>>17962215
wasn't this guy appointed to command simply out of politics?

Pope was just in over his head, he didn't know the Virginia theater and was facing the ANV at its peak. He was also undermined by McClellan and his butt buddies in the AOP.

>>17962221
He won a battle out west where the navy did most of the heavy lifting and he was a loyal Republican. Lincoln was desperate for a winner in the east.

Burnside kept getting undeserved jobs as well because of being a Republican. Even after the Crater disaster finally shelved him, he had a successful postwar political career as Senator from Rhode Island.

>>17962536
Pope was promoted to brigadier general in the regular army when he got the command in Virginia. That meant he would be a general for the rest of his life and retire a general no matter what else happened. He remained in the army postwar and eventually retired in the 1880s with the rank of major general.

>>17962288
>He was also undermined by McClellan and his butt buddies in the AOP.
/thread
McCuck and his band of ass-grabbing sycophants should have all been hanged on site.

>assumes command
>immediately tells the soldiers they're pussies and not as cool or badass as the Western armies
the thing about first impressions is that you only get to make one

None of Pope's corps commanders ended up holding any important commands after 2nd Bull Run, maybe he didn't have the best material to work with.

McDowell was just as much of an idiot in this battle.

>>17963209
also true

to his credit Pope for the first time in the Eastern theater proposed actually using cavalry as an instrument of war instead of part of the army signal corps and organized them into brigades instead of McClellan's setup of assigning one cavalry regiment to each infantry brigade

Pope didn't want to really go to Virginia and had considerable apprehensions about it.

ok

>Army of Virginia
>From the North

>Army of Northern Virginia
>From the South

>The army Pope commanded, called the Army of Virginia for its brief existence, wasn't technically an army, just three corps thrown together. The I Corps was led by Irvin McDowell and it contained some of the best soldiers in the army, but they had yet to see any combat action when Pope assumed command. McDowell, the only real soldier in the group, was a good man with good intentions, but cursed with forever bad luck and the stigma of Bull Run hanging over him. His troops detested him and for some bizarre reason became convinced that he was in cahoots with the enemy--indeed a peculiar-looking summer hat made of bamboo and canvas that McDowell had designed for himself was imagined by them as some kind of distinguishing mark for the enemy to see and recognize.

>The II Corps was led by German emigrant Franz Sigel and comprised of mainly Germans, but also some native-born Americans mainly from the Western states. They had formerly belonged to John Fremont; the corps had never licked anybody under him and would do little better under Sigel. Their morale was low and Sigel was not the sort of man to pull them together.

>The III Corps was led by Nathaniel Banks, former Speaker of the House, staunch abolitionist, and a good man devoted to the Union cause, but he was no soldier; during the spring, Stonewall Jackson had routed and run rings around him and his troops consumed his stores so much that he was dubbed "Commissary Banks." Banks commanded first-rate troops, mainly from the West, and they would do well if they ever got proper leadership.

>That was Pope's army; some good troops, some poor ones, two corps commanders who belonged back in civilian life, and one who had neither luck nor the affection of his troops on his side.

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>My side has a larger population, more resources, and will ultimately win if it's a long, drawn out war of attrition
>Therefore I will play it safe and be cautious, whilst my opponent knows he needs a dramatic victory and will need to make audacious moves. The only real way I can lose is to also do something risky and fuck it all up.
What was wrong with this strategy? He seems to have sucked at an operational level (not really something the general should be micromanaging too much anyway), but as a grand strategy what was wrong with the Union being cautious and waiting for Lee to fuck up?

>>17965729
There are a lot of things wrong with waging a war slowly when most of your hundreds of thousands of casualties are coming from disease.

McCuck was openly writing how he wished Pope would fail so he got put back in command.

>>17965791
Surely disease would be killing rebs just as fast, no?
It's brutal, but that's war. Think of Georgy Zukhov and you're losing 100k/month to the cold alone...but so are the krauts

>>17963011
Including especially Fitz-John Porter.

