Well, good evening everybody. Hope everyone is doing well. Welcome into the live stream presentation tonight here on my YouTube channel. It's good to see some people already hanging out and waiting to be a part of this momentous occasion. I say it's momentous because this is KT Shively's first time on the programming. So, we need to welcome them in this evening. Uh, thank you both for being on. And I want to give a little bit of bio for both of you before we get rolling here into the book. Uh, but I'm so appreciative to see your faces again on a live stream video.
Uh, KT Shively is associate professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University. They are the author of Nature's Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment, 1862, co-editor of The Second Manassas Campaign, which I still have my copy here and there's all kinds of notes in the margins and things like that because you become a PhD student, you suddenly have like notes and margins of every book that you own. Uh, and they are the author of a chapter in that work entitled 'Management Most Wretched: Logistical Self-Destruction in the Army of Virginia.' And once again Gary Gallagher joins us. I think Gary, this is like your fifth time on my stuff.
We've had a great time over the years on numerous occasions, John. I don't remember how many.
Yeah, it's always a good time having Gary on. Gary is the John L. Nau III Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Virginia and author or editor of more books than I can count and I have an accounting degree, including Lee and His Army in Confederate History and The Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1864, amongst many others. Uh, the title of his chapter in The Second Manassas Campaign is 'The Tide of War Has Been Rolled Back: Second Manassas in Confederate Perspective.' And for everyone who is tuning in or who will be tuning in, please find pinned at the top of the chat a link directly to the book from UNC Press.
Uh, so KT, I would love to start with you because you haven't โ this is your first time on and you co-edited this work. Uh, how did this work come about? Why the Second Manassas Campaign?
Well, first thanks for having me on, John. It's great to be here. Um, so I came onto this project a little bit later than my co-author, um, Carrie. Uh, Carrie had edited โ how many volumes did Carrie do with you, Gary? One or two?
One. We did one together.
And then Gary stepped away and Carrie did a volume on her own. Um, and the Military Campaigns of the Civil War series with UNC was to me just the greatest military series out there. Um, when I started studying the Civil War, um, it was one of the series that really drew me to become a scholar of the Civil War, was one of the things that drew me to study with Gary. Gary was my PhD adviser at the University of Virginia. Um, and honestly, I had a dream of being a participant in the series, which I was. Um, and when I noticed that Carrie was editing on her own, I thought, you know, she really needs a co-editor. It's just too much work for one person. So, honestly, I insinuated myself in it and just contacted Carrie and said, um, is there a possibility that you might want a co-editor? Uh, I knew that she was going to start working on the Second Manassas volume. Uh, which actually Gary can probably tell you more about the very beginning origin story of this volume. Um, but Carrie said that she would love to have a co-editor. Um, you know, I'm a military historian myself. Um, and so I came on board and at that point I think some of the essayists had already been, you know, gathered. Um, but we sort of finished out the lineup together. Um, but yeah, turning to the origins of Second Manassas as a topic, Gary, I believe this was one of the conferences that you did, right?
It was. The Military Campaigns came out of a series of conferences that began at Penn State and then transferred to UVA when I went to UVA. And the original idea was to provide a forum that would make people think about military history in a broader framework that would include reciprocal ties between the home front and the battlefront, and which would include National Park Service historians, graduate students, and established scholars. Wanted to have all three kinds of those voices present in these books. And that's how it developed. First one came out in the mid-90s and they came out about one a year and we did have a conference on Second Bull Run, Manassas, and to my โ let's just say there weren't enough good essays that came out. It's the only conference we had that didn't have enough good essays to make a book and so it just went by the wayside and it was very disappointing.
But here we go. Carrie and KT came through and have filled the gap that has been present there. It should have come out in the late 1990s. That's when the book would have come out if the conference had yielded enough good essays, but it didn't. And again, it was the only one that didn't. It's really interesting.
Gary, do you think the book would have looked a little different? Uh, been made up a little bit differently because of just the evolution of the field itself, the evolution of the craft.
It might have looked a little different, but really these volumes going all the way back to the beginning have very different kinds of essays in them, which this volume does as well. I can't โ there isn't an essay in this book that wouldn't have worked in the book that I would have imagined in the late 1990s. I think every topic in this book is something that would have struck me as a good way to try to get at some aspect of the campaign.
Uh, KT, how did you come to the conclusion that you wanted to write your particular chapter? What was the spark that was like, I want to write about logistics in the Army of Virginia?
You know, I actually was kind of a slog coming to this topic. Um, we started researching for these essays in just the height of COVID. Um, it was extremely difficult to do archival research. Um, and I kind of โ I've been writing a book about Jubal Early for the past 15 years. Uh, I did just turn it into the press though. So...
