by Bruce Catton
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 like a rug. In addition, this flanking column 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 his 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
McDowell had made a good plan and except for delays here and there he was executing it tolerably well; but he was leading an army bigger than the one Winfield Scott had commanded in Mexico and neither he nor his subordinates knew quite how to go about it, and so the great attack came in by driblets, a series of well-intentioned taps rather than one heavy smash. The head of his column consisted of four regiments, one from New Hampshire, two from Rhode Island, and one from New York, the lot of them commanded by an imposing-looking colonel with magnificent sideburns, Ambrose E. Burnside, who was accompanied today by the wealthy young governor of Rhode Island, William Sprague. (In this innocent early morning of the war it seemed perfectly natural for a governor to accompany his state’s troops, to encourage them, and perhaps to lend a hand with their leadership.) These soldiers had been on their feet for six hours and they were tired and hungry, and afterward they remembered the opening of the battle as slightly unreal. They had tramped past a cabin where an excited woman kept shouting that there were enough Confederates up ahead, including her own husband, to whip the lot of them, and when the firing began, the men were fascinated and a little appalled by the strange whirring noise the bullets were making just overhead. Getting from a long column of fours into a fighting line two ranks deep and four regiments wide was an intricate business, and Burnside’s soldiers did it clumsily. One man fell off a rail fence and broke his bayonet, and others were showered with chaff and bits of dead grass when a shell blew up a haystack behind which they had been huddling; and when at last the men were deployed, they lay on their stomachs and began to return the Rebels’ fire, shooting wildly but making an impressive racket.3
Shanks Evans’s men were badly outnumbered and they were every bit as green as Burnside’s, but they could hold their own against an attack no more resolute than this one. Yet as the morning wore on, things got a good deal tougher. Two first-rate regular batteries reached the sce
ne and began to hammer the Confederate line, and the sluggish Federal marching column was slowly but steadily pushing men up to the zone of action. (The colonel commanding one Federal division, a grumpy old regular named Samuel P. Heintzelman, noticed when he crossed at Sudley ford that there seemed to be no higher officers around to tell him what to do; he was even more disturbed to see, off to the west, immense clouds of smoke against the clear sky, and he believed that this meant that Johnston’s army was coming in from the Shenandoah.)4 Burnside’s men managed to make two attacks and were knocked back, disorganized and through for the day, but other men were coming up to take their place, and Evans’s men were badly cut up and out of order, too; and Evans, seeing at last that he could not stay where he was without help, sent back desperate appeals for reinforcements. Up to the rescue came a brigade from Johnston’s army, men from Mississippi, Alabama, and North Carolina led by Brigadier General Barnard Bee, a first-rate soldier who had a certain gift for making a memorable phrase. Stiffened, the Southerners held, and from the rear, Confederate artillery began to pound the Federal advance.
Back by the ford McDowell was trying to add weight to his attack. He got Heintzelman’s command forward, and he sent word downstream to Tyler to make more of a fight of it. The stone bridge itself struck Tyler as a bad place to cross, but half a mile above it he had a brigade led by cross-grained Sherman—the same who had been an unhappy bystander during the street fighting in St. Louis—and Sherman found a place where his men could wade across the river. He got them over, and brought them into the fight on the left of McDowell’s line, other regiments from Tyler’s command following him. The pressure grew heavier and heavier, and before noon the Confederates were overpowered. They ran back, going clear across the turnpike, splashing through a muddy creek known as Young’s branch, and climbing the slope of an imposing hill to the south, a hill which took its name from a family named Henry, which had a farmhouse on the crest. Here they found help—South Carolina troops led by that legendary planter Wade Hampton, and a couple of Georgia regiments under a Colonel Francis S. Bartow—and on the level top of the hill they made a new line. Federal skirmishers kept peppering them, and north of the turnpike an overpowering mass of troops was obviously regrouping for a new attack. If this Confederate line should break, the whole Confederate flank would be gone and the Federals would have won the battle.5
By this time the Confederate high command had caught on to what was happening. Johnston had sent forward those elements of his own army that were at hand; now he was seeing heavier and heavier dust clouds from the direction of Sudley Springs, and he realized that the decisive action was going to be fought near the turnpike, just west of the stone bridge. He began to order troops from the right over to the left, letting Beauregard’s planned offensive collapse of its own weight, and at last, growing more and more uneasy, he gestured toward the north with a toss of his head and snapped: “The battle is over there—I am going.” He got on his horse and went galloping toward the Henry house hill. Beauregard (who had been having doubts of his own) delayed only long enough to order more of the men on the right to go post-haste over to the left, and then mounted and raced after him. Just before the two men got to the scene of action, the five Virginia regiments led by Brigadier General Jackson marched up and took position. Jackson carefully posted them far enough away from the brow of the hill so that the Federals would have to get all the way to the top in order to shoot at them effectively.6
