could be navigated by troop transports and supply boats, which drew less water. Still, Pope knew he needed at least one gunboat to cover his landing on the Tennessee side of the river. Foote finally surrendered—not to Pope, but to the personal request of Halleck. With profound misgivings, he sent the USS Carondelet to venture the run on the moonless night of April 4. Her success persuaded Foote to allow the USS Pittsburgh to make the same run on April 6.
Covered by two gunboats, Pope crossed the Mississippi and led a superb attack against New Madrid and Island No. 10, capturing the garrisons of both. It was by any measure a magnificent achievement, but Pope being Pope, he exaggerated the triumph nevertheless, claiming the capture of 273 officers and 6,700 enlisted men. Historians believe that fewer than 4,500 were actually taken.
Pope received official recognition for his Mississippi River victories in the form of a promotion to major general, but news flowing from the epic Battle of Shiloh, which was in progress at the time, overshadowed press coverage of the conquests of the Mississippi forts, despite Pope’s unseemly courting of reporters. Still, one man did take note.
Abraham Lincoln had suffered through the heartbreak and disappointment of Irvin McDowell and George McClellan, not to mention the horrific bloodbath Grant was delivering at Shiloh. One general after another had failed to give him a victory. Now John Pope, tall, magnificently bearded, supremely military in bearing, had just won control of the upper Mississippi River. True, it had not been a picture-book triumph on a vast field of battle, banners waving, bugles calling. Nor was it a great tactical feat of maneuver. Instead, it was a victory of brute strength against fixed fortifications. But, strategically, it was the most important Union victory to date. The president accordingly directed his secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, to summon John Pope to Washington.
It was a measure of Pope’s rapidly rising stock that his commanding officer, Halleck, tried to block Stanton’s request. He did not want to let go of a winning commander. Stanton stood firm, however, Pope traveled, and the secretary of war informed him that he and the president were creating a new army, the Army of Virginia, which would bring together the disparate Union forces under Irvin McDowell, Nathaniel Banks, and John C. Frémont that were now fighting in that state. The new catchall army would operate in coordination with what was still George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac, its initial mission to draw Confederate forces away from Richmond, so that McClellan could finally assault the rebel capital.
Prone to vainglory, Pope was highly susceptible to flattery, and doubtless Lincoln and Stanton expected him to jump at the chance to command a new army not in the West, but in the East, in what the public considered the most important theater of the war. Instead, Pope responded by complaining that he was being commissioned to serve as bait, a “forlorn hope,” he called it, using the military term for a unit sent ahead as a sacrificial gambit. His mission, he correctly enough believed, was to make things easier for McClellan to win a great victory. As if that weren’t bad enough, Pope pointed out that the generals who would be put under his command were all senior to him. It was hardly an enviable position for even the most genial of generals, and Pope was very far from being genial.
Pope bluntly told the president that the Army of Virginia was not a good idea, and he asked to be returned to the West. Lincoln, however, stood firm. Pope bowed to the inevitable and thus “entered that command with great reluctance and serious foreboding.” No sooner did Pope take up his new post than Frémont, accusing his new commanding officer of having plotted against him to gain the command, resigned. He was replaced by Franz Sigel, a scrappy German immigrant who spoke broken English with a thick accent and, although he enjoyed the devotion of his mostly German-American troops, would prove to be a marginally competent commander at best.
For his part, Pope hightailed it back to Washington as soon as possible, devoting himself to a combination of public relations and political lobbying while he left his army to fend for itself in the field. Convinced that the Army of Virginia was doomed, he wanted nothing more than to use it as a stepping-stone to a more promising command. In Washington, he filled President Lincoln’s ears with poison against McClellan, suggesting that the “Young Napoleon’s” chronic tendency to an excess of caution was not so much a matter of military philosophy as it was a function of politics. As a Democrat, Pope told Lincoln, McClellan was in no hurry to win a war that would bring an end to slavery.
We don’t know how Lincoln responded to such talk, though his record as a patient, tolerant moderate was consistent. The Radical Republicans in the Senate and Congress were not hesitant about making their views known, however. They relished every word Pope spoke, and they encouraged and supported his announced plan to feed and supply his army by taking whatever was necessary from the rebellious citizens of Virginia. Moreover, they applauded his promise of meting out the harshest of reprisals for any guerrilla or partisan attacks on Federal troops or property in the occupied territories. And they even approved of his proclamation that all Virginians were subject to the administration of a loyalty oath and that anyone who refused to submit would be sent beyond the lines with a stern warning that they would be shot on sight if they returned to the occupied territory. When McClellan voiced objection to Pope’s policy, Pope amplified it even more outrageously. Anyone, he warned, man or woman, who corresponded with anyone in the Confederate army—son, brother, father, friend, no matter—would be subject to execution.
Pope’s orders were never enforced and were largely unenforceable in any case; however, they earned the scorn of most of his military colleagues and the outright hatred of his enemies. Robert E. Lee, commanding the Army of Northern Virginia, called Pope a “miscreant” and informed Stonewall Jackson that he wanted “Pope to be suppressed.”
