How would this have changed things for the ANV?
The Confederacy gets pasted even faster and the Civil War ends in 1863/64.
I know the Cult of Stonewall is almost as big as the Cult of Lee but be reasonable. The first guy who gets command of the Union Eastern forces who comes close to beating the ANV is Meade at Gettysburg. Hooker blows it, as does McClellan (que 67thTigers), and Burnside and Pope.
Lee still has many able subordinates to call upon that can do the job in Jacksons stead, maybe not as well as he could but well enough. D.H. Hill would certainly do the job very well and he has yet to allieniate everyone in high office, he has a very good record up to that point and was present with the Army before the Maryland campaign. He would only fall out of favor in the ANV following the famous lost orders incident when he got most of the blame for it.
Yet Meade is a General very similar in ideas and ability to McClellan. Meade tries to revive McClellans old plans and, after some wraggling in Washington, such as the Lincoln mandated Mine Run campaign, gets his way and places the AoP on the James and renews the siege of Richmond broken off two years earlier.
An obvious butterfly here. Without Jackson there is no "lost order". McClellan will continue his more deliberate advance rather than trying to throw his army pell mell at Lee in an effort to take Lee in detail. Lee will consolidate his army again and move north into Pennsylvannia as planned, in prettymuch the same manner he did ending at Gettysburg.
There is both danger and opportunity here...
Wasn't it DH Hill who lost the order? It still could happen, especially if the butterfly nets are of the size we are working with here.
Anyway, isn't there a bigger butterfly in the air? If Hill is commanding Jackson's wing, whose commanding the troops left behind at Harper's Ferry, and will that commander be effective enough to get his men to the battlefield on time, wherever it is?
What had happened was this:
Longstreet and Jackson recieved their written orders from Lee. Longstreet read it, memorized it, then ate it. Jackson wrote out duplicate orders personally for D.H. Hill who read it and put it away for safe keeping. An official copy had been made for D.H. Hill from Lee's HQ that Jackson was unaware of but those orders never reached Hill.
D.H. Hill was the scapegoat. In typical fashion he vigerously defended himself to his dying day and pulled no punches but he was made the scapegoat of the whole thing.
D.H. Hill only ever recieved Jackson's personally written orders, copied from Jackson's own orders from Lee. If he had recieved Lee's orders as well he would never have allowed such important documents to be misplaced. He was far to thorough a general to do that.
As for your other point, I think you've got your Hill's mixed up. A.P. Hill was in charge at Harper Ferry and famously had his part in the climax of Antietam when he arrived from there to prevent Burnside encircling the ANV. D.H. Hill was involved in the fighting in the Sunken Road at Antietam.
Right, but if Jackson is dead, and AP Hill is commanding Jackson's men, who is commanding the men at Harper's Ferry?
Right, but if Jackson is dead, and AP Hill is commanding Jackson's men, who is commanding the men at Harper's Ferry?
The Confederacy gets pasted even faster and the Civil War ends in 1863/64.
Have we gotten mixed up somewhere here?
We were talking about D.H. Hill and him getting command of Jackson's part of the ANV then you asked if "Hill" was in command of Jackson's part of the ANV who was in command at Harpers Ferry.
When you asked that were you refering to Ambrose Powell Hill or Daniel Harvey Hill?
I assumed that since D.H. Hill was the subject of the prior discution that it was him you were asking about not A.P. Hill. As far as I know we were going down the road of D.H. Hill getting Jackson's job after Jackson's death and A.P. Hill retaining his OTL job.
Wait, no, we were going down the road of AP getting Jackson's job, I thought. At least, that's what it says in 67th Tigers post.