Although since the 1820s, railways had revolutionized transportation in the eastern half of the United States, the railway as a factor in military strategy lagged far behind. It might take four days or more for Joe Johnston to march his army over the Blue Ridge Mountains from Winchester to Manassas, even in good weather—infantry could cover fifteen miles a day, but artillery and cumbersome supply wagons moved at the speed of horses and mules at the walk. Lee believed that if J. E. B. Stuart’s cavalry could successfully mask Johnston’s movements. Johnston could march his army ten miles south and entrain it on the cars and wagons of the Manassas Gap Railroad at Piedmont, and then it could be in Manassas overnight. It might be a day or more before Patterson realized that the Shenandoah Valley lay before him undefended. Lee thought that at the first sign of a Union advance the Confederate army could be reinforced to 32,000, plus 5,000 men under Brigadier General Theophilus Holmes marching northwest from Aquia Landing, on the Potomac. This would give the Confederates more troops than McDowell had by a narrow margin, with a substantial portion of them well positioned for a flanking attack. Not only had Lee integrated the railway into his plans; he foresaw how to make the best use of Johnston’s army—unlike General Scott, who despite his long experience in warfare, allowed Patterson and his 18,000 men to sit out the coming battle in Charlestown.
The great difficulty on the Confederate side was command. The missing element was precisely what Lee was best suited to provide, but neither Johnston nor Beauregard was prepared to serve under anyone but President Davis. It is fascinating to speculate what might have been gained had Lee been in a position to carry out his own plan, and had command not been divided between two rival generals, and with President Davis, who rushed to the scene. As it was, there would be a victory, and a stunning upset to the North, but not the decisive one it might have been had Lee been present and in command.
McDowell’s plans were an open secret, as was his reluctance to put them into effect. He complained to President Lincoln—and to anyone else in Washington who would listen—that his men were not ready to take the offensive, but Lincoln was under considerable pressure to do something before Congress reconvened, and before the ninety-day enlistments of McDowell’s volunteers expired. “You are green, it is true,” the president told McDowell, “but they are green also; you are all green alike.” This was true enough, but it ignored the fact that McDowell had a far higher proportion of ill-prepared “political” officers than did Johnston and Beauregard. McDowell himself had never commanded men in battle. Tall, bulky,* and incommunicative, a West Point classmate of Beauregard, he protested that he was a supply officer, not “a field commander.” He owed his command of the Union’s “Army of Northeastern Virginia” to “his mentor” Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln’s treasury secretary, and to his friendship with General in Chief Scott, both of whom admired his imperturbability. True, McDowell had the look of a man who would be unlikely to panic, but he made no claim to being a skilled tactician. His plans for attacking the Confederate Army at Manassas were too complicated for inexperienced troops to carry out—and seemingly made without any thought of concentrating, rather than dissipating his forces, thus breaking the first and most important rule of battle. It was not so much the Union troops who would fail at Bull Run as their officers and their commanding general. McDowell seems to have been under the impression that if he marched south and made a demonstration in sufficient force, the Confederates might retreat. In fact they were well positioned on good ground on the southern bank of the meandering Bull Run, and determined to fight.
Even the date of McDowell’s advance was no secret. The well-placed socialite and Confederate spy Rose O’Neal “Wild Rose” Greenhow had no difficulty in finding it out and passing it on to General Beauregard in Manassas. After the war she became such a celebrated heroine that she was received by Queen Victoria and Emperor Napoleon III, but since all the officers in Washington were talking about the coming attack, and toasting each other on their certain victory in barrooms and salons all over the city, it must have been common knowledge, so it seems overgenerous to give Mrs. Greenhow all the credit for the Confederate victory. Apart from that, as McDowell’s troops began to march southwest through what are now the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., toward Centreville on July 16, many of them collapsing from heat exhaustion within the first few miles, the news that the Union army was on the move traveled faster than the army itself. The men were unfit, ill disciplined, and poorly led. Even on a good day they could march only six miles, less than half what a veteran infantryman was expected to do. In any case an army of 35,000 men (the largest army so far assembled in North America), together with their supply wagons, artillery, and cavalry, threw up dust clouds that could be seen for miles, in what amounted to enemy territory once they were across the Potomac. Even without the help of Wild Rose Greenhow, Beauregard would have had to be blind not to know they were coming.
