CHAPTER 23
Lee’s resignation was a shock to many people. His cousin, Orton Williams, who was on General Scott’s staff, reported that the whole army was “in a stir over it.” Simon Cameron, the Secretary of War, wrote in a memorandum much later that Lee should have been arrested before he left General Scott’s office. President Lincoln felt embarrassed. He knew the story of his offer to Lee would become public knowledge.
Three days later, former Colonel Lee departed by train for Richmond with Judge John Robertson, an advisor to Virginia’s governor, John Letcher. Lee had met several of Robertson’s associates in front of Christ Church in Alexandria, when he attended services there on the day after he resigned. Lee’s daughter Agnes, watching the men converse, had no doubts about their topic. Her father’s face showed “a mortal struggle, much more terrible than any known to the din of battle.” The men were telling Lee that Governor Letcher had invited him to Richmond to discuss Virginia’s military needs and plans. Their conversation closed with Lee agreeing to meet Robertson in Alexandria for the trip.1
Agnes was not the only spectator of this conversation in front of Christ Church. Virtually the entire congregation watched from a discreet distance. The local paper had just published an editorial, urging the governor to consider Colonel Lee for a high post. “There is no man who would command more of the confidence of the people of Virginia than this distinguished officer,” the editor wrote. An acquaintance who saw Lee on the train said he was “the noblest looking man I had ever gazed upon—handsome beyond all men I had ever seen.” Unquestionably, Lee had the look of a leader. Just short of six feet tall, at fifty-four he still emanated physical vitality. His dark hair had only a few streaks of grey; his trim mustache was entirely black. At two stations on the trip to Richmond, Lee was forced to go to the rear platform of the train to acknowledge crowds of people calling his name and cheering when he appeared. Obviously many Virginians had been hoping even relying—on his help as the crisis with the North grew more ominous.2
At Richmond, Lee went directly to the capitol, where Governor Letcher awaited him. A baldheaded, bottle-nosed lawyer, Letcher had been a cautious unionist until Lincoln called for troops after Fort Sumter’s bombardment. The governor probably told Lee that the vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens of Georgia, had just arrived in Richmond to negotiate an alliance with Virginia. Letcher was a busy man and did not waste words. Would General Lee accept an appointment as “commander of the military and naval forces of Virginia, with the rank of major general?” he asked. The governor added that his advisory council had already recommended Lee for the post.
When Lee said yes, Governor Letcher sent his acceptance to the Virginia convention, which was still in session. The delegates approved the appointment unanimously. Former Colonel Robert E. Lee was now a major general in the army of a seceded state.3
• • •
Meanwhile, the first blood in the war had been spilled in an unlikely place: Baltimore. The Sixth Massachusetts Regiment arrived there on April 19. It was one of the three regiments that Bay State Governor John Andrew had rushed to the capital to help fight the war he so eagerly welcomed. There was no direct rail service to Washington, DC; Baltimore had banned soot-spewing steam engines from its streets. There were five stations at which trains arrived from the west and north. The Bay State soldiers were on a Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore Railroad train, which arrived at the President Street station. Their cars were to be towed by horses through the city to the Camden Street station, where a Baltimore & Ohio engine would haul them to Washington.
The soldiers arrived fearing the worst. Baltimore was known as “Mob City,” with a tradition of civic unrest that went back to the War of 1812. Worsening matters was Maryland’s hostility to the Republican Party. Lincoln had received only 3.6 percent of the vote in Baltimore and 2.6 percent in the state. On the previous day, over five hundred Pennsylvania militia had arrived at the Bolton Street Station and they were immediately confronted by an angry mob. They endured volleys of bottles, stones, and epithets as they marched through the city to the Mount Clare Station to embark on another line to Washington, DC.
Local police made little or no attempt to control the mob; they frequently laughed at the volunteers’ discomfiture. The Keystone State’s soldiers headed for Washington with several of their number painfully wounded by flying stones.
When the Massachusetts soldiers arrived at the President Street station, the pro-secessionist mob was far more organized. They had stockpiled rocks and bricks along the line of the march. Some people carried pistols. The mere mention of the word Massachusetts further inflamed everyone. These were the abolitionist Yankees who had started this war.
