Please join us for a Chambersburg Civil War Seminars & Tours Lecture Series! Our next lecture will be: Special Orders No. 191: Conception, Context, and Consequences by Dr. Alex Rossino. Cost is $6 per person. Zoom Login details will be sent with your email registration confirmation.

Brief Synopsis

Multiple mysteries surround the loss of a copy of Robert E. Lee's Special Orders No. 191. These include the location near Frederick, Maryland, where a corporal with the 27th Indiana Volunteers found the so-called "Lost Orders" and the identity of the man who lost them. Previous investigations of the subject have blamed General Daniel Harvey Hill, a member of Hill's staff, or a courier carrying the orders from Lee's headquarters on the Best Farm to Hill's headquarters. In this presentation, Dr. Alex Rossino will present new research providing an informed estimate of the place where the orders were found and revealing the identity of the culprit who lost the orders based on what the available evidence suggests. He will also describe the devastating effect on Confederate operations that the discovery of the orders by Federal troops had.

Bio

A resident of western Maryland, Dr. Alex Rossino is an independent historian and author. He earned Master’s and Doctoral degrees in History at Syracuse University, where he taught for two years, before working as an historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

Dr. Rossino turned his attention to the American Civil War in 2011 and after several years of research he produced Six Days in September: A Novel of Lee's Army in Maryland, September 1862. The book proved to be popular among historians and enthusiasts alike, leading to a sequel titled The Guns of September: A Novel of McClellan's Army in Maryland, September 1862, which is scheduled for release by Savas Beatie in 2023.

Dr. Rossino also returned to writing history, producing Their Maryland: The Army of Northern Virginia from the Potomac Crossing to Sharpsburg in September 1862 in November 2021 and co-authoring with Gene Thorp The Tale Untwisted: General George B. McClellan, The Maryland Campaign, and the Discovery of Lee's Lost Orders, which came out in January 2023. Both books challenge long-held beliefs about the 1862 Maryland Campaign and offer new insight into one of the Civil War's most important periods.