This Great Struggle (9 page)

The gaudy and nonstandard uniforms and the rampant confusion set the tone for the day’s action. The Confederates were as inexperienced as the Yankees, but all they had to do was hunker down behind their entrenchments, then known as breastworks, and shoot the Federals as they advanced. It proved all too easy. Only the First Vermont got across Brick Kiln Creek and then only briefly before retreating. One Confederate was killed, and seven were wounded, as against eighteen Union dead, including an officer descended from both Massachusetts’s first governor, John Winthrop, and its greatest divine, Jonathan Edwards. Another sixty Yankees suffered wounds. Butler’s force retreated disconsolately back to Fort Monroe, and the Rebels celebrated what soon came to be dignified with the title of the Battle of Big Bethel, citing it, despite recent setbacks in the western part of Virginia, as further proof, if any was needed, that one Rebel could lick ten Yankees with a cornstalk.

In reality Butler’s forlorn foray had demonstrated two important facts. The first of these was that it would prove difficult and costly in this war to overcome troops defending entrenchments, even when the attacker enjoyed, as Butler did, an almost three-to-one superiority in numbers. The second lesson of Big Bethel was that Benjamin Butler, like most men of his type, was a much better lawyer than general. Good political skills did not necessarily bring with them the ability to lead troops in battle. Leaders of both sides would require much time and repetition before absorbing either lesson.

THE FIRST BATTLE OF BULL RUN

Butler’s probe up the York–James peninsula had not been anything like a serious Union effort to penetrate to Richmond and put the Confederate government there out of business. For such a grand offensive, northern newspaper editors began to clamor with increasing insistence, led as usual by press doyen Horace Greeley, who placed on the masthead of his influential
New York Tribune
that summer the slogan “On to Richmond.” The Rebel congress was scheduled to convene in that city in late July, and northern editors demanded that the Union army should get there first. Greeley’s strategically naive slogan operated on the false premise that capturing the enemy’s capital would deliver a swift victory—a popular misconception that helped shape military movements in the East during much of the war.

Commanding the main Union field army in northern Virginia was Brigadier General Irvin McDowell. A big, bluff regular army officer; classmate of Beauregard in West Point back in 1838; and veteran of staff duty in the Mexican War, McDowell had not been Lincoln or Scott’s first choice. That had been Virginian Robert E. Lee, recently promoted to colonel of the army’s Second Cavalry Regiment, both because of Lee’s sterling reputation as an engineer officer in the Mexican War and because of the political benefit to be found in giving the command to a Virginian. Lee had turned them down and gone with his state, so Lincoln and Scott had turned to McDowell, by all accounts a loyal and capable officer, though he had never before commanded troops in battle.

McDowell was painfully aware of his army’s lack of experience and training and badly wanted more time for drill. America’s militia system had lapsed into disarray in the decades before the war, existing in most states only in name and imparting no training at all. The most active part of the prewar militia had been the so-called volunteer companies, local drill teams that doubled as social clubs and turned out on ceremonial occasions in fancy uniforms but had almost as little real military training as their fellow citizens who never even showed up for the perfunctory annual militia muster. The lack of military order in McDowell’s army was visually evident in its polyglot array of uniforms—several species of Zouaves, French chaussers, Prussian jaegers, regular army blue (sometimes worn by the volunteers as well), militia gray, and, in the case of the First Minnesota Regiment, simple red flannel shirts— but the army possessed none of the military skills suggested by any of its garbs, foreign or domestic, except perhaps the Minnesotans, who were, as their uniforms suggested, a collection of lumberjacks and farmers.

Lincoln disagreed with McDowell. Taking the same line as the newspaper editors, he insisted that McDowell launch an early advance against Richmond. This was not merely the product of overheated bravado like Greeley’s but stemmed at least as much from Lincoln’s appreciation of the massive political and economic cost to the country with each week that the war continued. To McDowell’s protest that his men were green, Lincoln allowed that this was true. “But so are the Confederates,” he countered. “You are all green together.” This sort of horse sense would often give Lincoln better insight than his generals during the course of the war. In this case, however, it overlooked the fact that the green Union troops would have to perform the more difficult task of taking the offensive. All the Confederates had to do was get in their way and stay there.

McDowell devised an intelligent plan for defeating the Confederates in front of his army, then encamped near Washington, D.C., and opening the way to Richmond. A smaller Union army of about eighteen thousand men under aged Pennsylvania militia general and War of 1812 veteran Robert Patterson would continue to operate near Harpers Ferry, holding in check a Confederate army of twelve thousand men operating in the lower Shenandoah Valley (because the Shenandoah River flows roughly south to north, the lower Shenandoah Valley always refers to the northeastern end of the valley and the upper valley to its southwestern end). While Patterson kept Johnston’s attention, McDowell himself with thirty-five thousand men would advance from Washington about twenty-five miles due west to Centreville, Virginia. Just beyond Centreville, on the other side of a sluggish stream called Bull Run, waited the twenty-thousand-man Confederate army of Brigadier General Pierre G. T. Beauregard, hero of Fort Sumter, guarding the important rail nexus called Manassas Junction. McDowell would outnumber him, outflank him, and drive him back in retreat. At least that was the plan.