Lee, stuck in Richmond, had ample time to order General Johnston’s army toward Manassas Junction and to start General Holmes’s brigade marching to the northwest. They would cover over twenty-five miles in just two days’ march, moving at twice the speed of McDowell’s infantry.
Carl von Clausewitz’s comment on the “fog of war”* has seldom been better illustrated than at the First Battle of Manassas. McDowell intended to divide his army into three columns, two of which would attack and hold the Confederate army deployed in the area of Bull Run, while the third made a wide swing around the Confederate right and advanced south to cut the line of the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad, separating Beauregard’s army from Richmond. McDowell’s first mistake, perhaps made through overcaution, was that although he had almost 35,000 men, he kept two divisions in reserve: one around Centreville, three miles from the battle; the other spread out from Fairfax back to the Potomac, to guard the roads leading to Washington. Thus he would go into action with fewer than 19,000 men, giving up any hope of superiority in numbers.
His second mistake was that although his attack on the Confederate left was meant to be diversionary—that is, intended to pin down the bulk of Beauregard’s troops while he went behind them to sever their line of communications—McDowell allowed it to bog down into his main thrust, and then, instead of concentrating his forces in a single powerful attack, threw his units into the battle in what, in a later war, Britain’s Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery would dismiss scornfully as “penny packets.”
Flowing from west to east, with many bends, Bull Run itself was not a serious military obstacle, since it could be forded in many places; but the ground immediately behind its southern bank was defined by a series of modest, gently sloping hills that gave the Confederates the advantage of higher ground on which to form their line. Despite the fact that McDowell had an innovative secret weapon, in the form of a reconnaissance balloon, he does not seem to have grasped that the bends in Bull Run gave Beauregard the advantage of interior lines, by means of which to move reinforcements quickly to any point that was threatened. McDowell’s third mistake was showing his cards too soon, by ordering Brigadier General Daniel Tyler to probe the Confederate right at Mitchell’s Ford and Blackburn’s Ford on July 18 with one division; the engagement degenerated into a prolonged skirmish and artillery duel and then petered out, giving Beauregard three days’ warning to prepare his positions.
Beauregard, who had been warned to fall back behind the Rappahannock River if attacked, fortunately took this as advice rather than an order and ignored it, even though he supposed that the Federal army advancing on him had 50,000 men. As Confederate reinforcements arrived he placed them on his right, where Tyler had made his demonstration, hoping to make a flanking attack from there against McDowell’s left when he advanced. Beauregard was thus badly balanced when McDowell finally attacked his left in the early morning of July 21, and had to rush General Johnston’s army, which was detraining at Manassas Junction piecemeal over to his own left, where the Union troops were pushing back the Conf
ederates in some of the hardest fighting yet seen in the war.
It took some time before Beauregard—who had now been joined on the field by Johnston—realized from the intensity of gunfire on his left that a disaster was taking place there, but to his credit as soon as it was apparent, he abandoned his own plan of attack; he and Johnston moved “all their available forces” to the left, and quickly rode there themselves, in time to see Brigadier General Barnard E. Bee Jr.’s brigade retreating in panic and confusion. Bee and the two commanding generals tried in vain to rally the men, and Bee finally rode over to where Brigadier General Thomas J. Jackson was seated on his horse, his face grim and the brim of his crushed gray kepi cap pulled low over his eyes as he watched the men of his brigade trying to hold their place in line under withering artillery and musket fire. “General,” one of his men cried out, “they are beating us back!” Jackson, whose determination and calm under fire were always an example to his men, replied: “Then we will give them the bayonet.”
