"Special Order 191: Ruse of War? " Topic

"On September 5, 1862, General Lee crossed his army over the Potomac into Western Maryland. It had taken him four months to drive Lincoln's armies out of Virginia and the effort had left his soldiers staggering. He desperately needed to get them into the Shenandoah Valley, the only place within a radius of sixty miles from his position, after the fierce battle at Manassas, where they could find subsistence, rest, and reorganize. But, in turning his army back from the environs of Washington, it was impossible for him to lead it directly across the Blue Ridge into the Valley. Lincoln's armies would quickly consolidate under McClellan's command again and move immediately toward Richmond, and he would have to hurry his soldiers across the wasteland of Northern Virginia to intercept them. Only one strategy would keep the enemy away from Richmond while he marched his army to the Valley and that was to move there indirectly, through Maryland.

General Lee's decision to move the Army of Northern Virginia into Maryland arguably resulted in the greatest, certainly the bloodiest, battle of the Civil War. Twelve days after General Lee's army entered Maryland, the Battle of Antietam was fought on Constitution Day. In the space of twelve hours, over five thousand soldiers, blue and gray, lost their lives in action and another twenty thousand were wounded. Soon after, General Lee's soldiers were safely in the Shenandoah Valley, camped along the Opequon, where they remained undisturbed until the end of October when they moved east across the Blue Ridge to counter McClellan's movement toward Culpeper.

Since the end of the Civil War, generations of historians, as well as popular Civil War writers, have uniformly espoused the view that the Battle of Antietam happened by accident, that in entering Maryland General Lee had planned to carry the war into Pennsylvania, drawing McClellan after him, but someone—perhaps one of General Lee's division commanders, D.H. Hill—had negligently lost a copy of Lee's general movement order, which allowed McClellan to thwart Lee's plans and force him into battle at Sharpsburg. When this question of accident is reexamined in light of all the evidence now available, however, reasonable minds will recognize that the Battle of Antietam probably happened by General Lee's design—a design that he formulated, in collaboration with Stonewall Jackson, while they were camped at Frederick, Maryland …"
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Amicalement
Armand

I would think that if the lost order was such a calculated ruse, that
1. Not providing the actual location of the army units would have been part of the ruse--false information.
2. The different parts of Lee's army, if not informed of the ruse, would have been ordered to prepare for a quick response, and
3. It was poorly executed. Lee's ruse, if that is what it was, completely failed, so completely that it is difficult to see the lost order as a 'plan.'
4. It was the habit of sending and receiving orders, even "a courier, traveling the short distance from Lee's headquarters camp to D.H. Hill's," to put the orders in a pouch and/or oil cloth to protect them from the elements and to secure them to the person of the courier.

If anything would telegraph a 'ruse', the absence of these precautions would have. The rain that is described is a stronger reason to doubt that it was anything but an accident rather than a ruse.

Thanks!.

Amicalement
Armand