If the Radical Republicans in Washington embraced the new commander of the new army, the officers and men of the Army of Virginia itself were more than anything astonished by their commanding officer’s apparently infinite capacity to offer insult. On July 14, 1862, he addressed a message to the soldiers of his new command:
Let us understand each other. 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 to beat him when he was found; whose policy has been attack and not defense. In but one instance has the enemy been able to place our Western armies in defensive attitude. I presume that I have been called here to pursue the same system and to lead you against the enemy. It is my purpose to do so, and that speedily. I am sure you long for an opportunity to win the distinction you are capable of achieving. That opportunity I shall endeavor to give you. Meantime I desire you to dismiss from your minds certain phrases, which I am sorry to find so much in vogue amongst you. I hear constantly of “taking strong positions and holding them,” of “lines of retreat,” and of “bases of supplies.” Let us discard such ideas. 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, disaster and shame lurk in the rear. Let us act on this understanding, and it is safe to predict that your banners shall be inscribed with many a glorious deed and that your names will be dear to your countrymen forever.
Almost instantly, the rumor that Pope addressed all orders as coming from “Headquarters in the Saddle” swept through the army. His officers and men answered his patronizing sneers with their utter contempt.
Perhaps no general has ever assumed a new command more ineptly and obnoxiously than John Pope. Yet the authority of this most unpopular of officers was about to expand. Finally fed up with McClellan, Lincoln asked Pope to advance southward to attack Lee front on while McClellan joined in with an attack on Lee’s flank. Pope objected, whereupon Lincoln ordered McClellan and the Army of the Potomac to withdraw from the Yorktown Peninsula and join his great army to the Army of Virginia. Neither the president nor his secretary of war made clear whether McClellan or Pope would assume overall command. For his part, Lincoln was riveted on the problem of protecting Washington, and he didn’t much care who did it. Pope, however, wrote an angry letter to the army general-in-chief Henry Halleck. “What,” he demanded, “is to be my command? Am I to act independently against the enemy?” Worse, the Army of the Potomac did not march to its ordered merger with the Army of Virginia en masse, but in fragments, a unit here, a unit there. The soldiers, severed from contact with McClellan, for whom most felt a profound loyalty, could not bring themselves to accept Pope. Thus, isolated units drifted northward through a kind of limbo of command. Halleck’s solution to the crisis was to urge McClellan to expedite the movement of his troops, so that Pope could move ahead to create a rational structure of command. But McClellan, plodding by inclination, now acted slowly by design. He was ambivalent, believing that Pope, an incompetent blowhard in his estimation, would lead “his” army to destruction (and since he cared deeply for his men, he did not want that), yet also half hoping that Pope would fail and fail catastrophically, if only to demonstrate to Lincoln and the rest that he, the Young Napoleon, offered the best prospect for the Union’s salvation.
Robert E. Lee could no more stop himself from swooping down upon the delay of ambivalence than a hawk could resist targeting its prey. With the Army of the Potomac migrating slowly and in piecemeal to the Army of Virginia, Lee ordered Stonewall Jackson on August 9, 1862, to strike part of Pope’s force at Cedar Mountain, near Culpeper. The result was by no means a major battle, but it did force Pope to withdraw to the northern bank of the Rappahannock River. And that is precisely where Lee wanted him. The Army of Virginia, as yet lacking three corps from the Army of the Potomac, was vulnerable—provided Lee struck now.
To carry out the attack, the Confederate general deliberately broke one of the sacred commandments of offensive doctrine: Thou shalt not divide your army in the presence of the enemy. He placed half his forces under James Longstreet and tasked them with occupying Pope’s front. The other half he assigned to Jackson, who marched his men rapidly around to the northwest, pointing them in a direction from which he would launch a surprise attack on the rear of the Army of Virginia.
While Longstreet and Jackson maneuvered, elements of the Army of Virginia made a lightning raid on the camp of Lee’s dashing cavalry commander Jeb Stuart. They hoped to bag Stuart himself, and though he got away, the raiders did capture his adjutant—along with one more item of perhaps even greater value. In his haste, Stuart left behind his flamboyant and much-prized ostrich-plumed hat, together with a cape lined in shining crimson. These Pope’s raiders gleefully made away with. On August 22, the unabashed Stuart would exact his vengeance. Galloping with a small raiding party into the heart of Pope’s headquarters camp at Catlett’s Station, Stuart took three hundred prisoners, seized $35,000 in Union army payroll money, and ransacked Pope’s personal baggage in search of the purloined hat and cloak. Failing to find these, he took Pope’s dress uniform coat instead. And, since this was, after all, a military operation, Stuart also rode off with a bundle of the general’s battle plans.
The raid, aimed as it was directly at the bombastic ego of John Pope, stung far beyond any quantifiable military damage it did, putting Pope dangerously off balance. When Stonewall Jackson lashed out four days after the raid, overrunning, looting, and destroying Pope’s supply depot at Manassas Junction, Virginia, a stone’s throw from the site of the disastrous Bull Run battle, Pope sputtered. He had suffered a serious loss of supplies, but, far worse, Jackson smashed his rail and telegraph connections, leaving him partially deaf, partially blind, and seriously hobbled. Pope commenced a pursuit, but Jackson was too fast, too nimble, and too stealthy for him.
