Three Cigars and a Lost Order: How the 27th Indiana Found Lee’s Battle Plan

On the morning of September 13, 1862, the 27th Indiana Infantry filed off the road outside Frederick, Maryland, and halted to rest in a meadow. The regiment had been marching hard. The Army of the Potomac was moving west across Maryland in pursuit of Robert E. Lee, who had carried the war north of the Potomac for the first time, and the 27th Indiana — part of the Twelfth Corps — was somewhere in the long blue column doing the marching.

The meadow they stopped in had been used before them. Confederate troops had camped on the same ground a few days earlier, and the grass still held the litter an army leaves behind. Corporal Barton W. Mitchell of Company F, resting with the rest, noticed a small bundle lying in the grass: three cigars wrapped in a sheet of paper. The cigars were the find that mattered to a tired soldier. Mitchell looked at the paper they were wrapped in.

The paper was a Confederate order. Its heading read “Special Orders, No. 191, Headquarters, Army of Northern Virginia.” It was addressed to Major General D. H. Hill, and it described, in detail, how Lee had divided his army.

What Mitchell picked up out of the grass is known to history as the Lost Order. It is one of the most consequential pieces of paper in the American Civil War, and two soldiers of an Indiana regiment found it.

The regiment in the meadow

The 27th Indiana was a three-year regiment, organized in the late summer of 1861. The surviving records place its rendezvous variously at Evansville and at Indianapolis; its companies were recruited across southern and central Indiana. Its colonel was Silas Colgrove, a lawyer who had settled at Winchester, in Randolph County, and who would lead the regiment through its hardest fighting.

The 27th had one distinction visible on any parade ground: it was known for recruiting unusually tall men, and Company F — the company of both Corporal Mitchell and Sergeant John M. Bloss — counted some of the tallest soldiers in the Union army on its rolls. By September 1862 the regiment was a veteran command. It had served in the Shenandoah Valley under Nathaniel Banks earlier in the year, and it now belonged to the Twelfth Corps of the Army of the Potomac.

That September the war had changed shape. Lee, fresh from victory at Second Bull Run, had crossed the Potomac and carried the fighting into Maryland — the first Confederate invasion of the North. The Army of the Potomac, under George B. McClellan, moved west out of Washington to find him. The 27th Indiana marched with it. On September 13 the regiment halted outside Frederick, in a meadow that Confederate troops had camped on a few days before. That coincidence — Union soldiers resting on ground a Confederate command had just left — is the reason there is a story to tell.

Three cigars and a sheet of paper

What Mitchell found, and handed to Sergeant Bloss, was a copy of Special Orders, No. 191, issued from Lee’s headquarters on September 9, 1862. The order was the operational plan for the Maryland campaign. To deal with the Union garrison at Harpers Ferry, which sat astride his supply line, Lee had done something audacious and dangerous: he divided the Army of Northern Virginia, sending its columns on separate roads with orders to converge again days later. The order named the columns, their commanders, their routes, and their timetable.

For the Union army, the value of the paper was total. It did not merely suggest where Lee was. It stated, in the hand of Lee’s own headquarters, that the Army of Northern Virginia was split into widely separated fragments — any one of which McClellan’s concentrated army could fall upon and destroy before the others could march to its aid. An opposing general almost never learns this. McClellan had it in writing.

Up the chain

The find was worth nothing until someone above a corporal understood what it was. Mitchell showed the paper to Sergeant Bloss; the two took it to their company officers, and it moved up the regimental chain to Colonel Colgrove, who carried it to the headquarters of the Twelfth Corps. The credit for the discovery itself is not perfectly settled — affidavits gathered from other 27th Indiana veterans decades after the war told the story differently, some assigning the actual pickup to another man. Colonel Colgrove’s report, written within days of the event, named Mitchell, and the account here follows that contemporary record over the later recollections.

There the order met the one man positioned to vouch for it. Captain Samuel E. Pittman, on the staff of General Alpheus Williams, knew the signature on the document. The officer who had signed it for Lee was Robert H. Chilton, Lee’s assistant adjutant general, and Pittman had known Chilton’s signature before the war, from banking business in Detroit. Exactly what Pittman recognized, and how, has been examined closely by historians since: the popular version, in which Pittman knew Chilton’s handwriting from processing his army pay drafts, does not survive a careful look at the dates, and the historian Charles B. Dew has reconstructed the more defensible account. What is not in dispute is the result — Pittman told the staff the order was genuine, and it was rushed to McClellan.

