But times had changed greatly since the Mexican War. By the mid-1850s, old smoothbore muskets had been replaced by expandable minié balls that were easier to load, more accurate to fire, and capable of killing at much greater ranges. When placed in strategic defenses alongside heavy artillery with canister and heavy entrenchments, they allowed defenders to destroy attacking enemies massed in close-order formations before they ever reached defended lines.
Northern and Southern commanders understood the new technology, to be sure, but traditional West Point culture blinded them to the need to alter battlefield tactics. The vast majority of amateur non—West Point officers knew even less about technology and tactics, and had only the dimmest idea of how to manage combat under fire.
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They did not anticipate the scope or duration of the burgeoning conflict. Nor, at first, did they contemplate a war on civilian populations. They knew only that armies had to be destroyed in the field en masse for the war to be deemed successful.
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Technological advances, however, rendered tactical offenses meat grinders. Fueled in no small measure by the vivacity of a West Point education, the commanders had to see thousands of lives slaughtered before finally drawing the appropriate tactical lesson: in this war, the side that mounted the most effective defense against frontal assaults ultimately won.
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By mid-July, General Irvin McDowell’s grand army of more than thirty thousand Federal troops advanced on Virginia soil and prepared to attack Brigadier General P. G. T. Beauregard’s Confederate force of over twenty thousand rebels. To civilian and soldier alike the spectacle of a massed army was sublime. One eyewitness described the advancing Federal army in characteristically romantic terms: “The stirring mass looked like a bristling monster lifting himself by a slow, wavy motion up the laborious ascent.”
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The citizen spectators were even more excited about the coming battle than the citizen soldiers. But soldiers and observers alike were struck by the sheer, animal majesty of an army in the field.
For Northern newspapermen in the field, such as E. C. Stedman of the
New York World,
the whole affair took on the air of violent entertainment. In a letter to his wife he wrote: “We had a perfectly magnificent time to-day. I never enjoyed a day so much in my life. Was in the van throughout, at the head of the army, and it was exciting and dramatic beyond measure.”
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Right down to the last moment, the thrill of battle outweighed any sense of horror. Even religious newspapers such as the
Christian Instructor
could not help but marvel: “An army is truly a great machine. A locomotive; all its varying parts, living, intelligent, and working in harmony with one another.... Never has it been my lot to witness so general a display of order and strength, beauty and romance, as to-day.”
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As the “great machines” faced each other by the town of Manassas, thirty miles southwest of Washington, crowds of spectators dotted the hillside with picnic lunches. McDowell signaled his intent to end the war in one decisive blow leveled against outnumbered and undersupplied rebel troops. So confident was he in his own superiority that he hardly bothered with a comprehensive plan of battle, nor did he consider the possibility of Confederate reinforcements that might overwhelm his army Presidents Lincoln and Davis were likewise naive, fancying themselves accomplished military minds with overarching strategies in hand for a speedy resolution to the conflict.
But McDowell and Lincoln were in for a cruel surprise. In a pattern that would plague Union forces in the bloody years to come, Confederate commanders had closely followed newspaper accounts and intelligence reports documenting the exact progress of McDowell’s advance and prepared to surprise the invading foe.
If any commander could calmly and forthrightly survey the fray and stand his ground, the battle would be his. Sadly for the Union, that leader stood on the other side, among General Johnston’s reserves. As Union forces advanced ragtag on the Confederates at the Warrenton turnpike on Sunday, July 21, a brigade of rebels massed at Henry House Hill and stood their ground under the command of a dyspeptic former Virginia Military Institute professor-turned-general named Thomas J. Jackson.
As Jackson ordered “no retreat,” General Barnard Bee of South Carolina looked to Jackson at Henry House and rallied his troops, (supposedly) crying out: “There is Jackson standing like a stone wall! Rally behind the Virginians!” Jackson’s brigade stopped the Union assault in its tracks and, in the process, established the legend of the indomitable “Stonewall” Jackson.
