by Bruce Catton
McDowell had made a good plan and except for delays here and there he was executing it tolerably well; but he was leading an army bigger than the one Winfield Scott had commanded in Mexico and neither he nor his subordinates knew quite how to go about it, and so the great attack came in by driblets, a series of well-intentioned taps rather than one heavy smash. The head of his column consisted of four regiments, one from New Hampshire, two from Rhode Island, and one from New York, the lot of them commanded by an imposing-looking colonel with magnificent sideburns, Ambrose E. Burnside, who was accompanied today by the wealthy young governor of Rhode Island, William Sprague. (In this innocent early morning of the war it seemed perfectly natural for a governor to accompany his state's troops, to encourage them, and perhaps to lend a hand with their leadership.) These soldiers had been on their feet for six hours and they were tired and hungry, and afterward they remembered the opening of the battle as slightly unreal. They had tramped past a cabin where an excited woman kept shouting that there were enough Confederates up ahead, including her own husband, to whip the lot of them, and when the firing began, the men were fascinated and a little appalled by the strange whirring noise the bullets were making just overhead. Getting from a long column of fours into a fighting line two ranks deep and four regiments wide was an intricate business, and Burnside's soldiers did it clumsily. One man fell off a rail fence and broke his bayonet, and others were showered with chaff and bits of dead grass when a shell blew up a haystack behind which they had been huddling; and when at last the men were deployed, they lay on their stomachs and began to return the Rebels' fire, shooting wildly but making an impressive racket.3
Shanks Evans's men were badly outnumbered and they were every bit as green as Burnside's, but they could hold their own against an attack no more resolute than this one.
Yet as the morning wore on, things got a good deal tougher. Two first-rate regular batteries reached the scene and began to hammer the Confederate line, and the sluggish Federal marching column was slowly but steadily pushing men up to the zone of action. (The colonel commanding one Federal division, a grumpy old regular named Samuel P. Heintzelman, noticed when he crossed at Sudley ford that there seemed to be no higher officers around to tell him what to do; he was even more disturbed to see, off to the west, immense clouds of smoke against the clear sky, and he believed that this meant that Johnston's army was coming in from the Shenandoah.)4 Burnside's men managed to make two attacks and were knocked back, disorganized and through for the day, but other men were coming up to take their place, and Evans's men were badly cut up and out of order, too; and Evans, seeing at last that he could not stay where he was without help, sent back desperate appeals for reinforcements. Up to the rescue came a brigade from Johnston's army, men from Mississippi, Alabama, and North Carolina led by Brigadier General Barnard Bee, a first-rate soldier who had a certain gift for making a memorable phrase. Stiffened, the Southerners held, and from the rear, Confederate artillery began to pound the Federal advance.
Back by the ford McDowell was trying to add weight to his attack. He got Heintzelman's command forward, and he sent word downstream to Tyler to make more of a fight of it. The stone bridge itself struck Tyler as a bad place to cross, but half a mile above it he had a brigade led by cross-grained Sherman—the same who had been an unhappy bystander during the street fighting in St. Louis—and Sherman found a place where his men could wade across the river. He got them over, and brought them into the fight on the left of McDowell's line, other regiments from Tyler's command following him. The pressure grew heavier and heavier, and before noon the Confederates were overpowered. They ran back, going clear across the turnpike, splashing through a muddy creek known as Young's branch, and climbing the slope of an imposing hill to the south, a hill which took its name from a family named Henry, which had a farmhouse on the crest. Here they found help—South Carolina troops led by that legendary planter Wade Hampton, and a couple of Georgia regiments under a Colonel Francis S. Bartow— and on the level top of the hill they made a new line. Federal skirmishers kept peppering them, and north of the turnpike an overpowering mass of troops was obviously regrouping for a new attack. If this Confederate line should break, the whole Confederate flank would be gone and the Federals would have won the battle.8
By this time the Confederate high command had caught on to what was happening. Johnston had sent forward those elements of his own army that were at hand; now he was seeing heavier and heavier dust clouds from the direction of Sudley Springs, and he realized that the decisive action was going to be fought near the turnpike, just west of the stone bridge. He began to order troops from the right over to the left, letting Beauregard's planned offensive collapse of its own weight, and at last, growing more and more uneasy, he gestured toward the north with a toss of his head and snapped: "The battle is over there—I am going." He got on his horse and went galloping toward the Henry house hill. Beauregard (who had been having doubts of his own) delayed only long enough to order more of the men on the right to go post-haste over to the left, and then mounted and raced after him. Just before the two men got to the scene of action, the five Virginia regiments led by Brigadier General Jackson marched up and took position. Jackson carefully posted them far enough away from the brow of the hill so that the Federals would have to get all the way to the top in order to shoot at them effectively.6
