The elation of the men in the ranks was shared by their officers and by Mr. Davis himself. The President had been unable to endure in Richmond the suspense of the approaching battle. On the morning of the twenty-first he had taken a special train for Manassas. In the village he had taken horse and hurried to the field. He procured from Johnston such information as the general possessed and then, after supper, sat down to enjoy the soldier’s greatest delight, the writing of the first announcement of a victory.
While the President was drafting this dispatch to the War Department, General Beauregard came in. Jubilant congratulations were exchanged. New details of the triumph were explained. Just then Major R. C. Hill reached headquarters to report that he had been to Centreville, where he found the deserted street jammed with abandoned artillery. Mr. Davis observed that such a situation constituted the best of reasons for following the Federals furiously and in maximum force. At that, someone observed that Major Hill had been known in the old army as “Crazy Hill” because of his manner, which always suggested excitability. Further inquiry elicited the fact that Hill had been deceived concerning the ground and had not in fact penetrated to Centreville. This altered the outlook. Davis, Johnston, and Beauregard agreed that an advance on Centreville in the darkness would be imprudent. They would send Bonham forward the next morning.4
Before dawn rain began to fall and continued throughout eastern Virginia all the twenty-second. By none of the roads was mass pursuit possible. Loud was the lament, because everywhere Confederate detachments penetrated that day they found evidence that many of the Federals had become panic-stricken and abandoned all equipment that impeded flight. Public property recovered on the field or in the wake of the retreating army included 28 excellent field guns, 37 caissons, half a million rounds of small-arms ammunition, 4,500 sets of accouterments, 500 muskets, and 9 flags. The prisoners, wounded and unhurt, numbered approximately 1,460, or only about 500 less than gross Confederate casualties.5
Credit for these captures and for the victory itself was given immediately, without stint or scrutiny, to General Beauregard. When Johnston suggested before breakfast on the twenty-second that Beauregard’s services be recognized by promotion, the President assured him that this already had been arranged. While the three were eating, Mr. Davis handed Beauregard a note in his autograph explaining: “you are appointed to be ’General’ in the army of the Confederate States of America….”6
The honor thus bestowed by the President and speedily confirmed by the Senate was followed by public acclamation. Incidents of Beauregard’s valor on the field, some of them apocryphal, were read and repeated. There was praise for Johnston, to be sure. His name, by reason of his seniority, was listed first in the congressional vote of thanks, but the concentration of the two armies, not less than the victory itself, was assumed to be the work of Beauregard. The momentary, almost universal belief that the Battle of Manassas would end the war gave place to a belief that Beauregard would invade the North for a desperate struggle. Then impatience was voiced that the advance was delayed.7
2
SUBORDINATES OF PROMISE
So exultant was the South that it made no effort and, indeed, had no occasion to appraise critically the generalship of Beauregard. Few inquired whether the victory might not have been due as much to chance and to the valor of his subordinates as to the design and discernment of the commander. In those first intoxicating days there was general praise for all, but little of specific commendation for any except Beauregard, Johnston, and the fallen officers. The bodies of General Bernard S. Bee and Colonel Francis S. Bartow were brought to Richmond and laid in state, with a guard of honor, before they were returned for burial in native soil.
Through the circulation of stories of the death of General Bee the South formed its first admiring estimate of General T. J. Jackson. The Charleston Mercury described how Bee’s brigade “dwindled to a mere handful…. He rode up to Gen. Jackson and said, ‘General, they are beating us
back’ The reply was, ‘Sir, we’ll give them the bayonet.’ General Bee immediately rallied the remnant of his brigade, and his last words to them were: ‘There is Jackson standing like a stone wall. Let us determine to die here, and we will conquer. Follow me’” This made instant appeal to the public imagination. The next day a Charleston correspondent of Punch wrote that he drank “two ‘stone walls’ and a ‘General Jackson’ before breakfast.”8
Although the sober Jackson would have disapproved the medium of its expression, he deserved this tribute. At a critical point of the battle he had advanced straight to the point of danger, had held his ground through the hardest fighting, and, as became an instructor in artillery, had massed his guns to play upon the enemy in front of his compact, unyielding line. Jackson’s horse had been wounded under him, and a bullet had broken the bone of the middle finger of his left hand. To reduce the bleeding and to ease the pain, he had carried his arm upraised through the remainder of the action. Observing this, some of his men thought he was invoking the blessing of Heaven.
