John Pope (general)

• 1. Introduction

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  John Pope was serving on lighthouse duty when Abraham Lincoln won the presidency. The army chose him as one of four officers to escort the president-elect into Washington, D.C. He even offered to join Lincoln's staff as an aide. Within months he held a Union general's commission instead, sent west to fight rather than escort. That path carried Pope through a string of victories along the Mississippi River and then into the worst defeat of his career in Virginia. It also carried him onto the plains of Minnesota and into the deserts of the Southwest. Later it pulled him into the tangled politics of Reconstruction. And in old age, an official report reopened his most humiliating battle for one final judgment. How did an engineer who spent a decade surveying railroad routes end up commanding two of the Union's largest armies? And why did the general credited with clearing Confederate strongholds from the Mississippi march his own force into a trap outside Manassas?

• 2. Engineer Of The Frontier

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  Louisville, Kentucky was where Pope was born, on the 16th of March 1822. His father, Nathaniel Pope, was a prominent federal judge in the early Illinois Territory and a friend of the lawyer Abraham Lincoln. His family ties ran deeper than that one friendship. Pope was the brother-in-law of Manning Force, and a distant cousin of his married the sister of Mary Todd Lincoln. He graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1842, ranked 17th in a class of 56. He was commissioned a brevet second lieutenant in the Corps of Topographical Engineers.

  Florida is where that engineering career began, followed by survey work along the northeastern border between the United States and Canada. During the Mexican-American War he fought under Zachary Taylor at the Battle of Monterrey and the Battle of Buena Vista. Those battles earned him brevet promotions, first to first lieutenant and then to captain. After the war Pope surveyed in Minnesota, and in 1850 he demonstrated that the Red River was navigable. He served as chief engineer of the Department of New Mexico from 1851 to 1853. He then spent most of his remaining prewar years surveying a southern route for the proposed Pacific Railroad. He also published some of that survey work in the official Pacific Railroad Reports.

• 3. Rising In The West

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  On the 14th of June 1861, Pope was appointed brigadier general of volunteers, with his date of rank set retroactively to the 17th of May. He was then ordered to Illinois to recruit. Assigned to the Department of the West under Maj. Gen. John C. Frémont, he took command of the District of North and Central Missouri that July. The post gave him operational control over part of the Mississippi River.

  Pope's relationship with Frémont soured quickly, and he worked behind the scenes to have his superior removed from command. Frémont, in turn, became convinced that Pope harbored treacherous intentions, pointing to Pope's inaction on Frémont's offensive plans in Missouri as proof. The historian Allan Nevins wrote that "incompetence and timidity offer a better explanation of Pope than treachery, though he certainly showed an insubordinate spirit."

  Pope forced Sterling Price's Confederates to retreat south, taking 1,200 prisoners in a minor action at Blackwater, Missouri, on the 18th of December. Even early in the war Pope had a reputation as a braggart, and he made sure the minor victory drew heavy press coverage. That coverage reached Frémont's replacement, Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck.

  Halleck appointed Pope to command the Army of the Mississippi on the 23rd of February 1862. He gave Pope 25,000 men and orders to clear Confederate obstacles from the river. Pope made a surprise march on New Madrid, Missouri, capturing it on the 14th of March. He then turned to Island No. 10, a fortified Mississippi River post held by 12,000 Confederate soldiers and 58 guns. Pope's engineers cut a channel that let his forces bypass the island. With the gunboats of Captain Andrew H. Foote, he landed troops on the opposite shore and cut the garrison off. The island surrendered on the 7th of April 1862, opening Union navigation of the Mississippi as far south as Memphis. That performance earned Pope a promotion to major general, backdated to the 21st of March.

  During the Siege of Corinth that followed, Pope commanded the left wing of Halleck's army. He held that post only briefly before Lincoln summoned him east.

• 4. The Army Of Virginia

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  After George B. McClellan's Peninsula Campaign collapsed, Lincoln summoned Pope east. He was given command of the newly formed Army of Virginia, assembled from scattered forces in the Shenandoah Valley and northern Virginia. The promotion infuriated John C. Frémont, Pope's old commander, who resigned his commission rather than serve under him.

