Chapter 11. Farewell to the Ninety Days' War

I

General McDowell had good reason for his reluctance to march green troops "Forward to Richmond" in July 1861. Circumstances beyond his control plagued the campaign from its outset. Scheduled to begin July 8, the movement of McDowell's 30,000 men was delayed by shortages of supply wagons and by the necessity to organize late-arriving regiments into brigades and divisions. When the army finally began to move out on July 16, the terms of several ninety-day men were about to expire. Indeed, an infantry regiment and artillery battery went home on the eve of the ensuing battle. The longer enlistments of Confederate soldiers gave them a psychological advantage, for the recruit whose time was almost up seemed less motivated to fight.

Out in the Shenandoah Valley, General Robert Patterson likewise feared that the ninety-day recruits in his army of 15,000 would not stand fast in a real battle against Joseph E. Johnston's 11,000 Confederates. This was one of several reasons why Patterson failed in his task of pinning down Johnston in the Valley while McDowell attacked Beauregard at Manassas. Patterson was also confused by orders from Washington that left it unclear whether he should attack or merely maneuver against Johnston. Wrongly believing himself outnumbered by the enemy, Patterson chose the safer course of maneuver. Unfortunately, he maneuvered himself right out of the campaign. On July 18 and 19, Johnston's army gave him the slip, marched from Winchester to the railroad at Piedmont, and entrained for Manassas. With their arrival the Confederate forces at Manassas became equal in size to McDowell's invading army.

Beauregard had been forewarned of McDowell's advance by his espionage network in Washington, headed by Rose O'Neal Greenhow, a friend of several northern politicians but also a Confederate spy. In the best romantic tradition, coded messages carried by southern belles riding fast steeds brought word of Union plans. Even with this advance knowledge, Johnston could not have reinforced Beauregard in time if McDowell's army had moved faster than a snail's pace. At this stage of the war, soldiers without marching experience carrying fifty pounds of equipment took three days to cover a distance that road-wise veterans later slogged in one day. At every turn in the road, troops halted to clear away trees felled by rebel axemen or to seek cover from rumored "masked batteries." Halts at the head of a column undulated accordion-like back to the rear, where men got tired of standing for hours in the July sun and wandered off to look for water or to pick blackberries. When the Yankees finally reached Centreville, three miles from the Confederate defenses behind Bull Run, they had eaten all their food and had to delay another day while more rations were brought up. Lacking trained cavalry, McDowell personally scouted enemy lines and discovered that rugged terrain and strong defenses on the Confederate right ruled out his original plan to turn that flank. Another day went by as he planned an attack on the left flank and scouted the roads in that direction. While this was going on, the overworked railroad was bringing Johnston's troops to Manassas. By the time McDowell launched his assault on the morning of July 21, three Valley brigades had arrived and the fourth was on its way.

Despite all the delays, McDowell's attack came within an ace of success. Beauregard had distributed his troops along the south bank of Bull Run, a sluggish, tree-choked river a few miles north of Manassas. Confederate regiments guarded the railroad bridge on the right, the Warren-ton turnpike bridge six miles upstream on the left, and a half-dozen fords between the bridges. Expecting McDowell to attack toward the railroad, Beauregard placed nine of his ten and one-half brigades on that flank, from which he planned to anticipate the Yankees by launching his own surprise assault on the morning of July 21. Instead, the roar of artillery and crack of musketry several miles upstream shortly after sunrise indicated that McDowell had sprung his surprise first.

The Union attacking column, 10,000 strong, had roused itself at 2:00 a.m. and stumbled through the underbrush and ruts of a cart track on a six-mile flanking march while other regiments made a feint at the turnpike bridge. The flanking column forded Bull Run two miles upriver from the bridge, where no Confederates expected them. The commander of rebel forces at the bridge was Colonel Nathan "Shanks" Evans (so-called because of his spindly legs), a hard-bitten, hard-drinking South Carolinian. Recognizing the Union shelling of the bridge as a feint and seeing the dust cloud from the flanking column to his left, Evans took most of his troops to meet the first Yankee brigade pouring across the fields. Evans slowed the Union attack long enough for two brigades of Confederate reinforcements to come up.

