John Pope as he appeared less than one week after the Battle of Second Manassas.
“Headquarters in the Saddle.”
For a man that uttered many phrases that often make him the main course of mockery for Civil War historians, John Pope’s infamous dateline certainly receives its fair share of jokes. It did too in 1862. Supposedly Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee even made light of those four words.
So did the soldiers under Pope’s command. Pvt. James Sullivan of the 6th Wisconsin Infantry remarked of Pope, “He issued his first order dated ‘Headquarters in the saddle,’ and the soldiers, with their usual aptitude to ridicule all attempts at self-glorification on the part of generals, said that he must have his brains where most persons have their hindquarters, and immediately dubbed him ‘Hindquarters in the saddle Pope,’ and after events fully justified their judgement.” It might be one of Pope’s most enduring lines, but, for the first month of his stint as Army of Virginia commander, it is not one of his most accurate.
John Pope took command of the Army of Virginia on June 26, 1862. Pope’s army itself was something new–a conglomerate of multiple Federal entities in northern Virginia meant to bring cooperation between those disparate forces that would win victories. And when Pope came east, he entered into a sort of vacuum of high command for the United States Army. Since March 11, the Federal government had been fighting the war without a General-in-Chief to lead and coordinate its armies. This remained true until Henry Halleck’s arrival in the capital on July 23. In the meantime, Lincoln held Pope in Washington for counsel and would not release him to his field army until Halleck filled that vacuum. Continue reading →