That's great. Congratulations.
Thank you. Yeah, that happened last Friday. Um, so I have been celebrating. But so I initially thought that I might write an essay focused on him. Um, but I just was casting around and finally I was able to get an appointment with the National Archives. Um, and when I did so and I started digging into the archival research they had on the Army of Virginia, um, the story was so clearly about logistics to me. It really just leapt out. Um, and that's the direction I had to go. That's what the evidence said. I mean, right, Gary, this is what you always said to me. Just go where the evidence leads you.
My mantra. It really is. You can't go wrong if that's what you do. That's my belief.
Right? So that's where I had to go. Um, that's what I saw in the evidence. And, but you know, it was a process, um, because at that point we already knew that Cesaly Xander was writing her essay on Pope. And so I was like, well, you know, I'm not sure we need a second essay on him. Um, but it was, you know, the logistical story was the story that came out and it's not only focused on Pope, but I think that's one of the strengths of this volume. There's so much interpretive space to look at Second Manassas because there's been so little written on it. And I think my essay is a revisionist look at Pope insofar as it looks at him. Um, and I also think there's room for contrasting interpretations in these volumes, which is one of the things that I admire about them so much.
That's always been true in the series. People have disagreed with one another, which is great.
Uh, I just did an interview earlier today and Jonathan Noyales was a part of that and he was talking about how history needs to be a forum and you can really see in some of these edited works like this that the forum in paper form where people are disagreeing or they are slightly moving to one sector of the history compared to someone else or they're coming at it in a different direction. And I think that's a beautiful part of edited works is you get to see several people who are having a conversation through the pages in different ways and really help to progress the field hopefully, especially with Second Bull Run with this.
I was going to say I also think we need to be a little bit more comfortable with disagreeing. I mean, that's sort of what scholarship is all about, right? Is that we're going to bring contrasting interpretations and look at different evidence and look at evidence in new ways. I mean, that was one of the things that really struck me when I came to this evidence. Um, you know, I noticed that, um, like diary entries that have been looked at again and again and, you know, Jacob Cox's memoirs, they always get sort of interpreted in one way. And I took a look at them and I said, you know, I really see them the opposite way. There really is a different way to look at these things. Um, so I think, yeah, we just could all get a little bit more comfortable with disagreeing in collegial ways.
And Gary, you've written so much on the Confederate war effort over the years and spoken about it at length. Uh, what was it that you wanted to get across in your chapter right away for the reader? What was the main kind of thesis or idea you wanted the reader to be introduced to when you talk about the Army of Northern Virginia just before Second Bull Run or Second Manassas?
Well, I came late to this. I think I came to it because at one point it seemed that there weren't as many essays sort of on the Confederate side of things. And so, in conversation with the editors, I offered to write something on the campaign from a Confederate perspective. It's always seemed to me that Second Bull Run โ Manassas, and I use Second Manassas in my essay because I'm quoting mainly Confederate sources, and it would have been weird to go back and forth between Bull Run and Manassas โ but it seems to me to get lost between the Seven Days and Antietam. And one of the things I really wanted to do in my essay was try to get people to think of the campaigning between June and September 1862 as one sprawling campaign in three distinct acts but all very closely related. Act one is the Seven Days, which blunted McClellan's offensive. Act two is Second Manassas, which reoriented the war to the Potomac frontier. And act three is the Maryland Campaign, which took the fighting into the United States for the first time with the Army of Northern Virginia. A lot of people at the time on the Confederate side interpreted it that way. They saw it as one major campaign with these three key parts.
I also saw it as a very critical element in Lee's making the Army of Northern Virginia his army and changing the culture. Every army has a culture and the culture was Johnston's culture in that army before Lee arrived and this was the campaign where he got rid of a lot of senior officers and where he settled on his three principal officers as Longstreet, Jackson and Stuart and began to shape the army in his image and make it a very aggressive army rather than a reactive army. The third thing that I wanted to emphasize was just how powerfully John Pope's statements โ and to me the interesting question is did he do all the things he said he was going to do? He didn't. He did some of them but he didn't do all of them. The fact that he said them together with what both Congress, with the Second Confiscation Act, and Lincoln was doing regarding emancipation marked a real turning point in the war where the war took a decided shift toward a much, much harder kind of war. Not George McClellan's kind of war, not Joseph Johnston's kind of war, but a war that put everything in the Confederacy on the table. Everything relating to their slavery-based society. And so those are the three themes that I got at in my essay. Look at it as part of a broader campaign. Look at the change in the Army of Northern Virginia with Lee in charge. And look at just how this campaign resonated behind the lines and with the Confederate government issuing these really sharply worded stink bombs directed toward the United States. It's really an interesting radicalization of the war in significant ways in late July and August 1862.
