Wednesday marks the bicentennial of Maj. Gen. John Pope’s birth. While best remembered for leading the Union army to defeat at the Second Battle of Bull Run in 1862, Pope served in the Army for more than 40 years and played a pivotal, if not particularly dramatic, role in controlling the frontier. More importantly for the Sunshine State, in 1867, Pope served as governor of the Third Military Division, overseeing Reconstruction in Alabama, Florida and Georgia.
Born in Kentucky in 1822, as a child, Pope moved to Illinois where his father flourished. Pope’s father Nathaniel ranked as one of the most prominent leaders in Illinois, representing the territory in the U.S. House and helping guide it into statehood. In 1819, President James Monroe named Nathaniel Pope to the federal bench where he served for more than three decades. During his many years as a judge, the elder Pope grew friendly with a number of lawyers, including an up-and-coming attorney by the name of Abraham Lincoln.
The judge’s influence helped John enter West Point where he ranked 17th out of 56 in the Class of 1842. The young officer served in the Topographical Corps with his first assignment taking him to Palatka, Florida where he served under Cpt. Joseph E. Johnston who would later become one of the Confederacy’s most prominent generals. Early on in his career, Pope showed he had a habit of pulling strings and a knack for annoying his fellow officers, including his superiors. After serving in Florida and Maine, Pope took part in the Mexican-American War, earning commendations from Gen. Zachary Taylor and other commanders.
As the nation divided in the late 1840s and 1850s over slavery, Pope remained in the Army serving in Minnesota and the frontier as he continued to clash with superiors, including squabbling over maps he crafted in comparison to those made by other officers. Moving into the 1850s, Pope continued his work out West, helping survey railroad routes, including early efforts to build a transcontinental railroad in the Southwest.
Now a captain, Pope’s career began to rise in 1859 when he married Clara Horton, the oldest daughter of a prominent Ohio businessman who served in Congress. Now based out of Cincinnati where he focused on building lighthouses. As the 1860 election heated up, Pope felt divided. His father-in-law was a close friend of Salmon Chase but the Hortons were distantly related to Mary Todd Lincoln. After Abraham Lincoln’s election, as states across the South began to secede, Pope threw himself into politics, offering the incoming president political and military advice and ripping the outgoing Buchanan administration for refusing to defend federal garrisons. With his over-the-top rhetoric against President Buchanan and Sec. of War John Floyd, who would soon be a Confederate general, Pope almost faced a court martial. Pope was spared that fight when Buchanan decided not to push the matter.
Still, as one of the few Republicans and opponents of slavery serving in the Army, Pope became a favorite of the new administration. When Lincoln traveled from Springfield to Washington to start his presidency, Pope was in the small group of officers who came with him. As the Civil War began, Pope, now a general, served first in Missouri and soon commanded the Army of the Mississippi, a 25,000 man force that captured New Madrid, Missouri and Island Number 10, a Confederate garrison on the Mississippi River. Pope’s near bloodless victory at Island Number 10, which included the capture of around 7,000 Confederate troops, opened up the Mississippi River all the way to Memphis, putting the South on the defensive. That victory made Pope something of a hero for the North. During the long siege of Corinth, Mississippi, a slow and unrewarding Union victory, Pope proved more aggressive than other federal commanders, garnering even more attention. However, Pope’s relentless self-promotion, from reporters at his headquarters to inflated numbers of captured Confederates, led other commanders to distrust him. Pope and his commander Henry Halleck spent years arguing over who authorized those fake reports even as they continued to work together.
In the summer of 1862, with Gen. George McClellan’s Army of the Potomac stalled before Richmond, the Lincoln administration turned to Pope to change the war in Virginia. Despite protesting that he wanted to stay out West, Pope was assigned to lead the Army of Virginia as the War Department merged three different units into the new command. All three of Pope’s new subordinates outranked him and one of them–John Charles Frémont who ran for president in 1856–simply refused to serve under him. Two of the three corps in the Army of Virginia had been defeated badly by Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley earlier in the year. Two of Pope’s main subordinates–former U.S. House Nathaniel Banks and German revolutionary Franz Sigel–had shown little ability on the battlefield but could not be fired for political reasons. The other corps was commanded by Maj. Gen. Irvin McDowell, a luckless and colorless general who had led the Union to its first defeat at the First Battle of Bull Run.