>>17962577
he was sent to command in Minnesota in late 1862, but did briefly re-appear in the Civil War during the 1864 Confederate invasion of Missouri when he was part of Union forces sent to drive them out of the state

>Army of Northern Virginia artillery chief E.P. Alexander recalled in his memoirs an episode back when Pope was a young man in Savannah, Georgia in 1842. According to Alexander, he propositioned the daughter of a prominent Savannah family and did so in such crude terms that she smacked him across the face. Alexander also claimed that during the Mexican War, Pope and a fellow officer were driving a wagon in which they had "abducted three or four Mexican girls, aged about fifteen, for sensual purposes."

ok

>>17965709
absolute bunch of circus clowns he had

John Pope was no military genius but he operated under conditions that made his job much more difficult that it needed to be. Here are four reasons why the fault for his defeat was not entirely his:

First, his selection to lead the new army has to be questioned. Pope was brash, no doubt about it, but he was also inexperienced in the mobile warfare of the Eastern theater. His victories in the West had come primarily against static defenses. Here he was confronted with experienced, decisive, and aggressive enemy leaders. His limited experience in this regard soon became obvious. Lee, Jackson, and Longstreet were totally different than anyone he had faced before. Perhaps a more experienced commander should have been plucked from the Army of the Potomac.

Second, Pope's dilemma was made infinitely more difficult by the lack of adequate troops to accomplish the tasks assigned to him. Waiting for McClellan's incredibly slow movements to reinforce his army left him shorthanded to conduct the necessary operations. This was never more apparent than the shortness of his defensive line on the Rappahannock that gave Jackson the opportunity to march past his right flank. It was not the kind of opportunity that Jackson was going to pass up.

Third, Pope's inexperience was compounded by poor subordinate leadership. There were several balky and recalcitrant leaders in key positions. Orders were ignored or serviced at their own pace. Pope had every reason to have a lack of confidence in them.

Fourth, the mission of the Army of Virginia was threefold:

1. Threaten the Shenandoah Valley to

2. Aid McClellan's Peninsula Campaign by drawing troops away from Richmond and

3. Protect Washington D.C. from a Confederate attack.

The first two were accomplished but the contrary attack/defend order hamstrung any real aggressive offensive maneuvers.

Facing these problems Pope was easily in well over his head. The end result of the campaign made that quite clear.

>>17968287
>>17968283
nah Pope was just an idiot. He should have pulled back and waited for McClellan's troops, which were moving surprising fast to get to him. Remember that more than half of McClellan's army was with Pope and had he simply held back, essentially all of it would have been with him. McClellan's army arrived at about the rate it went out because that was as fast as their shipping could move.

I don't think Grant, Sherman, or Sheridan could have won anything if their corps commanders were Banks, McDowell, and Sigel. 'Nuff said.

>>17968295
more than half of McClellan's army was with Pope

>>17968309
Not in the critical window of time I'm talking about. Burnside's troops (7,000 men) were the first to arrive but they had no transportation, cavalry, or artillery. They moved onto the left of Pope's defense on the day before Mac was ordered to retreat from the Penisula. The first AoP troops, Porter's 5th Corps, did not arrive until 8/19 after several key events had already placed Pope's army in jeopardy.

>>17968313
McClellan's troops actually moved pretty fast, the main bottleneck being railroad transportation. It's also apparent that Halleck was ignorant of troop movements--the one time he'd ever maneuvered an army in the field was when it took him 52 days to march 20 miles from the Shiloh battlefield to Corinth. He assumed all was going well and basically told Franklin not to hurry on the evening of Aug. 24 and to encamp near Washington rather than try and find Pope.

What McClellan did was ship all his sick, equipment etc. off as ordered, and provide artillery and cavalry to Burnside. He had enough transports at Harrison's to embark one division. The division he embarked was the Pennsylvania Reserves, who left 11th-13th to rejoin 1st Corps. It was typically a two day journey to Aquia Landing, and the Pa Reserves finished offloading around the 16th. They were south of the James at Coggin's Point, and so had to be embarked anyway.