Bee, impressed by Jackson’s firm control of his men, his “soldierly bearing,” and his ferocious intensity, rode back to where his own men were milling about trying to find someplace to shelter from the Union artillery, and pointing to his left cried out: “Form! Form! Look, there stands Jackson like a stone wall! Rally behind the Virginians! Let us determine to die here, and we will conquer! Follow me!”* It was the moment of crisis in the battle. Enough of Bee’s men rallied, managed to form into two lines, and followed him in a charge that stopped the Union advance. Bee himself was killed as he led them, but Jackson rode out in front of his men, apparently indifferent to enemy fire, and shouted: “Reserve your fire until they come within fifty yards! Then fire and give them the bayonet! And when you charge, yell like furies!” They did so, giving birth to the rebel yell, a high-pitched, savage scream partly inspired by the cries of fox hunters, partly of Scottish and Irish tradition in warfare, that would continue to chill the blood of men who had heard it until the last veterans of the Civil War died. General Beauregard, in the thick of the fighting himself, took advantage of the moment to order the colors of all the regiments of his left wing to be advanced forty yards in front of the mass of Confederate infantry. It was a grand gesture, and it was enough. The shaken Confederate line re-formed, and the men advanced toward their own standards. The battle, which had been as good as lost in the morning, was won by the late afternoon, as regiment after regiment of Union troops broke and ran before repeated Confederate charges.
President Jefferson Davis, unable to remain in Richmond while the battle was raging, left Lee behind “to mind the shop,”* and arrived at Manassas Junction by special train in the late afternoon (one guesses how much Lee must have disapproved of this dramatic rush to the front by the president, whose job after all was to remain calmly at his desk). Seeing the number of Confederate stragglers on the road to Bull Run, Davis concluded that Beauregard had been defeated. A Confederate surgeon who was dressing a wound in Jackson’s hand at a field hospital watched Davis as he rode among the stragglers. “He stopped his horse . . . stood up in his stirrups, the palest, sternest face I ever saw, and cried to the great crowd of soldiers, ‘I am President Davis, follow me back to the field.’” Jackson, who was hard of hearing—a natural physical defect for an artillery instructor—did not know who it was until the surgeon told him, but then he stood up, took off his cap, and cried out to Davis, “We have whipped them—they ran like sheep. Give me 10,000 men and I will take Washington tomorrow.”
Jackson, who from that day forth would be known as “Stonewall” Jackson, was right. Major General McClellan, arriving in Washington from northwestern Virginia, would find “no preparations whatever for defense, not even to the extent of putting troops in military positions. Not a regiment was properly encamped, not a single avenue of approach guarded. All was chaos, and the streets, hotels and bar-rooms were filled with drunken officers and men . . . a perfect pandemonium.” Even Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton remarked that Washington “might have been taken without resistance. The rout, overthrow and demoralization of the whole army were complete.” But the Confederate Army was as exhausted and disorganized by victory as the Union army was by defeat. There was no one to take command, form the force of 10,000 men that Jackson wanted, and order an immediate advance to the Potomac. Many of the retreating Union troops were throwing away their muskets or cutting horses loose from their harness to ride them back to Washington along roads blocked by panicked politicians who had driven out in their carriages. Sometimes a politician was even accompanied by his wife and her friends in all their finery to watch the anticipated Union victory. From Fairfax Court House the unfortunate General McDowell telegraphed to General Scott that his troops were “pouring through this place in a state of utter disorganization. They could not be prepared for action by tomorrow morning even if they were willing. . . . There is no alternative but to fall back on the Potomac.”
But President Davis, General Johnston, and General Beauregard were too dazed by the magnitude of the Confederate victory, as well as by the bloodshed in the aftermath of what was then the biggest and most costly battle fought on American soil, to seize the moment. Brigadier General James Longstreet, who would become Lee’s “Old War-Horse,” lived into the twentieth century still arguing, as he did that evening at Bull Run, that the supplies and ammunition abandoned by the Union forces at Centreville were “ample to carry the Confederate army to Washington,” and that his brigade, together with those of Holmes, Ewell, and Early, all of which had been on the Confederate right and were “quite fresh,” could have reached Washington the next day.