He believed that he had received that blessing. He wrote his wife: “Whilst great credit is due to other parts of our gallant army, God made my brigade more instrumental than any other in repulsing the main attack…. I am thankful to my ever-kind Heavenly Father that He makes me content to await His own good time and pleasure for commendation—knowing that all things work together for my good.” He was “content to await,” but not to be denied “commendation.” Did he mean “fame”? Was ambition burning under the faded blue coat he had brought to Manassas from V.M.I.? Beneath his cadet cap his large blue eyes had blazed with a strange light during the battle; what did that portend? His soldiers did not know, but they confirmed the tribute implied in Bee’s shouted words. From that day Professor Jackson was “Stonewall” Jackson.9
Along with the service of Bee and Jackson on the left General Johnston ranked that of E. Kirby Smith. The Florida brigadier who had been his chief of staff at Harper’s Ferry had been left behind to bring up the rear brigade. His men detrained at Manassas station about 1:00 P.M., threw off their knapsacks, and formed into line. With the back of his hand raised in front of his cap, Smith cried, “This is the signal, men, the watchword is ‘Sumter’!” He begged Johnston to let him throw them into the battle, then moved his column at the double-quick to the left. Almost immediately he received a minié ball, which grazed his spinal column, plowed through the muscles of his neck, and passed out near the collar-bone.10
As Smith fell, he turned over the command to his senior colonel, a stout-hearted officer of the old army, Arnold Elzey. Listed in first reports as dead, Smith was to recover speedily. His future, all men saw, was to be large, nor did that of his second in command promise to be small. Elzey handled the troops admirably, giving a fine example of soldierly enthusiasm. The judgment of his leading soon won for him a commission as brigadier general.11
Elzey had a bluff and hearty manner and on occasion did not disdain what the soldiers called “a dram.” One evening, when he and some of his comrades were in expansive mood, the general called in the sentinel on the post and gave him a drink, for which the man was pathetically grateful. Later in the night, when the party was over and Elzey was asleep, the same man was walking his post. Without abashment he put his head inside Elzey’s tent and woke him with the loud query, “General, General, ain’t it about time for us to take another drink?” The wrathful Elzey had the man put under arrest, but the soldier had the gratitude of the army for inspiring a question that echoed every day in all the camps.12
Colonel Jubal A. Early, who had extended the left flank beyond the line of Smith and Elzey, received praise on the field and later in the reports, but in smaller measure than his comrades to the right. His arrival was decisive because it showed the Federals they were outflanked, but his share in the actual fighting had been small. The personality of the colonel, even more, kept him from being a popular hero. Born in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, he went to West Point
, where he was graduated No. 18 in the class of 1837, but after two years in the army he resigned to become an attorney in his native county. As lawyer, Whig legislator, and prosecuting attorney he labored until 1861, except for a period of uneventful service as a major of volunteers during the Mexican War. Early was forty-four, about six feet tall and weighed under 170 pounds; but as a result of rheumatism contracted in Mexico he stooped badly and seemed so much older than his years that his soldiers promptly dubbed him “Old Jube” or “Old Jubilee.” His long beard; his keen, flashing black eyes; his satirical smile; his avowed irreligion; and his rasping, mordant wit made him appear almost saturnine. He was stern in his discipline and was charged with a snarling harshness toward his subordinates. That he was able many believed, and that he was coldly brave all who saw him on the field admitted. What he would become as a commander none knew and few cared. When the caustic colonel was promoted to brigadier from the day of the battle, there probably was scant enthusiasm.13
