by S. C. Gwynne
It was at about this time that Barnard Bee, who had been busy since his retreat trying to locate what remained of his brigade, finally came upon the 4th Alabama, wounded, exhausted from their morning fight, and resting in the woods five hundred yards behind the storm of artillery and musket fire along Jackson’s line. He did not recognize them at first. He rode up and asked, “What regiment is this?” Informed that the men were his own, he replied, “This is all of my brigade that I can find. Will you follow me back to where the fighting is going on?” The men—one hundred of them—responded with a resounding yes. Now Bee pointed to his left, up the slope toward the pine woods on the edge of Henry Hill. “Yonder stands Jackson like a stone wall,” he said. “Let’s go to his assistance.”16
At the time, his statement, overheard by four witnesses, probably sounded like an inspiring bit of metaphorical language, something to help spur the men into the fight. But Bee’s words would become one of the most famous utterances of the war, noteworthy both because they gave birth to a name and a legend, and because they were among the last words ever spoken by the dashing warrior from South Carolina, one of the battle’s greatest heroes, who at that moment had less than an hour to live.
Now the battle changed. Up to this point it had been largely an artillery duel, but the charge by Jackson’s Virginians and their seizure of Griffin’s guns marked the start of a more personal struggle. This time it would be infantry against infantry, regiment against regiment, man against man. It began when the 14th New York, a regiment from Brooklyn wearing red trousers and red kepis, trained a murderous fire on Cummings’s 33rd Virginia, which retreated from its captured guns under fire, losing an astonishing third of its men. Suddenly, after their great success, the troops on Jackson’s left were collapsing. The emboldened New Yorkers, scenting victory, now came straight on against the Confederate’s center—the 4th and 27th Regiments—who had been on their bellies in the woods for several hours. The usually reserved Jackson was all animation now, eyes alight, face glowing with the heat of battle, moving along his line, telling his men, “Reserve your fire until they come within 50 yards, then fire and give them the bayonet, and when you charge, yell like Furies.”
The New Yorkers moved forward, and Jackson’s men did what they were told, waiting, then opening on the enemy with a furious volley of canister and bullets. (Canister consisted of tin cylinders filled with iron shot that, when fired from a cannon, created the effect of a sawed-off shotgun and was extremely destructive to human beings at up to 250 yards.17) The Federals were driven back; they regrouped, came on again, and were repulsed yet again by rolling volleys of canister and lead. Undeterred, and acting more like veterans than the green troops they were, they attacked a third time, many of them this time coming within a few yards of Jackson’s line in a loud and savagely close fight. They paid for it. At such short range, the Virginians cut them to pieces. The Yankee battle line faltered, stood as though frozen for a moment in the swirling eddies of smoke, and then broke.
Now Jackson prepared to charge. He ordered his artillery from the field—to clear the way for the infantry—then rode over to the commander of the 4th Virginia Regiment, Colonel James Preston. “Order the men to stand up,” he said. “We’ll charge them now and drive them to Washington!” Obeying their orders and screaming like whatever they conceived the Furies to be, Jackson’s Virginians swept straight out of the woods, toward the retreating enemy, and toward those lethal Federal batteries on the far edge of Henry Hill. The peculiar, piercingly loud noise the advancing men made was something neither rebel nor Union troops had heard before, and whose exact inspiration is unknown. It was the implausible result of each man giving a sequence of three sounds that registered somewhere between the screech of a bird and the bark of a fox: a short, high-pitched yelp, followed by a short, lower-pitched bark, followed by a long, high-pitched yelp. Collectively, the noise sounded feral, unearthly, and inhuman, like an ululation from the pit of hell. It would become the stuff of Union nightmares throughout the war. As one Federal soldier put it: “There is nothing like it on this side of the infernal region. The peculiar corkscrew sensation that it sends down your backbone . . . can never be told.”18 The practice would spread through the entire Confederate army and it would soon have a name: the rebel yell.19
On came Jackson’s Confederates across Henry Hill, toward Henry House and the two Federal batteries, where the remaining Union men maneuvered around dead and dying horses and fired canister that tore through the Confederate ranks. Still, Jackson’s men came on, bravely crossing three hundred yards of open ground with all that flying death in the air around them. There had been nothing in their lives before to prepare these young men for this, for the astounding sense of pure vulnerability of so much soft human flesh in the presence of so much buzzing lead and iron. Some were scared and expected to die; others, like gunner William Thomas Poague, described a strangely calm feeling that might have been something like what Jackson himself experienced in battle. “This was a most novel sensation,” he wrote later, “hard to describe, a sort of warm, pleasing glow enveloping the chest and head with an effect something like entrancing music in a dream. [But] my observing, thinking, and reasoning faculties were normal.”20 The time was about 3:30.