Fearing the worst, the commander of the Sixth Massachusetts distributed twenty rounds of ammunition to his men and authorized them to fire at anyone they saw aiming a gun at them. Again, Baltimore’s police chief made no attempt to control the gathering crowd. From all sides catcalls and insults rained on the marching men. Then came the bricks, stones—and gunshots. The soldiers fired back, killing a sniper who toppled from a second floor window into the street. A Massachusetts soldier was hit by a brick and fell into the gutter, where the mob beat him to death. His name was Luther C. Ladd; he is considered the first casualty of the war.
The regiment reached Washington with four men dead and seventeen wounded. Behind them on Baltimore’s bloody streets lay twelve dead civilians and an uncounted number of wounded. Southern newspapers called it “the Baltimore Massacre.”4
The mayor and the police chief persuaded Maryland’s governor to let them destroy the railroad bridges that connected Baltimore to Philadelphia and Harrisburg, severing the two chief train routes to Washington, DC. The governor declared Maryland’s “neutrality” in the war. President Lincoln reacted with executive ferocity. He ordered the U.S. Army to arrest secessionist leaders, including the mayor and police chief, and incarcerate them in Fort McHenry. When lawyers for one of the prisoners demanded his freedom on a writ of habeas corpus, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney heard the case and ordered his release. The president refused to obey the order. He said that his reading of the Constitution entitled him to jail anyone who assailed the federal government verbally or physically while it was fighting a war.
Lincoln also ordered federal marshals to raid telegraph offices in every northern state and seize copies of all messages sent and received in the previous twelve months. The goal was detection of conspiracies against the government. The president also commandeered millions of dollars in the U.S. Treasury without any authorization or knowledge of Congress (it was not in session) and secretly sent huge amounts by special messengers to industrialists with orders for guns and uniforms and equipment for the embryo Union army. Many of the five hundred Pennsylvanians had arrived without weapons or uniforms.5
• • •
The ruined Baltimore bridges did not prevent thousands of additional volunteers from reaching Washington, DC, by more circuitous routes. Soon the capital was safe from southern attack. Many of the arriving regiments sang a new marching song as they entered the city. Based on a traditional camp meeting melody, it had been introduced by a Massachusetts regiment departing from Boston and won instant popularity among New England soldiers.
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave
His soul’s marching on!
Regiments from other states added their own often irreverent words to the basic text. One of the favorites was, “We will hang Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree.” A Chicago version had a mocking verse:
He captured Harpers Ferry with his nineteen men so few
And frightened old Virginny till she trembled thru and thru
They hung him for a traitor, themselves the traitor crew
But his soul is marching on.
Later in the year, Julia Ward Howe, wife of one of John Brown’s secret backers, converted the song into a fiery hymn, which began:
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.
The Battle Hymn of the Republic helped transform the war into a holy crusade for many soldiers.
The South soon responded with its own song.
I wish I was in the land of cotton
Old Times they are not forgotten
Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land!
Originally a minstrel tune, popular in vaudeville theaters, Dixie radiated love of the South. The Confederate government soon made it a war song.
Southern men the thunders mutter!
Northern flags in South winds flutter
To arms! To arms! To arms, in Dixie6
• • •
On May 23, by a four-to-one margin, Virginia voters approved the convention’s decision to secede. The Old Dominion was now part of the Confederacy, and General Scott decided it was time to seize the high ground on the Virginia side of the Potomac, including the Lee estate at Arlington. He ordered the town of Alexandria occupied as well. Rebel troops were stationed there and the Confederate flag flew from several poles.
The operation went smoothly. Engineers and infantry poured over the bridges across the Potomac at two a.m. on May 24 and began building trenches and forts around Arlington and elsewhere along the river. A U.S. Navy sloop of war preceded a transport carrying a regiment of Union soldiers to Alexandria. The sloop gave the small Confederate garrison an hour to evacuate the town. The rebels departed with only a few random potshots that the Union men ignored.
The regiment, under the command of Colonel Elmer C. Ellsworth, soon disembarked. They were wearing bright red uniforms; the imaginative Ellsworth had copied the style from French colonial troops. Born in New York State, Ellsworth had moved to Illinois to practice law and had become friendly with Abraham Lincoln; for a time he had worked in his Springfield office.
