And their only reply when Russell asked what had happened was the refrain, “We’re whipped” or “We’re repulsed.”
The Englishman, a witness to the Crimean War and other British conflicts, wrote that the road from Centreville to the rear toward Washington presented the scene of a totally demoralized army. “Drivers flogged, lashed, spurred, and beat their horses, or leaped down and abandoned their teams and ran by the side of the road; mounted men, servants and men in uniform, vehicles of all sorts, commissariat wagons thronged the narrow ways. At every shot a convulsion, as it were, seized upon the morbid mass of bones, sinew, wood, and iron, and thrilled through it, giving new energy and action to its desperate efforts to get free from itself.”
This was the battle, of course, that had attracted innocent—ignorant, too— sightseers from the nation’s capital. They had gone over the Potomac with picnic baskets to see the Rebs chased away with a whiff of Union grapeshot.
Among the onlookers, Republican Representative Albert G. Riddle of Ohio and two other House members, plus a constituent from Cleveland, went forth early that Sunday morning with “a strong carriage, a pair of stout horses, a good driver, a hamper of lunch, and four of the largest Navy revolvers,” Riddle later wrote. They traveled beyond Centreville, site of Irwin McDowell’s headquarters. They passed William Tecumseh Sherman’s troops. The Union soldiers they encountered said the enemy—the Rebs—were in retreat. But later in the day, that tide turned. More and more of the men they saw seemed to drift, then hurry, back toward Centreville.
Unsuccessful in finding defined front lines, Riddle’s own party was now headed back, but at fairly leisurely pace. From his seat in the right-hand front of the carriage, the congressman was surprised to see “a small body of cavalry turn the angle of [a distant] wood, and head toward us at full speed.”
It was a puzzle. “Of course I supposed they were our men, or why were they there? But why were they in such a hurry? The whole army I thought was between them and the enemy.”
The explanation dawned when Riddle saw the Union stragglers around his carriage spring to life and run to a nearby fence with their weapons “in position to fire.” Riddle leaped from the carriage with his revolver after shouting to his companions, “These are Rebs! Jump out and be ready for them.”
They were Rebs at that, but they halted fifty or sixty yards away, their charge discouraged by the “stout Virginia fence” between the congressmen and the cavalrymen. They fired their carbines, however, and killed at least one Union man, David McCook, “a private and a hospital guard.” (For more on the McCooks, see The Fighting McCooks on page 172.)
Riddle’s fellow Yankees returned the fire. As a result, “two or three horses” ran off riderless with the Confederate cavalry troop.
It was right after this that Riddle and his companions saw what had begun as an orderly Union retreat turn into absolute, mindless panic. Nothing—no plea nor threat—could stop the terrified Union soldiers or their wagon drivers (teamsters). “Off they went, one and all, off down the highway, over across their fields towards the woods, anywhere, everywhere, to escape.”
The Riddle carriage itself was swept up in the surge, he reported. It could be upset or broken up at any moment, but the driver’s skill and the strength of the two horses kept the carriage intact and stable. Yet another danger also loomed. “The poor, demented, exhausted wretches, who could not climb into the high, closed baggage wagons, made frantic efforts to get onto and into our carriage.”
As Riddle’s “wretches” grabbed at every handhold offered by his tossing vehicle, their sheer weight slowed it down to a standstill. “We had to be rough with them,” Riddle explained in an account that later propelled him into controversy back home in Ohio, “and thrust them out and off.” He and one companion guarded the doors with their pistols.
But then, “one poor devil did get in, and we lugged the pitiful coward a mile or two. He wore major’s straps, was hatless, and had thrown away his sword; finally I opened the door, and he tumbled—or was tumbled out.”
Minutes later, Riddle and party came across a “poor drummer boy struggling under the horses’ feet.” Riddle rescued the boy “with much difficulty” and took him in the carriage. They also took aboard an exhausted New York soldier who had somehow lost hat, coat, and even shoes. They dropped both off at Centreville and resumed their journey back to Washington. On the way, however, they halted and joined forces with two U.S. senators and a visiting Michigan officer to form a line across the road to stop the headlong retreat toward Washington. The seven “with loud cries…confronted the on-sweeping multitude filling the broad road…and with our weapons we commanded an immediate halt then and there, on pain of instant loss of brains, which none of them would miss.”
It was a dangerous moment. An angry teamster who had cut his horse loose from a wagon for the flight from the battlefields shot the visiting Michigan officer in the wrist with a revolver, then dashed on down the road. Still, if Riddle’s story is to be entirely believed, the others held their thin line. “As the multitude, thus damned up, swelled and raged, the pressure upon us became very great. Loud cries and threats reached us in the deepening twilight.”
Just when Riddle’s small congressional line was about to be burst asunder by the swelling mob, a colonel with the 2nd New York turned out his men from their encampment at nearby Fairfax Courthouse and “took the tumultuous mass of fugitives off our hands.”
