Special Order 191 Fact or Fiction?

Fact or Fiction

  • Fact

    Votes: 22 81.5%
  • Fiction

    Votes: 5 18.5%

  • Total voters
    27
My issue, as Sears pointed out is that the entire plan relied on everything going exactly right to have any effect whatsoever. To my mind, it seems that the simplest explanation is the likeliest one.

R

Exactly. And in the meantime, Lee would be left wondering whether everything had gone exactly right or not. He would actually be putting himself in the dark by doing this. The whole point of a ruse is to leave your opponent in the dark, not yourself.
 

Leaving a note wrapped around cigars in a random field, relying on some soldier to find that note, read the note, and pass it along is a very roundabout way of getting false information to an opponent. Lee would be relying on everything going exactly right for it to have any effect and, as brass pointed out, Lee would be in the dark as to whether or not that information had been discovered and acted upon. It would have been much easier to have a "straggler" give up that information after being captured as happened on numerous occasions during the war.

R
 
Leaving a note wrapped around cigars in a random field, relying on some soldier to find that note, read the note, and pass it along is a very roundabout way of getting false information to an opponent. Lee would be relying on everything going exactly right for it to have any effect and, as brass pointed out, Lee would be in the dark as to whether or not that information had been discovered and acted upon. It would have been much easier to have a "straggler" give up that information after being captured as happened on numerous occasions during the war.

R
Very good point
 
If it was a ruse then Lee left himself remarkably wide open. If he intended to "trap" McClellan I have to think he would not have split his army up as he did. IMO he was relying on McClellan moving slowly, so he could capture Harper's Ferry and reunite his army before fighting a major battle. I'm pretty sure the order was lost accidentally.
 
If it was a ruse then Lee left himself remarkably wide open. If he intended to "trap" McClellan I have to think he would not have split his army up as he did. IMO he was relying on McClellan moving slowly, so he could capture Harper's Ferry and reunite his army before fighting a major battle. I'm pretty sure the order was lost accidentally.
I am beginning to agree. It just seemed possible
 
Perhaps this is just speculation, but I've read that there were to be three recipients of the order. Some one, I forget who, made a copy for D.H. Hill. The order found was to have been for Hill. It was finally considered to be genuine because one of McClellan's aides recognized the hand-writing as that of his West Point classmate.
 
Remember though that at the time it was conventional wisdom that the attacking force needed more than just numerical superiority - they needed 3 to 4 times the manpower of the defending force.
Do you have a source for that? Is it a "rule" in one i West point book or?
(not saying you are wrong, and it would be a good rule... just curious?)

Also isn't it more of a "you need to outnumber the enemy at the point of attack".... not your army vs his army.
 
Do you have a source for that? Is it a "rule" in one i West point book or?
(not saying you are wrong, and it would be a good rule... just curious?)

Also isn't it more of a "you need to outnumber the enemy at the point of attack".... not your army vs his army.

I'll have to look up a source and get back to you on that part. And yes, I'm sure it was outnumbering the enemy at the point of attack, but in McClellan's mindset, to outnumber the enemy by that margin at the point of attack leaves him vulnerable somewhere else and allows the enemy to attack him. Unless he has that numerical advantage in troops overall.
 
What I meant was he took immediate action which was uncharacteristic of McClellan. I think he acted untypical of his past performance by taking the initiative and acting on the intel in his procession. I think that is truly uncharacteristic of the man. I would not at all have been surprised that he received the good fortune of finding the document and distrusting the content. That would have been more his style. The fact that he not only took action but immediate action is what I find uncharacteristic in the SO 191 account.

I don't think it's atypical. You must disambiguate two different situations: fluid field situations of maneouver, and static "siege" situations with heavily entrenched opposition.

In the open field McClellan was pretty bold and aggressive, although not to the point of rashness. Often his aggressive nature was not matched by his subordinates, or once (Williamsburg) overridden by a couple of hopelessly rash division commanders who knocked their heads against fortifications and lost.

When McClellan comes up against a heavily entrenched enemy (North Va, winter of 61-2, Yorktown, Richmond) he looks to turn the enemy out of position if possible, and if not he conducts deliberate siege operations.

In Maryland the capture of SO191 merely confirmed what his other int indicators were telling him. He'd sent 9th Corps to attack South Mountain before he was in possession of SO191, because he'd pushed cavalry out that way and they'd told him the enemy was holding the gaps. This was contradicted by what Halleck and Curtain were telling him.