Colonel Ellsworth ordered the Alexandria railroad station occupied and headed for the telegraph office with a small escort. On the way, he noticed a Confederate flag flying on the roof of the Marshall House Inn. Irked, Ellsworth charged into the hostelry and up the stairs to the roof, where he found a ladder and quickly cut down the flag.
As the colonel and his escort descended the stairs, James W. Jackson, the owner of the inn, stepped from the shadows on the first floor landing and killed Ellsworth with a point blank shotgun blast to his chest. Ellsworth’s escorts instantly dispatched the assassin with bullets and bayonets. Screaming hysterically, Jackson’s wife flung herself on her husband’s bleeding corpse. If it was not war, it was a gruesome imitation of it.
A grief-stricken President Lincoln ordered Ellsworth’s body carried to the White House, where it lay in state in the East Room. Flags were lowered to half mast and church bells tolled. The president gazed at the corpse and murmured: “My boy, my boy! Was it necessary that this sacrifice be made?” Thousands came to view the fallen hero, and northern newspapers claimed his murder was proof of the South’s bloody intentions. It was a graphic summary of the hatred inflaming so many on both sides.7
• • •
A far more influential symptom of the growing appetite for war emanated from the New York Tribune. For more than a decade Editor Horace Greeley had been a critic of the South and slavery. But after Fort Sumter, Greeley was horrified by the oncoming bloodshed and tried to become a voice of compromise. His managing editor, handsome, forty-one-year-old Charles Dana, had a very different view of the conflict.
New Hampshire born, Dana’s poverty had forced him to drop out of Harvard after a single year. But he managed to hobnob with New England’s elite at an experimental commune called Brook Farm and absorbed their attitude of moral superiority toward the rest of America—especially Southerners. He became an early convert to their belief in The Slave Power. At one point he shared a lecture platform with William Lloyd Garrison.
At Dana’s urging, on June 26, 1861, the Tribune proclaimed:
THE NATION’S WAR CRY
Forward to Richmond! Forward to Richmond!
The Rebel Congress must not be allowed to meet there on the 20th of July!
BY THAT DATE THE PLACE MUST BE HELD BY THE NATIONAL ARMY!8
Along with persuading Virginia to join the Confederacy, Vice President Alexander Stephens had proposed that Richmond become the capital. The Virginia legislature accepted the offer and President Jefferson Davis and the rest of the government began moving from Montgomery, Alabama, with visibly eager haste. It was more evidence of the importance of Virginia to the southern cause.
Dana’s instinct to strike at this target was unquestionably sound—if one had no compunction about starting the war and were confident that the southern cavaliers were all bluster and no courage. Hadn’t their reaction to John Brown proved that?
Dana had already demonstrated his abolitionist credentials at the Tribune with another headline. Starting in January 1861, while Greeley was out of town on a lecture tour, the Tribune began running a banner on its front page, above the daily stories: “No compromise! No concessions to traitors! The constitution as it is!” Greeley objected to this provocation, but Dana ignored him. When the editor in chief returned to New York, relations between the two men began to deteriorate.
Greeley still hoped desperately for peace. President Lincoln now had 30,000 troops in Washington, DC. But it was an army in name only; almost all were untrained men wielding a wild variety of weapons from squirrel guns to Sharps rifles. Another 200,000 men were assembling at training centers elsewhere in the nation. The president described this gathering host as “the greatest army in the history of the world.”
Greeley went along with Dana’s “Forward to Richmond” banner at first because he imagined that when this overwhelming force assembled in and around the capital, the South would come to its senses and negotiate a settlement. He too remembered the way South Carolina had collapsed when President Jackson confronted her 1833 secession with the threat of a massive invasion.
• • •
Dana ran the “Forward to Richmond” banner day after day. Other Republican papers, notably the influential Chicago Tribune, took up this war cry. Soon an estimated one hundred papers were running the slogan or paraphrasing it on their editorial pages. On July 4, Congress assembled in Washington, DC, and many Republicans, notably Senators Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, Ben Wade of Ohio, and Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, began saying the same or similar things. They were convinced that the corrupt slave owners lacked the courage to meet virtuous free men in open battle. A determined assault would smash their rebellion overnight.
