He faced a deadline of sorts at first. When Lincoln issued his call for seventyfive thousand new troops on April 15, he had given the Southern forces seizing Fort Sumter and other Federal properties (Norfolk’s naval shipyard among them) just twenty days to “disperse and return peacefully to their respective abodes.” Quite possibly that meant Lee had only, from his first day of business as Virginia’s military chief, twelve days to get ready for whatever the North would do next—from his start on April 23 until May 5, the expiration of Lincoln’s twenty-day ultimatum.
Lee was quite aware, too, that his wife’s beloved Arlington estate across the Potomac from the enemy camp was at risk for easy seizure almost any day. Mrs. Lee must not tarry there too long.
In the meantime, Lee had begun to assemble a core group of capable officers—many to become historic figures themselves. They included Joseph E. Johnston, John Bankhead Magruder, Richard S. Ewell, J. C. Pemberton, and Henry Heth.
The prize catch, though, was the major from VMI who appeared at Lee’s office one day to discuss the use of the military academy’s cadets. Quickly seized upon as colonel of infantry and sent to hold the newly captured Federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry as long as possible, he was Thomas J. Jackson, later known as “Stonewall” Jackson.
A state convention had voted to secede, a decision that was to be submitted to the voters for ratification on May 23. On April 25, three days after Lee took the reins of military command, the same state convention voted to join the Confederacy. But where would that place Lee, a major general in his own Virginia hierarchy, in respect to the Confederate military apparatus, whose highest ranks issued thus far were those of mere brigadier generals? Would he have a problem with lesser-ranking chieftains issuing him orders from higher up the chain of command?
According to Confederate Vice President Stephens, Lee told him he would be “perfectly satisfied” with the alliance. Further, Lee said “that he did not wish anything connected with himself individually, or his official rank or personal position, to interfere in the slightest degree.”
In practical terms, the alliance not only meant the arrival in Virginia of military units from the various Confederate states to the south, but some preliminary confusion as to the validity of the commissions of Virginia officers. With the confusion also came minor friction. “Conflict was in the air,” wrote Lee’s biographer Douglas Southall Freeman, “and the personal representative of the [Confederate] Secretary of War began to crowd the wire with suspicions of Lee and Letcher, intimating that Lee was ‘troubled about rank.’”
But Lee assured President Jefferson Davis he was happy with his role as commander of Virginia forces: He and Davis were destined to respect one another and to get on well, in any case. Further, on May 10 Lee was authorized by the Confederacy itself to assume command of all Confederate forces in Virginia, and that largely removed the potential of any further divisive conflict. He also was given the Confederate rank of brigadier general. Thereafter, Lee for a time served both his new nation and his commonwealth.
Early in May, too, Lee and his colleagues were becoming painfully aware of the wide state of disaffection in the western provinces of antebellum Virginia. They worried also over the possibility of a Union movement south from Washington, which was the reason for Lee’s buildup of forces at Manassas Junction on the Manassas Gap Railroad below Washington.
Lincoln’s apparent deadline of May 4 had come and gone with no major change in the North-South standoff following Fort Sumter. On May 23, however, Virginia voters did ratify their state convention’s call for secession. The very next day, Federal troops moved out of their Washington area encampments and occupied the Virginia shoreline on the Potomac. As Lee had feared, Arlington then fell into Federal hands—forever, at that. His invalid wife, though, had left the grand estate ten days earlier. She was fortunate in this instance, but in the days ahead she would find herself in “Yankee” hands, at the mercy of Federal authority after all.
Death of a Congressman
AS A MEMBER OF THE PROVISIONAL CONFEDERATE CONGRESS THAT ORIGINALLY met in Montgomery, Alabama, he helped form the new Confederacy, but it wasn’t long before he set out to make his mark on the battlefield as well. The “Provisional’s” second session, removed to the new capital city of Richmond, had just adjourned when Captain Francis S. Bartow and his Company B, 8th Georgia, marched off—for the duration, it was vowed.
Bartow, an attorney and politician back home in Georgia, had led his Oglethorpe Light Infantry at the seizure of Federal Fort McAllister close on the heels of Georgia’s decision to secede in late 1860. Now, leaving Richmond in the spring of 1861, he bravely told his wife not to expect him back. If he must die, he hoped to die fighting for Southern liberty on the battlefield, which he did. He was Georgia’s first martyr to the war cause.
