by Bruce Catton
Patterson had good ground for complaint, considering everything. He never knew exactly what Washington wanted him to do. He had been told to make warlike movements and he had been told to be very careful lest evil befall him, and no one ever quite said, in so many words: Fight Joe Johnston, and even if you get licked we will win down on the Manassas plain. Patterson tried to get into action, and he got his army down to the Potomac and took it across. It made a bright picture—a six-hour parade of men tramping down to the river, bands playing, splashing through the bright water and moving off into the wooded valleys on the Virginia side—and presently the army was confronting armed Confederates at Bunker Hill. Johnston had been warned that the big push was on in front of Beauregard, and he must go down and help; and to do this he must first either beat Patterson or deceive him grossly. The latter part looked simpler. Johnston sent Stuart forward to take care of it. On July 16, Patterson's advance fought a little skirmish with Stuart's people, and then Patterson sidled over to Charlestown, where John Brown had been tried and hanged two years earlier. Patterson's army was composed mostly of three-months men, and the time of many of these men was expiring, and when he thought everything over, he reported that "it would be ruinous to advance, or even to stay here, without immediate increase of force." He was now twenty miles away from the Confederates, who were about to leave for Manassas Junction, and he would stay where he was, meaning everything for the best but accomplishing nothing whatever, confronting absolute vacancy with an army that could have been of much service elsewhere; a deserving man who might have done fairly well if he had ever understood just what was expected of him.9
So Joe Johnston started down to join Beauregard, and Beauregard talked to his spies and read the daily papers and evolved a Napoleonic plan, and Jeb Stuart shuttled cavalrymen back and forth and caused a good Federal army to remain inactive in the Shenandoah Valley, while McDowell's army pulled itself together and went tramping across the Potomac bridges in front of Washington. General Scott, unable to fight the kind of war which he dimly saw was needed, did what he could to give strength to McDowell's elbow; and everybody on each side was more or less helpless, caught up by the fact that the armies at last were in motion. In Richmond, President Davis hurried through his dealings with Congress because he felt that he ought to get where there was going to be fighting, and in Washington, President Lincoln watched the troops moving south and mulled over whatever thoughts may have come to him; and fifty or sixty thousand young men in assorted uniforms, knowing nothing whatever about war, got ready for the first big test which lay just ahead of them. And although it was not possible to see this at the time, the hard fact was that nobody really had control of anything. The armies had begun to move. Events were moving with them. The war itself had begun to move. The great political conventions, the campaigns, the meetings and oratory and half-hearted negotiations, had all come down at last to this. Men were going to fight.
In spite of Patterson's failure, McDowell still had plenty of time if he had been able to use it. He got his army of 34,000 men in motion on July 16, a week after the target date, and Beauregard was less than thirty miles away. Johnston's advance, as things developed, would not reach Beauregard until July 20, and most of his troops would not come in until July 21; at a minimum, McDowell had four days to get to the scene and fight his battle. Later in the war, when the troops knew how to march, and generals and their staffs knew how to handle them, this would have been more than time enough, but at this time no one knew anything; from general down to ninety-day private, everybody was green. McDowell's troops had come in slowly, and when the march began McDowell had never set eyes on a great many of his regiments, which in turn had never in their existence moved in brigade formation. Supply arrangements had been badly fouled up, and when the column started out, the wagon trains that had to carry all of its supplies were still in process of organization; when the head of the army began to move, the tail of it was still being put together. A worse beginning could hardly have been made.