From the Confederate right to the left was a long way, the roads were bad, and the day was very hot, and the raw Confederate regiments hurrying over to get into the fight were no better at cross-country marching than the Yankees had been. Men tramping forward with fixed bayonets broke ranks to go out in the fields and eat blackberries. (No one ever tallied the number of boys who died that day with blackberry stains on their lips; it would make a good footnote to military history, if the proper figures could ever be gathered.) The on-coming Confederates stopped to drink at little brooks, they gaped at the wounded men who were drifting to the rear, and they plodded on through dust so thick that no man could see much more than the back of the man in front of him. (One officer, seeing from a hill top a billowing dust cloud off to the northwest, where the road from the Shenandoah came in, believed that this meant that Patterson's Federals were coming in, and felt that the battle probably was lost.) In effect, Johnston and Beauregard were trying to realign their entire army in the middle of a battie and it was slow work. The whole fight had suddenly become a struggle for the Henry hill; it was being waged, on both sides, by boys who were tired, hot, and thirsty, who in all of the marching had lost all sense of direction.7
On the hill top the tempo was picking up after a brief lull. It was close to noon now, and the Federal line was very long; those two fine regular batteries were firing effectively, the Federal regiments were edging forward, and the Confederate line wavered. Evans's weary brigade was disorganized, and Bee's men were sagging toward the rear; they suffered, apparently, from the weakness common to all green troops— the tendency to fire and then to drop back a few feet before reloading for another volley—and Bartow was appealing to the pride of his two regiments. Flag in his hand, he cried out: "General Beauregard says you must hold this position —Georgians, I appeal to you to hold on!" Then a Yankee bullet found him and he fell dead. An increasing number of men from the firing line drifted back to a little ravine, and Beauregard was there, rallying them; a Federal shell exploded under his horse, killing the animal, leaving the general unhurt. Farther to the rear, Johnston was trying to get fresh troops up to the line; and the Henry house plateau was full of smoke and crashing noise and sudden death, with the Federals visibly gaining the upper hand. If Beauregard could stiffen his men enough to hold on until the men Johnston was calling showed up, well and good; if he could not, disaster was at hand.8
Then came a dramatic moment, to live in legend, giving the American story one of its unforgettable names. Of the 6000 Confederate soldiers on this broad hill top, at least half had lost their organization and were out of the fight; only J
ackson's brigade and Wade Hampton's South Carolinians remained in line, waiting for the final onslaught. General Bee was trying desperately to reorganize his men; all of his field officers were down, and he seemed to command no more than a fragment, and he rode to Jackson and said, despairingly: "General, they are beating us back." Wholly unperturbed, Jackson replied: "Sir, we will give them the bayonet." Bee rode off through the smoke to an unwieldy tangle of stragglers, stood erect in his stirrups, and gestured with his sword to the solidity of Jackson's brigade. "Look!" he shouted. "There is Jackson standing like a stone wall! Rally behind the Virginians!"
It was Bee's final contribution. A bullet struck him in the abdomen, knocking him off his horse with a mortal wound; but at least some of his men responded and sorted themselves out into a fighting line, and the rallying cry was always remembered. Jackson would be Stonewall, thence forward and forever.9
Later in the war, after he had become very famous, Jackson insisted that the nickname really belonged to his brigade rather than to himself; it was the firmness of the men in the ranks, he said, that saved the day on the Henry house hill, and after Jackson's death the Confederate government officially designated this unit the Stonewall Brigade. Yet the instinct that led men to give the name to the general was sound, for this was a battle in which—more, perhaps, than in any other fight in the war—much depended on the brigade and division commanders. The soldiers themselves were first-rate men, but they were pitifully untrained, and they needed leadership far more than battle-tested veterans would ever need it. In most units, in both armies, the leadership which ordinarily comes from company and field officers was almost non-existent. In the blind turmoil of battle, companies and regiments were fragmented and lost; they had to have a man on horseback to pull them together and tell them what to do. Jackson's Virginians were not better men than the confused thousands all about them—except that they had Jackson. With him, they were a stone wall, immovable in a dissolving world.
. . . Wholly characteristic is the adventure that befell young Captain Delaware Kemper, who commanded a Virginia battery off on the Confederate left. Momentarily detached from his battery, Captain Kemper stumbled into the middle of a Yankee regiment in a smoke-filled thicket and he was ordered, with a dozen muskets leveled at him, to surrender. He replied that he would give up his sword to a qualified officer, but his captors explained that all of their officers had vanished and they did not know where to find any others. Stiffly, Captain Kemper insisted that he would surrender only to an officer; and so he and the Yankees set off through the woods to find one—blundering, at last, into a Confederate regiment, which released Captain Kemper and sent the unofficered Federals off in headlong flight.10
Mid-afternoon came, and of the 18,000 Federals who had crossed the river, McDowell was able to get perhaps 10,000 lined up for an assault on the Henry house bill. He was isolated from the rest of his army; Tyler never did manage to force his way across the stone bridge, although a good many of his men had gone across by Sherman's ford, and there was an open gap between the attacking column and the troops east of Bull Run. The gap could have been closed. Tyler's troops could have swept across the bridge without great trouble, and upstream Burnside's soldiers lay idle in a safe wooded hollow, resting from their morning's work; they could have marched downstream almost unopposed, uncovering the bridge and linking the two halves of the army. It seems to have occurred to no one that these things ought to be done.