As Riddle said, it was getting dark by this time. He didn’t reach his boardinghouse quarters in town until 2 a.m., and he was too keyed up after the day’s events to sleep even then.
The next day Washington, of course, was full of “the wildest rumors” and a good many fears. Wouldn’t the Rebs now take advantage of their good fortune and march on into Washington?
First Postmortem
FEW OF THE PARTICIPANTS AT GROUND LEVEL, LIMITED TO A WORM’S-EYE VIEW OF the battle, realized at first what had happened…or why. Only later, after the smoke had cleared, did the many facets of the clash become evident. For starters, Irwin McDowell had marched southwest from Alexandria, Virginia, on the Potomac to Centreville in northern Virginia, nearly thirty miles. He had with him a veritable host of thirty-five thousand troops, but many were raw militia with short-term enlistments…and precious little training.
McDowell at first faced Pierre G. T. Beauregard’s twenty thousand Confederates at the strategic Manassas rail depot. McDowell then moved out on July 18, 1861, and took two entire days to reach the creek called Bull Run, just beyond Centreville. In the interim, the Confederates were using the time to rush reinforcements, commanded by Joseph E. Johnston, from the upper Shenandoah Valley near Harpers Ferry (they came by train to Manassas, a feat considered the first strategic use of rails in the history of warfare). Johnston brought nine thousand troops, and they enabled Beauregard to hold the line and even to counterattack after McDowell finally mounted his main assault on Sunday, July 21.
Following the feint to his left, McDowell drove against his foe’s left with three divisions that crossed Bull Run at Sudley Springs. The left Rebel flank was pushed back to Henry House Hill, where Thomas Jackson and his brigade so famously held like a “stone wall.”
This was in the morning, and the front stretched for fourteen miles. Meanwhile, both sides rushed more men to the west, in the direction of McDowell’s main attack. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon when the tide changed direction, and instead of a Union attack, it was suddenly a Confederate one. At first the retreat of the Federal right toward Centreville was orderly, but then the famous panic set in, and the retreat became a rout. The South had won the first major battle of the Civil War, with casualties for both sides that were a shock… and yet nothing in comparison with what was to come. On this day 2,896 Federals were killed, wounded, or captured, compared to 1,982 Confederates.
Why did the victorious Confederate forces not pursue the foe all the way into the nation’s capital, possibly to end the Civil Wa
r then and there?
General Johnston once explained:
My failure to capture Washington received general condemnation. Many erroneously attributed it to the President’s prohibition; but Mr. Davis expressed neither wish nor opinion on the subject.
The conditions forbade an attempt on Washington. The Confederate army was more disorganized by victory than that of the United States by defeat.
Besides, the reasons for our course were unfitness of raw troops for assailing entrenchments; the fortifications upon which skillful engineers had been engaged since April; the Potomac, a mile wide, bearing the United States vessels of war, which commanded the bridges and the southern shores.
The Confederate army would have been two days in marching from Bull Run to the Federal entrenchments, with less than two days’ rations, or not more. It is asserted that the country could have furnished food and forage in abundance. Those who make this assertion forget that a large Federal army had passed twice over the route in question. As we had none of the means of besieging, an immediate assault upon the forts would have been unavoidable; it would have been repelled, inevitably, and our half supply of ammunition exhausted; and the enemy, increased by the army from Harpers Ferry, could have resumed their march to Richmond without opposition.
And, if we had miraculously been successful in an assault, the Potomac still would have protected Washington and rendered our further progress impossible.
As for McDowell, he had explanations, too:
It was now about 3 o’clock in the afternoon. Three times had the enemy been repulsed and driven back from the Henry House plateau. The third time it was supposed by us all that the repulse was final, for he was driven entirely from the hill, so far beyond it as not to be in sight, and all were certain the day was ours.
The enemy was evidently disheartened and broken. But we had then been fighting since 10:30 o’clock in the morning, the men had been up since 2 o’clock and had made what to those unused to such things seemed a long march, though the longest distance gone over was not more than nine and a half miles; and although they had had three days’ provisions served out to them the day before, many, no doubt, either had not gotten them or had thrown them away, and were therefore without food. They had done much severe fighting.
It was at this time that the enemy’s reinforcements came to his aid from the railroad train. They threw themselves in the woods on our right and opened fire on our men, which caused them to break and retire down the hillside. This soon degenerated into disorder, for which there was no remedy. Every effort was made to rally them, even beyond the reach of the enemy’s fire, but in vain. The battalion of regular infantry alone maintained itself until our men could get back to the position we had occupied in the morning.
The retreating current passed slowly through Centreville to the rear. The enemy followed us and, owing to the rear becoming blocked, caused us much damage, for the artillery could not pass, and several pieces and caissons had to be abandoned. In the panic the horses hauling caissons and ammunition were cut from their traces and used for escape, and in this way much confusion was caused, the panic aggravated and the road encumbered.
By sundown it became a question whether we should endeavor to make a stand at Centreville. The condition of our artillery and its ammunition, the want of food for the men, and the utter disorganization and demoralization of the mass of the army seemed to admit of no alternative but to fall back. Our decision had been anticipated by the troops, most of them being already on the road to the rear.