Knowing that raw troops could not stand surprise, McDowell warned his subordinates that to stumble on an enemy battery or entrenchment unexpectedly "will not be pardonable in any commander." This was sound enough, but combing the woods and fields with advance patrols to prevent surprise caused still more delay, and although each part of the column tended to move a little faster than the part just behind it, even the men out in front went very slowly. By the first evening the advance reached Fairfax Court House, drove out some Confederate pickets, and made camp. McDowell ordered the army to pursue vigorously on the following day, only to discover that the soldiers "were too much exhausted to do so."10 With all of its other troubles, this army simply was not physically fit. Such training as the men had been given had not hardened them. They had never had to make a driving cross-country march, carrying full equipment, in July heat, and it was a very different thing than tramping back and forth for an hour or so on the parade ground. Their officers did not know how to make things easier for them. There were long halts when the regiments stood, sweating mightily, in the dust—halts that were as tiring as marching, because nobody told the men to break ranks, stretch out, and catch forty winks. On the second day a six-mile march was the best the army could do.
Of discipline most regiments really had none at all, as various Virginia civilians began to learn. Fairfax Court House was cruelly ransacked. Vacant houses were plundered, some were burned, and guffawing militiamen went spraddling up and down the streets with crinoline underskirts and ruffled drawers pulled on over their uniforms. With bland understatement, one of these lads wrote that this town, when the army camped there, "wore the softened aspect of a carnival." There was more looting at Germantown, where men shot pigs and snatched up chickens, and went through houses to steal things for which they had no use. One soldier ambled off after his regiment carrying a feather bed in all the July heat; another, for some unimaginable reason, bore a sledge hammer; a third carried a huge looking-glass. Part of the army's weariness came out of senseless romping.11
With all of its difficulties the army did keep moving. Despite the billowing dust, and the disorderly swarms of thirty men who broke ranks whenever a regiment passed a brook or a pool, it made an impressive martial picture, especially to the men who, moving as a part of all of this, had never before seen thousands of soldiers on the march. Mile after mile, the swaying column kept going, dust overhead, sunlight flashing from musket barrels, officers and couriers impressive on horseback, every man feeling that he was moving toward something unknown and tremendous ... it had a touching quality, this blind and ill-managed advance.
By July 18 the advance guard, led by Brigadier General Daniel Tyler, of the Connecticut militia, got to the hamlet of Centreville, where the Confederates until recently had had a strong point. The town itself was nothing much. An officer in the 69th New York held that it was "the coldest picture conceivable of municipal smallness and decrepitude," and wrote scornfully: "It looks for all the world as though it had done its business, whatever it was, if it ever had any, full eighty years ago, and since then had bolted its doors, put out its fires and gone to sleep."12 The soldiers found the Confederate trenches empty, scouted around for wells and cisterns, and then were called back into ranks again; General Tyler wanted to know whether Bull Run, which lay just a few miles ahead, was held by the Confederates in force.
He sent a brigade forward to find out—to make a reconnaissance in force, as the military jargon had it—and the brigade got down to the stream at Blackburn's Ford, blundered into a sharp fire by artillery and by infantry, lost eighty men, and saw one of its militia regiments go mnning back to Centreville in panic. The Rebels were there, all right, and word went back to the high command. During the next two days McDowell hauled up the rest of his army, and he concluded that his best move was to circle off to the northwest and get around the Confederates' left flank.
The Confederate army that was waiting for him was in no better shape than his own as fa
r as training and discipline went, except that it did not contain any ninety-day regiments whose time was about up. McDowell had many of these; a few, learning on the literal eve of battle that their ninety days had been spent, insisted on marching off to the rear despite McDowell's earnest entreaties. Beauregard had nearly 25,000 men, drawn up in a line eight miles long on the far side of Bull Run. He had most of his strength on his right, and he was planning to make a grand left wheel, hitting the invader in the flank; he reported that his men were "badly armed and suffering from the irregularity and inefficiency of the Quartermaster's and Commissary's Departments," but he believed they would do well enough. They did have one advantage: they had not had to tire themselves out and disrupt their organization with a long and wearing march. Like McDowell, Beauregard was worried for fear his men could not tell friend from foe once the fight began—in each army some men wore blue and others wore gray, there were all manner of fancy-dress uniforms in use, and some Confederates had no uniforms at all. McDowell had ordered that the United States flag be displayed constantly in all units, and Beauregard hoped that the ladies of Richmond might contribute colored scarves which his men could loop over their shoulders. The ladies did their best, but the supply was short, and what resulted was a sort of rosette which men were asked to pin to their coats. Beauregard noted that a good many of his regiments had no flags at all.
