Of course one cannot exclude from this the effect of a certain rivalry between Longstreet and Jackson, and on Longstreet’s part a degree of resentment about the fame Jackson had accrued despite his poor performance on the peninsula. When Longstreet came to write his memoirs, his comments on Jackson were anything but generous, at a point when Jackson’s reputation almost rivaled Lee’s. “His [Jackson’s] game of hide-and-seek about Bull Run, Centreville and Manassas Plains, was grand, but marred in completeness,” Longstreet wrote, dismissing Jackson loftily: “As a leader he was fine; as a wheel-horse, he was not always just to himself. He was fond of the picturesque.”
A “wheel-horse” describes somebody who is strong, reliable, and a dependable part of a team, which is just what Longstreet prided himself on being. Clearly Longstreet thought that Jackson was something of a prima donna; that he was not a team player, to use a modern term, as he had amply demonstrated on the peninsula; and that while he was up to playing hide-and-seek in the Valley or around Manassas, he was not up to the serious business of war. Part of the problem between the two men was that while Longstreet had ambitions to help direct Confederate strategy—that is, to participate in Lee’s decisions as an equal—Jackson was content to command under Lee and had no desire to make policy himself.
Lee’s aide, Colonel Long, makes no secret of the fact that Lee “earnestly” wanted Longstreet to attack as soon as “his command was formed for battle,” which happened about noon. Jackson had been under attack by four Federal divisions (“at least thirty thousand men”) since early morning, and had just managed to hold on. Federal losses were at least “six to eight thousand in killed and wounded,” and the opportunity clearly existed for a decisive blow against the left flank of Pope’s army at a critical moment in the first day of the battle. “The question will naturally arise, Why did Longstreet not attack, and so relieve the heavy pressure on Jackson?” Long asks, but declines to answer, leaving it to be understood by the reader that Lee would never override the reluctance of one of his generals to attack “even though his martial instinct and his military judgment alike told him that the thing to do was to attack at once.”
Criticism of Longstreet has been widespread for over 150 years, and not just in the South. The distinguished English biographer of Stonewall Jackson, Lieutenant General G. F. R. Henderson, wrote scathingly of Longstreet’s behavior on August 29: “Longstreet, with a complacency it is hard to understand, has related how he opposed the wishes of the commander-in-chief. Three times Lee urged him forward. The first time he [Longstreet] rode to the front to reconnoiter, and found that the position, in his own words, was not inviting. Again Lee insisted that the enemy’s left might be turned. While the question was under discussion, a heavy force (Porter and McDowell) was reported advancing from Manassas Junction. No attack followed, however, and Lee repeated his instructions. Longstreet was still unwilling. A large portion of the Federal forces on the Manassas road now marched northwards to join Pope, and Lee, for the last time, bade Longstreet attack towards Groveton.” Shortly, it was too late in the day to attack, and Longstreet suggested that it would be better to prepare “all things in readiness at daylight for a good day’s work.” He reports that Lee “hesitated” before accepting what was now inevitable because Longstreet’s delays had made it so, but Lee’s hesitation suggests that he may have been holding back his temper, or at least his impatience, with some difficulty.
It is impossible to know for sure whether Longstreet was tactically right or not. In his tactful way Taylor, who was there, makes it clear that he thought Longstreet was mistaken; more important, he makes it very clear that Lee did not agree with Longstreet and that Lee was “disappointed” at Longstreet’s failure to attack. Showing a preference for the defensive that was to cause an even bigger (and fatal) disagreement between the two men at Gettysburg almost a year later, Longstreet wanted to secure the high ground above the turnpike and let Porter attack him. In addition, he did not like the ground before him, over which he would have to advance to support Jackson, and he was concerned that Porter might attack his rear, but Lee had considered all of these things and thought otherwise—and his judgment was certainly as good as Longstreet’s.