President Lincoln went before Congress and defended his use of executive authority since he took office by saying the South had left him no choice but to “call out the war power of the government.” The president asked for $400 million to raise an army of 400,000 men to guarantee that the contest would be “short and decisive.” Applause swept the overwhelmingly Republican legislature.9
• • •
In Richmond, Major General Robert E. Lee had become President Jefferson Davis’s military advisor. The two men were old if not close friends from West Point days and the War with Mexico. When Virginia joined the Confederacy and Davis arrived in Richmond, Lee expected and even hoped that he would be assigned to a field command. But Davis valued his advice too highly to let him leave his inner circle.
Lee had never returned to Arlington after his April 23 trip to Richmond. He had immediately gone to work mobilizing an army to defend Virginia, a state the size of all New England. He did not share the Republican illusion that the conflict would be a brief struggle. On April 30, he told Mary Custis Lee that “the war may last ten years.” He issued similar warnings to the civilians in Richmond. They were “on the threshold of a long and bloody war.”
Lee’s strategy was defensive. Virginia had neither the resources nor the justification for attacking the North. He vetoed a reckless proposal to rush Virginia troops to rebellious Baltimore. In another letter to his wife, Lee deplored the bombast that filled southern newspapers about the South’s ability to whip the effete abolitionists.
At one point, an influential man talked his way into Lee’s office with his five-year-old son. The boy gave Lee a Bible and his father asked, “What is General Lee going to do to General Scott?”
“He is going to beat him out of his breeches,” the boy piped. It was an obviously rehearsed remark.
“My dear little boy,” Lee said. “You should not use such expressions. War is a serious matter and General Scott is a great and good soldier.” Lee’s eyes were on the father as he said these words.10
• • •
Lee’s first task was fortifying Virginia’s rivers to bar federal warships from threatening cities and towns with their guns. He emplaced heavy artillery found in the Norfolk Navy Yard at key points. Next he had to worry about the Harpers Ferry arsenal, seized by Virginia militia even before the state seceded. He put fellow West Pointer Thomas Jackson in charge and had no further worries about that troublesome site.
Lee appointed other West Pointers to take command of the Virginia militia. Soon Joseph Johnston, Richard S. Ewell, and other soon-to-famous professional soldiers were beginning the task of disciplining and training an army. Its size grew rapidly as Lee pondered how many fronts he had to defend. The civilians had originally estimated that 15,000 men would be more than enough. Lee raised that figure to 51,000 and urged every man to be enlisted for the duration of the war.
The civilians in Richmond, influenced by the overconfidence of their newspapers, envisioned a short war and voted for one-year enlistments. Lee acquiesced without protest. But he refused to enlist anyone younger than eighteen years of age. Sixteen-and seventeen-year-olds were sent home. Lee added a comment that the civilians ignored. “I fear we shall need them . . . before this war closes.”
Lee soon had an army gathered around Manassas, a railroad junction about twenty miles from Washington. Another army defended the western counties in what is now the state of West Virginia. A third army, commanded by Joseph Johnston, was positioned between them at the head of the Shenandoah Valley, ready to assist either army or defend this vital area of the state.
Lee had no difficulty raising men. Nor did recruiters in other Confederate states. Although only 6 percent of Southerners owned slaves, the people of the South lived in a society with immense numbers of blacks in their midst. Albert Gallatin Brown, a former governor of Mississippi, explained why these nonslaveholders were ready and even eager to fight. They assumed that the goal of the “Black Republicans” was the emancipation of the South’s four million slaves. If that happened, “the Negro would intrude into [their] presence.” Blacks would insist on living on terms “of perfect social equality . . . His son shall marry the white man’s daughter and the white man’s daughter his son.” If the nonslaveholder rejected these terms, “then will commence a war of races such as marked the history of San Domingo.”11
There it was again: Thomas Jefferson’s nightmare.
• • •
In Washington, DC, the New York Tribune arrived at the White House every day with ON TO RICHMOND above the day’s news. President Lincoln began to feel the mounting political heat generated by Charles Dana’s war cry. Letters poured in, and congressmen and senators wondered aloud what Lincoln was going to do with the army he was assembling.
