It is not unusual for the commander of a defeated force to get sacked. Nor is it unusual for such a commander to suffer additional consequences, if that defeat is particularly egregious, or seems to involve an overly ripe degree of blundering.
Defeat at Ball’s Bluff sent Union Colonel Charles P. Stone to a Federal prison for six months, despite the lack of a trial or even having charges filed against him. The fall of New Orleans so tainted Confederate General Mansfield Lovell’s career that he never held a major command again, despite the fact that his court of inquiry cleared him of blame.
When Colonel Dixon Miles surrendered Harpers Ferry in September 1862, the fact that he was mortally wounded by an artillery shell on the very day he decided to capitulate didn’t stop the United States Government from launching a formal Court of Inquiry into the sorry affair. Nor did Miles’s demise absolve him from the court’s blame-laying. He was posthumously condemned for “incapacity, almost amounting to imbecility.”
Brigadier General John W. Frazer likely would have faced a similar court for his decision to surrender his small garrison of Confederates at Cumberland Gap in September 1863 had he not spent the rest of the war a Union prisoner. There was certainly anger enough. Confederate President Davis denounced Frazer in a public oration. Frazer’s commission, a provisional appointment that required congressional confirmation that fall, was subsequently given the thumbs-down by all 18 sitting Confederate Senators. He was also neither paroled or exchanged, which was unusual for a general officer at that stage of the war.
All of the examples above are at least understandable, if not excusable: losing has consequences.
But what of winning?
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