McDowell’s army marched away from Washington on July 16, and things began going wrong immediately. Staff officers were insufficient in numbers and woefully unprepared by training or experience for moving the largest army yet seen on the North American continent. The troops fell out to pick blackberries, and company officers, who had been elected by these same men and were their neighbors back home, lacked the moral authority to get them back on the march. Commanders of regiments, brigades, and divisions proceeded cautiously, frequently halting to scout ahead lest they lead their columns into an ambush, against which McDowell’s march orders had strictly warned. A march that was supposed to have taken one day—and regulars could have done it in that time—instead took five before all the army’s units were in place near Centreville. The neophyte army’s inexperience was painfully obvious as the Union troops trudged slowly south. Meanwhile, in case Confederates had failed to give timely notice to their commanders of the impending Union attack, one of McDowell’s subordinates on July 18 probed forward contrary to orders toward Blackburn’s Ford on Bull Run and suffered a sharp repulse, alerting the Confederates and giving further proof of the martial superiority of the southern soldier.

In fact, Beauregard was already well aware of McDowell’s approach, having been warned on the Union army’s first taking the road by Confederate female spy and prominent member of Washington society, Rose O’Neal Greenhow. Beauregard, who was in a state of pronounced nervous excitement, not to say panic, notified Davis at once and lamented that his impending defeat was the president’s fault for not reinforcing him sooner. Now, he wrote, it was too late.

But it was not too late for the Confederates. Davis ordered Johnston to slip away from Patterson and hurry to Beauregard’s aid. Since Patterson was doing nothing even remotely interesting to his enemies, Johnston, who was to prove one of the war’s most adept retreaters, had no trouble getting away and leaving the Pennsylvania septuagenarian guarding a valley devoid of almost all Confederate troops. Patterson remained for some time none the wiser. On the way to Manassas Junction, Johnston discovered, somewhat to his surprise, that he could move his troops by railroad, thus speeding their approach.

By the morning of July 21, 1861, as McDowell launched his carefully planned attack, Johnston and almost all of his troops had joined Beauregard, and with additional reinforcements Davis had dispatched from other parts of Virginia, the Confederate army behind Bull Run numbered about the same strength as McDowell’s. Johnston, who outranked Beauregard, exercised nominal command but allowed Beauregard the actual direction of the fight.

McDowell’s men set out well before dawn, and by first light a third of them had crossed Bull Run west of Beauregard’s position and were bearing down on his flank while the other two-thirds of McDowell’s army confronted the Confederates in front, across the creek. Beauregard, who had been planning an attack of his own that would have been something of a mirror image of the assault McDowell had launched, abandoned his offensive plans and rushed reinforcements to his crumbling left flank. At first, it seemed no use, as the Federals drove forward relentlessly, rolling up the Confederate line. The key terrain feature turned out to be a hill topped by the farmhouse of eighty-five-year-old widow Judith Henry. Stubbornly refusing to leave her house even as the fighting approached, Mrs. Henry suffered a fatal wound.

Meanwhile, she was not the only one who stubbornly refused to leave Henry House Hill. Brigadier General Thomas J. Jackson was there with his brigade of five Virginia regiments drawn up in line awaiting the next Union push. Informed that the Federals were coming, the 1846 West Point graduate, noted Mexican War artillery officer, and recent Virginia Military Institute professor replied, “Then, Sir, we will give them the bayonet.” Amid the wreckage of several brigades fleeing from the Confederate left, Brigadier General Barnard Bee tried to rally his troops. “There is Jackson standing like a stone wall,” he shouted to his men. “Let us determine to die here and we will conquer.” Several other versions of the famous statement exist, and Bee, who was killed moments later, could never clarify his exact words or even his intent, but Jackson, who now had his famous nickname, worked together with additional reinforcements from the Confederate right to hold Henry House Hill. The other Confederate troops rallied around them, and the tactical situation began to stabilize.

Things began to go wrong again for McDowell. He and his inexperienced officers could not orchestrate a mass assault—no easy task on a battlefield with tired and untrained troops—and his attack devolved into a series of regimental charges. The assault stalled. A Confederate regiment attacked one of McDowell’s key artillery batteries, and because the Rebels wore blue uniforms, the Federals mistook them for friendly troops until it was too late to stop them or to save the battery. As the Union troops began to fall back, the already extreme confusion produced by battle, even a hitherto victorious battle, was compounded. The army began to disintegrate.

As organization broke down, panic seized the weary, fought-out soldiers. With no training to steady them, they broke and ran. The Confederates whooped with delight and set off in pursuit, giving a high-pitched cry that would soon be known as the “Rebel Yell.” Caught in the tangle of the hasty retreat were Union civilians, including some members of Congress, who had come out from Washington in buggies with picnic baskets to enjoy the show from a safe distance. They now added their carriages to the confusion on the roads and their panic to the emotional distress of the retreating Union soldiers.

The Confederate pursuit did not last long, as Beauregard and Johnston halted their own exhausted and disorganized troops within sight of the battlefield that their side would soon be calling Manassas and the Federals would call Bull Run. McDowell had unbroken reserves at Centreville and was able to cover an orderly retreat, but for the great mass of his army, the retreat was anything but orderly, as the troops, many of them having thrown away their weapons and ammunition, kept on running or at least walking until they were back in Washington, having covered the return trip in about one-fifth the time they had taken going out.