Twenty miles away across the Potomac River, Brigadier General Pierre G. T. Beauregard, the man who had seized Fort Sumter, commanded the Confederate army around the rail junction at Manassas. A turgid creek named Bull Run (sometimes called a river) added a defensive barrier. Beauregard had issued an exhortation to Virginians: “A reckless and unprincipled tyrant has invaded your soil. Abraham Lincoln, regardless of all moral, legal and constitutional restraints, has thrown his Abolition hosts among you . . . All rules of civilized warfare are abandoned . . . Your honor and that of your wives and daughters are involved in this momentous contest.”
Here was Thomas Jefferson’s nightmare as a Confederate war cry. The General apparently thought there was no need to reiterate “Santo Domingo.” Portraying the Union Army as would-be rapists said more than enough.
General Scott urged President Lincoln to avoid a war of conquest, which would leave “fifteen devastated provinces” in the reunited nation and would require an army in their midst “for generations.” Instead, he proposed that they blockade southern ports and seize control of the Mississippi River to suffocate the rebellion. Newspapers dismissed the idea as an “Anaconda Plan” that would take years to succeed. The Republican voters of the North wanted action. The ninety-day volunteers would soon be going home.
Stocky Brigadier General Irvin McDowell, the West Pointer in command of the Washington, DC, army, joined General Scott in urging caution. As professional soldiers they viewed the ninety-day volunteers as worse than useless. McDowell warned he might defeat Beauregard’s force but he did not have enough men to capture Richmond. President Lincoln, thinking politically as well as militarily, replied, “You are green, it is true. But they are green also.” Lincoln hoped a shattering defeat might demolish the rebels’ overconfidence and end the war without desolating the South.
McDowell drew up a promising battle plan. He would pretend a frontal assault on Beauregard’s army and outflank him with a ten-thousand-man column that would overwhelm the Confederate left wing and throw the rebels into a panic. Crucial to the success of the plan was preventing the Confederate army in the Shenandoah Valley commanded by Brigadier General Johnson from reinforcing Beauregard. Another Union army, led by Brigadier General Robert Patterson, was assigned the task of attacking—or at least menacing—Johnston to keep him out of the battle. The president gave the plan his approval, and General Scott added a reluctant nod.
From the start, things went wrong. McDowell’s army was supposed to march on July 8. That was two weeks before most of the ninety-day enlistments would expire. But a shortage of supply wagons delayed them for another eight days. By that time, the ninety-day men were thinking about home, and two of the regiments, who were among the first to respond to Lincoln’s call, refused to march and headed for the railroad station.
Meanwhile, General Patterson, a sixty-nine-year-old veteran of the War of 1812, wildly overestimated the size of Johnston’s army and declined to attack it. He stayed so far away that Johnston concluded he was free to reinforce Beauregard anytime he pleased.
Once McDowell marched from Washington, speed was essential. But his amateur soldiers, each carrying fifty pounds of equipment in the hot July sun, took three days to cover twenty miles. The Confederates repeatedly blocked the road with felled trees that had to be chopped up and dragged away. Another distraction was the way some soldiers wandered off to steal chickens and other edible animals from nearby farms, and in some cases loot the houses. They apparently felt slave owners could be abused with impunity. General McDowell issued a stern prohibition against this misconduct. Meanwhile, General Johnston was transferring his army to Beauregard’s command on a railroad that ran day and night.
On July 21, a scorchingly hot, sultry day, the battle began. So confident were the Republican politicians of a victory that they turned the clash into a spectator sport. Senators Wade of Ohio, Chandler of Michigan, Wilson of Massachusetts, Trumbull of Illinois, and Grimes of Iowa rushed from the capital, accompanied by a swarm of congressmen. Many brought along wives and/or lady friends in holiday crinoline gowns, while servants lugged picnic baskets and wine coolers and water jugs up a hill about two miles from the battlefield. It was going to be such rare sport, watching the cowardly slaveholders scamper for the horizon, or plead piteously for mercy if captured. John Brown was about to be avenged, justified, and glorified. The politicians might even have sung his song as the guns began to thunder.
In spite of the confusion and delays, General McDowell stuck to his battle plan. General Beauregard had arrayed his army along the south bank of Bull Run, with nine out of ten brigades on his right flank, positioned to defend the railroad junction, which he assumed McDowell would make his prime objective. The conqueror of Fort Sumter had a plan of his own—a frontal assault on McDowell’s left flank.
