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| Where the commander heard the cannonading: Pope's headquarters during the battle of Cedar Mountain The Hudson farmhouse, with its mossy shingles, vines, and aged locust trees, suggests anything but the storm-center of a nation at war. Yet it was here that General John Pope set up his headquarters while his eight thousand trained soldiers under General Banks sped toward Gordonsville, to strike the first blow of what the new general had promised would be a series of victories. As this picture was taken, the New York Herald wagon stands plainly in view to the left of the porch; the newspaper correspondents prepared to despatch big “stories.” John Pope was the leader whose swift success in capturing New Madrid and Island Number10 in the Mississippi campaign formed a brilliant contrast, in the popular mind, to the failure of the Eastern armies in their attempt upon Richmond. Pope himself proclaimed, “I have come to you from the West, where we have always seen the backs of our enemies.” So he set out for the front with “headquarters in the saddle.” He could not know what the world later learned — that Robert E. Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson were generals before whose genius few opponents, however brave, could make headway. And so it was too late when Pope heard the cannonading from the Hudson house on the 9th of August. |