With an underwhelming group of commanders and facing Robert E. Lee and Jackson when their army was at its peak, Pope had his work cut out for him. Even worse, for a month, Pope had to serve in Washington to serve as Lincoln’s military advisor. Pope advised that McClellan’s army be pulled back and joined with his forces in the northern part of Virginia. With Lee recognizing that McClellan was withdrawing–at his usual glacial pace–the Confederate army quickly targeted Pope’s forces, hoping to defeat it before the Union armies joined up.
Looking to change the tone of the war, with the backing of the administration, Pope issued a series of general orders. Pope’s pompous rhetoric left a bad taste with much of the Union army, including McClellan and his circle of supporters. Pope also contrasted his record with McClellan’s in less than subtle terms.
“I have come to you from the West, where we have always seen the backs of our enemies; from an army whose business it has been to seek the adversary and to beat him when he was found; whose policy has been attack and not defense,” Pope said. In but one instance has the enemy been able to place our Western armies in defensive attitude. I presume that I have been called here to pursue the same system and to lead you against the enemy. It is my purpose to do so, and that speedily. I am sure you long for an opportunity to win the distinction you are capable of achieving. That opportunity I shall endeavor to give you. Meantime I desire you to dismiss from your minds certain phrases, which I am sorry to find so much in vogue amongst you. I hear constantly of ‘taking strong positions and holding them,’ of ‘lines of retreat,’ and of ‘bases of supplies.’ Let us discard such ideas. The strongest position a soldier should desire to occupy is one from which he can most easily advance against the enemy. Let us study the probable lines of retreat of our opponents, and leave our own to take care of themselves. Let us look before us, and not behind. Success and glory are in the advance, disaster and shame lurk in the rear. Let us act on this understanding, and it is safe to predict that your banners shall be inscribed with many a glorious deed and that your names will be dear to your countrymen forever.”
Needless to say, Pope’s reputation for self-promotion stayed intact after that pompous utterance. Pope also produced orders for the army to live on the land and imposed harder war efforts. All of this stood in sharp contrast with the efforts of McClellan and other War Democrats who were more focused on protecting civilian property–including enslaved people held by planters and the Southern elite. In his recent study of the Army of Virginia, John Matsui, a history professor at VMI, stressed the anti-slavery sentiments of Pope and the army. “A majority of the army’s constituents–from commander John Pope to the lowest private–identified with the antebellum ideology of the Republican Party and radically opposed both slavery and pro-Confederate white civilians,” Matsui wrote. “Unlike the Army of the Potomac, the Army of Virginia was demonstrably anti-slavery from top to bottom. Until the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect and African Americans formally joined the Union war effort, the Army of Virginia constituted the Republican Party-in-arms.”
While Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman used parts of Pope’s playbook later in the war, they, of course, achieved military successes. Pope was not as fortunate. During August 1862, Pope led the army to a series of defeats, including, most famously, at Second Bull Run. Pope always blamed McClellan for dragging his feet to reinforce him, taking it out on Fitz-John Porter, one of “Little Mac’s” closest subordinates who was dismissed from the army after a controversial court-martial. As John Ropes noted two decades later, Pope did not need to fight the battle and could have simply headed to Washington. But with his earlier proclamation, Pope had become a prisoner of his own rhetoric. With McClellan now in charge of the entire army around Washington, the Lincoln administration ordered Pope, who was now seen as a liability, to take care of a Sioux uprising in Minnesota.
Navy Sec. Gideon Welles met with Lincoln in early September and the president shared his thoughts on Pope and the Northern Virginia campaign. “We had the enemy in the hollow of our hands,” Lincoln told Welles. Lincoln blamed “our generals, who are vexed with Pope” for not having “done their duty.” Lincoln spoke of Pope in “complimentary terms as brave, patriotic, and as having done his duty in every respect in Virginia.” Pope, Lincoln added, “did well, but there was army prejudice against him and it was necessary for him to leave.” In any case, with McClellan going off to stop Lee’s invasion of Maryland before failing to follow up on his victory at Antietam, Pope went to Minnesota, as Lincoln noted to Welles, “very angry, and not without cause.”
