September 5, 1862

September 5, 1862: Eastern Theater, Maryland Campaign - Gen. Halleck pens orders for McClellan, insisting that no one can doubt any longer that the Rebels are crossing north over the Potomac in force.


—The C.S.S. Alabama captures its first legitimate prize, the whaler Oemulgee, which Semmes orders burned.

CSS Alabama, near Cape Town

—General John Pope is told that all of his troops, now within the defenses of Washington, DC, are under McClellan’s command. He writes to Gen. Halleck in frustration:

ARLINGTON, September 5, [1862] - 12.05 p. m.
Major-General HALLECK,

General-in-Chief:
I have just received an order from General McClellan to have my command in readiness to march with three days' rations and further details of the march. What is my command, and where is it? McClellan has scattered it about in all directions, and has not informed me of the position of a single regiment. Am I do take the field and under McClellan's orders?

Jno POPE,
Major-General.

To this, Halleck answers, somewhat cryptically:
WASHINGTON, D. C., September 5, 1862.
Major-General POPE, Arlington:

The armies of the Potomac and Virginia being consolidated, you will report for orders to the Secretary of War.

H. W. HALLECK,
General-in-Chief.

Maj. Gen. John Pope

—General Bragg, having conducted a dance of deception and innuendo in eastern Tennessee, finally decides to strike north with Kirby-Smith, rather than strike at Nashville. General Buell, with his Federal Army of the Ohio, is trying to find out what Bragg’s intentions are, and is pulling most of his troops into the vicinity of Nashville—just in case.


—Henry Adams, son and secretary of the American Ambassador in London,. Charles Francie Adams, Sr., writes to his brother, Charles, Jr., who is an officer in the cavalry:

Firmly convinced as I am that there can be no peace on our continent so long as the Southern people exist, I don’t much care whether they are destroyed by emancipation, or in other words a vigorous system of guerilla war carried on by negroes on our side, or by the slower and more doubtful measures of choaking them with their own cotton. Perhaps before long we shall have to use both weapons as vigorously as we are now using the last. But one thing is clear to my mind, which is that we must not let them as an independent state get the monopoly of cotton again, unless we want to find a powerful and bitterly hostile nation on our border, supported by all the moral and social influence of Great Britain in peace; certain in war to drag us into all the European complications; sure to be in perpetual anarchy within, but always ready to disturb anything and everything without; to compel us to support a standing army no less large than if we conquer them and hold them so, and with infinite means of wounding and scattering dissension among us. We must ruin them before we let them go or it will all have to be done over again. And we must exterminate them in the end, be it long or be it short, for it is a battle between us and slavery.