Future Confederate Congressman Warren Akin, also from Georgia, was in Richmond and listening when Bartow’s death was announced in the House chamber with appropriate eulogies by several members of the body. A colonel by midsummer of 1861, Bartow had commanded the 8th Georgia and then the 2nd Brigade of the Army of the Shenandoah in the Shenandoah Valley. He and part of his brigade rushed to the aid of General Pierre G. T. Beauregard at the First Battle of Bull Run (Manassas) on July 21. There, Bartow’s command joined other Rebel forces in trying to hold off Yankee pressure against the Confederate left flank.
North of the Warrenton Turnpike and at Henry House Hill, the fighting was difficult. At one point, a Union battery manned by Regular Army men proved especially troublesome for the Southern volunteers. A greatly moved Warren Akin told the essentials of Bartow’s story in a letter to Mrs. Akin, penned on the same day that the eulogies were expressed: “After Bartow’s 8th G. Regt. was much cut to pieces late in the day, he rode to General Beauregard and said: ‘What is now to be done? Direct me and it shall be done if within human power.’ Beauregard replied, ‘That battery must be taken.’ Bartow immediately rallied the remnants of the 8th & ordered the 7th Georgia and one Va. Regt. with the 8th to take it. The charge was made & soon Bartow’s horse was shot under him & he was wounded in the leg.”
But Bartow was not yet stopped, nor even slowed down all that much, it seems. “He then went from company to company, cheering the men & officers onward, telling them ‘the day is ours; onward and take the battery!’”
The Rebels did go onward, but forty yards out from the U.S. line the Rebel standard-bearer was cut down.
Far from being left behind, the wounded Bartow was right there still. “Bartow seized the colors, waved it over his head, with his cap in hand, waving it also and bidding his men to follow him—his men falling at every discharge from the battery, almost like wheat stalks before the scythe.”
And just then…
“Just then a bullet pierced his breast.”
But Francis Bartow, Georgia’s first hero of the Civil War, wasn’t quite to be counted out. He told the men who gathered ’round him in a sorrowful knot: “They have killed me, but the day is ours. Never give up the field.”
Minutes later his fired-up volunteers overran the battery manned by Yankee Regulars, who “were routed and fled from the field.”
Bartow died in the arms of another prominent Georgia politician, former U.S. Congressman and future Confederate Congressman Lucius Jeremiah Gartell, present at Bull Run as a colonel with the 7th Georgia. In the same battle Gartell lost a son, and Bartow, wrote Warren Akin to Mrs. Akin, “had an adopted son who was badly if not fatally wounded in the same fight.” Already the bitter toll was being felt.
Most Famous Shooter
“OLD RUFFIN” THEY CALLED HIM. BORN IN ’94—1794, THAT IS—HE REALLY WAS old, by comparison with the combatants of the Civil War. Other combatants, one should keep in mind, since he himself took part in the fighting and indeed fired two famous and significant artillery rounds still noted in many histories of the Civil War.
Virginia-born Edmund Ruffin, in fact, remains at the center of a very old dispute: Who fire
d the first shot of the war?
For years—decades even—many said it was the fire-breathing secessionist Ruffin himself. Others said no. In any case, it apparently is true that he fired one of the very first rounds at hapless Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.
A gentleman of Virginia’s plantation society, Ruffin studied for a time at the College of William and Mary and in his prime as a serious farmer was a progressive agronomist, an advocate of crop rotation, and president of the Farmer’s Register. Also a veteran of the War of 1812, he eventually became consumed by the issue of slavery versus abolition. He attended the hanging of abolitionist John Brown and made it his business to present every Southern governor with one of the pikes that Brown would have used to arm rebelling Virginia slaves. Ruffin traveled throughout the South years before the Civil War, urging secession, calling for the creation of a new country, and writing articles in the same vein. One of his publications was Slavery and Free Labor Described and Compared.
It was no surprise, then, that he was present when South Carolina led the way to secession with its defiant vote of December 20, 1860. He happily noted the wild cheers of the onlookers at the signing of the secession ordinance that evening.
Early on the morning of April 12, he was at Charleston’s Cummings Point at the tip of Morris Island. There, as an honorary member of the Palmetto Guards, the sixty-seven-year-old was accorded the privilege of firing the first round from Columbiad No. 1 at Fort Sumter out in the harbor.
