16. Battle of Second Manassas, or Bull Run, August 30, 1862.
{Battle of Second Manassas, or Bull Run, August 30, 1862, and Battle of Gettysburg, July 2–3, 1863, by permission of Simon & Schuster Publishing Group, from General James Longstreet, by Jeffrey D. Wert, copyright © 1993 Jeffrey D. Wert.}
As Lee read the dispatches from his senior officers by the light of a bonfire in a soggy field, he was already aware that he had won a victory, perhaps the most important Confederate victory since the beginning of the war. He wrote late that night to President Jefferson Davis with the news that the entire South had been waiting anxiously to hear: “This Army achieved on the plains of Manassas a signal victory over combined forces of Genls. McClellan and Pope.” It is interesting that Lee put McClellan first, although “the Young Napoleon” had in fact been in Alexandria throughout the battle, grinding his teeth over being demoted to a secondary role while portions of his own beloved army were placed under the incompetent and despised Pope, whose defeat he had confidently predicted. Lee carefully gave equal praise to Jackson and Longstreet, although he surely realized by now that Longstreet’s repeated refusals to attack on afternoon of August 29 had cost him the decisive victory that he wanted. By the time he wrote his dispatch to Davis on August 30, heavy rain had turned roads to mud, while Bull Run was “rising fast, and in danger of becoming impassible.” Since the Federals had destroyed the Stone Bridge behind them, a victory on the twenty-ninth instead of the thirtieth would have given the Confederates the best part of a day of clear weather to pursue the Federal army and perhaps prevent it from crossing Bull Run to safety.
Lee had succeeded in his desire to “suppress” Pope, but at Second Manassas, just as at Malvern Hill, he missed the chance to “annihilate” his opponent’s army. The Army of Northern Virginia was a formidable fighting machine, but it was neither big enough, nor sufficiently well supplied to achieve the crushing victory that the Confederacy needed. Even had Lee been able to force Pope to surrender his sword and his army, as Washington forced Cornwallis to surrender at Yorktown, it is by no means certain that the United States would have recognized the Confederacy as a result, since major Union armies were fighting elsewhere. McClellan still had enough men to defend Washington; Lincoln’s presidency had another two years to run. The kind of victory Lee wanted eluded him at Second Manassas.
He was particularly hampered by the army’s constant shortage of food and forage. “An army marches on its stomach,”* of course, but the Army of Northern Virginia’s supply line was stretched thin, and the Confederacy was poorly organized to supply it. While Union armies received plentiful supplies and could build up huge depots close to the front, like the one that Jackson had just destroyed at Manassas Junction, the Army of Northern Virginia was forced to keep moving. It lived off the land, consuming food and forage at an alarming rate, and this made it difficult, almost impossible, for the army to remain in place for long, or to retreat over ground it had already picked clean. Time and distance were constantly on Lee’s mind, even at the moment of a victory that validated his bold decision to abandon Richmond, cross the Rappahannock, and split his army in the face of the enemy. Lee’s wagon train was empty of supplies; the roads before him were turning “nasty and soggy,” to quote Longstreet, ever the realist; and the army was hungry, exhausted, and short of every kind of ammunition. Even so, Lee was determined to try once more to cut the bulk of Pope’s army off before it could reach the safety of Washington.
At the break of day on the morning of August 31, wearing “rubber overalls and with a rubber poncho over his shoulders” against the steady rain, Lee and Jackson rode out to cross Bull Run, coming under fire from enemy pickets on the far side—proof that the remainder of the Federal army was still around Centreville, behind the lines that the Confederates themselves had dug the year before. Lee made his decision at once. Jackson, being farthest on the left, would move first, cross Bull Run at the Sudley Springs ford, advance north in a wide flanking movement around the right of Pope’s army and try to cut off his retreat from Centreville—a repetiton of Lee’s strategy at the Rappahannock on August 25. Longstreet would “remain on the battlefield, looking after the wounded and burying the dead, until Jackson had a good start,” and would then follow Jackson. Stuart was ordered to cross Bull Run with the cavalry and advance toward Ox Hill and Fairfax Court House, screening Jackson’s forces and holding Pope’s attention—just the kind of flamboyant display at which Stuart excelled.