The important question, with all due respect to Colonel Taylor, is not why Longstreet failed to attack, but why Lee did not simply order him to do so at noon, instead of letting him fritter away the rest of the afternoon. Longstreet was of Dutch descent, a heavyset man who was as stubborn and hard to budge as a rock, but Lee was a commanding presence, already a legendary figure in the Confederacy, and besides commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. Although Lee’s deference toward President Jefferson Davis was enormous—even exaggerated, as some thought—he did not hesitate to press his case in military matters when he thought Davis was wrong. Why then did he defer to Longstreet? The answer appears to be that even the greatest of great men have a weakness, and Lee’s was a genuine reluctance to enforce his own will on his subordinates. He explained this to a German observer, Captain Justus Scheibert:* “You must know our circumstances, and see that my leading in battle would do more harm than good. It would be a bad thing if I could not then rely on my brigade and divisional commanders. I plan and work with all my might to bring the troops to the right place at the right time; with that I have done my duty. As soon as I order the troops forward into battle, I lay the fate of my army in the hands of God.”
This is undoubtedly sincere, and what Lee himself believed, but in fact he very often took direct control of his army in battle, rather than leaving matters “in the hands of God.” The truth is that Lee had no compunctions about making his wishes known on the battlefield, but he would not overrule a commander who failed to heed them—and Longstreet was as good as tone-deaf to Lee’s politely expressed wishes. Probably nobody but Longstreet could have resisted Lee’s evident desire for an attack throughout a long afternoon, or found more reasons to thwart it.
During all this time the noise of furious battle was heard from the Confederate left, less than half a mile away, where Jackson’s brigades were repelling attack after attack, defending with the bayonet when they ran out of ammunition, an engagement such as “even the Army of Northern Virginia had seldom fought.” As darkness fell Major General J. B. Hood carried out the “reconnaissance in force” that Longstreet had been demanding, and returned with the “disheartening” news that the Federals held strong positions, and that an attack on them in the morning “would be dangerous.” Even The West Point Atlas of the American Wars, which is seldom critical, notes, “On three different occasions Lee had wanted Longstreet to attack Pope’s south flank, but each time he had reluctantly succumbed to Longstreet’s pleas for postponement,” and adds that had Lee been insistent, “it is very likely that the Confederates would have gained an important victory” on August 29.
The Army of Northern Virginia was now drawn up in a line facing east toward Bull Run perhaps two miles away. The left wing under Jackson stretched from Sudley Church to the turnpike above Groveton, roughly along the line of the unfinished railway cut at the base of Sudley Mountain, while the right wing under Longstreet, slightly less advanced, stretched from the turnpike to the junction of the Manassas Gap Railroad and the Warrenton, Alexandria, and Washington (Virginia) Railroad. The two wings had not linked up yet, but from left to right they formed a line of about three and a half miles, a secure enough position if Pope could be induced to attack it.
Daylight revealed that Pope had managed to bring up more of his troops during the night—another argument in favor of Lee’s desire to have had Longstreet attack at once on the previous afternoon. Apart from desultory artillery fire most of the morning passed quietly. Lee’s concern was that Pope might get away and was preparing to retreat, while Pope had convinced himself that the Confederates had been badly beaten the day before and reported to Washington by telegraph that they were now “retreating towards the mountains.” He estimated that he had taken 8,000 casualties in yesterday’s fight
ing, and put the number of Confederate casualties at twice that high. Long, however, whose job it was to know such things, put the number of Confederate casualties at 1,507. Although one would have thought that it was hard to hide the presence of Longstreet’s 25,000 men, Pope continued to believe that they were still at Thoroughfare Gap.
Around noon Lee summoned Jackson, Longstreet, and Stuart, and they reached a collective decision to wait in expectation of a Federal attack. There seems to have been no friction between Jackson and Longstreet because of Longstreet’s failure to support Lee the previous day; certainly neither Longstreet nor Lee’s aide Colonel Long makes any mention of it. If Pope did not attack, it was Lee’s intention “to slip across Bull Run in the vicinity of Sudley Springs” to the extreme left of Jackson’s position that night, and place his entire army between Pope and Washington. Sometime after one o’clock in the afternoon, however, Pope at last made his move and attacked Jackson again. Once more, Jackson was hard pressed by the sheer volume and ferocity of the Federal attacks, and some of his brigades were so short of ammunition that they were reduced to throwing rocks at the advancing Union troops. Lee himself was surprised by the attack—he had expected Pope to withdraw—but he quickly realized that the Union commander had presented him with an opportunity. The Federals were now out in the open, advancing across rolling, lightly wooded ground. There was no indication that Pope had noticed Longstreet’s 25,000 men on higher ground on his left.
