The discovery of Robert E. Lee’s Special Orders No. 191 outside of Frederick, Maryland, on September 13, 1862, is one of the most important and hotly disputed events of the American Civil War. For more than 150 years, historians have debated if George McClellan, commander of the Union Army of the Potomac, dawdled upon receiving a copy of the orders before advancing to challenge Lee’s forces at the Battle of South Mountain. In this detailed new study, authors Gene Thorp and Alexander Rossino exhaustively document how ‘Little Mac’ rapidly reorganized his army, advanced on Frederick with more speed than previously thought, and then moved with uncharacteristic energy to take advantage of Lee’s divided forces. These actions enabled McClellan to strike a blow that wrecked Lee’s plans for a decisive battle on his own terms and sent the Army of Northern Virginia reeling back toward the Potomac River. The Tale Untwisted: General George B. McClellan, the Maryland Campaign, and the Discovery of Lee’s Lost Orders proposes a rich, new interpretation of the fate and impact of the Lost Orders on the history of the 1862 Maryland Campaign. AUTHORS: Born in Baltimore, Gene Thorp is a senior cartographer at the U.S. Department of State, Office of the Geographer. He spent 15 years as an award-winning graphics editor at The Washington Post covering daily stories from the 2000 Bush-Gore election to the rise and fall of the Islamic State. His custom maps can be found in numerous non-fiction books on the New York Times Best-Seller list and throughout museums and parks across America. Award-winning author and historian Alexander B. Rossino resides near Boonsboro, Maryland. He worked at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (1994-2003) and is the author of Hitler Strikes Poland: Blitzkrieg, Ideology, and Atrocity, an acclaimed history of the policies implemented by the Third Reich during its 1939 invasion of the Polish Republic, and more than a dozen scholarly articles and book reviews. Dr. Rossino is also the author of the deeply researched and beautifully written Six Days in September, a novel about Lee’s Army in Maryland during the 1862 campaign, as well as Their Maryland: The Army of Northern Virginia from the Potomac Crossing to Sharpsburg in September 1862 (2021), a historical study of the same period. He is currently anticipating the release of The Guns of September: A Novel of McClellan’s Army in Maryland, 1862, a companion to Six Days in September.
17 images, 7 maps