Having set Jackson in motion, Lee dismounted briefly near a high railroad embankment to talk to General Longstreet, with Traveller’s reins looped loosely over one arm. A party of Federal prisoners under armed guard suddenly surged over the embankment, and Traveller threw up his head and “jumped backwards” in alarm, throwing Lee violently to the ground, spraining both his wrists and breaking a small bone in one hand. A surgeon was summoned, and both of Lee’s arms were put in slings, rendering him unable to ride. For some days he would be obliged to accompany his army in an ambulance. Quite apart from the pain, which was considerable, the accident was “a sore trial to the general’s patience . . . since inevitably a horse-drawn, wheeled vehicle “could not go into many places where a horse would have carried him.”
Time and weather, as well as his own injuries, were now working against Lee. Longstreet followed Jackson at 2 p.m., to the strains of “Dixie” being “cheerfully” played by the army’s band in the pouring rain. The troops marched, in Longstreet’s words, “over a single-track country road, bad enough on the south side of the river, much worn . . . over quicksand subsoil on the north side.” Longstreet complained—with a certain degree of what sounds very much like petulance—that if Jackson “had been followed by enemy whose march he wished to baffle, his gun-carriages could not have made deeper cuts through the mud and quicksand.” Hard as it was for Longstreet’s army to slog over a muddy road that had already been trampled by Jackson’s passage, it would also have made the progress of Lee’s ambulance even slower and more uncomfortable than it would ordinarily have been.* Enclosed in a small space Lee could have no clear view of what was going on.
During the course of the morning he received a formal request from Pope for a truce to pick up Federal wounded from the battlefield. Lee’s response was measured. He would permit Federal ambulances to cross the Confederate line, but he would not agree to a truce. As usual, Lee was practical and hardheaded. He had no wish to swamp his already overburdened medical officers with several thousand Federal wounded, and he also did not want to be slowed by a formal truce.
By nightfall Longstreet was still on the wrong side of Bull Run, while Jackson’s hungry, weary, rain-soaked troops were still well short of Fairfax Court House. They bivouacked for the night in Pleasant Valley, on Little River Turnpike, almost ten miles from Jackson’s goal. The only person who had managed to move quickly was Pope, who had abandoned Centreville and marched his army far enough north so that Jackson could no longer cut off his retreat. By late afternoon of the next day, September 1, Jackson reached the mansion of Chantilly, one of the great houses of Virginia; it had been built by the Stuart family, which intermarried with the Lee family, and was adjacent to the estate of Lee’s kinsman Francis Lightfoot Lee. Having realized that he could not get behind Pope, Jackson decided to attack his right flank. This was not a success; a thunderstorm of unprecedented violence “beat in the men’s faces” as they advanced to meet the enemy, and the Federals resisted stoutly. Thunder contested with the noise of the guns as the fight continued on until darkness put an end to it. Longstreet, who came up with his army as night fell, commented that the Federals “made a furious attack, driving back the Confederates with some disorder.” That may have been due to Lee’s absence. His ambulance had arrived too late for him to have taken command of the battle. Doubtless tired and in pain from his injuries, he made his headquarters in a nearby farmhouse. Longstreet remarked to Jackson, when he rode up “as the storm of the battle, as well as that of the elements, be
gan to die down,” that Jackson’s men did not “appear to be working well today,” having observed the number of stragglers on the way, a comment that Jackson can hardly have welcomed, especially since Longstreet had not managed to arrive until after the fighting was all but over. Jackson brusquely replied, “No, but I hope that it will prove a victory in the morning.”