That day Lee’s headquarters were “on the Warrenton Pike,” almost in the center of the Confederate line and about two miles south of Jackson, whose headquarters were above the pike, in a field full of wheat sheaves. Lee’s signals officer Captain J. L. Bartlett briefly summarized the afternoon’s action in his record of Lee’s signals to Jackson:
[To] General JACKSON:
What is result of movements on your left? LEE
Answer. [To] General Lee:
So far, enemy appears to be trying to get possession of a piece of woods to withdraw out of our sight. JACKSON
This rather flippant reply proved optimistic. Six hundred yards away from his position Jackson could now see “some 12,000 Federals—thirty-seven regiments in all—in assault formations that extended a mile and a quarter from Groveton to near Bull Run . . . an awesome sight, battle lines in full array, flags rolling lazily above gleaming bayonets.”
Despite the fact that the railway cutting “angled away” from the line of the Federal attack, leaving the Union troops open to volleys of musketry on their right flank as they advanced uphill, they kept coming. Far from trying to withdraw, Pope sent in brigade after brigade against the Confederate far left. At times the Federals were so close to the railway cutting that “the opposing flags were only ten yards apart,” and soldiers on both sides used the bayonet, or swung their muskets like clubs as they ran out of ammunition ran out or if they were too close to each other to pause and reload. Even for Jackson’s battle-hardened veterans, who had withstood two days of “sanguinary struggle,” the pressure was too much. By two o’clock in the afternoon Jackson was obliged to request a division from Longstreet’s command. Longstreet’s subsequent claim that Jackson “begged for reinforcements” aroused, and continues to incite, bitter quarrels between his supporters and Jackson’s—certainly no “begging” was involved. Lee promptly ordered Longstreet to shift a division, which he seems to have been willing enough to do, except that from where he was standing, on higher ground nearer the middle of the Confederate line, he could see that “the left flank of the Federals” was exposed to fire from his artillery, which would “break up [the Federal] attack before he could possibly move a division to Jackson’s relief.”
Lee may have reached the same conclusion, since his next message to Jackson was:
To General JACKSON:
Do you still want reinforcements? LEE
By this time, Longstreet’s artillery had already opened fire and the Federal attack began “to melt away.” Longstreet describes the effect of his “enfilade” fire on the Union troops in his memoirs: “Almost immediately the wounded began to drop off from Porter’s ranks; the number seemed to increase with every shot; the masses began to waver, swinging back and forth, showing signs of discomfiture along the left and left centre. In ten or fifteen minutes it crumbled into disorder and turned towards the rear.” Half an hour later Jackson signaled to Lee that he no longer needed reinforcements: “No; the enemy are giving way.”
Lee, as was his custom, remained an island of calm. As Longstreet’s guns were firing, he turned to one of his aides and remarked, “I observe that some of those mules are without shoes. I wish you would see to it that all of the animals are shod at once.” This was a perfectly sound observation, but it helps to explain the extraordinary hold Lee had on his men, from generals down to soldiers: he seemed altogether immune to the emotions that buffeted them—excitement, alarm, apprehension, concern. He had perfect control over himself, not by any effort of will, but naturally, a very rare thing.
Lee knew he had taken a fearsome risk, split his forces in the face of the enemy, and reunited them in the nick of time; and as Porter’s lines began to crumble before Longstreet’s well-placed guns, he could hardly have failed to realize that a great victory was within his grasp. He might have been forgiven a moment of exultation, but instead he noticed that a team of passing mules were not shod and politely ordered that this be attended to. Hardly any moment captures Lee’s simplicity and greatness better than this.
Next, he gave the order for Longstreet to attack, and then “threw every man in his army against Pope.” He sent a further signal to Jackson, telling him that Longstreet was advancing, and to “look out and protect his left flank,” for the two wings of the army were now drawn up at an angle of about forty-five degrees, and it was important that Jackson’s troops should not open fire on Longstreet’s as they advanced through the dense, drifting gun smoke toward each other. The two parts of Lee’s army were now closing like the jaws of a pair of pliers on the Federal troops advancing toward Jackson’s lines, and forcing them back toward Bull Run.