Pope had made a hash of the change process during his short stint in Virginia but his subsequent leadership helped the nation. Over the next two years, Pope led the Department of the Northwest against the Sioux during the Dakota War, one of the largest and bloodiest conflicts with Native Americans in U.S. history. At the end of November 1864, Grant, now the commander of the Union army, offered Pope the command of the Department of the South, overseeing operations in South Carolina, Georgia and the east part of Florida. After Pope declined the command, Grant offered him the Department of the Missouri, one of the largest and most important assignments in the Army. Pope promptly accepted the assignment. Grant offered some of the reasons why he turned to Pope in a message to Halleck, then serving as the Army’s chief of staff. “With Pope in command we secure at least two advantages we have not heretofore had, namely, subordination, and intelligence of administration,” Grant noted. In his new post, Pope oversaw parts of the war winding down, including the surrender of Confederate forces west of the Mississippi River.
While Pope avoided serving in Georgia and Florida when he declined Grant’s offer, he was ordered to lead the Third Military Division during Reconstruction. With the support of Republicans in Congress, Pope championed civil rights for now freed African-Americans while trying to respect the democratic process as former Confederates began to vote. While Pope did not go far enough for Unionists and many Florida Republicans–who wanted him to remove any opponent of Reconstruction from office–he allowed African Americans to serve on juries. As President Andrew Johnson and Congress continued to clash over Reconstruction, Pope was caught in the middle. It came as no surprise that Johnson removed Pope at the end of 1867.
Pope served in the Army for another two decades, leading the Department of the Lakes and the Division of the Missouri. Originally a supporter of harsh measures against Native Americans, Pope evolved into one of their leading champions in the high command. In his recent study of how Civil War generals commanded in the West after the war, Robert Utley found much about Pope to praise. “History largely remembers the volcanic John Pope: the arrogant, bombastic, vain, ambitious, opinionated, insubordinate, mendacious, scheming self-promoter,” Utley noted before presenting a more matured Pope after his service in Virginia. “He lost none of his verbosity but commanded effectively and thoughtfully.”
After serving as the Army’s senior brigadier general, Pope was promoted to a major general in 1882. He ended up as the commander of the Department of the Pacific in San Francisco where he served three years before retiring in 1886 at the age of 64. Pope and Clara moved to St. Louis but their happiness proved fleeting. Clara, more than a decade younger than her husband, died in 1888 at the age of 59.
In his final years, perhaps to keep busy after the death of his wife, Pope wrote a series of autobiographical articles for the National Tribune. Collected by Peter Cozzens and Robert Girardi, Pope’s memoirs rank as one of the most illustrative and engaging autobiographies from a Civil War general. Despite Pope’s reputation as a blowhard, he emerged quite differently in his memoirs though he still carried a grudge against McClellan and his circle. In any case, Pope’s account of the war offer a great deal of insight and he offered memorable takes on many political and military leaders. Pope died in 1892 at the age of 70 and is buried in St. Louis.
Pope’s commanded some attention in recent decades, thanks, in part, to his memoirs. Utley, Richard Ellis, Michael Burns, and other historians have offered more insights on Pope’s career in the West. Matsui’s book on the Army of Virginia is essential to understand how the Northern war effort transformed from a fight to preserve the Union into one to end slavery. After his work on the general’s memoirs, Cozzens wrote an excellent biography, fitting subtitled “A Life for the Nation,” covering Pope’s decades of service, including his brief stints impacting Florida.
Kevin Derby is a Ph.D. student in the University of the Cumberlands’ Leadership program and is currently working on his dissertation on Gen. Pope and leading the change process. He would like to thank Dr. Joy Levine and Dr. David Hollingsworth from the University of the Cumberlands for their assistance and support on this project.