Applause was allotted also to Colonel Nathan George Evans for his first challenge of the advancing enemy. He had put up as stout resistance as could have been offered in the face of such odds. His casualties, 12 per cent of his engaged force, were entailed in heavy fighting and not in mere delaying action. Promotion was not to follow immediately, for reasons as personal as those that denied popularity to Early. “Shanks” Evans—his thinnest members received stoutest acclaim—had won some repute in the Indian fighting that had followed his graduation from West Point in the class of 1848. He was thirty-seven, of medium height, slightly bald, with the fiercest of black mustachios and small restless eyes to match. His look was quick, cunning, and contentious, as if he always were suspecting a Comanche ambush. There was no question of his capacity, but he was the devil-may-care type and was accused—falsely, it would appear—of excessive fondness of the bottle.14
Much of the heaviest fighting under Evans had been done by a Louisiana battalion of Zouaves from New Orleans, one company of which, styled “The Tigers,” had given its name and evil reputation to the whole. In whatever cities these troops had halted on their way to the front there had been undisciplined rioting and whispers, at the least, of theft and pillage. Their major, fortunately, knew how to deal with them. Roberdeau C. Wheat he was, son of an Episcopal clergyman and inheritor of Huguenot tradition and Maryland blue blood. Physically superb, over six feet in height, with manners that bespoke his uprearing, he volunteered for service in Mexico and, on the conclusion of peace, went to New Orleans and entered politics and practiced law. He would have risen high, perhaps as a criminal lawyer, had he not become absorbed in those Latin-American adventures of the 1850s in which Gulf State ideals of political freedom were combined paradoxically with the extension of slavery.
As Wheat had fought alongside hard men of alien tongues, he had been wholly at ease when he led his Tigers into action at Manassas. In a charge he had been shot down. The surgeon who examined him shook a sage professional head: A bullet wound of that nature, through both lungs, was necessarily fatal. “I don’t feel like dying yet,” Wheat avowed. He was desperate; perhaps in battle he had been foolhardy, but he had accumulated more combat experience than any other Confederate officer at Manassas. Would he survive his wound to use that experience?15
From his brigade headquarters at Portici, Colonel Philip St. George Cocke had directed the earliest reinforcements to reach the flank. It was he who had informed first Bee and Bartow, then Hampton, and then Jackson of Evans’s advance and of the progress of the action. Without Cocke’s guidance, based on his thorough knowledge of the terrain, the order of battle could not have been established so readily or so soon. What seemed in retrospect a marvel of distant control by Beauregard was, in reality, the work of Colonel Cocke.
Cocke was ambitious for military rank and fame, but for neither did he have need. Born in 1808 to one of the oldest and wealthiest families in the state, he had been schooled in arms at West Point, but after less than two years’ garrison duty he resigned to devote himself to the care of his estates. Virginia had no planter more renowned that St. George Cocke. Through the years he had kept his interest in military affairs. Now that the first contest was over and Cocke had shown what he was capable of doing, the press had praise of him. By brother officers he was recognized as “a high-minded and gallant soldier, a devoted patriot, and a gentleman of cultivation and refinement.” Would he and men like him, the middle-aged aristocrats and the proprietors of the great estates, measure up, as a class, to the requirements of command, and could they endure the hardships and exactions of prolonged field service?16
South Carolina colonel Wade Hampton, of a social station as high as that of Cocke, gave on the field of Manassas a hopeful, if incomplete, answer to that question. He did more. In his antecedents and in his own career he represented the rise and the attainments, the strength and the weakness, of the economic system which the war would vindicate or destroy.