Halleck was telling McClellan the whole rebel invasion was a diversion, and the rebels would seize Washington with another army. Curtain was telling McClellan the rebels were already marching into Pennsylvania, and the army needed to come up there (McClellan dispatched some cavalry to Gettysburg to check this out).

Bursting through the South Mountain gaps McClellan's int was that the rebel army was in three pieces - one at Sharpsburg, one retreating to Williamsport and another at Harper's Ferry. He resolved to strike the rebel centre at Sharpsburg with his entire force. His plan of action was to assault the enemy left and right simultaneously with 1st and 9th Corps to cut off the roads to the north and the fords. Thus on the late morning of the 16th McClellan ordered both Burnside and Hooker forward, but Burnside didn't move. He continues with the plan the next day, and Antietam results.

Of course after the rebel retreat his intention is to hold the Potomac crossings at Shepherdstown and Williamsport with detachments and immediately move his main body to Winchester to envelop Lee, but Halleck (and Lincoln) object to the plan for exposing Washington and operations cease for a month.
 
Forgive me for the self-indulgence of suggesting that Snooks, a hero of mythical proportion, was the one who lost the cigars (and the papers they were wrapped in) after receiving them at dead of night in a railway shack hard by the Frederick spur of the Harpers Ferry to Baltimore line in this fashion:

Yet the call came again and then again until I woke up in the darkness of the hut and heard the whispered name coming from somewhere outside the broken window at the rear.

“Hick...ah...I mean, Smith’s not here”, I hissed back. “He sent me. Do you have the package?” There was a sharp indrawing of breath from the shadowy figure outside and a woman’s voice replied.

“Who are you? Your name at once!” I moved as close to the window as possible. If this wench were at all favourable I’d have her in the building and trading secrets in ten minutes or draw stumps and declare myself beaten. As it turned out, I didn’t need much light to see that whatever attractions she may have as courier, she had none at all as a female. She was short and round—altogether too much like our beloved Queen to entice anyone other than a desperate sausage-eater whose sense of duty was far larger than whatever other sense he may have had.

“Flashman”, I replied, almost by habit now. “Major Flashman. Now do you have it or not and where am I to go?”

For a moment I thought this name meant something to this repulsive dumpling—she seemed to stiffen and almost drew back. Then she thrust something through the broken glass, something that fell to the floor and rolled some distance before I could grasp it in the pitch-black interior.

“My gold!” I cried, “Don’t forget the dosh!”

“Gold?” she hissed. “There is no gold here. Take the packet toward Frederick, to the first Union officer you can find. He’ll make sure you get your reward”.

And with that she turned away and in moments I heard the sound of a wagon moving off into the night, heading further south. **** Wild Bill—probably there never was to be any gold. He’d just wanted to put me to the hurdle and I’d jumped it for nothing. But this packet now, that might be something valuable.

I scrabbled around until it was safely in hand. It was a paper or two rolled up to hold four cigars and that was all. I took one out and gave it a good sniff and a listen, whereupon it promptly fell apart in my hand—typical dry rubbish from some southern plantation no doubt, not worth the effort of locating a match, so I tossed the halves aside. The rest I wrapped up again and stowed away in my jacket pocket; come daylight there might be something to these papers and even a bad cigar might win me a friend at need.

Sorry to backtrack, did not mean to disrupt the conversation, am not clear on who it is who is said to have written this? Not taking issue with you, Gen Meade ( sir... ), it's the writing? Anyone else think it's not at all similar to other era accounts- of anything? I just seems modern in usage and terminology? For instance, did the British use slang like ' dosh ' 150 years ago and were sausages a staple in the era? Maybe, I do not know. The author's conversation is just a little slick, isn't it? Plus, never heard anyone disrespecting the Queen by plainly calling her fat. Putting it in writing? Ouch.

You would hope it would not be written by anyone with responsibilties; this is a mean person. It's hard to get past the man's complaining in order to ascertain what his supposed intentions might be. ' Repulsive dumpling "? Whoever wrote this, whenever it was written spent an awful lot of nights as a single man.

Not that this proves or disproves a thing, sorry again to have disrupted a great flow.
 