  On the 14th of July 1862, Pope issued a message to his army that dismissed talk of retreat outright. Many of his eastern soldiers took his self-assurance as arrogance. He told the army he had come from the West, where, in his own words, "we have always seen the backs of our enemies." He said he had little patience for the cautious talk of retreat that he heard around him. In the address, Pope declared, "Success and glory are in the advance, disaster and shame lurk in the rear."

  Despite the bravado, his army swelled to 70,000 men after absorbing units from McClellan's Army of the Potomac. Robert E. Lee, sensing that Pope was indecisive, split his own smaller army of 55,000 men. He sent Maj. Gen. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson with 24,000 men on a diversion toward Cedar Mountain, where Jackson defeated Pope's subordinate, Nathaniel Banks.

• 5. The Trap At Manassas

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  While Lee advanced with the rest of his army, Jackson swung north and seized Pope's main supply base at Manassas Station. Unable to locate the main Confederate force, Pope walked his army straight into the trap that became the Second Battle of Bull Run. On the 29th of August 1862, his men attacked Jackson's corps directly. The next day, Maj. Gen. Fitz John Porter reluctantly obeyed orders to swing against Jackson, exposing the whole Union flank. Maj. Gen. James Longstreet launched a surprise attack on that flank, and the Union army broke and retreated.

  Pope blamed the defeat on Porter's disobedience, and a court-martial found Porter guilty and disgraced him. Brig. Gen. Alpheus S. Williams, who had served briefly under Pope, thought little of him. In a letter to his daughter, Williams wrote simply, "All hated him." Pope was relieved of command on the 12th of September 1862, and his army was folded into George McClellan's Army of the Potomac.

• 6. Reconstruction And The Indian Wars

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  For the rest of the war, Pope commanded the Department of the Northwest from Minnesota, overseeing U.S. forces in the Dakota War of 1862. That frontier posting paid off on the 30th of January 1865, when he was given command of the Military Division of the Missouri. On the 13th of March 1865 he received a brevet promotion to major general in the regular army. The promotion was credited to his service at Island No. 10. He also published an account of his own campaign, The Campaign of Virginia, in Washington that year.

  In April 1867, Pope was named governor of the Reconstruction Third Military District and set up headquarters in Atlanta. He allowed African Americans to serve on juries and ordered Mayor James Williams to stay in office another year. He also postponed elections and banned city advertising in newspapers hostile to Reconstruction. President Andrew Johnson removed him from command on the 28th of December 1867, replacing him with George G. Meade. Pope then led the Department of the Lakes out of Detroit, Michigan, from the 13th of January 1868 to the 30th of April 1870.

  Under the Grant administration, Pope returned west to command the Department of the Missouri, the nation's second-largest geographical command, holding it through 1883. He fought with distinction in the Apache Wars, including the Red River War that relocated Southern Plains tribes to reservations in Oklahoma. His recommendation that the military, not the Indian Bureau, administer reservations earned him political enemies in Washington, since he considered the bureau corrupt. Pope also called publicly for more humane treatment of Native Americans. Yet the author Walter Donald Kennedy notes that Pope also said he meant "to utterly exterminate the Sioux." Pope spoke of reaching a "final settlement with all these Indians."

• 7. Judgment And Legacy

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  In 1879, a Board of Inquiry convened by President Rutherford B. Hayes reopened the case against Fitz John Porter. The board was led by Maj. Gen. John Schofield, Pope's immediate predecessor in the Department of the Missouri and by then head of the Department of the Pacific. It concluded that Porter had been unfairly convicted of cowardice and disobedience. The Schofield report drew on evidence from former Confederate commanders and found that Pope himself bore most of the responsibility for the Union defeat. It described Pope as reckless and dangerously uninformed about what was actually happening during the battle. The report also criticized Maj. Gen. Irvin McDowell, a general Pope detested, and credited Porter's disobedience with saving the Union army from complete ruin.

  Despite the report, Pope was promoted to major general in the Regular Army in 1882. In 1883 he was given command of the Military Division of the Pacific, serving there until retirement. He retired on the 16th of March 1886, and his wife, Clara Pope, died two years later. Pope himself died on the 23rd of September 1892, at the Ohio Soldiers' Home near Sandusky, Ohio. He was buried beside his wife in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri. His own account of the war had already reached the public by then. Between February 1887 and March 1891, The National Tribune serialized the memoirs in which he told his own side of a story others had judged.