For two hours 4,500 rebels gave ground grudgingly to 10,000 Yankees north of the turnpike. Never before under fire, the men on both sides fought surprisingly well. But lack of experience prevented northern officers from coordinating simultaneous assaults by different regiments. Nevertheless, the weight of numbers finally pushed the Confederates across the turnpike and up the slopes of Henry House Hill. Several southern regiments broke and fled to the rear; McDowell appeared to be on the verge of a smashing success. A multitude of northern reporters, congressmen, and other civilians had driven out from Washington to watch the battle. They could see little but smoke from their vantage point two miles from the fighting. But they cheered reports of Union victory, while telegrams to Washington raised high hopes in the White House.

The reports were premature. Johnston and Beauregard had sent additional reinforcements to the Confederate left and had arrived personally on the fighting front, where they helped rally broken Confederate units. For several hours during the afternoon, fierce but uncoordinated attacks and counterattacks surged back and forth across Henry House Hill (named for the home of Judith Henry, a bedridden widow who insisted on remaining in her house and was killed by a shell). Men whom the war would make famous were in the thick of the fighting: on the Union side Ambrose E. Burnside, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Oliver O. Howard, each of whom commanded a brigade and would command an army before the war was over; on the Confederate side Beauregard and Johnston, the former in field command and the latter in overall command; along with James E. B. ("Jeb") Stuart, the dashing, romantic, bearded, plumed, and deadly efficient colonel of a cavalry regiment that broke one Union infantry attack with a headlong charge; Wade Hampton, whose South Carolina legion suffered heavy casualties; and Thomas J. Jackson, a former professor at V.M.I, now commanding a brigade of Virginians from the Shenandoah Valley. Humorless, secretive, eccentric, a stern disciplinarian without tolerance for human weaknesses, a devout Presbyterian who ascribed Confederate successes to the Lord and likened Yankees to the devil, Jackson became one of the war's best generals, a legend in his own time.

The legend began there on Henry House Hill. As the Confederate regiments that had fought in the morning retreated across the hill at noon, Jackson brought his fresh troops into line just behind the crest. General Barnard Bee of South Carolina, trying to rally his broken brigade, pointed to Jackson's men and shouted something like: "There is Jackson standing like a stone wall! Rally behind the Virginians!" But at least one observer placed a different construction on Bee's remark, claiming that the South Carolinian gestured angrily at Jackson's troops standing immobile behind the crest, and said: "Look at Jackson standing there like a damned stone wall!" Whatever Bee said—he could not settle the question by his own testimony, for a bullet killed him soon afterward—Jackson's brigade stopped the Union assault and suffered more casualties than any other southern brigade this day. Ever after, Jackson was known as "Stonewall" and his men who had stood fast at Manassas became the Stonewall Brigade.¹

Much confusion of uniforms occurred during the battle. On numerous occasions regiments withheld their fire for fear of hitting friends, or fired on friends by mistake. The same problem arose with the national flags carried by each regiment. With eleven stars on a blue field set in the corner of a flag with two red and one white horizontal bars, the Confederate "stars and bars" could be mistaken for the stars and stripes in the smoke and haze of battle. Afterwards Beauregard designed a new battle flag, with white stars embedded in a blue St. Andrew's Cross on a red field, which became the familiar banner of the Confederacy.²

One mixup in uniforms affected the outcome of the battle. At the height of the fighting for Henry House Hill, two Union artillery batteries were blasting gaps in the Confederate line. Suddenly a blue-clad

1. For a discussion of the controversy over what Bee really said, see Douglas Southall Freeman, Lee's Lieutenants: A Study in Command, 3 vols. (New York, 1943–44), I, 733–34.

2. With the admission of Missouri and Kentucky to the Confederacy in late 1861, the Confederate flags acquired thirteen stars—which by coincidence evoked memories of the first American war for independence.

regiment emerged from the woods seventy yards to the right of two of the guns. Thinking the regiment might be its requested infantry support, the artillery withheld fire for fatal minutes while the regiment, which turned out to be the 33rd Virginia of Jackson's brigade, leveled muskets and fired. The guns were wiped out and the Union attack lost cohesion in that sector of the battlefield.