When his grandfather, the first Wade Hampton, died in 1835 he had 3,000 slaves and ranked as the richest planter in the United States. The second Wade Hampton (1791-1858) was of a fortunate generation that could spend its maturity in an era of peace and plentitude. His mansion, Millwood, was almost as much the political capital of South Carolina as was near-by Columbia. In his great library, one of the best-stocked private collections in the nation, he ruled as the “Great Warwick of South Carolina.” When he died, Millwood, a fortune, and the leadership of the family passed to the third Wade Hampton, who had been born in Charleston in 1818. By the time he was in his middle thirties he came to doubt the economy of slave labor and on that account dissented from the politics of the dominant element of his state. In the legislature, which he entered so that he might counteract some of the policies of the “fire-eaters,” he served diligently and without any shadow of selfish ambition.17
Until 1861, in short, his was the ideal life of the society in which he was reared. Standing just under six feet, he had the balance of the horseman and the smooth muscles of the athlete. His courage, personal, moral, and political, was in keeping with his physique. Once South Carolina seceded he put all argument behind him and placed at the command of the state his wealth and his services. He set about the enlistment of a “Legion,” six companies of infantry, four of cavalry, and a battery of artillery. Some of the best-born young men of the Palmetto State were proud to be privates in Hampton’s Legion. Colonel Hampton was then forty-three, older than many officers of like or higher rank, and he had the manner of one to whom war was not a frolic or an adventure but a grim, bitter business to be discharged as quickly as might be with determination and without relish.18
Hampton and his 600 infantry detrained at Manassas when the guns were already roaring. Although he had never been in action and never had been given even the rudimentary training of a militiaman before 1861, he led his men straight into the heat of the battle. He held his position until he was enfiladed, then led his men back. The Federals advanced again, to the right and to the left, surrounding Hampton on three sides. Still his men fought furiously. In their pride they might have remained on the hillside till the last of them was killed had not Bee and Bartow urged Hampton to retire. In the final advance Hampton fell leading a charge against a battery. Fortunately his wound was slight, but among his 600 men the casualties reached 121, or 20 per cent. Although in dispatches he merely was commended for “soldierly ability,” everything expected of him he had done, and he had displayed inspiring courage and persistence. There was more of potential military excellence about him than his superiors at the moment realized.19
These, then, were the surviving officers who had most distinguished themselves in actual combat under Johnston and Beauregard: Stonewall Jackson, a former brevet major in the regular army and then a professor in a state military institute; a tall Floridian of thirty-seven, E. Kirby Smith, who only two months and a half previously had resigned a major’s commission; Jubal A. Early, one-time lieutenant and for almost thirty years a lawyer
and a politician; an Indian fighter, Shanks Evans; a young soldier of fortune who commanded a notoriously tough battalion, Rob Wheat; a successful planter and distinguished host, P. St. George Cocke, who had not borne arms for nearly thirty years; and a Carolina millionaire sportsman of no previous military training. Had Fate, blindfolded, drawn their names at random they scarcely could have been those of men more diverse in temperament or in training.
Others had done well. The lawyer-colonel J. B. Kershaw, 2nd South Carolina, was a man who seemed to have military aptitude. Arnold Elzey had handled his brigade most intelligently after Kirby Smith fell. All three of Early’s colonels had behaved like veterans—James L. Kemper, Harry Hays, and William Barksdale. Colonel Eppa Hunton of the 8th Virginia had borne himself gallantly. Brigadier General Holmes had marched fast from the right.
Those who had been denied a hand in the fray had chafed or had cursed. There was James Longstreet, who counted among his colonels a restless man named Samuel Garland. Dick Ewell had with him a young acting assistant adjutant general named Fitzhugh Lee, and also a stalwart colonel of the fine 5th Alabama, a soldierly figure with sandy mustache and penetrating eyes, Robert E. Rodes, who had been a teacher and a civil engineer in railway employ. In D. R. Jones’s brigade, ill content to play so small a role in so exciting a drama, was Micah Jenkins, colonel of the 5th South Carolina. Arriving late from the Shenandoah, Colonel A.R Hill moved to the right with his 13th Virginia but could not fire a single shot.
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