Terrible Swift Sword

by Bruce Catton

  Some of the fighting on this day was as severe as these armies ever had. If Pope had been able to co-ordinate his attacks properly the story might have been different, but co-ordination was lacking; indeed, there were upwards of 30,000 Federal infantrymen who were close enough to the battle all day long to hear it but who never effectively got into it.

  Pope had intended to use these men, but this was a day when good intentions did not count. The 30,000 belonged to McDowell and Porter, who that morning were under orders to march to Gainesville and strike Jackson’s right flank; and for various reasons, some of them good and some of them bad, this movement was never made. Porter, moving up from Manassas, saw dust clouds ahead and concluded that a large body of Confederates lay in his path. He seems also to have been oppressed by the signs of chaos which he had noted earlier in the day; and in any case he strongly disliked General Pope. So in midmorning he halted his corps behind a little stream and there he took root, two miles from the Federal left, remaining completely inert all day long while the clamor of battle resounded off beyond his right. McDowell did little better, although he at least kept moving. It is hard to feel certain that one knows what any Federal general had in mind on this confused day, but McDowell seems to have felt that he could best support the advance which he supposed Porter was going to make if he backtracked and got north of the turnpike; so he turned his troops around, moved back to the Sudley Springs Road, and then marched north, and by the end of the day only a few of his men had got into any sort of action. In effect, these two corps were wasted. What might have happened if they had actually executed the planned movement is beyond telling; all that is certain is that on this day of battle they were of very little use to John Pope and the Union cause.2

  Another force which listened to the battle without getting into it was James Longstreet’s corps of 30,000 Confederates.

  By noon or a little later, Longstreet was getting his troops massed just south of the turnpike, ready for action, and Lee’s immediate impulse had been to order an attack. But Longstreet wanted to wait, on the not-illogical theory that the confused Federals would present an even better opening if they were just given more time—and after long discussion and a careful study of the situation Lee let Longstreet have his way. There were times when Lee was strangely reluctant to impose his own will on this stubborn, deeply trusted subordinate, and this may have been one of them; yet it is possible that another consideration was involved. It was clear by now that at least a substantial part of McClellan’s army had reached Pope, and the plan to defeat Pope before this happened looked a little different than it had looked a few days earlier. A glimpse at Lee’s mind is given in a dispatch he wrote to President Davis after the fighting died down.

  So far, Lee said, the campaign had been successful; it had compelled the Federals to leave the Rappahannock and to concentrate between Manassas and Centreville. Meanwhile: “My desire has been to avoid a general engagement, being the weaker force, & by maneuvering to relieve the portion of the country referred to—I think if not overpowered we shall be able to relieve other portions of the country, as it seems to be the purpose of the enemy to collect his strength here.”3 Perhaps, in other words, the moment for a decisive battle had passed; perhaps, after all, this must be a campaign with limited objectives, winning a breathing space rather than trying for a knockout; the general would wait and see how things looked before he made up his mind.

  Things looked better before long, largely because certain routine Confederate troop movements brought additional confusion to the mind of General Pope.

  Late on the evening of August 29 Longstreet had sent one division down the turnpike on a reconnaissance, and his men skirmished briskly with some of McDowell’s troops. After dark these Confederates were withdrawn, and at the same time Hill retired some of his own men who had gone out beyond their own lines after repulsing the attacks Pope had made from his extreme right. These withdrawals were noted in the Federal camp, and to Pope they meant that the Confederates were in retreat. On the morning of August 30 he ordered a vigorous pursuit, detailing part of his army to overrun Jackson’s position and forming the rest for an advance straight west along the turnpike. It took time to get everything organized, and the action did not begin until around noon. When it did begin the full truth about the entire battlefield situation was at last made manifest to the Federal commander.4