As the sun rose, Beauregard got a rude surprise. Starting at two a.m. McDowell had led his ten-thousand-man column on a six-mile march to an undefended ford across Bull Run and hurled his brigades at Beauregard’s under-strength left flank. As rifles cracked and cannon boomed, the Confederate commander rushed two brigades to reinforce the lone brigade falling back before this onslaught. At first the Confederates gave ground grudgingly. But when they grasped McDowell’s numerical advantage, panic sent several regiments fleeing to the rear.
On their hill, Republican senators and congressmen danced with glee. Those who had brought along spyglasses could see little but figures shrouded by clouds of gunsmoke. But messengers from the battlefield rushed to telegraph the good news to the White House. Exultant reporters did likewise to their waiting newspapers. If only John Brown were alive to see this fulfillment of his life’s work!
The celebration was premature. Generals Beauregard and Johnston had joined the defenders of the collapsing flank with more reinforcements. For much of the afternoon, the two armies attacked and counterattacked on and around Henry House Hill. Mrs. Henry, a widow, had refused to leave her house. Before the day ended she would be killed by an exploding shell.12
Much of the fighting was uncoordinated. At one point when a Union brigade surged forward, out of the Confederate line burst a regiment of horsemen led by an officer wearing an exotic plumed hat. It was Jeb Stuart, the West Pointer who had tried to persuade John Brown to surrender at Harpers Ferry. His horsemen shattered the charging Union infantry, cutting men down by the dozen with their murderous sabers.
Another climactic moment made a hero of Thomas Jackson, the taciturn soldier whom Robert E. Lee had put in charge of Harpers Ferry. He led a fresh brigade from General Johnston’s army onto Henry House Hill as a South Carolina brigade broke and ran for the rear. Their general pointed up the hill and shouted, “Rally behind the Virginians! There is Jackson standing like a stone wall!” Minutes later the general went down with a bullet in his heart. Jackson’s brigade met the oncoming Union assault with astounding courage and discipline. Henceforth they were known as “the Stonewall Brigade” and their leader became the soon-legendary general, “Stonewall” Jackson.13
As the afternoon waned, the Union army began to falter. Men who had been marching and fighting since two a.m. reached the limit of their stamina. Nothing contributes more to battlefield panic than exhaustion. At first individuals, then whole companies, began stumbling out of the battle. At four p.m. the Confederates received crucial reinforcements. The last brigade from General Johnston’s army debarked from their train and charged into the gunsmoke, shouting a bloodcurdling combination of a wail and a scream. It was the first appearance of another legend—the rebel yell—which would symbolize the South’s defiance for the next four sanguinary years.
General Beauregard, sensing the shift in momentum, ordered the rest of his army to attack. McDowell’s army collapsed. The ninety-day men were among the first to flee as images of homes and parents, neighbors and sweethearts, shredded their nervous systems. They ran for the fords across Bull Run and kept running for most of the next twenty miles to Washington. They streamed past the horrified, disbelieving abolitionist politicians on the hill behind the battlefield without giving them so much as a glance.
Some of the politicians rushed down to the road and exhorted them to stop. They called the running men cowards and swine and traitors. They begged them to remember the courage of John Brown. Some congressmen brandished pistols and threatened to shoot them. Not even the threat of sudden death slowed their pace.
It dawned on the civilians and their lady friends that they, too, were in danger. Mounting their horses and climbing into their buggies and gigs, they abandoned their picnic baskets and joined the thousands of fugitives on the road. As the soldiers ran, they threw away hats, coats, blankets, guns, canteens. The road began to resemble a scene from a nightmare.
The only glimpse of hope was a brigade commanded by an Ohio West Pointer named William Tecumseh Sherman. They retained their discipline and formed a rear guard that discouraged a Confederate pursuit. McDowell added fresh regiments from two brigades that had been guarding the opposite flank and had never entered the battle.
