by Bruce Catton
This would crowd things, July 9 being only ten days away. Haste seemed necessary, however, because in about a fortnight the ninety-day terms of many of the militia regiments would begin to expire; better use the men while they were still available. In the end the target date proved unattainable. New regiments were still coming in, including some of the three-year volunteers, and it took time to fit them into the new army’s organization. It took even more time to find all of the wagons, horses, and harness for the supply trains. McDowell had only eight companies of cavalry and practically no engineer troops; and, all in all, there was a good deal of point in Scott’s notion that the summer ought to be spent in the slow task of getting ready. It would be several days after July 9 before McDowell could get his unwieldy force on the road.
If this force were to do its job, the Confederate army in the Shenandoah had to be kept out of action, and this was up to Major General Robert Patterson, who had some 14,000 troops in Maryland along the upper Potomac in the general vicinity of Hagerstown. Patterson was sixty-nine, a veteran of the War of 1812 and of the Mexican War. He came from the militia rather than from the regulars, and he had spent most of his life as a businessman, successful and prosperous; he owned sugar and cotton plantations in the South and textile mills in the North, he had helped to promote the Pennsylvania Railroad, and he had interests in Philadelphia steamship lines, and he was on duty now as a major general of volunteers, serving a three-month term like the rest of the militia. Handicapped though he was by age, he was a stout old smooth-bore, and in the middle of June he had wanted to cross the Potomac and clear the lower Shenandoah Valley of Rebels at least as far as Winchester. Scott turned down his plan rather brusquely, took the few regulars Patterson had away from him, and sent a series of rather confused orders which left the old general somewhat muddled.
In the end Patterson got the picture: McDowell was going to advance, and Patterson was to keep Johnston occupied. The picture was still fuzzy, however. Scott seemed to be saying that Patterson must fight Johnston but that he must be very careful, and if it was too risky to pursue the enemy, he ought to think about coming down the Potomac Valley toward McDowell instead; the sum of it seemed to be (as far as Patterson could see) that he was to make warlike demonstrations and delay the enemy, but that he was not to take undue chances. A reverse or even a drawn battle would encourage the enemy, “filling his heart with joy, his ranks with men and his magazines with voluntary contributions.” The two old generals, conferring along the length of the telegraph wire, just were not getting through to one another.5
The Confederates were suffering from a little confusion of their own, although in the end this was not so expensive. Early in June, Beauregard had written to President Davis urging that they work out a detailed strategic plan, but Davis warned him that because they were so outnumbered they must first see what the Yankees were up to; “the present position and unknown purpose of the enemy require that our plan should have many alterations.” The unknown purpose became clear enough before long. Beauregard had plenty of spies in Washington and they kept him posted, and anyway the Northern newspapers were printing detailed stories telling what McDowell was going to do, and Beauregard soon was very well aware that he was about to be attacked. Full of expedients, he laid plans for his battle—Napoleonic plans, based, as he said, on what Napoleon did at Austerlitz. They were excellent, although as things worked out no single part of them could ever be put into operation. Beauregard’s role was simply to hold on and stand the hammering until Johnston could join him.6
Johnston, on his part, was suffering from some unease. McClellan seemed about to break through the mountains from the west, and Patterson might cross the Potomac in force at any minute; and although Lee warned him that to give up Harper’s Ferry “would be depressing to the cause of the South,” Johnston considered the place indefensible—and on June 15 he evacuated the historic little town and retreated to Winchester. (Patterson considered this a ruse. An outpost commander warned him that “there may be a deep-laid plot to deceive us,” and Patterson wired Scott: “Design no pursuit; cannot make it.”) Johnston reconsidered a little, after his retreat, and moved twelve miles forward to Bunker Hill, where he took position and regained a measure of confidence. The threat from McClellan evaporated, and Johnston watched to see what the Federals might do next.7
He was well served by his lieutenants. One of them was that singular genius, Brigadier General Thomas J. Jackson, a shy man full of ferocious Presbyterianism, born to fight; and Jackson put over a sly trick on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad people, confiscating trains that ran through Harper’s Ferry and depriving the road at last of forty-two locomotives and 386 freight cars. Most of these were wrecked and thrown into the river, but Jackson was able to haul fourteen locomotives and a few boxcars overland, by road, with horses for motive power, all the way to the town of Strasburg, where they could be put on the Manassas Gap Railroad and added to the Confederacy’s stock of railroad equipment.8 Johnston also had some cavalry, commanded by a bearded young West Pointer named James Ewell Brown Stuart—Jeb Stuart, who would be known to fame a little later, a man who was both an unconscionable show-off and a solid, hard-working, and wholly brilliant commander of light horse. He wore an ostrich plume in his hat, he had a gray cloak lined with scarlet, and he kept a personal banjo player on his staff, riding off to war all jingling with strum-strum music going on ahead, and before he got killed (which came in the final twilight several years later) he gave the Yankees a very bad time of it. Johnston used Stuart these days to befuddle the already confused General Patterson, and no one could have done it better.
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 thirsty 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 running 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 far 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 Centreville, 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 marvelou
sly 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