Instead, the Confederate army stayed put and missed the opportunity of ending the war in 1861. As night fell, President Davis telegraphed to the one man who, had he been present on the battlefield, might have seen the good sense of Stonewall Jackson’s promise. “We have won a glorious though dear-bought victory,” was Davis’s message to Lee. “Night closed on the enemy in full flight and closely pursued.”
Indeed, the indefatigable Colonel J. E. B. Stuart had pushed his cavalry as far as Fairfax Court House, hard on the heels of General McDowell, within ten miles of the Potomac. Stuart reported that “there was no [Union] force this side of Alexandria,” but it was too late. All that was missing was, in the words of one historian, “a general who grasped the full meaning of victory,” but that man was in Richmond.
For the moment, Beauregard was the hero of the hour throughout the South, with Johnston taking an honorable but secondary role. Despite his pivotal role in the battle, Stonewall Jackson’s turn in the limelight was yet to come. The fact that the victory had been orchestrated by Lee was not appreciated by the general public. It must have galled Lee to realize that J. E. B. Stuart’s vedettes had been less than ten miles from Arlington, the Lee home, on the night of July 21.
At Kinloch, Mary Lee and her girls were close enough to Manassas that they “could hear faintly but distinctly, the sound of cannonading” in the distance, carried on the hot, still summer air, all through all day and the evening of July 21. The next day, in the pouring rain, they saw ambulances carrying badly wounded Confederate soldiers to a nearby estate, which had been turned into an improvised hospital. Mildred and Mary Custis volunteered to work there as nurses, stifling their horror at the stench and the dreadful wounds—for battlefield wounds and surgery were not for the faint of heart in the days before doctors had any knowledge of germ theory, and surgeons had no treatment to offer but the scalpel and the saw. Wounds to the head or torso were considered fatal, and usually were. Infection, if it set in, was often fatal too. For the girls this was a rude awakening to the realities of war.
They were not alone. Though the casualties at Bull Run were light compared with those of the great battles to come—just under 3,000 on the Union side, just under 2,000 on the Confederate side*—the report that the “dead and dying cover the field,” as Mary Chesnut recorded in her diary, swept through the South as quickly as the news that the Co
nfederate army was victorious. In the Spotswood hotel in Richmond, where Mrs. Chesnut was staying, alongside President and Mrs. Davis and Robert E. Lee, there was grief aplenty among the guests. Mrs. Chesnut described how Mrs. Davis herself woke up the wife of Colonel Francis Barstow. “Poor thing! [Mrs. Barstow] was lying in her bed. Mrs. Davis knocked. ‘Come in.’ When she saw it was Mrs. Davis, she sat up ready to spring to her feet—but then there was something in Mrs. Davis’s pale face that took the life out of her. She stared at Mrs. Davis—and then sank back. She covered her face. ‘Is it bad news for me?’ Mrs. Davis did not speak. ‘Is he killed?’ . . . As soon as she saw Mrs. Davis’s face—she knew it all in an instant—she knew it before she wrapped the shawl around her head.” The next day Mrs. Barstow fainted at the funeral ceremony. “The empty saddle—and the led war horse—we saw and heard it all,” Mrs. Chesnut wrote. “And now we are never out of the Dead March in Saul. It comes and comes until I feel inclined to close my ears and scream.”
Lee was well aware of the suffering all around him, and also of the fact that this was only the beginning. In the North, the defeat produced a new determination to increase the number of troops, and to train them better. General McClellan would soon be brought to Washington to replace McDowell, and shortly to replace the aged and increasingly infirm Scott too. In the South, jubilation over the victory was tempered by the realization that it had not ended the war. “Do not grieve for the brave dead,” Lee wrote to Mary from Richmond. “Sorrow for those they left behind. The former are at rest. The latter must suffer.” Writing about the victory at Bull Run, he told her that he had wished “to partake in the former struggle, and am mortified at my absence, but the President thought it more important that I should be here.” He also broke the news that he was taking a field command at last: “I leave tomorrow for the Northwest Army. . . . I cannot say for how long, but will write you.”
Clouds of Glory Page 35