Jackson’s two regiments drove forward, “piercing the enemy’s center,” in Beauregard’s words, and capturing the Federal guns. “The charge of Jackson’s men was terrific,” wrote Private John Casler of the 33rd Virginia. “The enemy were swept before them like chaff before a whirlwind. . . . The men seemed to have caught the dauntless spirit and determined will of their heroic commander.”21 More Confederate troops were now on the field, having been ordered forward by Beauregard, and suddenly, as he observed, “the whole of the open surface of the plateau was swept clear of federals.”22
But nothing was settled. As dramatic as it had been, Jackson’s charge was only the beginning of a bitter fight for possession of those two Federal batteries, which would change hands at least three times as the battle surged forward and backward across the top of the hill. For whatever reason, these new troops on both sides fought fearlessly and stubbornly and went down in staggering numbers. Colonel Francis Bartow, one of the heroes of the morning, was shot dead. Barnard Bee was mortally wounded. Jackson, on a horse that was limping due to a leg wound, was holding his wounded hand aloft, his military tunic torn at the edges by several bullet holes. His five regiments were at the battle’s white-hot center for the next hour and took by far the heaviest casualties of any brigade.
At the end of the third successful Federal surge forward—their battle line just at that moment was “gigantic in proportions, crescent-like in form,” wrote one observer—it seemed that the Union boys had finally cleared the plateau and had won the battle.23 McDowell certainly thought so. He wired Washington to that effect. “It was supposed by us that the repulse was final,” McDowell wrote later in his official report of the battle, “for [the enemy] was driven entirely from the hill, so far beyond it as to be not in sight, and all were certain the day was ours. . . . The enemy was evidently disheartened and broken.”24
He was desperately wrong. Though he did not know it, he was about to pay one final time for his earlier, two-hour delay. Suddenly it was McDowell’s army—which had started the day with a brutal march and was now exhausted, thirsty, and out of ranks in large numbers—that was in trouble. His midday lapse—plus the heroism and hard-nosed fighting of brigades such as Evans’s, Bee’s, and Jackson’s—had bought Johnston and Beauregard time, and time had brought them reinforcements both from their old Bull Run line and from Johnston’s arriving Army of the Shenandoah. New, fresh Virginia regiments now collided with the Federals at the Henry House, driving several surprised New York regiments off the hill. Suddenly the Union boys, who had exulted in their victory a few moments before, were in full retreat. After two hours of brutal fighting, the Confederates held the precious hill again. The scene was horrific: the ground was thick with dead and dying m
en and horses, the wreckages of wagons and cannons and of the house where old Mrs. Henry had been killed that day by an artillery shell. But the hill was theirs.