  Jackson had not retreated, and the attempt to sweep across his position brought on a tremendous fight. Once again, Federal storming columns charged up to the railroad embankment, hitting so hard that for a short time it looked as if this mishandled battle might turn into a Federal victory. Much against his will, Jackson was obliged to notify Lee that he had to have help if he were to hold his ground. Help was ready. Pope’s advance had stripped the Federal left flank nearly naked in front of Longstreet, and when Lee ordered Longstreet to attack that officer obeyed with high enthusiasm and complete competence. With his massed artillery he cut the props out from under the attack on Jackson’s line; then he ordered his entire corps to advance and his 30,000 men went rolling eastward on the south side of the turnpike, overwhelming the inadequate Federal force that was posted there and driving on toward the Bull Run bridge. Now Pope was beaten, beyond remedy, and the only question was whether he could save his army … that, and the final size of the casualty list.5

  Longstreet’s men never reached the bridge. Now that his illusions were gone Pope handled his army about as well as a man could under the circumstances; at the very least he got everybody into action, and although he could not prevent defeat he was able to avert complete disaster. The battlefront had suddenly doubled in size, and from the Sudley Springs ford all the way down to the hills and fields south of the Warrenton Pike the exultant Confederates were driving forward. In the end, Federal troops were moved over to slow down Longstreet’s advance, and toward evening elements from various army corps made a stand around the Henry House hill—the spot where Jackson had made his legendary stand in the first battle of Bull Run, more than a year ago—and there they brought the Southern offensive to a full stop. Slowly, painfully, the battle sputtered out in the twilight. The bridge was safe; Pope could get his men away.

  His men were at the point of total exhaustion. They had done much marching and fighting, and in a fortnight’s campaigning the army had lost 14,500 men in killed, wounded, and missing. During the night of August 30 they went back to Centreville, numb, dejected, stumbling under the weight of defeat. At Centreville the retreat stopped, and Pope formed a new battle line, rimming the town in a huge semicircle, well entrenched; if Lee proposed to follow up his victory the Federals would make a new fight here. And at Centreville, too, the beaten army saw welcome reinforcements—General William B. Franklin’s corps, just up from the peninsula by way of Alexandria, three or four days late but ready for action at last. It was known that General Edwin Sumner’s army corps was not far behind.

  Pope’s men were glad to see these stout fighting men. Now the battle losses at Bull Run would be made good, with strength to spare. Yet there was something deeply disillusioning, almost ominous, about the meeting. Franklin’s men had nothing but scorn for the men to whose rescue they had come, and they openly exulted in the fact that these men had been defeated. The spirit that led McClellan to remark that disaster to Pope might mean triumph for himself had seeped down through all ranks, and an officer in one of Pope’s brigades remembered that although “our hearts leaped with joy” at the sight of the troops from the peninsula the joy was quickly chilled.

  “To them,” he wrote, “we were only a part of Pope’s beaten army, and as they lined the road they greeted us with mocking laughter, taunts and jeers on the advantages of the new route to Richmond; while many of them in plain English expressed their joy at the downfall of the braggart rival of the great soldier of the peninsula.”6

  Pope’s soldiers made no response to the jeers. They wanted nothing except a chance to get a little rest. There was a sullen all-d
ay rain, a good many men had straggled away from their commands, and a Wisconsin soldier spoke for all when he wrote a note to his people to say that he had lived through the battle and added: “I cannot give you particulars or write more now. The terrible weariness of long fight is upon me.”7

  The terrible weariness was also upon the Confederates, for they too had marched and fought to the limit of human endurance, and they had suffered more than 9000 casualties. Lee had no intention of attacking Pope’s position at Centreville, but he did think he might flank Pope out of it, and he ordered Jackson to swing out on a wide circling movement to get behind Pope’s right. Jackson put his tired men on the road, crossed Bull Run at the Sudley Springs ford, and went north; and although his “foot cavalry” could march so fast, on this day they went at a crawl—the unpaved roads were deep in mud, rations had gone short so that everyone was hungry, the men were all but completely worn out, and not even merciless Jackson could get any speed out of them. They reached the Little River turnpike, which ran eastward toward Alexandria, and turned right to get in Pope’s rear, and at last had to camp for the night several miles short of their goal. The next day, September 1, they went on again, and Pope got wind of the move and sent troops out to meet them; and late that day, with a thunderstorm breaking, two Federal divisions attacked Jackson’s man on rolling ground near a country estate called Chantilly, a few miles directly north of Pope’s camp at Centreville.