Indeed, by midafternoon the northern army lost what little cohesion it had everywhere, as regiments continued to fight in a disconnected manner, stragglers began melting to the rear, and McDowell failed to get two reserve brigades into the action. Johnston and Beauregard, by contrast, had brought up eVery unit within reach, including the last brigade from the Valley, just off the train and marching onto the field abut 4:00 p.m. By that time the rebels had an equal number of men in the battle zone (about 18,000 were eventually engaged on each side) and a decisive superiority in fresh troops. Most of the Union regiments had been marching or fighting for the better part of fourteen hours with little food or water on a brutally hot, sultry day. Seeing Confederate reinforcements appear in front of them, some northern soldiers asked: "Where are our reserves?" At this moment, sensing his advantage, Beauregard ordered a counterattack all along the line. As Confederate units surged forward a strange, eerie scream rent the air. Soon to be known as the rebel yell, this unearthly wail struck fear into the hearts of the enemy, then and later. "There is nothing like it on this side of the infernal region," recalled a northern veteran after the war. "The peculiar corkscrew sensation that it sends down your backbone under these circumstances can never be told. You have to feel it."³

Startled by this screaming counterattack the discouraged and exhausted Yankee soldiers, their three-month term almost up, suddenly decided they had fought enough. They began to fall back, slowly and with scattered resistance at first, but with increasing panic as their officers lost control, men became separated from their companies, and the last shred of discipline disappeared. The retreat became a rout as men threw away guns, packs, and anything else that might slow them down in the wild scramble for the crossings of Bull Run. Some units of Sherman's brigade and several companies of regulars maintained their discipline and formed a rear guard that slowed the disorganized rebel pursuit.⁴

3. Bruce Catton, Glory Road: The Bloody Route from Fredericksburg to Gettysburg (Garden City, N.Y., 1952), 57.

4. Sherman's brigade suffered more casualties (including the death of Colonel James Cameron, brother of the secretary of war) and probably fought better than any other Union brigade. Sherman was rewarded by promotion to command of Union forces in Kentucky, where he underwent an attack of nerves and a demotion, as narrated in Chapter 9, above.

Fleeing Union soldiers became entangled with panic-stricken civilians. Some congressmen tried in vain to stop wild-eyed soldiers, now miles from the battlefield, who had no intention of stopping short of the far side of the Potomac. "The further they ran, the more frightened they grew," stated one of the congressmen.

We called to them, tried to tell them there was no danger, called them to stop, implored them to stand. We called them cowards, denounced them in the most offensive terms, put out our heavy revolvers, and threatened to shoot them, but all in vain; a cruel, crazy, mad, hopeless panic possessed them, and communicated to everybody about in front and rear. The heat was awful, although now about six; the men were exhausted—their mouths gaped, their lips cracked and blackened with the powder of the cartridges they had bitten off in the battle, their eyes starting in frenzy; no mortal ever saw such a mass of ghastly wretches.⁵

Back on the other side of Bull Run, jubilant rebels celebrated their victory and rounded up hundreds of Union prisoners. Jefferson Davis himself had turned up at the moment of victory. A warrior at heart, Davis could not sit still in Richmond while the battle raged eighty miles away. He chartered a special train, obtained a horse near Manassas, and rode with an aide toward the fighting in mid-afternoon through a swelling stream of wounded and stragglers who cried out "Go back! We are whipped!" Though Davis knew that the rear areas of a battlefield always presented a scene of disorder and defeat no matter what was going on at the front, he rode on with a sinking heart. Was this to be the fate of his Confederacy? As he neared Johnston's headquarters, however, the sounds of battle rolled away to the north. Johnston came forward with the news of southern triumph. Elated, Davis urged vigorous pursuit of the beaten enemy. Although some Confederate units had gone a mile or two beyond Bull Run, Johnston and Beauregard believed that no full-scale pursuit was possible. In Johnston's words, "our army was more disorganized by victory than that of the United States by defeat."⁶

When the magnitude of Confederate victory sank in during the following

5. Albert Riddle, quoted in Samuel S. Cox, Three Decades of Federal Legislation, 1855–1885 (Providence, 1885), 158.

6. Johnston, "Responsibilities of the First Bull Run," Battles and Leaders, I, 252.

weeks, southern newspapers began to seek scapegoats for the failure to "follow up the victory and take Washington." An unseemly row burst out in which the partisans of each of the principals—Davis, Johnston, Beauregard—blamed one of the others for this "failure." Postwar memoirs by the three men continued the controversy. But the prospect of "taking" Washington in July 1861 was an illusion, as all three recognized at the time. McDowell formed a defensive line of unbloodied reserves at Centreville on the night of July 21. Early next morning a heavy rain began to turn the roads into soup. Confederate logistics were inadequate for a sustained advance even in good weather. The army depots at Manassas were almost bare of food. Despite a mood of panic in Washington, the rebels were not coming—and could not have come.

