Military History | Monocacy National Battlefield — Three Cigars, or Two

On 9 September 1862, with the Army of Northern Virginia camped on the Best Farm south of Frederick, Maryland, Robert E. Lee issued Special Orders No. 191, dividing his army for a move on Harpers Ferry. Seven copies went to senior commanders. The copy addressed to Major General D. H. Hill was left behind when the columns marched.

Four days later, men of Company F, 27th Indiana Infantry, moving into ground the Confederate army had vacated, picked up an envelope wrapped around cigars. Who picked it up is not settled. Colonel Silas Colgrove's report credits Barton W. Mitchell, ranked private in some accounts and corporal in others; the National Park Service names Sergeant John M. Bloss. How many cigars is not settled either: the roadside marker says three, the park's own page says two, and the park has run a ranger program built around the question.

The paper reached George B. McClellan's headquarters in Frederick around noon. Samuel E. Pittman vouched for the handwriting, having been a teller at the Michigan State Bank in Detroit before the war while Robert Chilton, who drafted the order, was the army paymaster there. McClellan told John Gibbon he held a paper with which, if he could not whip "Bobby Lee", he would be willing to go home. Hill denied to the end of his life that he had lost it.

Nobody can say which field it came out of. The Maryland Civil War Trails marker, raised in 2009, stands at the Monocacy National Battlefield visitor center and says only that the evidence suggests the Hermitage or Best Farm — the same tract where, by the 1800 census, the Vincendière family held ninety enslaved people on a plantation built after they left Saint-Domingue.

📸 Cover: the fields at the Best Farm / L'Hermitage, about 800 m south of the wayside — area view, not the find site, which is not known; the guns are the park's display pieces. Photo by Acroterion, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.