KT, you spoke about that in your chapter as far as what Pope is saying, what he's thinking he's going to do or what he's hoping to do. What are those aims of his that he's hoping to put out into the field that really gets the Confederate war effort moving more aggressively in the field?
Yeah. Um, thanks for asking that. So my essay takes a different approach to understanding Pope's general orders. So the traditional interpretation of them had been that Pope was really sort of a pawn of the Republican Party and that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and others were really prompting him to kind of double down on confiscation and punishing Confederate civilians, etc. Um, and while I do agree that he was certainly, you know, playing political games in Washington, and I think again Cesaly Xander's essay does a good job of showing how he interacted with politicians in that period. Uh, my essay is really looking at logistics. And what I found was that Pope's general orders really discreetly and clearly corresponded to the logistical problems that he was trying to figure out how to sort through. Um, so things like getting enough forage for the horses. Um, things like all of his corps and all the way down to the regimental level had far too much baggage train, far too many wagons in their baggage trains to a ridiculous level. Even his cavalry were performing reconnaissance raids with just grossly ballooned baggage trains in tow. Um, and he was having a very difficult time getting his commanding officers to understand that he wanted to get the army on the move. He wanted to consolidate it. He wanted to be able to be kind of an offensive machine and it was impossible with this amount of logistical backlog. Um, and he kept asking and ordering and things weren't happening. Um, so finally he started escalating and his general orders addressed these things. And part of the way he understood the problem was that his communications and supply lines were being sabotaged by Confederate civilians, by guerrillas. And this was something that he had experience with from Missouri. And he saw this problem playing out again. And so he, you know, asked Lincoln specifically, you know, if it would be okay essentially to say, 'We're going to shoot these people. If civilians are acting like soldiers, then they can be shot, right?' Um, and he checked to make sure that that would be okay. So, he's issuing these orders. Um, and part of what I talk about is they're in line with Republican Party policy. He's not overstepping the policy that, you know, he's not overstepping confiscation. He's emphasizing it. He's saying we're going to enforce it, which is something that McClellan didn't do. McClellan enforced confiscation, but he didn't emphasize it. He didn't, you know, he made sure that there wasn't any plundering. He kept things under guard. Um, and Pope wanted to do away with all of that. Uh, but I think what Gary's essay shows that's very, very important is that it doesn't matter what Pope's intention was. The effect was to escalate the war, was to escalate this back and forth that the US and Confederacy had already been engaging in, where civilians were becoming increasingly part of the war through guerrilla warfare, through hangings on either side. And his general orders were perceived and accepted as an escalation of this. Right? So that may not have been Pope's interpretation and he was kind of surprised by the response. And, you know, I think one of the really telling things is that Confederates perceived that Pope was giving his soldiers license to plunder with his general orders. And that wasn't Pope's intent at all actually. Um, in fact, when he saw that it increased plundering, he issued another general order saying, 'Stop that.' Um, that one didn't get much play in the Confederacy, the follow-up general order.
Yeah. So, I mean, again, the reception of that, they don't care what Pope's intent is, right? They're focused on...
I mean, the response was they had just finished agreeing on a prisoner of war cartel just before โ I mean, just before this got going. And the reaction in the Confederacy, the reaction to Pope's statements was such that they exempted Pope and some of his subordinates. They said they would not be treated as prisoners of war if they were captured because they weren't behaving as soldiers. They were behaving as people operating outside the laws. I mean, the words they used was civilized warfare. The words civilized and savage occur again and again and again in the Confederate coverage of what Pope was doing and they said, yes, of course he came from Missouri where these things had been going on before. I mean, we got Francis Lieber's Code of War because of this kind of thing in Missouri. That's what prompted the Code of War that Lieber put together. How do you deal with these civilians? What are they? Who's a civilian? Who isn't? Who's a soldier? Who isn't? What will we accept? What we won't accept. But the reaction to Pope was โ I mean, Pope became, he joined Ben Butler as the two great evil figures in United States uniforms. I mean, they specifically yoked him to Ben Butler and said they were indicative of the kind of war that the United States was going to wage, which had this โ it's bad enough if he's going to hang civilians who help the army, but they also yoked it to emancipation. What they want to do is destroy our slavery-based social system. That's what they want to do. And so Pope gets tied into that because of what Congress and Lincoln were doing apart. The Confederates put it all together. It's all happening at the same time. And so they put it together as part of a broader Union effort to incite insurrection in the Confederacy. They use that charge. Davis charged the United States with that. The Confederate Department of War charged the US government with that in the course of this period as well.
