Return To The Killing Ground

By Jeffry D. Wert

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Brash, bombastic John Pope tempted fate by returning to the old battleground at Manassas. He thought he had caught Robert E. Lee napping. He was wrong.

A heavy, soaking rain fell across northern Virginia on the night of August 30-31, 1862. Despite the storm’s intensity, it could not wash away the bloodstains that reddened the fields and wood lots along Bull Run creek. On the two previous days, more than 100,000 Northerners and Southerners had killed and maimed each other.

If General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia had a single crucible that forged it into one of history’s finest commands, it was perhaps this familiar killing ground at Manassas.

The road back to Manassas for a second bloodletting stretched across two months to the outskirts of Richmond. There, during the last weeks of June, Lee’s troops shoved Union Maj. Gen. George McClellan’s Army of the Potomac down the Virginia peninsula away from the Confederate capital. When the retreating Federals repulsed Rebel charges at Malvern Hill on July 1, the Seven Days’ campaign ended. McClellan shifted his units to the vicinity of Harrison’s Landing, where Union gunboats offered firepower.

The two antagonists stalked each other for the next six weeks. McClellan singed the telegraph wires to Washington, D.C., with demands for more men, arms and supplies, and blamed President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton for all the Union Army’s setbacks. Lee, meanwhile, probed the Federals with occasional artillery bombardments and infantry skirmishers. As the inactivity lengthened, Lee turned his attention to a second Union threat lumbering across central Virginia.

In June, even while McClellan crawled up the peninsula toward Richmond, the Lincoln administration consolidated three departments scattered across the Old Dominion into a unified command. On June 26, the government merged the Mountain, Shenandoah and Rappahannock departments into the three-corps Army of Virginia. For commander of the new army, Union officials selected 40-year-old Maj. Gen. John Pope.

A Kentuckian, John Pope had led the Army of the Mississippi during the spring of 1862. Pope’s forces captured New Madrid, Mo., and Island No. 10, releasing the Confederate hold on the upper Mississippi River. Awarded a major generalcy for the operations, Pope was ordered eastward upon creation of the Army of Virginia.

John Pope, unfortunately, was his own worst enemy. Abrasive, conceited and loudmouthed, he rubbed people the wrong way. When he reported to Virginia, he managed to alienate his top subordinates almost at once and soon earned the enmity of the common soldiers. Brigadier General Samuel D. Sturgis, for instance, upon receipt of an order from Pope, snarled, “I don’t care for John Pope one pinch of owl dung.”

As for the men in the ranks, Pope greeted them with a bombastic proclamation that the soldiers never forgot. “I have come to you from the West,” Pope announced, “where we have always seen the backs of our enemies….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….Let us look before and not behind. Success and glory are in the advance.”

Despite his flaws, Pope was energetic and aggressive, with a zest for fighting–the type of officer Lincoln wanted for the post. His mission was to relieve pressure on McClellan by advancing southward from Washington along the Orange & Alexandria Railroad toward Gordonsville. If Pope could capture Gordonsville, he could sever the Virginia Central Railroad, which hauled the rich harvest of the Shenandoah Valley to Lee’s army at Richmond.

When Pope took command of the Army of Virginia, his three corps were scattered across northern Virginia from the Shenandoah Valley through Manassas Junction to Fredericksburg. West of the Blue Ridge, the I and II Corps, commanded by Maj. Gens. Franz Sigel and Nathaniel P. Banks, respectively, were stationed at Middletown, roughly a dozen miles south of Winchester. The III Corps, under Maj. Gen. Irvin McDowell, was divided, with one division at Manassas Junction and the other at Fredericksburg. Consequently, Pope ordered a concentration of the corps at Culpeper Court House on the Orange & Alexandria Railroad, 30 miles north of Gordonsville between the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers

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