It reached the commanding general near midday. According to Brigadier General John Gibbon, who was with him, McClellan held up the paper and said, “Here is a paper with which, if I cannot whip Bobbie Lee, I will be willing to go home.” That day he telegraphed President Lincoln: “I have all the plans of the rebels, and will catch them in their own trap if my men are equal to the emergency.”

What McClellan did with it

What McClellan did with the Lost Order has been argued over for more than a century and a half. He did act on it. He moved the army toward the passes of South Mountain, the barrier between him and the divided Confederate columns, and on September 14 Union troops forced the gaps in a day of hard fighting. Three days later, on September 17, the two armies met along Antietam Creek near Sharpsburg, in the bloodiest single day in American history — roughly 23,000 men killed, wounded, or missing between the two sides.

But the order had promised more than the battle delivered. McClellan had it in hand by the early afternoon of September 13 and did not put his army in motion until the following morning — a delay of most of a day. Lee, soon warned that a copy of his order was missing, was given time to begin drawing his scattered commands back together. The chance the paper offered — to destroy the Army of Northern Virginia piece by piece before it could reunite — narrowed with every hour. The historian Bruce Catton judged that no general in the war was handed a fairer chance to defeat an enemy army a fragment at a time. Antietam stopped Lee’s invasion and gave Lincoln the victory he had been waiting for before issuing the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. It did not destroy Lee’s army. Whether a faster commander would have done so is the long argument; the Lost Order is what made the argument possible.

The men who found it

Four days after the meadow outside Frederick, the 27th Indiana fought at Antietam. The regiment was carried into the morning’s fighting around the Cornfield — the patch of the battlefield whose name needs no further description for anyone who has read about that day. The 27th Indiana went in with something over four hundred men and lost nearly half of them, killed and wounded; by the regiment’s own count the loss ran to roughly 209 of about 440 engaged. The regiment that found the order also paid, four days later, on the field the order had helped to set.

Among the wounded were the two men from Company F. Barton Mitchell was hit in the leg. Bloss was wounded as well. Both survived the battle. The war did not treat them equally afterward.

Mitchell never fully recovered. The Antietam wound left him with a chronic, life-shortening injury. He returned home a man of modest means, worked a sawmill, and died in 1868 — his part in the discovery of the Lost Order known to his regiment and to a handful of historians, but never the source of any public recognition or reward in his lifetime.

John McKnight Bloss took the other road. A Hanover College graduate who had enlisted out of southern Indiana, Bloss recovered from his Antietam wound, returned to the 27th, and fought on at Gettysburg before leaving the army in 1864. He spent the rest of his life in education — a teacher and principal, then superintendent of the Evansville schools, Indiana State Superintendent of Public Instruction from 1880 to 1882, afterward superintendent of schools at Muncie, and later president of the college that is now Oregon State University. He died in 1905, an Indiana educator of long standing, and one of the two men who had handed George McClellan the plans of the Confederate army.

The paper and the page

The Lost Order is often told as a story of pure luck — three cigars, a careless Confederate officer, a paper dropped in a field. The luck is real. But the order did nothing on its own. It became history because a corporal bothered to read the wrapper around his cigars, because a sergeant agreed it mattered, because a colonel carried it up the chain, and because a staff officer could vouch for it. A line of ordinary soldiers, most of them Hoosiers, moved that paper from a meadow to the desk of the commanding general of the Army of the Potomac in a matter of hours.

Barton Mitchell got nothing for it but the wound that shortened his life. That is the part of the story this series exists to keep. The Hoosier Union History series follows Indiana’s citizen-soldiers into the places where the war actually turned, and records what their service cost them. The 27th Indiana found the most famous piece of paper in the war — and then bled for it in the Cornfield four days later. The dead earn the page. So does the corporal who picked up the cigars.

Sources

• U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies — Special Orders, No. 191, Headquarters Army of Northern Virginia, September 9, 1862, and the related Maryland-campaign correspondence of George B. McClellan.
• Edmund R. Brown, The Twenty-seventh Indiana Volunteer Infantry in the War of the Rebellion, 1861–1865 (1899) — regimental history written by a member of the regiment.
• Charles B. Dew, “How Samuel E. Pittman Validated Lee’s ‘Lost Orders’ Prior to the Battle of Antietam,” The Journal of Southern History, 2004 — the close scholarly treatment of the authentication.
• Stephen W. Sears, Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam (1983).
• William H. H. Terrell, Report of the Adjutant General of the State of Indiana, 8 vols. (Indianapolis, 1865–1869).
• Antietam National Battlefield, National Park Service — 27th Indiana monument and Maryland-campaign interpretation.
• American Battlefield Trust, “Special Order 191: Lost and Found.”
• This series, Posts 1 through 8, available at the blog index.