From the Confederate right to the left was a long way, the roads were bad, and the day was very hot, and the raw Confederate regiments hurrying over to get into the fight were no better at cross-country marching than the Yankees had been. Men tramping forward with fixed bayonets broke ranks to go out in the fields and eat blackberries. (No one ever tallied the number of boys who died that day with blackberry stains on their lips; it would make a good footnote to military history, if the proper figures could ever be gathered.) The on-coming Confederates stopped to drink at little brooks, they gaped at the wounded men who were drifting to the rear, and they plodded on through dust so thick that no man could see much more than the back of the man in front of him. (One officer, seeing from a hill top a billowing dust cloud off to the northwest, where the road from the Shenandoah came in, believed that this meant that Patterson’s Federals were coming in, and felt that the battle probably was lost.) In effect, Johnston and Beauregard were trying to realign their entire army in the middle of a battle and it was slow work. The whole fight had suddenly become a struggle for the Henry hill; it was being waged, on both sides, by boys who were tired, hot, and thirsty, who in all of the marching had lost all sense of direction.7
On the hill top the tempo was picking up after a brief lull. It was close to noon now, and the Federal line was very long; those two fine regular batteries were firing effectively, the Federal regiments were edging forward, and the Confederate line wavered. Evans’s weary brigade was disorganized, and Bee’s men were sagging toward the rear; they suffered, apparently, from the weakness common to all green troops—the tendency to fire and then to drop back a few feet before reloading for another volley—and Bartow was appealing to the pride of his two regiments. Flag in his hand, he cried out: “General Beauregard says you must hold this position—Georgians, I appeal to you to hold on!” Then a Yankee bullet found him and he fell dead. An increasing number of men from the firing line drifted back to a little ravine, and Beauregard was there, rallying them; a Federal shell exploded under his horse, killing the animal, leaving the general unhurt. Farther to the rear, Johnston was trying to get fresh troops up to the line; and the Henry house plateau was full of smoke and crashing noise and sudden death, with the Federals visibly gaining the upper hand. If Beauregard could stiffen his men enough to hold on until the men Johnston was calling showed up, well and good; if he could not, disaster was at hand.8
Then came a dramatic moment, to live in legend, giving the American story one of its unforgettable names. Of the 6000 Confederate soldiers on this broad hill top, at least half had lost their organization and were out of the fight; only Jackson’s brigade and Wade Hampton’s South Carolinians remained in line, waiting for the final onslaught. General Bee was trying desperately to reorganize his men; all of his field officers were down, and he seemed to command no more than a fragment, and he rode to Jackson and said, despairingly: “General, they are beating us back.” Wholly unperturbed, Jackson replied: “Sir, we will give them the bayonet.” Bee rode off through the smoke to an unwieldy tangle of stragglers, stood erect in his stirrups, and gestured with his sword to the solidity of Jackson’s brigade. “Look!” he shouted. “There is Jackson standing like a stone wall! Rally behind the Virginians!”
It was Bee’s final contribution. A bullet struck him in the abdomen, knocking him off his horse with a mortal wound; but at least some of his men responded and sorted themselves out into a fighting line, and the rallying cry was always remembered. Jackson would be Stonewall, thence forward and forever.9
Later in the war, after he had become very famous, Jackson insisted that the nickname really belonged to his brigade rather than to himself; it was the firmness of the men in the ranks, he said, that saved the day on the Henry house hill, and after Jackson’s death the Confederate government officially designated this unit the Stonewall Brigade. Yet the instinct that led men to give the name to the general was sound, for this was a battle in which—more, perhaps, than in any other fight in the war—much depended on the brigade and division commanders. The soldiers themselves were first-rate men, but they were pitifully untrained, and they needed leadership far more than battle-tested veterans would ever need it. In most units, in both armies, the leadership which ordinarily comes from company and field officers was almost non-existent. In the blind turmoil of battle, companies and regiments were fragmented and lost; they had to have a man on horseback to pull them together and tell them what to do. Jackson’s Virginians were not better men than the confused thousands all about them—excep
t that they had Jackson. With him, they were a stone wall, immovable in a dissolving world.
… Wholly characteristic is the adventure that befell young Captain Delaware Kemper, who commanded a Virginia battery off on the Confederate left. Momentarily detached from his battery, Captain Kemper stumbled into the middle of a Yankee regiment in a smoke-filled thicket and he was ordered, with a dozen muskets leveled at him, to surrender. He replied that he would give up his sword to a qualified officer, but his captors explained that all of their officers had vanished and they did not know where to find any others. Stiffly, Captain Kemper insisted that he would surrender only to an officer; and so he and the Yankees set off through the woods to find one—blundering, at last, into a Confederate regiment, which released Captain Kemper and sent the unofficered Federals off in headlong flight.10
Mid-afternoon came, and of the 18,000 Federals who had crossed the river, McDowell was able to get perhaps 10,000 lined up for an assault on the Henry house hill. He was isolated from the rest of his army; Tyler never did manage to force his way across the stone bridge, although a good many of his men had gone across by Sherman’s ford, and there was an open gap between the attacking column and the troops east of Bull Run. The gap could have been closed. Tyler’s troops could have swept across the bridge without great trouble, and upstream Burnside’s soldiers lay idle in a safe wooded hollow, resting from their morning’s work; they could have marched downstream almost unopposed, uncovering the bridge and linking the two halves of the army. It seems to have occurred to no one that these things ought to be done.