I'll have to look up a source and get back to you on that part. And yes, I'm sure it was outnumbering the enemy at the point of attack, but in McClellan's mindset, to outnumber the enemy by that margin at the point of attack leaves him vulnerable somewhere else and allows the enemy to attack him. Unless he has that numerical advantage in troops overall.

McClellan's int told him he was coming up against a roughly equal sized army. If the rebs hadn't straggled heavily he'd have been right. Lee probably had about 90-100,000 men "present" during the campaign. The numbers usually thrown around are the number of combat effectives Lee had on the field on the 17th (ca. 40,000) and this is probably an underestimate, as he had ca. 42,000 PFD immediately after the battle, indicating ca. 55-60,000 PFD at Antietam with 15-20,000 stragglers still missing.
 
Sorry to backtrack, did not mean to disrupt the conversation, am not clear on who it is who is said to have written this? Not taking issue with you, Gen Meade ( sir... ), it's the writing? Anyone else think it's not at all similar to other era accounts- of anything? I just seems modern in usage and terminology? For instance, did the British use slang like ' dosh ' 150 years ago and were sausages a staple in the era? Maybe, I do not know. The author's conversation is just a little slick, isn't it? Plus, never heard anyone disrespecting the Queen by plainly calling her fat. Putting it in writing? Ouch.

You would hope it would not be written by anyone with responsibilties; this is a mean person. It's hard to get past the man's complaining in order to ascertain what his supposed intentions might be. ' Repulsive dumpling "? Whoever wrote this, whenever it was written spent an awful lot of nights as a single man.

Not that this proves or disproves a thing, sorry again to have disrupted a great flow.

JPK, I think our good General Meade might have quoted from one of the “Flashman“ novels...
From Wikipedia:
“The books centre on the exploits of the fictional protagonist Harry Flashman. He is a cowardly British soldier, rake and cad who is placed in a series of real historical incidents between 1839 and 1894. While the incidents and much of the detail in the novels have a factual background, Flashman's actions in the stories are either fictional, or Fraser uses the actions of unidentified individuals and assigns them to Flashman.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Flashman_Papers&oldid=675545924

I may add out of context that the “Sharpe“ novels by Bernard Cornwell are following the same principle, but are a very good read, quite accurate in their historical background. Unfortunately a different war ... Sharpe saves England in the Napoleonic Wars. Sorry for once more deviating!
 
The purpose of such a ruse de guerre is to feed your enemy false information, trick him into doing something you want him to do, and thereby obtain an advantage. The information contained in S.O. 191 was correct, it caused McClellan to do something that Lee did not want him to do, and it placed Lee's army at a horrible disadvantage. There is absolutely no reason to doubt the traditionally accepted historical version of these events.
 
@JPK Huson 1863 good catch! "Dosh" will have to come out; first appearance seems to have been 1953. "Sausage" is perfectly fine - dates back to the 15th century - and as a pejorative for 'German' has been around a long time even on these very pages http://civilwartalk.com/threads/shane-whats-wrong-with-eating-sausage.13/. Snooks seems careless in thus describing Prince Albert and I rather think he shouldn't have done it - nor commented upon Victoria in the manner that he did. Yes, he is supposed to be a complainer and is not a pleasant fellow. In fact....

@FarawayFriend friend, you've hit the nail on the head. The book offers the explanation for Fraser's failure to write Flashman's Civil War adventure (see my sig line and avatar). Originally, the quoted piece was a typical Flashman commentary. For reasons of copyright, it had to become someone else - another character from Tom Brown's School Days. Even to have the thought raised that it might be a quote from a real Flashman book is either a great compliment to me or a bit of an insult to poor George McDonald Fraser! :smile: I fear the latter to be the case.
 
I may add out of context that the “Sharpe“ novels by Bernard Cornwell are following the same principle, but are a very good read, quite accurate in their historical background. Unfortunately a different war ... Sharpe saves England in the Napoleonic Wars. Sorry for once more deviating!

Yes! Sharpe was quite a guy. He managed to snag a French eagle at Talavera, but also blew a few hundred civilians away when he set off that powder magazine at Alameida. However there is a rumour that following Waterloo, he sailed to America and joined the defenders of the Alamo. Except for a poor powder charge, he would have killed Santa Ana with a rifle shot. I'm not sure where he is now. One of his descendants is known to have been in the rebel army at Antietam.
 
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