  It was a racking, bruising fight while it lasted. Brigadier General Isaac Stevens, leading one of Burnside’s divisions, picked up a battle flag and rode into action at the head of the column to inspire his men and was shot dead. His battle line wavered to a halt, and the rain began to come down in blinding sheets, and the Federals were not eager to renew the attack. Then Phil Kearny came splashing up through the mud to try to get things in motion once more. The men did not respond, and Kearny cursed them for laggards, and galloped down the line to find more spirited troops. The storm was growing worse, the rain was so heavy that no one could see anything, and Kearny rode into a group of Confederate skirmishers and was killed before he could get away. There was a fire fight after that, with no particular result except that a number of soldiers on each side lost their lives … and at last the storm was so bad that even Jackson was willing to call it quits, and the battle came to an inconclusive end. The Federals had lost two of their best generals and about a thousand of other ranks, but they had at least brought the flanking movement to a halt. Pope could stay in Centreville if he wished.

  While Jackson was moving off toward Chantilly, Longstreet’s corps remained on the Bull Run battlefield to bury their dead, bring in the wounded and pick up small arms and other abandoned Yankee property. The private soldiers, being necessitous, spent as much time as they could looking for food, finding quite a lot of it in the haversacks of dead Federals. One gaunt Virginian, who held that “you cannot hurt the dead by anything of this kind,” came upon an apparently lifeless Zouave with a full haversack, and drew his knife to cut the haversack straps and get the rations. The Zouave opened his eyes and begged, “For God’s sake don’t kill me.” Horrified, the Confederate went away, and in a letter to a friend he confessed: “I don’t believe I ever felt so bad in my life.”8

  After a day of this, Longstreet’s corps followed Jackson, and on September 2 the whole army rested—which, all things considered, is not hard to understand. Stuart’s cavalry probed south and east to examine Yankee intentions, and found that Pope’s men seemed to be withdrawing to the fortified lines around Washington; which compelled General Lee to take thought about his next move. The Washington lines were too strong to be attacked, and lack of supplies made it impossible for Lee to remain where he was; as he wrote to President Davis, “we cannot afford to be idle, and though weaker than our opponents in men and military equipments, must endeavor to harass if we cannot destroy them.” The surest way to harass the enemy, obviously, was to cross the Potomac and go into Maryland. The army could provision itself there, the people of Maryland were believed to be strongly pro-Confederate and might provide the army with many recruits, and if the army got into Maryland the war would at least be removed for a while from the ravaged state of Virginia. In preparing for this movement Lee had no intention of trying to take and hold a position on northern soil, he was not specifically aiming at the capture of Baltimore or any other city, and he was well aware that his army was not really equipped to invade enemy territory: all of his men were ragged, thousands of them lacked shoes, supplies of food were very low and most of the horses were badly worn down. But the move would harass the foe and relieve Virginia, and there was one additional possibility which Lee never lost sight of. With a Confederate Army in Maryland the Federals would most certainly leave the Washington fortifications and come out looking for a fight. Then the genuinely decisive victory which Lee had been looking for ever since Gaines’s Mill might at last be won.9