Confederate General Pierre G. T. Beauregard later said, however, the historic Ruffin shot was not really the first one of the entire Civil War, as often was alleged ever after. “The peaceful stillness of the night was broken just before dawn,” wrote Beauregard. “From Fort Johnson’s mortar battery, at 4:30 a.m., April 12, 1861, issued the first—and, as many thought, the too-long deferred— signal shell of the war. It was fired, not by Mr. Edmund Ruffin of Virginia, as has been erroneously believed, but by George S. James, of South Carolina, to whom Captain Stephen D. Lee issued the order.”
Even if Ruffin’s gun came into action shortly after the shell that signaled the start of the Civil War, the fanatical long-haired oldster cut quite a figure in his uniform of South Carolina’s Palmetto Guards. After the younger men of the same outfit were sent to Virginia, Ruffin was still much in evidence. “Old Ruffin has honored our company with a visit,” wrote Palmetto member Charles M. Furman in May 1861. “The old gentleman intended presenting us with a flag, but finding us well supplied in that particular, he made a donation of one hundred dollars. The old man is a real patriot, his purse, his pen & his aged frame are all in turn called upon to contribute to the great cause upon which his heart is fixed.”
Nor was this elderly legend-in-process through with his activity as an amateur artillerist. His next famous shot would come in July—it also is alleged—during the fighting near First Bull Run. The hated Yankees were in retreat on the Warrenton Turnpike in the direction of Washington. The roadway crossed two bridges, and Honorary Private Ruffin was nearby, watching the Union flight with members of a Virginia artillery battery. The younger sharpshooters of Delaware Kemper’s Battery asked the famous “first-shooter” if he would like to fire an honorary round with a gun aimed at one of the turnpike bridges: the Cub Run span.
He was more than happy to oblige. And wonder of wonders, it allegedly was Ruffin’s own shot that squarely hit the bridge and upended a wagon across its roadway, blocking it.
“Wagons waiting to cross the bridge were now abandoned by their terrified drivers, who chose to wade the creek,” wrote Glenn Dedmondt in his book Southern Bronze. “A great quantity of wagons and equipment would be later captured by the South as a result of this single artillery round.”
It was to no avail, of course, and in the end the South bowed to the superior manpower and resources of the Union. That was too much for Edmund Ruffin, who in June 1865—two months after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox—died an untimely death as a suicide who refused to live in the restored United States.
Perfect Storm of Bullets
IT STARTED OUT AS A “REVOLVING DOOR” BATTLE, THIS FIRST GREAT CLASH OF THE Civil War. Each of the two opposing generals—classmates at West Point some years earlier—planned a feint to his battle line’s left and a real lunge forward to the right. Had their strategy prevailed without deviation or the confusion of combat, Beauregard might well have marched on into Washington and McDowell into Richmond.
There had been skirmishes along the small creek line below Washington for two days, but it was on July 21 that the real fight ensued. With it, some famous names and amazing events emerged.
Pierre G. T. Beauregard, for instance, had his headquarters at the McLean House, home of civilian Wilmer McLean, whose farm bordered Bull Run. As Beauregard himself later wrote, he and his staff were interrupted during a meal by a Union shell that landed in the fireplace. Such events, both during First Bull Run and again a year later at Second Bull Run, were more than enough for McLean. In 1863 he moved his family out of the war’s path…or so he thought. In fact, the second Wilmer McLean House would be the site of Robert E. Lee’s surrender to U. S. Grant at Appomattox.
It was at Bull Run also that Thomas Jackson, Southern general, acquired a well-known, even revered, nickname. He and his men had arrived as badly needed, eleventh-hour reinforcements for Beauregard. An excited fellow Rebel, General Barnard Bee, sought to inspire his own troops by pointing out Jackson and his brigade: “Look. There stands Jackson like a stone wall! Rally behind the Virginians.” (Another version has Bee saying after the “Stonewall” reference, “Let us determine to die here, and we will conquer. Follow me.”) Unfortunately, Bee was fatally wounded minutes later and soon forgotten. However, the name Stonewall has endured.
Also killed in the fighting for Henry House Hill was the battle’s only civilian casualty, the home’s elderly owner, the widow Judith Carter Henry.