Now, with astounding speed, Federal elation gave way to despair. McDowell, understanding that Henry Hill was lost, launched a final attack from a long rise just to the west called Chinn Ridge, trying yet again to turn the Confederate left flank. But as he was preparing his attack two more fresh brigades from Johnston’s army, commanded by Jubal Early and Arnold Elzey, crashed into the Federal right, surprising those troops and sending them staggering backward. Union commanders tried to rally them but soon saw that it was hopeless. McDowell ordered them to withdraw. The retreat began in an orderly fashion. But a retreat, as it turned out, required as much skill and precision as an attack. And because these men had no experience of what it was like to retire before a victorious enemy, the retreat soon became a rout, and the rout a full-scale panic. Soldiers by the thousands now merged into an unruly, terrified, disorganized mob several hundred yards wide and several miles long whose single thought was to flee to the safety of Washington, DC. They reeled across the same Bull Run fords they had crossed earlier in the day. They left behind them their provisions, overcoats, knapsacks, blankets, muskets, canteens, and cartridge boxes.
There was a slightly surreal cast to this chaos. Many civilians from Washington, including socialites and politicians and people who wanted to see the rebels receive a good whipping, had ridden out with picnic baskets and blankets to see the battle. They were now subsumed into—or trampled by—the wild, panicked mob. Some of the onlookers tried to get the fleeing soldiers to change their minds. “We called to [the soldiers],” recalled one US congressman, “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.”25
Jackson, meanwhile, had gone to a field station to have his wounded hand dressed. The first surgeon to see it told Jackson that the finger would have to be amputated. But Jackson received a second opinion from his young medical officer Hunter McGuire, who thought it could be saved. While McGuire was dressing the wound in a tent full of wounded men, President Jefferson Davis rode up, his face stern and deeply unhappy and pale as death. He had just arrived on the battlefield, and had been told by Confederate stragglers far in the rear of the terrible Southern defeat. He had believed every word of it, and was now a knot of despair, disappointment, and rage. According to McGuire, “he stood up in his stirrups . . . and cried to the crowd of soldiers: ‘I am President Davis! Follow me back to the field!’ ” Jackson had not heard him say this, but when McGuire told him, he stood up, took off his cap, and said loudly, omitting all honorifics, “We have whipped them. They ran like sheep. Give me 10,000 men and I will take Washington tomorrow!”26
The magnitude of the victory soon became apparent to everyone, including Davis, who reluctantly allowed the men to wrap him in Confederate flags. Cheers rang through miles of Confederate soldiers, all the way back to Longstreet’s troops at Blackburn’s Ford, who had missed the entire show. The men were wild with excitement. As one wrote, it “passed all bounds, it approached madness. Every man of the thousands assembled threw their caps in the air, officers and all.” Some of them even believed, as they stood amid the wreckage on Henry Hill, that this was the end of the war.
PART TWO
THE MAN WITHIN THE MAN
CHAPTER TEN
GLORY AND DARKNESS
The people of the Confederacy had fully expected a splendid victory. They had been quite certain that a Southern boy could whip several times his weight in cowardly Yankees, and they had been proven right. They had believed that, faced with Confederate resolve and Confederate gumption, the Federals would turn and run like scalded dogs, and the Northern boys had given them the truly immense satisfaction of doing precisely that. The Southern press was exultant. “The breakdown of the Yankee race, their unfitness for empire,” gloated the Richmond Whig, “forces dominion on the South. We are compelled to take the sceptre of power.” The editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal was more contemptuous still. The Northern war effort would not last much longer, he said, because the Yankees, who were “dastards in fight, and incapable of self-government,” would “inevitably fall under the control of a superior race. A few more Bull Run thrashings will bring them under the yoke.”1 Political leader Thomas Cobb of Georgia deemed Manassas “one of the decisive battles of the world” and insisted that “it has secured our independence.”2 The triumph at Manassas seemed, quite literally, to be a dream come true.
