164 years ago today Robert E. Lee sat down in Maryland and wrote out a plan so bold it might have won the war for the Confederacy. Instead, a careless copy of that order would be dropped in a field, found wrapped around three cigars, and become the most famous lost document in American military history.


By September 9, Lee's invasion of the North had hit a snag. His whole campaign depended on his supply line running back through the Shenandoah Valley, but a Union garrison of some 12,000 men still sat at Harpers Ferry, right athwart it, refusing to withdraw. Lee decided to deal with them in characteristically audacious fashion. On September 9 he issued Special Orders No. 191, a detailed plan that did something almost reckless: it split his already outnumbered army into four separate pieces, scattered across miles of Maryland countryside. Stonewall Jackson would swing back to capture Harpers Ferry, other columns would take supporting positions, and Lee would push on with the rest, all of them to reunite later. It was a gamble that relied entirely on the slow, cautious Union commander George McClellan not realizing the Confederate army was divided and vulnerable.


Copies of the order went out to each of Lee's generals. And somewhere in the shuffle, one copy, the one meant for General D.H. Hill, went astray. It was used to wrap three cigars and then, somehow, dropped and forgotten in a meadow outside Frederick, Maryland.


A few days later, on September 13, Union soldiers marching into that same campground stopped to rest. A corporal from the 27th Indiana named Barton Mitchell spotted the little bundle lying in the grass, three cigars wrapped in a piece of paper. He unwrapped it and realized he was holding a full copy of Robert E. Lee's secret battle plan, signed and detailed, laying out exactly where every scattered piece of the Confederate army was going to be.


The paper raced up the chain to McClellan, who reportedly exclaimed that here was a paper with which, if he could not whip Bobbie Lee, he would be willing to go home. For once he had a golden chance: the exact locations of an enemy army divided into pieces he could destroy one at a time.


True to form, McClellan still moved too slowly to fully capitalize, giving Lee just enough time to pull his scattered forces back together. But the Lost Order forced the collision. It sent McClellan lunging at the mountain passes and set up the terrible clash days later along Antietam Creek, the bloodiest single day in American history. The order Lee confidently wrote out on this day may have cost him his whole campaign, all because of a dropped bundle of cigars.

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