The order to provide Burnside with artillery and cavalry probably delayed the movement by about four days. Yet none of these troops reached Pope. Burnside kept them at Frededericksburg.

Cont:

Meanwhile, Jackson turned Pope (with five of McClellan's divisions already) out of position on the Rappahanock on Aug. 26 but where did Pope go? Instead of moving behind the Occoquan, which would be the correct move, he moved to Warrenton (increasing his envelopment and moving away from reinforcement and supply) and then Gainesville. This was inexcusably incompetent.

Pope served well in MN during the Lakota war and afterwards in two decades of post-ACW army service that concluded with him retiring a major general. Both Grant and Sherman considered him a valued colleague.

>>17968329
I'd look at Pope's correspondence with Halleck. They essentially boil down to Pope refusing to accept any blame for his actions and demanding that either Halleck or McClellan take the fall for him. He keeps implying he has dirt on Halleck in an attempt to blackmail him, either Halleck remove McClellan and action the court-martial of Porter, or Pope would make Halleck's position untenable, and Pope also expected to be rewarded by the administration for being a Republican. He revealed openly in 1865 that he had evidence Halleck had falsified reports from Corinth. This is probably what Pope had over Halleck.

Halleck for his part initially ignored Pope's clumsy attempt at blackmail, but in November noted that there was a movement to blame him (Halleck) for the Bull Run debacle. Suddenly Halleck got friendly with Pope and actioned the discretionary order to remove McClellan (which he'd already had for two days) and court-martial Porter.

The move to court-martial Franklin seems to have been averted when McClellan, knowing he was done, took the blame for Franklin's failure.

It seems to me we could all agree on some basic facts.

As I understand it, in my limited familiarity:

>Mac had a good plan but executed poorly
>Lincoln rug-pulled Mac by sending reinforcements overland after Mac warned him it would cause him to overextend his lines to the north and invite being turned by that flank
>Mac was in fact turned by that flank, performed an unjustly derided change of base that placed his army across the James much the same as Grant two years later
>Lincoln was looking for a fighting general and one who would be loyal to the administration so he summoned Pope from the west although Corinth had demonstrated that he had a knack for venturing into exposed positions without proper support
>Lincoln once again rug pulled Mac and ordered him to withdraw from the peninsula despite the fact that he now threatened both Petersburg and Richmond (again, same disposition Grant would assume two years later)
>Mac reacted poorly, as would most of us having just had the rug pulled from under us twice and was slow returning his men, but it wasn’t as egregiously slow as has been presented

>>17968364
there we go. Pope was a fighting general which was something the AOP had hardly any of outside Phil Kearny. in his memoirs Longstreet never said much negative about Pope's performance at 2nd Bull Run, rather he spent more ink bashing his own colleagues especially A.P. Hill and Fitz Lee.

>>17968364
yeah Pope's actions during the Corinth campaign don't bode well for him and he did leave his army exposed and vulnerable to destruction if Beauregard had been able to work up the nerve to do anything about it. all it took was a halfway competent Confederate commander to school him,

>>17968295
>>17968283
Pope may be partially excused for being in over his head as regards the overall campaign but some of his actions at 2nd Manassas were inexcusable. On the evening of 8/29 Hood's division clashed with Hatch's division at Groveton and Sullivan's brigade was driven back in disorder. This should have clued Pope in that a major Confederate attack on his left was coming, but instead he puts Hatch north of the turnpike and only two regiments and Hazlett’s battery to guard the ground the Confederates had driven a full brigade from the previous evening. The result was a disaster later on the 30th as Longstreet rolled over resistance on the same ground that Sullivan had lost the night before. This time however the Confederates did not stop at Young’s Branch nor until they had driven Pope all the way across Bull Run.

>>17968303
Not fair, he also had Hooker, Kearny, FJP, Stevens, and Reno all highly regarded generals and he didn't put them to use. Granted, Pope had only had this command a few weeks but many of the troops McClellan had at Antietam were new to him too. I give credit to Mac and Pope for being able to function with such an ad-hoc force, they both faced real challenges in that regard.