Except that it really wasn’t at all. Those dreams of glory had not allowed for the bloodiest day in American history, in which green troops, Federals included, fought and stood fire with an unexpected fury; they had not counted on the sheer destructive power of the weapons and the hideous, disfiguring things they did to young men, the cruel agonies of death they inflicted. Confederates lost 400 killed and 1,600 wounded, of whom 225 would later die of their wounds. Union losses were 625 killed and mortally wounded, 950 nonmortally wounded, and more than 1,200 captured.3 Jackson’s brigade had taken the worst losses of all: 119 killed and 442 wounded. What had taken place was, by any previous reckoning in American history, a slaughter. And in spite of the crowing in the press, the South seemed to grasp that its triumph was also a tragedy. Though crowds massed in the streets of Richmond, there were no wild celebrations, no bonfires, no cannonades, and bells were silent in the steeples until the next day, when they summoned worshippers to prayer. In Savannah, Georgia, the gatherings had a similarly melancholy cast. “Our city is filled with mingled exultation and sorrow at the news of the recent triumph,” wrote one resident. “Colonel Bartow and some of our best young men have fallen, and our city is filled with mourning.”4 Victory was also tempered by stark military reality: the exhausted, disorganized Confederate army was in no position after the battle to pursue its quarry into Washington to deliver a final blow.
In the North, reactions ranged from despair to visions of the Apocalypse descending. “Today will be known as Black Monday,” wrote one New Yorker. “We are utterly and disgracefully routed, beaten, whipped.” Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune and one of the biggest boosters of an early invasion of the South, could scarcely conceal his gloom. “On every brow sits sullen, scorching, black despair,” he wrote to Lincoln, in a suddenly defeatist mood. “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.”5
The disaster had seemed worse because of the fatuous overconfidence that preceded it. McDowell had been convinced at noon that he had the battle won, and he believed it again at about 3:30, when his men had seemingly cleared Henry Hill of Confederates. Back in Washington, Winfield Scott had spoken buoyantly of success, and had gone to church at eleven. When Lincoln in midafternoon received a wire saying that the Union seemed to be losing, he went to see Scott and found him asleep. Roused, Scott explained to the president that the fog of battle was often misleading and that he shouldn’t worry. When the picture brightened, with wires from McDowell’s headquarters saying he had “driven the enemy before him,” Lincoln went for a ride. At 6:00 p.m. an ashen William Seward finally delivered the news. “The battle is lost,” he said. “The telegraph says that McDowell is in full retreat, and calls on General Scott to save the capital.” Presumably Scott was fully awake by that time.
Northern newspapers had been brimful of that same arrogance and presumption, often—and bizarrely—sticking with it into the following days. On July 22, readers of the New York Times were presented with a breathless and, in retrospect, comically inaccurate story of the Union victory. “After a battle of unparalleled severity,” read the editorial, solemn and gloating, “in which our soldiers fought against great odds . . . they have come off more than conquerors—not onl
y driving the enemy from their formidable positions, but seizing all their guns and equipments. . . . The glorious flag that flew at Sumter is now fully avenged.”6 What had taken place was not just a victory, according to the Times; it was also a total devastation of the Southern army. One can only wonder how many Northern hearts leaped when they read it.
But the North’s agonies of despair were not really what they seemed, either. The first lesson of Bull Run was that, bad as it was, it was not the foretold Armageddon. There was no final settling of accounts. The Union army was battered and demoralized, but it still existed, and until the moment panic seized them, most of its soldiers had fought hard and well. Northern advantages in wealth, population, and industrial capacity were all just as they were. Washington was safe. And it soon became clear that the battle’s ultimate effect would be to strengthen Northern resolve, not weaken it, as the initial shock and distress shifted quickly into a grim new determination. The day after the battle, President Lincoln signed a bill for the enlistment of 500,000 three-year volunteers, and three days later signed another for 500,000 more. The public response in the North was immediate and enthusiastic; new recruits jammed Union recruiting offices. Even more important, for the future of the war, Lincoln had found someone to lead these new men. At 2:00 a.m. on the morning after the battle, he sent a telegram to the dynamic thirty-four-year-old Major General George Brinton McClellan, fresh from his victories in western Virginia, ordering him to take command of the new volunteers, who would soon be gathered into an entity called the Army of the Potomac. McClellan happened to be Jackson’s classmate at West Point and his opposite in almost every conceivable way. He was coming to Washington, as he and many other people in the North saw it, as the savior of the Union.