  But for the moment the pieces on the chessboard stopped moving. These pieces were living human beings, and the amount of sheer misery some of them endured during the days just after the battle is not pleasant to think about. Many Federal wounded, for instance, were brought back to Fairfax Courthouse, wagon after wagon jolting in along the deeply rutted highways, and at Fairfax there was nothing resembling a hospital; just a huge open field, where people tore apart bales of hay and covered the ground so that the wounded men could lie on something besides bare earth. It was dark and there were no medicines, nothing much in the way of food, and hardly any doctors. There were a few civilian helpers, among them a woman named Clara Barton, and she and a few like her went briskly to work. They found three thousand wounded men lying on the hay in midnight darkness. There was a gusty wind that blew out most of the candles the nurses were carrying, “and the men lay so thick we could not take one step in the dark.” The attendants had two water buckets, five dippers and a few boxes of crackers to minister to the wounded men, and as they worked they were haunted by the fear that someone would drop a candle into the hay and burn everyone alive. They managed to get through the night, doing the little they could do to ease suffering; and when morning came the army managed to bring up ambulances and move most of the men back to the capital.10

  3: To Risk Everything

  Balance the two campaigns, second Bull Run and the Seven Days. In each case Robert E. Lee first deluded an opponent and then beat him. The retreat from Bull Run was like the retreat from the Chickahominy; the defeated army was led away rather than driven away. The men in the ranks had done their part but the man at the top never quite understood what happened to him. There was a strange similarity in the post-battle protests of the beaten generals. Each man said that he had been foiled by designing men who should have helped him and did not; each asserted that by heroic efforts he had escaped destruction, thereby putting the country in his debt, and each insisted that he would have won if he had been properly reinforced. Even the casualty lists were about the same. In two weeks’ campaigning around Manassas the Federals lost almost exactly the number lost in seven days near Richmond. And because these battles had been lost the crisis of the war was at hand at the end of August, and the administration in Washington had to face a baffling problem in leadership.

  It was obviously necessary to get rid of General Pope, and that would be attended to promptly. It seemed to many of the administration leaders—among them Secretary of War Stanton—that it was equally necessary to get rid of General McClellan, and it presently developed that this was impossible.

  The effort to put McClellan on the shelf had been going on all summer and no one was more aware of it than McClellan himself. He had regarded the elevation of Halleck with suspicion and that of Pope with outright horror, and when he came north from the peninsula he knew very well that his official existence was at stake. The odds seemed to be against him. Most of the cabinet would be glad to see the last of him, and so would the leaders of the Republican majority on Capitol Hill. Mr. Lincoln was aloof; since receiving
McClellan’s letter of advice at Harrison’s Landing he had been withdrawn, and practically all of the general’s subsequent communication with the administration had been conducted through General Halleck.

  Nevertheless, survival was possible, even probable. If McClellan were removed somebody would have to take his place, and no good candidate was in sight. Pope was out of the question, partly because he was not big enough but also because the Army of the Potomac simply would not have him. Among his many problems, so many of them self-created, Pope also had that one, and it had been a powerful handicap. What had happened to Pope might very well happen to another man. The army’s devotion to General McClellan was something the administration could not ignore. It actually seemed possible that at this particular moment no other general could use the Army of the Potomac.1

  To an extent, the army’s devotion for this man had grown up naturally. McClellan had taken thousands of untrained recruits and had made them feel like soldiers. They had been used to confusion and he had given them order and had taught them to be proud of themselves. It could almost be said that he had given ancient traditions to an army that had no past. The long stay in Washington, extended month after month while Congress and the press demanded action, had led the men to feel that this general was on their side, protecting them against the pressure of ignorant politicians. McClellan’s personality was magnetic; at the innumerable grand reviews that played so large a part in the first months of the army’s life it had been easy to greet him with cheers. This habit of cheering was actively promoted. A Massachusetts officer noted that when the army took to the road McClellan would remain in camp until the entire column had been formed. Then he would ride to the head of the column, preceded by a staff officer who went galloping along the line crying “McClellan’s coming, boys! McClellan’s coming! Three cheers for McClellan!”2 The officer who wrote about this considered it “claptrap and humbug,” but the men did not; one great reason being that McClellan quite sincerely returned the affection they felt for him. His response to their cheers came from the heart; he identified himself with them just as they identified themselves with him. In their belief that McClellan had their interests at heart and wanted to save and protect them in every possible way the soldiers were entirely correct.