Booknotes: The Tale Untwisted

New Arrival:
• The Tale Untwisted: General George B. McClellan, the Maryland Campaign, and the Discovery of Lee’s Lost Orders by Gene M. Thorp & Alexander B. Rossino (Savas Beatie, 2023).

The fortuitous discovery by Union troops of a copy of Robert E. Lee’s Special Orders No. 191 during the 1862 Maryland Campaign is widely regarded as the Civil War's greatest military intelligence coup. The standard story is that McClellan, upon receipt of the document, inexcusably delayed in acting upon it, and, when he finally did, he threw his newfound advantage away through an abundance of overcaution. In recent years, this ingrained narrative has been persuasively challenged in several ways. In addition to questioning the true value of the presumed information bonanza that fell into McClellan's lap, some recent writers have argued that McClellan actually wasted little time in assessing the situation, and they have credited his army's movements with much more celerity than books and articles have traditionally allowed.

From the description: In The Tale Untwisted: General George B. McClellan, the Maryland Campaign, and the Discovery of Lee’s Lost Orders, co-authors Gene Thorp and Alexander Rossino "document in exhaustive fashion how “Little Mac” in fact moved with uncharacteristic energy to counter the Confederate threat and take advantage of Lee’s divided forces, seizing the initiative and striking a blow in the process that wrecked Lee’s plans and sent his army reeling back toward Virginia."

Few would argue that McClellan's overall conduct in response to Lee's invasion of Maryland was a masterpiece of generalship, but I think the old standard narrative of Little Mac's gross mishandling of the Lost Orders has been rendered mostly untenable at this point (though it seems there are still holdouts). Events like these are never truly settled in all their aspects, but The Tale Untwisted promises to be a major force in the ongoing debate.