In July 1861 the controversy about failure to pursue lay in the future. The South erupted in joy over a victory that seemed to prove that one Southron could indeed lick any number of Yankees. It was easy to forget that the numbers engaged were equal, that Confederate troops had fought on the defensive for most of the battle (easier than attacking, especially for green troops), and that the Yankees had come close to winning. In any case the battle of Manassas (or Bull Run, as the North named it⁷) was one of the most decisive tactical victories of the war. Although its strategic results came to seem barren to many in the South,

7. The Union and Confederacy gave different names to several Civil War battles:

In each case but one (Shiloh) the Confederates named the battle after the town that served as their base, while the Union forces chose the landmark nearest to the fighting or to their own lines, usually a river or stream. In the case of Shiloh (Pittsburg Landing), the South named the battle after a small church near the spot of their initial attack; the North named it after the river landing they fought to defend. In the cases of Shiloh, Perryville, and Winchester the North eventually accepted the Confederate name for the battle, and those names are used in this book. For each of the other battles, neither name has any intrinsic superiority over the other, so the names are used interchangeably.

the battle did postpone for eight months any further Union efforts to invade Virginia's heartland. And the price in casualties was small compared with later battles. About 400 Confederates were killed and 1,600 wounded, of whom some 225 would die of their wounds. The Union forces also lost about 625 killed and mortally wounded, 950 non-mortally wounded, and more than 1,200 captured.⁸

Perhaps the most profound consequences of the battle were psychological. But these consequences were full of paradox. The South's gleeful celebration generated a cockiness heedless of the Biblical injunction that pride goeth before a fall. Manassas was "one of the decisive battles of the world," wrote political leader Thomas R. R. Cobb of Georgia. It "has secured our independence." Edmund Ruffin considered "this hard-fought battle virtually the close of the war." He thought Beauregard's next step should be "a dash upon Philadelphia, & the laying it in ashes . . . as full settlement & acquittance for the past northern outrages."⁹ The Mobile Register predicted that the Union army would "never again advance beyond cannon shot of Washington." The Richmond Whig went even further: "The breakdown of the Yankee race, their unfitness for empire, forces dominion on the South. We are compelled to take the sceptre of power. We must adapt ourselves to our new destiny."¹⁰

Immediately after the battle the shame and despair of many northerners almost caused them to agree with these southern assessments. "Today will be known as BLACK MONDAY," wrote a New Yorker when he heard the news. "We are utterly and disgracefully routed, beaten, whipped." Horace Greeley, whose New York Tribune had done so much to prod the government into premature action, endured a week of self-reproachful, sleepless nights before writing a despondent letter to Lincoln: "On every brow sits sullen, scorching, black despair. . . . If it is best for the country and for mankind that we make peace with the rebels, and on their own terms, do not shrink even from that."¹¹

8. Civil War casualties cannot be known with exactitude because of incomplete or faulty reports. The figures cited here represent the best approximation from available evidence. Some of the Union captured were wounded. In Civil War battles about 15 percent of the wounded subsequently died of their wounds.

9. E. Merton Coulter, The Confederate States of America 1861–1865 (Baton Rouge, 1950), 345; The Diary of Edmund Ruffin, Vol. II, The Years of Hope April 1861–June 1863, ed. William K. Scarborough (Baton Rouge, 1976), 96, 98.

10. Mobile Register quoted in J. Cutler Andrews, The South Reports the Civil War (Princeton, 1970), 92; Richmond Whig quoted in Nevins, War, I, 221.