Returning to the battle scenario, Confederate Colonel Nathan Evans of South Carolina had seen through Union commander Irvin McDowell’s diversionary feint to his own left that morning. As explained later by Beauregard, “Evans, seeing that the Federal attack at the [Stone] bridge did not increase in vigor, and observing a lengthening line of dust to the left of the Warrenton Turnpike [the Confederate left, the Union right, that is], became satisfied that the attack at his front was a feint, and that a column of enemy was moving around through the woods to fall on his left flank from the direction of Sudley Ford.”
Indeed, that was the case. Then-colonel Ambrose E. Burnside’s brigade marched at the head of the eighteen-thousand-man Union column. In the fight that followed, Bee, Evans, Jackson, and others did their best to contain the Union wave, which also included a brigade led by William Tecumseh Sherman.
The fortunes of battle ebbed and flowed through the day. A Richmond journalist watched at mid-morning as both Beauregard and newly arrived General Joseph E. Johnston, senior to the hero of Charleston, dashed “at a headlong gallop” to a threatened sector of their line—the very moment, in fact, that Bee and Evans fell back and Jackson’s brigade planted itself as a stone wall in the path of the enemy.
And what a “thrilling moment!” wrote the onlooking journalist. “General Johnston seized the colors of the 4th Alabama, and offered to lead the attack. General Beauregard leaped from his horse, and turning to his troops, exclaimed, ‘I have come here to die with you!’”
More ebb and flow followed, with the Rebs barely holding out and awaiting still more reinforcements. Finally, to the rescue from left and right, came both E. Kirby Smith and Richard Ewell with their respective commands, and not a moment too soon. A Confederate private who was with a Maryland regiment rushing from the rail depot at Manassas to Beauregard’s aid encountered a dismaying retreat on the way. “Wagons in great numbers were coming to the rear at headlong speed,” wrote Private W. W. Goldsborough of the 1st Maryland Infantry, “and demoralized fugitives by the hundreds from the battlefield were rushing frantically by, c
rying out, ‘All is lost, all is lost, go back, or you’ll be cut to pieces! The army is in full retreat.’”
That, of course, was not entirely true. Nor was it a lasting situation, since shortly thereafter Goldsborough and his fellows took part in a highly successful charge. “At the command, with one wild, deafening yell, and amidst a perfect storm of bullets, we drove the enemy pell-mell from their strong position into the thicket in their rear.”
Minutes later, Johnston, Beauregard, and Confederate President Jefferson Davis himself rode up to congratulate the 1st Maryland’s commander, Colonel Arnold Elzey. Davis was “beaming with excitement and enthusiasm.”
While Elzey did not himself win the Battle of First Bull Run, he earned promotion on the spot to brigadier general and effusive praise from Jefferson Davis. The battle was won, though, by their side—the Confederacy. It was the first real battle of any size in the Civil War. It was an uplifting victory for the South, but it at the same time spelled ultimate disaster for the South, for while it created euphoria in Dixie, it showed a shocked Union that the war was serious business—that the enemy was real, was capable…and would fight. The Union response, while often inept, would be serious, no-holds-barred warfare until the issue was settled.
At Every Shot a Convulsion
NEWSPAPERMAN HENRY VILLARDFOUND UNION COLONEL AMBROSE E. BURNSIDE, future general and commander of the Army of the Potomac, riding hatless and swordless in apparent pursuit of the rear during the Federal retreat at First Bull Run. “I am hurrying ahead to get rations for my command,” was Burnside’s entirely transparent explanation.
Another newsman, William Howard Russell of the London Times, later called home for displaying a pro-Union bias in his reportage of the American Civil War, was certainly unsparing in his description of the Union rout at First Bull Run—“‘Turn back! Retreat!’ shouted the men from the front. ‘We’re whipped, we’re whipped!’ They cursed and tugged at the horses’ heads and struggled with frenzy to get past.” A veteran war correspondent, Russell had never seen anything like this “cowardly rout—a miserable, causeless panic.” Not even as “alarms among camp followers” had he seen the like. “Negro servants on led horses dashed frantically past; men in uniform, whom it were a disgrace to the profession of arms to call ‘soldiers’ swarmed by on mules, chargers, and even draft horses, which had been cut out of carts or wagons, and went on with harness clinging to their heels, as frightened as their riders. Men literally screamed with rage and fright when their way was blocked.”
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