Yeah. I mean, I think one of the things that's important to understand is I agree with all of that. Um, but you know, Pope himself, it's sort of like the results redefined the intent in the scholarship. Right? So, for instance, you know, Pope did agree that the war should destroy slavery. He was not in favor of arming black soldiers and his general orders didn't talk about black soldiers. Didn't mention it at all.
Didn't even mention them.
Right. So, I mean, again, I think it's important for us to understand it's both and, right? Pope was not sort of this forward-thinking mouthpiece of the Republican Party in my view, because the Republican Party was very concerned with emancipation and black soldiers at that point, and he would not touch it. But at the same time, everything Gary just said is true. So the results were the results.
He had a very utilitarian view of getting rid of slavery. It would hurt the Confederates if he got rid of โ he didn't give a good goddamn about black people, but killing slavery would help the United States war effort. I mean, he's very โ it's just very practical in his view there.
Well, Pope's having some issues with logistics and getting his army together and kind of solidifying their place in the field. Gary, what's the Army of Northern Virginia looking like coming off of the Seven Days Campaign going into this stretch, into the early days of, you know, heading towards Manassas and such? Are they a consolidated force? Not only because of the rhetoric, but because of where they are or...
Well, they're โ because of who's in charge now is a big โ I mean, Seven Days is a really fumbling victory for Lee. It's not some masterpiece on his part. And one of the reasons that it was difficult is that it had this top echelon of command. There was just a bunch of major generals commanding divisions. There's not a unit of organization larger than a division in the army that Lee is commanding outside Richmond. And so the first change he makes is to weed out a bunch of the losers in the high command and sends them to a place that doesn't matter. Just send them across the Mississippi River. Who cares? Nothing out there matters anyway. So there goes Theophilus Holmes. There goes John Bankhead Magruder, Ed McGruder. They all head west, way west, way west to the dumping ground of the Confederacy. And there's no corps unit yet in the Confederacy. The United States had one. The Confederacy wouldn't โ Congress wouldn't bring that until later in 1862. But he in effect created corps. He called the right wing and left wing, Longstreet's wing and Jackson's wing of the army. Essentially treats Longstreet as his senior corps commander, Jackson as his second senior corps commander. Longstreet's always senior to Jackson. And then all the cavalry under Jeb Stuart. The key organizational change that Lee makes. It's now a streamlined high command with just three principals as his key subordinates, which is infinitely superior to having this gaggle. Whiting is another one of the division commanders who's weeded, who heads south toward North Carolina. But that's the key thing that Lee does. And the other thing that he does is โ and the Seven Days does this โ it indicates that there is a new culture at least in the process of being created and that is an aggressive culture and that suited the Confederate populace very well. Go smite the enemy. Inflict damage on the enemy as much as you can. Don't just sit and wait for them to do whatever they're going to do. Do something to them. And Lee is doing that as well. So he's restructuring the high command and he's also inculcating within the officer corps in the Army of Northern Virginia this more aggressive frame of mind. And it's a wonderful contrast. It's actually what Pope's trying to do in the Army of Virginia in some ways. Pope's also โ when Pope says we come from the West, a lot of what he said actually makes sense and it's a direct insult to McClellan, which McClellan deserved in my view in many ways. Pope wants a more aggressive army than McClellan had in the Army of the Potomac. Pope actually in some interesting ways is trying to do some of the things that Lee was doing in the Army of Northern Virginia.
Yeah. And actually Gary, I mean, the speech that Pope's so famous for, right? His address to the troops where he's an ass...
Yeah. So, I mean, he had said the same thing to all of his corps commanders before and finally he issues that address to the whole lot of them because he's not getting the aggressive results he wants from his corps commanders.
And he's right. I mean, what he's telling them to do, Abraham Lincoln certainly would have agreed with what he was telling them. Abraham Lincoln wanted some army to behave the way that Pope wanted his army to behave. And I didn't focus on the North, but I looked at a lot of northern newspapers where quotations from that were reprinted in the Confederacy, which added grist to the Confederate mill of how awful Pope was. A lot of Northern papers said, 'Yes, Pope is doing what needs to be done in Virginia. Finally, somebody is doing what needs to be done in Virginia.' Uh, the retrospective bashing of Pope is interesting. I mean, it's a โ and he's never, despite what KT might write or what many other people might write, I can't envision a time when Pope isn't sort of a throwaway laugh line among what, you know, kind of the nonprofessional audience for the Civil War. John Pope is easily lampooned. Uh, but he was actually a serious figure and a really important one I think in a number of ways even though he wasn't โ he's only around for a couple of months in Virginia, but he leaves a pretty large imprint in some ways.