At last McDowell's line moved forward. There were four brigades in line, and yet the assault was made by separate regiments, rather than by one solid mass; try as they would, McDowell's officers seemed unable to bring their brigades in as co-ordinated units. To stiffen the attack, McDowell sent those two regular batteries forward, instructing their commanders, Captains J. B. Ricketts and Charles Griffin, to get onto the high ground just south of the Henry house and pound the Confederate line at close range. Ricketts and Griffin did as they were told, but they got ahead of the line of infantry and were exposed to a deadly fire of musketry, some of which came from infantrymen who huddled behind the Henry house, which stood near the brow of the hill. The Federal gunners fired a few rounds at the house to dislodge them; in the process they killed eighty-four-year-old Mrs. Judith Henry, mistress of the house, who lay a helpless invalid in one of the bedrooms and who died when shells crashed through the walls and exploded in her bedroom.11
Federal infantry was sent forward to support the batteries,
Ellsworth's famous Fire Zouaves and a battalion of United States Marines, but Jeb Stuart had brought his Virginia cavalry regiment down from the valley and he led a hot charge along the turnpike, crashing straight through the Fire Zouaves and scattering them. The marine detachment was composed wholly of recruits who had been in service no more than three weeks, and when Confederate fire hit them, they broke and ran for the rear. Gruff Heintzelman tried to rally the fleeing Zouaves and marines but could not; he wrote afterward that the men would run a hundred yards, turn around and fire wildly toward the front, and then run some more, their discipline wholly gone. A Confederate regiment in blue uniforms came close to the Federal guns, which held their fire, thinking these men were Northerners; the Confederates fired a volley at close range, and a Union officer watching the business from afar through field glasses wrote that "it seemed as though every man and horse of that battery just laid right down and died right off."12
McDowell himself was on the hill top now, climbing to the upper floor of the Henry house for a better view. His men crossed the plateau, were driven back, reformed, tried it again. Off to the west new Union brigades crossed the turnpike and marched up the valley to outflank the Confederate line, and it seemed as if Union victory might be at hand. But the attack was much less solid than it looked. A Confederate officer coming to the front met a friend and asked how things were going, and was given the confident answer. "Them Yankees are just marchin' up and bein' shot to hell." A newspaper correspondent in the Confederate ranks scribbled that "for one long mile the whole valley is a boiling crater of dust and smoke," and in this murky fog the Union advance wholly lost its cohesion. Strong Confederate reinforcements came up on the left: Jubal Early's brigade, from Beauregard's right, and a brigade from Johnston's army led by Edmund Kirby Smith, just off the train. These got on the flank of the Federal advance and crumpled it. Beauregard led a counter-attack across the Henry house hill, the Federal batteries were overrun—and suddenly the whole Union army was in retreat, heading for the fords and safety.13
McDowell and his officers did their best to reorganize the men and make a stand, but the effort was hopeless. These untrained regiments had simply been used beyond their capacity and they had fallen apart. One officer estimated that by this time there were more than 12,000 Federals on the field who had entirely lost their regimental organization; they could no longer be handled as troops because men and officers were not together. Captain D. P. Woodbury, of the Corps of Engineers, noted the profound difference between veterans and raw recruits: "An old soldier feels safe in the ranks, unsafe out of the ranks, and the greater the danger the more pertinaciously he clings to his place. The volunteer of three months never attains this instinct of discipline. Under danger and even under mere excitement he flies away from his ranks and looks for safety in dispersion." The vast majority now was looking for safety, and there was nothing McDowell or anyone else could do but try to herd the disorganized crowd back out of range.14
As a matter of fact, much the same sort of thing had happened to a good part of the Confederate army. Porter Alexander, riding to the rear just after the moment of victory, wrote that he found so many panicky stragglers behind the lines that he would have believed the Confederates had been defeated if he had not already seen them winning. President Jefferson Davis came up from Richmond, reaching Manassas and leaving the cars just about the time when the tide was turning, and he got the same impression. To a mounted aide he remarked grimly that "fields are not won where men desert their colors
as ours are doing," and as he rode through a dense throng of displaced soldiers near a field hospital, he undertook to rally the men, crying: "I am President Davis! Follow me back to the field!" Stonewall Jackson was near by, getting a wound in his hand dressed. His doctor told him what the President was saying, and Jackson shouted: "We have whipped them! They ran like sheep! Give me 5000 fresh men and I will be in Washington City tomorrow!"
A Confederate battery drew up on the turnpike to hammer the retreating Federals. Riding along on one of the gun carriages was indomitable old Edmund Ruffin, who had hiked by himself all the way over from his post on the Confederate right, carrying his musket. When the first gun was unlimbered, the gunners asked the old man to fire it. He jerked the lanyard, and planted a shell in the middle of a flying tangle of Federal soldiers who were running madly for the rear.15