>>17968410
It is the notion that the Confederates organizationally had much more experience in terms of leadership, divisions, brigades, and artillery in combat within the same order of battle with a minimum of one major engagement and IIRC as high as 5 or 6....compare that to Pope's army and extended forces.

>>17968414
it's more like Lee had reorganized ANV after the 7 Days Battles and gotten rid of all the shitty generals--Holmes, Magruder, and Huger were gone and he had a mostly first-rate officer corps. Pope had a larger but more heterogenous army and he was assuming things were going to happen than weren't in reality. On the 29th he spent hours waiting for Porter to attack Jackson's flank without realizing that he hadn't actually ordered that, nor that Porter only had two divisions (one of them the small regular division) and that McDowell had consequently detached something like two thirds of the flanking column. He also seems to have thought that as of the afternoon of the 30th Jackson had been in a state of retreat for more than a day, somehow doing this without moving.

>>17968410
It is a testimony to Mac's organizational skills that he was able to take all the disparate commands he inherited from Pope plus thousands of new green troops and immediately put them on the road in the Maryland campaign.

>>17968423
Very few generals had what it took to be an army commander and Pope didn't have it nor did Burnside or Hooker.

I still say that anyone who has read the reports from Corinth carefully would expect Pope to get bitchslapped by Lee. He ventured dangerously far from Buell multiple times and would have gotten his shit pushed in there if Beauregard had been willing to fight at all.

Pope did several dumb moves including:

>ignoring Halleck's orders to not do anything risky, instead in the 1st week of August he moved to the Culpeper area in an attempt to disrupt the Confederate rail depot at Gordonsville, causing Lee to tell Jackson to "suppress" Pope
>Pope's forces were scattered and Banks was left exposed
>instead Banks attacks first at Cedar Mountain as he wants to avenge the defeat his army suffered in the Shenandoah Valley two months ago
>after initially smashing up one of Jackson's divisions and killing its commander, the rest of Jackson's command arrives and repulses him
>Banks lost about 2,200 men, all casualties Pope could ill afford

McCuck's entire essence as a general boils down to "If I don't get exactly everything I want then it's all part of a sinister conspiracy against me and if the country and this army is destroyed it's everyone's fault but mine."

>>17962577
>>17962572
Finding political generals with suitable political credentials like Sigel wasn't hard, finding West Pointers with them was harder as the prewar officer corps were mostly Democrats. Pope was a West Pointer and a Republican and so was Burnside.

>>17969141
Pope, Banks, and Sigel were all political appointees in a sense (McDowell was pretty apolitical)

>>17963196
He was right though. The AoTP was a bunch of nancies. Couldn't compare to those midwestern farm boys.

>>17969164
Jackson had already proven Banks incompetent to command an army, so putting him in command of an even larger army was not any sort of an option.

>>17968303
I believe Banks and McDowell outranked him though?

>>17969628
As anon said, Pope was made a brigadier general in the regular army in July 1862. He was also a major general of volunteers since March 21. McDowell was promoted to major general to rank from March 14 and Banks May 14, 1861 with Fremont's comission two days prior to that. Fremont then refused to serve under Pope as he ranked him and resigned his command. Sigel took over and his major general's commission was the same day as Pope's. A Congressional resolution of April 4, 1862 authorized the president to assign generals to commands as necessary, ignoring seniority.

Pope had been in fact summoned east to command the Army of Virginia in June, just before the Seven Days Battles. McDowell and Banks apparently were willing to waive seniority while Fremont was insulted at serving under his junior in rank and left his command, but he was never given any further commands in the war.

>>17969141
The command could have been successful under another general but who? Nobody in their right mind was going to put Banks or Sigel in charge and McDowell had a loser stigma about him. Burnside was Burnside and Hooker was too junior as of yet. Fitz-John Porter was a solid general but one of McClellan's biggest groupies so not happening.

I think Hatch's division must be to blame as well because Longstreet had gotten his guns up on the ridge west of Groveton and they assumed it was just Confederate horse artillery. When there's a lot of artillery and it includes long range guns it's a pretty safe bet that enemy infantry are near.

ok

I agree that Grant couldn't have made things work either if his corps commanders were McDowell, Banks, and Sigel.