Longstreet’s reluctance to attack the previous day was more than compensated for by the precision and the speed of his advance now. His entire wing, nearly 25,000 men in all, moved forward together, surging over the low hills and driving the enemy back, while his artillery rushed forward at a gallop, using every good piece of ground to halt and fire: “The artillery would gallop furiously to the nearest ridge,” wrote General Moxley Sorrel, “deliver a few rounds until the enemy was out of range, and then gallop again to the next ridge.” As Jackson began to advance, the Federal retreat became a rout. “[The Federals] retreated in confusion,” Lee would report, “suffering severely from our artillery, which advanced as [they] retired.” Lee added that Federal troops fought “stubbornly” at several “strong points” on the Confederate far right, but Lee’s tactics proved to be as effective as his strategy. It was a textbook battle, fought out exactly as planned, though the end result was not everything he had wished.
Unable to remain at his headquarters any longer, Lee himself rode forward to join Longstreet, exposing himself to vigorous artillery fire, until Longstreet “thought to ride through a ravine, and thus throw a traverse between [Lee] and the fire.” Lee seems to have shown, unusually for him, a certain polite impatience with Longstreet’s concern for his safety. He did not relish attempts to protect him.
His modest belief that it was his job only to bring his army to where it belonged, and not to direct the battle himself, is contradicted by his behavior on August 30. He had placed Longstreet’s wing of the army exactly where he wanted it, on ground he had reconnoitered himself, and then decided to wait and see if Pope attacked; he gave an order for Longstreet to transfer one of his divisions to the left wing of the army when Jackson was hard pressed and had asked for reinforcements, then canceled that order when he saw that Longstreet’s artillery batteries had made it unnecessary. Finally Lee himself chose the moment for
Longstreet to attack, and for Jackson to move forward.
Longstreet pushed his men forward nearly a mile and a half and Lee advanced with them “over the dead-strewn field.” He paused for a moment near a Confederate gun to scan the movements of the enemy, once again making himself an easy target—he seems to have shaken off the overprotective Longstreet. Lee’s youngest son, Robbie, was a private in the artillery, and the nearby gun happened to be the one he was serving. “The general,” Robbie wrote,
reined in “Traveller” close by my gun, not fifteen feet from me. I went up . . . and spoke to Captain Mason of the staff, who had not the slightest idea who I was . . . I had been marching night and day for four days, with no opportunity to wash myself, or my clothes; my face and hands were blackened with powder-sweat. . . . When the General, after a moment or two, dropped his glass to his side, and turned to his staff, Captain Mason said:
“General, here is someone who wants to speak to you.”
Lee, seeing a much begrimed artillery-man, sponge-staff* in hand, said:
“Well, my man, what can I do for you?” I replied:
“Why, General, don’t you know me?” And he, of course, at once recognized me, and was very much amused by my appearance, and glad to see that I was safe and well.
Both wings of the Confederate army were now “driving the enemy from each successive stand made in their sullen retirement,” across fields and woodlands carpeted with the dead and wounded from repeated Federal charges, a sight that caused even the battle-hardened Colonel Long to exclaim how sad it all was. The Federals attempted to make a stand at Henry House Hill, which overlooked Bull Run and the vital bridge across it. “Though the fighting [on Henry House Hill] raged until dark, Lee was unable to dislodge the Union forces.” By this time it was raining hard, and the Confederate pursuit slowed down, while Pope at last decided to withdraw his army across Bull Run during the night and destroy the bridge behind him, something he had contemplated doing in the morning, before launching an attack that cost him, all told, over 10,000 casualties and sent his defeated army reeling back in chaos toward Centreville. “Thousands of [Union] stragglers,” perhaps as many as 20,000, plodded glumly through the rain toward Washington, many having abandoned their units and their weapons. Lincoln was finally convinced that Pope would have to go even if it meant replacing him with McClellan. The state of panic in Washington at the news that Pope was “badly whipped,” as McClellan had predicted he would be, can be gauged by the fact that Mrs. McClellan asked her husband “to try to slip into the capital [to their house] and at least send the silver off” lest it be stolen by Confederate soldiers. Pope’s dispatch to Halleck asking “whether you feel secure about Washington should this army be destroyed” was a question that could hardly have been better calculated to cause dismay at the White House. Not only had Pope been beaten; he had lost overnight his brash self-confidence. His dispatches to Halleck were full of vague accusations of disloyalty on the part of his senior officers, and dire warnings that his army was in danger of collapse unless it was brought to shelter back behind the fortifications of Washington, and reorganized from top to bottom. Pope’s mistrust of any officer who had served under McClellan on the peninsula, like the unfortunate Porter, was almost as deep as McClellan’s contempt for Pope.
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