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The war’s first warrior hero had been incarnated.
When a Confederate shell hit a wagon on Cub Run Bridge, blocking the Federal retreat, Federal troops panicked and soon became ungovernable. Soldiers mingled with congressmen and sightseers in a frantic retreat. Only a spirited rearguard defense, hastily organized by a grizzled Mexican War veteran and former banker, Colonel William Tecumseh Sherman, prevented a wholesale rout of Federal forces. Unlike the “political” generals with no formal training, the West Point-hardened Sherman held on. In doing so, his brigade suffered higher casualties than that of any other Union commander.
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A jubilant President Davis turned up on horseback at the battlefield to witness the capture of hundreds of Union prisoners and savor “his” victory. Instead of celebrating victory (and in the process setting off a fight for bragging rights with General Beauregard), Davis should have been urging his soldiers on. But that would have required an experienced military mind that Davis only thought he possessed. Fortunately for the Union, the Confederates were equally unprepared for a real battle and failed to pursue and destroy McDowell’s army. Davis’s failure to order a night pursuit into Washington cost him the Confederacy’s best opportunity to end the war on Confederate terms. The Confederate army was as disorganized by its victory as McDowell’s was by its defeat. Heavy rains the next day erased all opportunity for a Confederate knockout victory, and Washington, D.C., remained safely in Federal hands.
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In the North, the shame of defeat proved bitter beyond anticipation. The disappointment was all the more galling, following as it did the premature news of victory. By late afternoon, John Nicolay observed, “The President has been receiving dispatches at intervals of 15 minutes from Fairfax station.... For half an hour the President has been somewhat uneasy as these reports seemed to indicate that our forces were retiring.”
Awakened from his nap, General Winfield Scott assured the president that this could not be the case, and Lincoln went out for a ride. The rest is described dramatically by Nicolay:
At six o-clock, the President having in the meanwhile gone out to ride, Mr. [William] Seward came into the Presidents room, with a terribly frightened and excited look, and said to John [Hay] and I who were sitting there
“Where is the President?”
“Gone to ride,” we replied.
“Have you any late news?” said he.
I began reading [Simon P.] ] Hanscom’s [optimistic] dispatch to him.
Said he, “Tell no one. That is not so. The battle is lost. The telegraph says that [General Irvin] McDowell is in full retreat, and calls on General Scott to save the Capitol” &c Find the President and tell him to come immediately to Gen. Scotts.
In about half an hour the President came in. We told him, and he started off immediately.... It is now 8 o’clock, but the President has not yet returned, and we have heard nothing further.
Besides capturing the pain of defeat, Nicolay’s account provides an early illustration of the indispensability of the telegraph in this civil war. With generals, statesmen, and journalists all crowding telegraph offices, it was not always clear who got the news first. But in the next several days, the whole country knew, with one side left deliriously joyful and the other disillusioned, grief stricken, and profoundly embarrassed. A dispirited Nicolay was forced to concede that “[o]ur worst fears are confirmed ... a total and disgraceful rout of our men. The whole army is in retreat.” As for President Lincoln, an assistant described a conversation with the goverment printer John D. Defrees in which an agitated Lincoln exclaimed: “John, if Hell is [not] any more than this, it has no terror for me.”
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Lincoln would soon enough see more hell than he ever imagined, but the first cut was the deepest. When General Scott learned that McDowell had been defeated and that his army was in full retreat, he imposed a strict censorship on the telegraph so that word would not go out over the wires until Monday morning.
With news of the victory at Manassas emanating from Richmond, predictable jubilation and self-righteousness erupted. On July 24, the Charleston Mercury brought the glad tidings of victory and confidence: “The battle of the 17th, at Bull’s Run, has inspired the greatest confidence in the superiority of our generals and their troops, and our power, with decent executive energy in receiving enough for the field, to defeat the mercenary hordes of the North; and compensates for our losses west of the mountains.”
