• Calamity at Frederick: Robert E. Lee, Special Orders No. 191, and Confederate Misfortune on the Road to Antietam by Alexander B. Rossino (Savas Beatie, 2023).
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Monday, October 30, 2023
Booknotes: Calamity at Frederick
New Arrival:
• Calamity at Frederick: Robert E. Lee, Special Orders No. 191, and Confederate Misfortune on the Road to Antietam by Alexander B. Rossino (Savas Beatie, 2023).
One might be forgiven for assuming that Alexander Rossino has already said his piece about Special Orders No. 191 in The Tale Untwisted: General George B. McClellan, the Maryland Campaign, and the Discovery of Lee’s Lost Orders (2023), supplemented by an interesting related essay included inside Their Maryland: The Army of Northern Virginia From the Potomac Crossing to Sharpsburg in September 1862 (2021), but that is clearly not the case. His newest book, Calamity at Frederick, is the author's full-length examination of the Confederate perspective on the matter, its content complementing the more Union-focused nature of The Tale Untwisted (co-authored with Gene Thorp).
The book promises new insights on a much-studied episode of the Maryland Campaign. From the description: "The loss of Robert E. Lee’s Special Orders No. 191 is one of the Civil War’s enduring mysteries. In this meticulous study, Alexander Rossino presents a bold new interpretation of the evidence surrounding the orders’ creation, distribution, and loss outside Frederick, Maryland, in September 1862."
More: Calamity at Frederick attempts to answer a number of questions, "including why General Lee thought his army could operate north of the Potomac until winter; why Lee found it necessary to seize the Federal garrison at Harpers Ferry; what Lee hoped to accomplish after capturing Harpers Ferry; where Corporal Barton Mitchell of the 27th Indiana found the Lost Orders; and if D. H. Hill or someone else was to blame for losing the orders. The result is a well-documented reassessment that sheds new light while challenging long-held assumptions."
When it comes to the Maryland Campaign and Antietam, 2023 has already given us a lot to digest, and it's not over yet!
• Calamity at Frederick: Robert E. Lee, Special Orders No. 191, and Confederate Misfortune on the Road to Antietam by Alexander B. Rossino (Savas Beatie, 2023).
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Thanks a lot for the shout-out! You're right, I'm not quite finished with this topic yet. Gene Thorp and I have been giving presentations on McClellan and S.O. 191 since 2019. During those talks we are consistently asked where the orders were found, who lost them, how they were lost, etc. I realized after a while that I did not have good answers to some of these questions, nor could I find good answers to them in the histories published so far. This led me to research the subject more deeply, and to complete this companion study to The Tale Untwisted. I still can't conclusively answer all the questions we have, and seriously doubt anyone ever will, but I have been able to uncover a lot of evidence that I believe gets us closer to understanding the event, where it happened, why, and who was probably responsible. We'll see if others agree with my findings. Hint - it was not D.H. Hill!
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DeleteMr. Rossino needs to concentrate on establishing facts, rather than presuppositions. He predicates his entire story on the presumed fact that "the penmanship [of Order 190] is indisputably Marshall's." The person who wrote the text of Order 190 is indisputably not Marshall. One need simply compare the script of Order 190 with the script of the copy of Lee's September 12, 1862 letter to Davis, which Marshall clearly penned, to know this.
DeleteRossino is not alone in sloppy investigation of the facts. In 1949, Bernard Baruch wrote a letter to Virginia Senator Byrd, stating he wished to give the "original" letters Lee had written to Davis, in September 1862, to the State Library. Since then the Library has parrotted Baruch's claim without recognizing that it is plain from the script of the letters that they are not the "originals." None of them are signed by Lee. None of them are written in the hand of Lee. They are copies Marshall made and kept when the war ended, passing them to his sons, the last living one of them giving the copies to Baruch.
While it is encouraging to see someone making an effort at sorting out the truth from the fiction of civil war history, Rossino is challenged by the complexity of the current confusion of the record to sift through; a project that will take him twenty years.