The General Who Won by Telegram

Major General John Pope

President Abraham Lincoln needed generals who could win battles. In the summer of 1862, he got one who could win them by telegram.

By late August, Washington was largely in the dark about what was happening in northern Virginia. On August 24, General-in-Chief Henry Halleck admitted to George McClellan that he didn’t know where Major General John Pope’s newly formed Army of Virginia was—or where the enemy’s main force stood. Two evenings later, Stonewall Jackson’s cavalry cut the telegraph lines to the capital altogether.

Behind that blackout, Robert E. Lee boldly divided his army, sending Jackson around to Pope’s rear to seize the Union supply depot at Manassas Junction before James Longstreet crushed Pope’s flank at the Second Battle of Bull Run. Pope’s lines collapsed, and his army was driven back toward Washington.

Yet into the silence came Pope’s dispatches—describing a victory in the making. Even as the fighting turned against him, he reported capturing roughly 4,500 enemy troops and assured Washington he would soon have the rebels in his power.

When the Cabinet asked the president what he made of Pope’s optimistic report, Lincoln paused and replied, “That reminds me of an old woman in Sangamon County who was ill.”

As Lincoln told it, the doctor came to see her and prescribed medicine for a severe case of constipation. Returning the next morning, he found her fresh, well, and up making breakfast. Asked if the medicine had worked, she confirmed that it had.

“How many movements?” the doctor inquired.

“One hundred and forty-two,” she replied.

“Madame, I am serious,” the physician said. “I know you are joking. How many?”

“One hundred and forty-two.”

“Madame, I must know,” he insisted. “You couldn’t have had one hundred and forty-two.”

“I tell you, one hundred and forty-two,” she said—“one hundred and forty of them wind.”

Lincoln let the room absorb the punchline before closing the discussion with a single line: “I am afraid Pope’s captures are one hundred and forty of them wind.”

Reality soon proved the president right. Once the true scale of the Union defeat at Second Bull Run became clear, Lincoln relieved Pope of command in September 1862 and reassigned him to the frontier in Minnesota.

“Wind,” indeed.

From the archives of Abraham Lincoln, Storyteller.

Mac

Works Cited

"In The Original Situation Room - Abraham Lincoln and the Telegraph." The Smithsonian Associates Civil War E-Mail Newsletter, Volume 8, Number 8.

Carwardine, Richard (2019) Lincoln's Sense of Humor. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.