It was going to be, in short, a battle of amateurs, and both commanders knew it. Looking back long afterward, Beauregard believed that a special weight rested on both sides: "There was much in this decisive conflict about to open not involved in any after battle, which pervaded the two armies and the people behind them and colored the responsibility of the respective commanders. The political hostilities of a generation were now face to face with weapons instead of words."13
5. Dust Clouds Against the Sky
COMING DOWN from Washington, the Warrenton turnpike ran a little south of west; a dusty straight road that passed through looted Fairfax Court House, climbed the slopes around Cen-treville, and then dropped down to the valley of Bull Run, where a brown river moved southeast in slow loops with a fringe of marshy underbrush, briar patches, and spindly trees on each bank. The turnpike crossed Bull Run on an arched stone bridge, and although the stream was not wide, this little bridge was marvelously long just now; it connected two different time spans, running from the United States into a country which, for all anyone then knew, might not even exist; it spanned darkness and mystery, and in the Federals' camps it was widely believed that the bridge was heavily guarded and was mined for destruction.
At two o'clock on the morning of July 21 a bright moon shone down on the brown river, the white roadway, the green rolling countryside, and the unremarkable town of Centreville itself, and by its uncertain light there was a great stir and movement. The regiments of McDowell's army were forming up and moving down to the roadway, their polished muskets making a faint frosty glitter in the moonlight. They left small campfires burning, where they had cooked the earliest of breakfasts, and on every hillside these fires twinkled and blinked as men passed back and forth in front of them, harnessing six-horse teams for gun carriages and caissons, getting wagons and ambulances ready to move. An impressionable soldier who looked down on the scene said that the great column of soldiers seemed to fill the roadway without a break, flowing up, down, and along "like a bristling monster lifting himself by a slow, wavy motion." Troops which were to be held in reserve lined the roadside to watch, calling to the marching men to bring back souvenirs—a "traitor's scalp," for choice, or at the very least a palmetto button. The men who marched were full of state pride, and they bragged about the fine deeds which this day would be done by Massachusetts, or New York, or Ohio. Like the Southern boys whom they were about to meet, their feelings of loyalty and patriotism were translated ultimately in the homely terms of what a man could see from his own attic window. In each soldier's heart the nation was very small and intimate . . . big enough to be worth dying for, but familiar enough to be loved personally.1
The direct route from Centreville to Manassas ran off mainly south by west, crossing Bull Run by a number of fords —Mitchell's, Blackburn's, McLean's, Union Mills. Nearly all of Beauregard's army was waiting in this area, snugly posted behind the river in good defensive positions, and McDowell had no intention of making a head-on attack. He wanted to get beyond the Confederate left, which appeared to be anchored along the Warrenton Pike at the stone bridge, and so he had his men moving out at two in the morning in the flat white light of the moon, marching toward the positions from which they could take the Rebels by surprise. Some would be retained in the vicinity of Centreville, in reserve. A few would go down to the lower fords just to put in an appearance and make Beauregard think something was apt to happen there. A much larger contingent would move straight off for the stone bridge, under instructions to fire cannon and make other warlike noises, so that the Confederates on the left would look fixedly at the bridge and would pay no attention to anything that might be going on farther upstream.
Farther upstream was where things really would happen. McDowell would take 14,000 men off on a wide circle to the right, coming to Bull Run at a ford by a place known as Sudley Springs, several miles north and west of the stone bridge. Crossing here, this force could march south and come in well behind the Confederate flank, and if the job were done right, it ought to roll up the whole Confederate army could send parties over to break the railroad line that ran down from the Shenandoah Valley, thus keeping Johnston's men from coming to Beauregard's assistance.