11. Strong, Diary, 169; Greeley to Lincoln, July 29, 1861, Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress.

Yet the deep, long-lasting impact of Bull Run on the North was not defeatism, but renewed determination. The London Times correspondent predicted such a result the day after the battle: "This prick in the great Northern balloon will let out a quantity of poisonous gas, and rouse the people to a sense of the nature of the conflict on which they have entered." In a sermon on a text from Proverbs—"adversity kills only where there is a weakness to be killed"—one of the North's leading clergymen expressed this new mood of grim resolution. It was echoed by a soldier in the ranks: "I shall see the thing played out, or die in the attempt." Even as Greeley was writing despairingly to Lincoln, an editorial in the Tribune by another hand maintained that "it is not characteristic of Americans to sit down despondently after a defeat. . . . Reverses, though stunning at first, by their recoil stimulate and quicken to unwonted exertion. . . . Let us go to work, then, with a will."¹²

Lincoln agreed with this editorial rather than with Greeley's letter. Though shaken by the news of Bull Run, the president and General Scott did not panic. They worked through the night to salvage some order from the chaos of defeat. "The fat is in the fire now," wrote Lincoln's private secretary, "and we shall have to crow small until we can retrieve the disgrace somehow. The preparations for the war will be continued with increased vigor by the Government." The day after Bull Run, Lincoln signed a bill for the enlistment of 500,000 three-year men. Three days later he signed a second bill authorizing another 500,000.¹³ Volunteers thronged recruiting offices during the next few weeks; offers of new regiments poured in from northern governors; and soon the regiments themselves began to crowd into the training camps surrounding Washington, where they found a dynamic, magnetic general to command them: George B. McClellan.

At 2:00 a.m. on the morning after Bull Run, a telegram summoned McClellan to take command of this new army of three-year volunteers, soon to be named the Army of the Potomac. When McClellan arrived in Washington on July 26 he found "no army to command—only a

12. William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South, ed. Fletcher Pratt (New York, 1954), 234; sermon by Horace Bushnell cited in Bruce Catton, The Coming Fury (New York, 1961), 468; soldier quoted in William C. Davis, Battle at Bull Run (Garden City, N.Y., 1977), 255; New York Tribune, July 30, 1861.

13. John Nicolay to his wife, July 23, 1861, quoted in Catton, Coming Fury, 469. The two enlistment laws are printed in O.R., Ser. Ill, Vol. 1, pp. 380–83.

mere collection of regiments cowering on the banks of the Potomac, some perfectly raw, others dispirited by the recent defeat."¹⁴ Whatever self-serving overtones one might detect in these words, McClellan did accomplish all that was expected of him in his first two months of command. His military police rounded up stragglers and combed their officers out of Washington barrooms. His examining boards weeded incompetent officers out of the army. McClellan was a superb organizer and administrator. He was a professional with regard to training. He turned recruits into soldiers. He instilled discipline and pride in his men, who repaid him with an admiration they felt toward no other general. McClellan forged the Army of the Potomac into a fighting machine second to none—this was his important contribution to ultimate Union victory—but he proved unable to run this machine at peak efficiency in the crisis of battle.

Not all southerners shared the post-Manassas conviction of Confederate invincibility. Mary Boykin Chesnut perceived that the victory "lulls us into a fool's paradise of conceit" while it "will wake every inch of [northern] manhood." A diary-keeping clerk in the Confederate War Department fumed a month after the battle: "We are resting on our oars, while the enemy is drilling and equipping 500,000 or 600,000 men." With the benefit of hindsight, participants on both sides agreed after the war that the one-sided southern triumph in the first big battle "proved the greatest misfortune that would have befallen the Confederacy." Such an interpretation has become orthodoxy in Civil War historiography.¹⁵

This orthodoxy contains much truth, but perhaps not the whole truth. The confidence gained by the men who won at Manassas imbued them with an esprit de corps that was reinforced by more victories in the next two years. At the same time the Union defeat instilled a gnawing, half-acknowledged sense of martial inferiority among northern officers in the Virginia theater. Thus the battle of Manassas, and more importantly the collective southern and northern memories of it, became an important part of the psychology of war in the eastern theater. This psychology helps explain why McClellan, having created a powerful army, was

14. Quoted in Kenneth P. Williams, Lincoln Finds a General, 5 vols. (New York, 1949–59), I, 113.

15. Woodward, Chesnut's Civil War, 111; Jones, War Clerk's Diary (Miers), 43; Edward A. Pollard, The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederacy (New York, 1866), 152.

reluctant to commit it to all-out battle. He always feared, deep down, that the enemy was more powerful than he. And the Confederates, armed with the morale of victory, enjoyed an edge that went far toward evening the material odds against them in Virginia.¹⁶ Hence the paradox of Bull Run: its legacy of confidence both hurt and helped the South; the humiliation and renewed determination both hurt and helped the North.