On the other side of Bull Run, hundreds of Union soldiers surrendered while the rest of their army fled. Beauregard’s men looked at each other in amazement. Most of them were so exhausted by the heat of the day and the tension of the seesaw battle that they found it hard to believe they were victors. No one was more pleased than Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Unable to stand the suspense, he had taken a train from Richmond and rushed from the Manassas station to the battlefield. Along the way he met retreating Confederate regiments in panicky disarray and stragglers who told him the battle was lost. But General Johnston soon gave him the good news.
The elated President urged a vigorous pursuit—perhaps even a capture of Washington, DC. But Generals Beauregard and Johnston both shook their heads. Their army was almost as disorganized as the fleeing unionists. Supplies and wagons to transport them were inadequate. Better to play it safe and let the newspapers shout the news of their glorious victory. Maybe it would convince the Yankees to accept a negotiated peace.14
Unmentioned in the praise that was soon pouring from the southern presses was the man whose strategy had made the victory possible. It was General Robert E. Lee who had positioned the two Confederate armies so that they were linked by a rail line and could come to each other’s assistance if needed.
• • •
When the political spectators fleeing Bull Run reached Washington’s night-shrouded streets, some rushed to the White House to tell the President what they had seen. By that time, Lincoln knew the worst. His day had been an emotional roller coaster. Well into the afternoon, telegrams from the battlefield were optimistic, almost triumphant. The president decided he could end the day with a ride in his carriage with his wife and sons—something of a daily custom. While he was gone, Secretary of State Seward appeared at the White House, looking almost as frantic as the retreating soldiers. He had heard reports, perhaps from one of the fleeing senators who rode a fast horse, that “the battle is lost.”
When the president returned, his two secretaries, John Hay and John G. Nicolay, told him of Seward’s visit. Lincoln rushed to army headquarters, where a clerk handed him a dispatch from a captain of the engineers: “The day is lost. Save Washington and the remnants of this army.” Lincoln showed it to General Scott, who said it was too soon to lose hope. The president decided to summon his cabinet for an emergency session. Then came a telegram from General McDowell: his army had disintegrated into a “confused mob.”15
For the rest of the night and much of the following day, the remnants of McDowell’s shattered regiments reeled behind the forts that General Scott had constructed along the Potomac. Even more dismaying were wagons loaded with 1,154 wounded. Behind them on the battlefield they left 560 corpses. No one knew that Confederate losses almost equaled the Union’s toll. For the next few days, Lincoln had to endure an avalanche of criticism from newspaper editors, blaming everyone and everything for the disaster. Even the picnicking senators and congressmen and their lady friends shared in the obloquy. One critic claimed that the politicians had been among the first to run and communicated their panic to the soldiers.
Unhappiest of these believers in John-Brown-fabricated illusions of easy victory was Congressman Alfred Ely of New York. He had not run fast enough and would spend the next six months in a Richmond prison.
Newspapers fanned the flames of war on both sides. James Gordon Bennett, while still damning Republicans at every opportunity, had committed the New York Herald to the defense of the Union. One of the paper’s correspondents described how rebel artillery had taken special pleasure in blasting groups of Union wounded, and “rebel fiends in human shape” bayoneted helpless dying men. Other rampaging rebels had amputated heads from Union corpses and kicked them around the battlefield like footballs. The newsman claimed these and other sadistic acts revealed what Southerners meant by their “boasted chivalry.” He was faking it, of course, hoping hatred would restore the North’s shattered morale.
At the end of the week, President Lincoln received a letter from Horace Greeley, which began, “This is my seventh sleepless night.” He told Lincoln that “the gloom in this city [New York] is funereal—for our dead at Bull Run were many and they lie unburied yet. On every brow sits sullen scorching black despair.” Greeley did not care what the president did next, as long as it involved withdrawal from the war. Lincoln could disband the army, recognize the Southern Confederacy, or call for a national constitutionalconvention—the Tribune would support him. Greeley closed the letter, “Yours in the depth of bitterness.” Whether the latter word was directed at himself, or Lincoln, or Charles Dana (whom he would soon dismiss) was unclear.16
Lincoln did not answer the erratic editor. Instead, the president requested and obtained from Congress the power to raise another 500,000 men. In Richmond, President Jefferson Davis asked the Confederate Congress to summon 400,000 men. Civil war—on a scale never foreseen or seldom imagined by anyone North or South—had begun.