This did not prove to be the case. The Battle of Ox Hill, as it is known in the South—or Chantilly, as it is known in the North—failed to delay Pope’s retreat to the safety of Washington, and cost Lee an additional 1,300 casualties. Although Stuart’s cavalry harassed the Federal retreat almost to the Potomac, any hope of annihilating Pope’s army was gone.
One of the Union casualties of the battle was Major General Philip Kearny, who had served with Lee in Mexico. He had inadvertently ridden into the Confederate line in the blinding rainstorm as night fell, and realized his mistake too late. He “wheeled his horse and put spurs, preferring the danger of musket-balls to humiliating surrender.” Kearny was a beau sabreur, who had charged with the French army at the Battle of Solferino, and became the first American to be awarded the Légion d’Honneur,* a wealthy man who had chosen the army as a career, and been obliged to resign after a messy affair and divorce.
Despite the aura of scandal that surrounded Kearny, Lee may have remembered his gallantry at Churubusco, and admired the courage of his last moments. He took the time to write a gracious note to Pope:
September 2, 1862
Major-General John Pope,
United States Army
Sir,—The body of General Philip Kearny was brought from the field last night, and he was reported dead. I send it forward under a flag of truce, thinking that the possession of his remains may be a consolation to his family.
I am, sir, respectfully,
your obedient servant,
R. E. Lee
General
At times the essential character of Lee appears out of the ferocity of war: formal, unfailingly polite, dignified, and caring. However much Lee despised Pope, he went out of his way to ensure that General Kearny’s body was “prepared for burial” and returned to the Union lines with the appropriate ceremony and respect.
Although Lee’s victory was greeted with jubilation in Richmond, he was well aware of the difficulties that accompanied it. He had taken over 7,000 Federal prisoners on the plains of Manassas, as well as “about 2,000 Federal wounded left in our hands.” In addition, he captured “thirty pieces of artillery, [and] upward of twenty thousand stands of small arms,” which caused the luckless Pope to write plaintively to General Halleck, “Unless something can be done to re-store [sic] the tone to this army, it will melt away before you know it.” But Lee had neither the number of men needed to attack Washington, having lost nearly 10,000 between crossing the Rappahannock and reaching the Potomac, nor the supplies to carry out a long siege. Years later, when asked why he had failed to pursue Pope farther, Lee would reply simply: “My men had nothing to eat.” Victorious they might be, but they were effectively stranded in the muddy shambles of a battlefield, without food for three days. There was no way Lee could ask starving men to assault well-manned fortifications. His army had to move or die.
17. Lee’s approach to Maryland.
{Robert E. Lee, Volumes 1, 2, and 3, by Douglas Southall Freeman, copyright © 1934, 1935, by Charles Scribner’s Sons, copyright renewed 1962, 1963, by Inez Godden Freeman. All rights reserved.}
He could not fall back—a victorious army does not retreat, and in any case his men had already picked clean the country between Manassas and the Rappahannock; nor did he want to provision it at the expense of his fellow Virginians, who by this time had little left for themselves after the passage of two armies. He had no realistic option except to cross the Potomac and advance north into the rich countryside of Maryland or Pennsylvania, where he could feed his army at the expense of the enemy. Maryland offered many strategic advantages—it was “enemy country,” of course, but many of its inhabitants were sympathetic to the southern cause, and he might even hope to acquire recruits.
As usual, Lee made up his mind quickly. He wrote to President Davis only two days after the Battle of Ox Hill: “The present seems to be the most propitious time since the commencement of the war for the Confederate Army to enter Maryland.” The danger of carrying out his plan, Lee added, was that his army was “not properly equipped for an invasion . . . is feeble in transportation . . . the men . . . in thousands of instances are destitute of shoes.” He did not wait for a reply from Davis. On September 4 he ordered the army to cross the Potomac into Maryland “in the vicinity of Leesburg.” By September 7 he had approximately 65,000 men north of the Potomac, marching toward Frederick, Maryland, while Stuart’s cavalry, which crossed the Potomac farther east at Edward’s Ferry, was spread out from there to New Market, shielding Lee’s right flank. As Lee himself crossed the band played “Maryland, My Maryland,” inappropriately as it turned out. Seldom has a major military maneuver been decided on so quickly or carried out so rapidly. One moment, it seemed, his army was just south of Washington, hardly fifteen miles away from the White House; the next it was to the northeast, threatening both Washington and Baltimore. It was a bold move, perhaps the boldest of Lee’s career.