>>17972310
that is accurate. not saying Pope didn't make some poor decisions that contributed to his defeat, but no general no matter how skilled was going to win anything with those corps commanders.

How many corps were there in the Union Army and what were they organized into?

>>17972337
>AOP was organized into 5 corps per presidential order of 3/17/62 under McDowell, Sumner, Heintzelman, Keyes and Banks
>McDowell and Banks are detached for service in northern Virginia, leaving the AOP with three corps
>McClellan obtains permission in May to make two additional corps (5th and 6th) and appoint their commanders
>Pope's AOV consists then of McDowell, Banks, and Sigel's commands
>the 7th, 8th, and 9th Corps are created in July
>this isn't actually necessary as the AOV still exists and at 2nd Bull Run the AOP 3rd Corps (Heintzelman) and AOV 3rd Corps (McDowell) are the two largest Union formations and contain roughly half of Pope's entire army
>later during the Maryland Campaign Banks's former command is re-designated the 12th Corps although in fact there is no 10th Corps as of yet

>>17969664
Fremont was an idiot, I don't think there's any historian who evaluates him positively.

>>17972427
an ancestor of mine served in the Union army and was at Wilson's Creek when Nathaniel Lyon fell. my understanding was that it was Fremont's rather than Sigel's incompetence that got Lyon killed.

>>17972437
Nah it was Sigel's faggotry. He allowed himself to march into SW Missouri a remote area with no strategic importance while ignoring enemy forces far in his rear, and not able to be resupplied because of said enemy forces, and then being told to withdraw as he was outnumbered. Sigel then launched a rash attack on Price and McCullough. His decision to retreat was the one smart move he made.

And Lyon was no longer in charge because Blair had found him incompetent and reckless. Also he realistically would never have been left in command as he was in over his head rankwise, a higher ranked general was going to replace him.

>>17972447
ok well i'm not the biggest expert on the Western theater but it's well known that Fremont had a bad reputation when he came east

>>17972450
Fremont allowed a culture of corruption to run rampant during his time in Missouri. Fremont, like some of the state governors, tended to run their own quartermaster department. Challenging Lincoln on the emancipation issue might have worked if Lincoln was a weaker figure.

>>17972452
>>17972447
Not giving Lyon adequate support, pulling regular army units from him in the face of the enemy, going "I am the law" and disregarding the civilian government in Washington, outright insulting the administration's policy, keeping his own flamboyant bodyguard outfit, and refusing to let Congressional and War Department fact finding teams investigate his actions, sending his wife to D.C. to stir up trouble, and making murky arms deals all adds to up to one gigantic clusterfuck.

>>17972455
yet the facts still stand that Fremont:

>secured Missouri for the Union which Lyon failed to do
>his replacement actually ceded territory to the enemy
>he also reinforced Cairo as Prentiss was clamoring for aid because Prentiss thought Polk and Hardee were going to move on it
>because he actually secured the state, many of the regulars he had raised and trained went on to serve in the west, and into Arkansas

>>17972455
>sending his wife to D.C. to stir up trouble, and
Ah yes, Jessie Fremont, Jessie Fremont...ugh. For as faggoty as McClellan was, he at least didn't use his wife as his chained pitbull. Jessie on the other hand had managed her husband's presidential campaign several years earlier and expected it.

>>17972463
I suppose you make some fair points, but the end doesn't always justify the means.

Success can be hard to argue with, but character is easier and Fremont's character was appalling and if he had not been removed his success most likely would have eventually backfired militarily as it did politically. And at that early phase of the war the political aspect of the war as much as the military aspect was still extremely fluid.

>>17972478
I wouldn't say the first three commanders in Missouri are going to be highly regarded by anyone but between Lyon, Fremont, and Hunter the only one with any lasting positive or redeeming effects would been Fremont. He did secure the state, he did raise and train a large body of men who went on to give good service in the Trans-Mississippi and the West.