It was a good plan, and it went into operation attended by equal parts of good luck and bad luck.
For good luck there was the fact that Beauregard so far had done just what McDowell would have wanted him to do. He had planned to use his own right to strike the Federal left flank, and although headquarters staff work right now was so hopelessly tangled that this movement would never get off the ground, the mere fact that it had been in contemplation meant that most of the Confederate army was massed on the right, where there was going to be no fighting at all. There were very few men up where the Yankee blow was about to land; hardly anyone, indeed, except for a rough-and-ready colonel from South Carolina named Nathan G. Evans, known to his old-army friends as Shanks, a West Point graduate and a former officer of dragoons. He was facing the stone bridge with two small regiments, a handful of cavalry, and a little artillery, possibly 1100 men in all, and unless he was both alert and tough there was nothing to keep McDowell's flank attack from doing just what McDowell wanted it to do.
For bad luck, there was the fact that Joe Johnston was already on hand. He out-ranked Beauregard and so he was in top command, although he had not been able to do much more than give a general approval to the dispositions that had already been made. He had brought some of his men with him, most notably a brigade of Virginia troops under Jackson. The rest of his men would come in during the day. (Poor old Patterson had been hopelessly fooled; he was up in the Harper's Ferry territory, no more than a corporal's guard of armed Confederates being within many miles of him.) As luck would have it, when Johnston's troops detrained, they would have good roads leading to the Confederate left, just where they could most effectively meet the Federal offensive.
So McDowell's army began to move, and its movement was as painful and as halting as all of the moves that had gone before. The flanking column came down from Centreville just behind the division of General Tyler, which was going to make the big demonstration in front of the stone bridge, and Tyler's men took a very long time getting past the crossroads where the route to Sudley Springs swung off to the right. So the men in the divisions of S. P. Heintzelman and David Hunter who were to be the main striking force, having been pulled out of bed shortly after midnight, had to stand in the road for hours before they had gone three miles from camp; and after they got on the road that led upstream, things were not a great deal better, and the hike was jerky, with spurts of activity coming
in between bewildering pauses. Daylight came, and the soldiers saw that the meadows and bottom lands were full of blackberry bushes, and they sauntered off to pick the ripe berries on the sensible theory that they might as well be doing this as standing around waiting. There was supposed to be a place where the road forked, with the two forks leading down to two separate fords, and the leading division was supposed to go by the right-hand fork while the second division took the one to the left; but the fork either did not exist or it went completely unnoticed, and the whole column went plowing on along one narrow road, and it was eleven o'clock and after before the whole force was over Bull Run.
Meanwhile, General Tyler moved up to the stream and early in the morning he opened fire—a slow, desultory cannonade which did little more than announce that the Yankees had got up early. Miles to the southeast, Johnston and Beauregard waited at army headquarters, supposing that Beauregard's own offensive would very soon be moving, recognizing in the firing of Tyler's guns a demonstration and nothing more. But far off to the left, Beauregard had a smart staff officer, Captain Edward Porter Alexander, of the Corps of Engineers, and Alexander was prowling about full of curiosity and resentment, inspired by the fact that the second shell fired by Tyler's gunners had ripped through the tent where Alexander was sleeping. He saw the sunlight glittering from the muskets and brass guns in the Federal columns and he wigwagged a message to warn Evans that the enemy was about to land on bis flank. Evans investigated, verified the report, and passed the word on to headquarters, which was somewhat skeptical; then, leaving four companies to watch the stone bridge— where, he concluded, the Yankees were not trying to do anything in particular—Evans took the rest of his command and two pieces of artillery over the fields to the north. By a little after nine o'clock he had his men drawn up on an open farm half a mile north of the turnpike, a regiment from South Carolina and another from Louisiana, and when the head of the Federal column appeared over the hills, these boys opened fire. After much jolting and creaking and many false starts, the war had at last begun.2