His old opponent General Pope had been sent far from the center of events to Minnesota, to fight recalcitrant Indians, and replaced by a reluctant president with General McClellan, after General Burnside, with a realistic view of his own inadequacy for the task, turned the president’s offer of command down. McClellan had the confidence of the army. Swiftly, and with his usual competence at organization and logistics, he turned it from a defeated, disgruntled uniformed mob into an efficient fighting machine. Even so, he faced misgivings on the part of Lincoln, and outright hostility from most of Lincoln’s cabinet, all of whom doubted whether McClellan could be relied on to use the army once he had completed its restoration, and some of whom even feared he would use it to carry out a military putsch, and enforce a deal with the Confederates for a negotiated peace. Typically, McClellan hesitated before accepting what he had wanted in the first place. President Lincoln and General Halleck were obliged to call “unannounced” at McClellan’s house, early in the morning on September 5, and spend two hours persuading him to accept the command. Even then he managed to further dismay Lincoln by having the first elements of the army march past his house cheering him on their way out of Washington, instead of past the White House.
For a change, McClellan was seeking a battle, while Lee was not. Lee was more concerned with feeding his army and restoring its strength, and with the political and strategic advantages of moving it to Maryland. So long as he was in place north of Washington, there would be no Federal attempt to renew the advance on Richmond—and so there would be a breathing space for the Confederate government—and Federal troops would have to be deployed in large numbers to defend Washington and Baltimore, as well as to protect Pennsylvania. Lee even contemplated the possibility that the army’s presence might inspire Marylanders to join the Confederacy—after all, it was only by a show of strength that Lincoln had kept Maryland in the Union in 1861. Lee issued a lofty proclamation in a rather obvious attempt to portray the invasion of Maryland as a response to “the wish” of its people “to enjoy the inalienable rights of free men, and restore independence and sovereignty to your State.” It did not have any effect on the Marylanders, who showed no signs of rising against the United States, joining the Confederate Army in significant numbers, or letting go of their food and forage for Confederate dollars.
On the same day as the proclamation; Lee made a rare attempt to influence politics in Richmond. He wrote a letter to Jefferson Davis urging him to use the invasion of Maryland as the moment to offer a peace proposal to the United States. “Such a proposal coming from us at this time could in no way be regarded as suing for peace,” Lee wrote, “but being made when it is in our power to inflict injury upon our adversary, would show concl
usively to the world that our sole object is the establishment of our independence and the attainment of an honorable peace.”
As it turned out, Lee was about to make several errors of strategy that would undermine, his notion of negotiating from strength, still it is perhaps the clearest statement he ever made of the intention behind his strategy. Once he had taken steps to secure Richmond, he intended to move the fighting out of Virginia and into the North, and to combine battlefield victories with vigorous diplomacy, gambling that the northern public would soon tire of a war fought on their own soil, at a great cost in lives, and with the inevitable destruction of property on a large scale. The victory of Second Manassas may have made him overconfident. He may also have underrated Lincoln’s determination or the outrage in the North at the news that the Confederate army had crossed into Maryland. Certainly he could not have guessed that McClellan would replace the ignominious and clumsy Pope as his opponent, still less that McClellan, who had so often retreated before him on the peninsula, had suddenly, and at the last moment, stiffened his spine. McClellan was as hostile as ever toward the president and the secretary of war, but the fact that he had been called on to repair the mess Pope had made, and restored to full command of the Army of the Potomac, boosted his confidence, and convinced him that he had been right all along. He was no longer feeling sorry for himself; there was no more thought about moving the family silver to safety in New York City.
Clouds of Glory Page 56