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Ecclesiastical reports invoked battlefield successes to proclaim the divine truth of the Southern jeremiad’s message. The Presbyterian Synod of Virginia’s annual report in 1862 would identify the public fast as the cause of victory at Manassas: “At first God did not seem to smile on our defensive operations.... Then God put it into the heart of [President] Davis to call for a day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer.... The united supplication of the whole people went up before the God of battles and was graciously accepted through the intercession of our great High Priest.... We were wonderfully delivered out of the hands of our enemies.”
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The toll from Bull Run seemed incredible enough at the time, and to disbelieving eyes lined up at telegraph offices and reading newspapers probably had greater effect than later battlefield reports that would yield far larger numbers. Citizens on both sides were startled to learn that for the Federals 460 were killed, 1,124 wounded, and 1,312 missing, for a total of 2,896 casualties. Confederate casualties included 387 killed, 1,582 wounded, and 13 missing for a total of 1,982. The shock lay in the fact that almost as many Americans had been killed in the entire Mexican War.
In a collective ritual that would repeat itself throughout the war, newspapers and telegraph offices recorded the names of the dead, wounded, and missing with updates that listed ever “more names of the killed and wounded.”
16
In Worcester, Massachusetts, Martha LeBaron wrote to her friend Mary:
This morning seems a week ago. I went down [the] street early, before I had seen a newspaper, and in the Post-office a young clerk with wet eyes, held out to me a list—of our dead officers. A few minutes after at the Station, the ticket master said to me, with tears raining down his face, “Ah, Miss LeBaron, I thought of you as soon as I heard this, and of how grieved you would be.” Wasn’t that strange in him? for he knows that no one
near
to me was in danger—and he felt only how my whole heart is in the war. Then I met other friends, and the hand-pressure was very close before a word could be spoken. People choked when they tried to talk, and attempted smiles ended in starting tears.
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If Sumter prompted Northern moderates to support war rather than secession, the bloodshed at Bull Run prompted them to hate the enemy as malicious and effective killers who, without formal recognition as a nation, nevertheless fought as a nation—and savagely at that. No moral reflection on the rules of war surfaced, even in the religious press—only a demand for blood revenge:
We are now opening our eyes to the unwelcome fact that they are enemies of the country, and must be dealt with as TRAITORS. This once settled, scruples fast vanish about the mode of conducting the war. We feel bound to use every means in our power to put down a rebellion which is striking at the very life of the nation.
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At the same time that the
New York Evangelist
advocated using “every means in our power,” it issued a bold and prescient proposal, certain to support a total war:
When hundreds and thousands of our brave young soldiers are brought home from the bloody field; when there is a cry in the land, like the wailing in Egypt, because in every house there is one dead, the question will be asked: why not make a speedy end of this dreadful business by at once proclaiming freedom to the slaves? ... Whatever rights they [Southerners] had before as loyal citizens, they have forfeited by their treason and rebellion.
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The South, too, saw the prospect of total war in Bull Run. On September 26, a day that Northern churches spent in fasting, the
Charleston Mercury
carried an ominous report titled “Negro Slaves Contraband of War”:
These virtuous Abolitionists of New England, when they can steal or get into possession of the negro slaves of Maryland and Virginia, no longer talk of emancipation. They take possession of them as property.... It is not enough that we arm and go forth to battle—we must do so with the desperate conviction that we fight along the edge of the precipice. We must hurl the enemy over; or he will hurl us. We must not suffer ourselves to be beaten. There must be, in every soul, a personal passion—an individual resolution—enforced by the most vindictive determination—to send our weapons home to the heart of the enemy. We must smite unsparingly, with sweeping vengeance, and not merely conquer, but destroy! It is our homes that are invaded by the robber and the outlaw—our firesides, our wives, women and children. Sons of the South, be men! Be men!
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