Uh, do you think that Pope's command would have been a little different if he was commanding a consolidated force like the Army of the Potomac and he's got something to maybe work with a little bit more than this โ like, aggressive and now he's got to look at his subordinates.
How would you like to inherit that group of subordinates here? The thing โ and I don't mean to tread on KT's turf too much here โ the Army of Virginia is not an army. It's three pieces thrown together and called an army. It is not really an army in significant ways, I think.
Right. And I mean, who the hell would want to work with them? God, you want more of Sigel?
Well, I mean, and you know, Sigel is not โ I mean, Sigel is really bad. And, you know, he is leaking to the presses, you know, it's just his level of, I think, insubordination is really appalling. But before him comes Fremont and Fremont won't even submit, you know, because he technically outranks Pope and so he's gone and he absconds with all of the papers so that administratively it's impossible to even know where the First Corps is, who's in charge, what it's doing. I mean, that level of, again, insubordination is truly mind-boggling. So yes, Pope gets a bad reputation, but I mean when Gary says his subordinates were bad, they were bad. I mean, it's not just that they were ineffective, which they were. I mean, Banks was horrifically ineffective, but it's that they actively worked against Pope.
Well, he has three guys at one time or another who are poster boys for appointments to military command for political reasons. He has Sigel and Fremont and Banks. I mean, they're soldiers for one reason, because they're checking boxes that Lincoln needs to check to keep various groups on board with the war effort. It's just โ if McDowell's your best card to play, you don't have a very good hand.
And he really is. I mean, McDowell is definitely the most organized. And McDowell can't even get the essential messages communicated to Pope in time for him, you know, to fight the battle of Second Bull Run. So, I mean, it really is appalling.
Banks, when you look, you could just look at the Official Records. You don't have to look at the manuscript materials like I did. And what you'll see is Pope just trying to get Banks to act in the most basic way a corps commander needs to. And Banks always just turns around to his subordinates and says, 'Well, you do it.' Right? I mean, there's just no ability for him to command at all. It is really striking.
And then Halleck comes in and I think, you know, everyone has some hope that maybe he can do something to coordinate, to get McClellan under control, to coordinate all of these moving pieces. And Halleck โ I mean, I think it stunned me when I sat down and read the materials to see how Halleck responded. He was overwhelmed and I think that's understandable. But he literally said to Pope at one point, 'Just think about all of the telegraph materials I have to deal with and then tell me how I'm expected to communicate with you at all.'
It's it's it's and McClellan literally wants Pope to fail. Not maybe wants Pope to fail. He writes it to his wife. He wants Pope to fail. I mean, so he's got this Star Wars bar scene group of principal subordinates. He's got McClellan who wants him to fail and he has Halleck who's just sort of dithering in Washington in some ways. It's really it it if if it had turned out it would have been miraculous if it had turned out any other way I think for Pope. Really and truly.
Agreed. Wow. I'm just I'm just picturing a Mark Chooljian painting now of that scene in the Star Wars bar. Uh that would have been amazing. He's got he's got his cast. He's got the perfect cast to put with McClellan knocking on the door to get in. That would be that'd be amazing. I I would I would buy that. Uh uh I got a I got a question here. Uh I I know a lot of Kearny fans were going to show up tonight and there's a couple people in here with Kearny. Uh there's some New Jersey people I know are going to show up tonight. Uh, what do you think of uh Kearny uh in there also? KT
I I don't know. Gary, you have a Kearny opinion. I mean, I don't know that I have a strong opinion.
He's very quotable. He's very quotable and I have a soft spot in my heart for Kearny because he loathes McClellan so much. So that that's entirely I mean Kearny is Kearny is certainly an outlier in terms of the culture that McClellan created in the Army of the Potomac. This culture of caution of not doing something until everything is right. I mean Kearny never buys into that. He's an absolute outlier there and is an aggressive officer in a lot of ways who comes to a very sad end uh at Chantilly of course. But I mean it's Kearny is not far enough up the food chain to make any difference in what's going on for Pope. He's he's he's just not.
No, I mean I think Kearny's solid. Um, and he certainly, you know, when he's killed, I mean, there there's certainly a an outpouring um of affection for him. I mean, I think he was really well-liked. Um, so I I think he was he was solid, but I would agree with Gary. He's just not high enough in command to really make a difference.