Jackson did have a way of being found—but only at the moment of his strike.
On August 28, Jackson struck. Suddenly wheeling about, he attacked an isolated brigade led by Brigadier General Rufus King at Groveton. To the Union commander’s credit, King responded to the surprise with a vigor and effectiveness that stunned Jackson. The commanders of both Confederate divisions engaged were badly wounded in the Groveton fight, but King’s celebrated “Black Hat Brigade” (later called the “Iron Brigade,” to acknowledge its consistent heroism), while inflicting many casualties, lost a third of its number, killed or wounded.
John Pope made a great show of shrugging off both the Manassas raid and the Battle of Groveton, Confederate victories though they were. All that mattered, he now said, was that Stonewall Jackson had revealed himself. Accordingly, Pope concentrated his forces around Groveton. He would, he announced, crush Stonewall Jackson and, in so doing, “bag the whole crowd.”
Pope attacked on August 29 and did so with a ferocity beyond anything McClellan was capable of delivering. Yet, vigorous as his jabs were, they were never quite hard enough. Jackson managed to repulse each attack, albeit at heavy cost. This done, the Confederate withdrew at the end of the day. Given to believing whatever he wanted to believe, Pope concluded that he had utterly defeated Stonewall. He was tired, and so were his men. Assuming the Confederate had been whipped, the Union general called a recess. He would finish him off the next day.
While Pope knew exactly where Jackson was, he hadn’t a clue to the whereabouts of Longstreet with the other half of Robert E. Lee’s audaciously divided army. When Longstreet’s command suddenly materialized around eleven o’clock on the morning of August 30, Pope was stupefied. History would remember it as the third day of the Second Battle of Bull Run.
A slow, methodical, lugubrious man—they called him “Old Pete” or sometimes “Gloomy Pete”—Longstreet was capable of decisive action when necessary. It was, he judged, necessary right now. All at once, he launched five of his divisions into the naked flank of the Army of Virginia along a vastly broad two-mile front. The resulting defeat he dealt Pope dwarfed that of Irvin McDowell at the First Bull Run. Commanding 62,000 men against Lee’s divided army of 50,000, Pope suffered 10,000 killed and wounded, against some 8,300 casualties in the Army of Northern Virginia.
Pope, numbed, fell back on Centreville. Lee sent Jackson on a quick march to attempt to interpose his force between Pope’s and Washington, D.C., but, pulling himself together, the Union commander counterattacked at the Battle of Chantilly on September 1. Tactically, the fight was an inconclusive draw, but it must be judged a strategic victory for the Confederates, since Pope’s army, even augmented at long last by elements of the Army of the Potomac, was brushed aside, putting Lee in position either to pursue Pope or to advance into Maryland, thereby invading the Union. Judging that the Army of Northern Virginia had pretty thoroughly spent itself at Groveton and Second Bull Run, however, Lee did not give chase and allowed Pope to limp away intact. With Pope marching away from him, Lee formed up the vanguard of his army on September 3 and sent it across the Potomac, into Maryland, where it would encounter the Army of the Potomac at a place called Antietam.
Harper’s Weekly published this engraving of Major General Franz Sigel’s corps at the Second Battle of Bull Run.
AUTHOR’S COLLECTION
At Antietam, Lee would be met not by John Pope, but George McClellan. Brigadier General Alpheus S. Williams, who had commanded II Corps under Pope, spoke for many when he wrote of a “splendid army almost demoralized, millions of [dollars in] public property given up or destroyed, thousands of lives of our best men sacrificed for no purpose.” He continued: “I dare not trust myself to speak of this commander [John Pope] as I feel and believe. Suffice to say . . . that more insolence, superciliousness, ignorance, and pretentiousness were never combined in one man. It can in truth be said of him that he had not a friend in his command from the smallest drummer boy to the highest general officer.”
Practically friendless in the army, Pope had lost all his friends in Washington as well. On September 12, 1862, he was relieved of command, and his Army of Virginia, absorbed into the Army of the Potomac, was turned over to McClellan. Pope was not merely relieved of command of the Army of Virginia, he was virtually exiled from the Civil War. He was sent to command what was being called the “Department of the Northwest,” assigned not to fight rebels but to contain the obstreperous Santee Sioux of Minnesota.
Another Brady portrait of Pope, with the style of beard he adopted later in the war. NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION
Some egos are inflated but fragile, collapsing when pricked by defeat. No ego was more inflated than that of John Pope, yet few were tougher. He accepted his new assignment, held it through the rest of the war, then remained through the postwar years as one of the chief commanders in what the U.S. Army called the “Indian Wars.” Pope served in a senior frontier command until his retirement in 1886, when he embarked on a career as a Washington-based historical journalist, writing Civil War articles for the National Tribune. Later still, he produced a personal memoir of surprising quality. The officer whose career had too often been defined by his outspoken contempt for colleagues, subordinates, and superiors alike now wrote of them with generosity and an evenhanded fairness that have made his book a valuable historical document rather than a mere autobiographical curiosity. He died in his sleep on September 23, 1892.