Sherman’s Threat Appealed
AT FIRST BULL RUN, THE UNION SIDE WAS NOTED IN SOME QUARTERS FOR ITS ninety-day wonders, men whose three-month enlistments were up just about the time of the great battle. The New York Herald’s Henry Villard, for instance, rushing to file his story on its outcome, encountered an entire regiment of Pennsylvania ninety-dayers leaving the scene because, they said, their enlistments had expired.
Villard could only report the fact, but William Tecumseh Sherman, encountering one such ninety-day wonder in his own command, resorted to sterner measures. Sherman, a colonel and a Union brigade leader at the time, was busy in the days after the disastrous rout preparing his men for the possibility of a renewed Rebel drive. “We took it for granted,” he later wrote, “that the Rebels would be on our heels and accordingly prepared to defend our posts.”
Among his problems, however, were the short-termers in his command. They were “extremely tired of the war and wanted to go home,” he reported. “Some of them were so mutinous, at one time, that I threatened to open fire on them, if they dared to leave camp without orders.”
Sherman kept his men busy and under control with drills, exercises, and roll call that only he, in person, could dismiss. But then came the open, highly visible, defiance of an officer from New York, a lawyer in civilian life who had the nerve to approach Sherman after reveille one morning. He announced that he was leaving for New York that very day. Sherman replied, “I do not remember to have signed a leave for you,” and would have moved on.
But that was not the end of the encounter. As “a good many soldiers” stopped to listen, the errant officer said he had signed up for three months, his three months were up, and he was going home. Sherman realized that if this officer defied him, the onlookers also would. “So I turned on him sharp and said: ‘Captain, you are a soldier and must submit to orders till you are properly discharged. If you attempt to leave without orders, I will shoot you like a dog!’” For the moment, that was an end to their conversation.
Later the same day, Sherman spotted a carriage approaching with both President Lincoln and his secretary of state, William Seward, sitting side by side inside the open hack. Sherman had posted himself by the roadside by the time they drew abreast. They stopped, and he asked if they were going to his encampment. Lincoln said, “Yes, we heard that you had got over the big scare [of First Bull Run], and we thought we would come over and see the boys.”
Sherman joined them in their carriage to show the way while one of his men was sent racing ahead to alert Sherman’s command that the president was coming.
On the way, Sherman was pleased to discover that Lincoln “was full of feeling and wanted to encourage our men.” But when he announced he wished to address them, Sherman asked Lincoln “to discourage all cheering” and said there had been enough of that “to ruin any set of men.” What was needed now, Sherman said, were “cool, thoughtful, hard-fighting soldiers—no more hurrahing, no more humbug.”
Lincoln “took my remarks in perfect good nature,” then delivered “one of the neatest, best and most feeling addresses I ever listened to, referring to our late disaster at Bull Run, the high duties that still devolved on us and the brighter days to come.”
Before finishing, Lincoln assured the troops that they could appeal to him in person to right any wrongs done to them. That was when Sherman again heard from the New York captain who had buttonholed him that very morning. The man’s “face was pale and his lips compressed” as he pushed his way forward to the presidential carriage and addressed Lincoln with words that Sherman would never forget. “Mr. President,” said the New York advocate, “I have a cause of grievance. This morning I went to speak to Colonel Sherman, and he threatened to shoot me.”
Lincoln coolly glanced from one man to the other, Sherman later related, then stooped low and told the complaining officer in a perfectly audible stage whisper, “Well, if I were you and Colonel Sherman threatened to shoot, I would not trust him for, by Heaven, I believe he would do it.” And that was that. Lincoln never even asked what their dispute was about.
Head of the Passes
IF FIRST BULL RUN (FIRST MANASSAS) WAS THE FIRST MAJOR LAND BATTLE OF the Civil War, and a stinging defeat for the Union at that, what was its equivalent on water? And who came away the victor?
One early sea battle between North and South came on October 12, 1861, at the Head of the Passes below New Orleans in the delta of the mighty Mississipp
i River. Here were both an early clash and a historic engagement for an ironclad. Here, too, Lilliputians did their best to entrap a few “Gullivers.” The action that took place would probably have come about at some early point anyway, but it was U.S. Navy veteran George N. Hollins who had the aggressive instinct to move events along to their climax.
The great river, a pulsating artery leading into the heart of America, was vital to commerce and crucial to both sides’ military strategies. Whoever controlled the Head of the Passes controlled access to and from the seas beyond.
Leading to the Gulf of Mexico from the lower Mississippi was a fan of outgoing channels. Above the fan, however, was a single channel, a “handle” to the fan that was navigable to large ships—the Head of the Passes. It was no surprise, then, that the Union Navy moved quickly to establish there a blockading flotilla of four ships: the screw steamer Richmond as flagship, the paddlewheel steamer Water Witch, and the sailing vessels Preble and Vincennes.
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