by Bruce Catton
6. Death of the Minute Man
PROBABLY IT would not have been quite so bad if the battle had not been fought on a Sunday. Because it was Sunday a great many people in Washington had nothing to do, and numbers of these precious folk had taken carriages, packed lunches, and ridden down through Centreville to make a picnic where they could have the pleasure of watching a battle. They had been coming down all morning and they had planted themselves on the easy slopes between Bull Run and the little brook known as Cub Run, a mile or so east of the battlefield, and there they stayed through the long afternoon, unable to see much except for the rising billows of gun smoke and the casual coming and going of military traffic along the highway, hearing the great crash of battle and entertaining themselves with the exchange of groundless rumors. Among them were Union officers who, having in one way or another got lost from their commands, elected to stay here among the holiday-makers, offering portentous explanations of the goings-on from which they had disengaged themselves. Many ladies were present, in their brightest summer frocks. Also present, by the best estimate one can make, were six United States Senators and at least ten Congressmen.
These holiday-makers were there, in substantial numbers, because it never occurred to the authorities to keep them from coming. They were there because curiosity and the strange notion that war was an exciting pageant had led them to suppose that it might be stimulating to watch (from a safe seat in the gallery) while young men killed one another. They were there, in short, because America did not yet know what it was all about; and because they were there they contributed mightily to the fact that an overstrained army driven from the field in defeat dissolved into a wild and disorderly rout which no man could stop.
At first it was just a retreat—broken, out of control, dismaying to the eye of a regular soldier, but a retreat rather than a screaming runaway. The men who had been driven from the Henry house hill and from the wooded country to the west were so confused and disorganized that it was impossible to get them to do any more fighting, but they had not fallen into self-accelerating panic. They had simply had all they were going to take, and they wanted to get back to some place where people would no longer be shooting at them, some place where they could sort themselves out, get something to eat and drink, and, above all things, lie down for a while. Some of them waded Bull Run where Sherman's brigade had crossed at noon, and the rest went up to the Sudley ford and came back roundabout, and they moved with an odd, beaten-up, almost casual briskness—not losing any time, but not exactly running, either. They had a rear guard—a regiment of regular infantry, a little cavalry, and a good battery—and the Confederates were not pressing them very hard. McDowell sent over to his far left, east of the little river, and brought up Louis Blenker's brigade and other troops to keep the Rebels from surging over the stone bridge, and he believed that at Centreville he could perhaps pull things together and make a stand.
But although it was only three miles from the bridge to Centreville, they were very bad miles and bad things happened on them. The picnickers had been noticing that increasing numbers of stragglers were drifting back along the highway, and as late afternoon came, these clotted groups got bigger and thicker, grimy men slouching along with or without weapons, accompanied by lumbering caissons, battery wagons, guns, and drifting white-topped wagons, moving with a little more urgency, overflowing at times from the road into the fields. It began to occur to the spectators that it would be well to get home, and the holiday carriages came wheeling down from the hillsides to get into the road; and before long the highway was full and there was a fine traffic jam in the making. The jam came, at last, partly by enemy action and partly by spontaneous combustion. Exultant Confederates near the stone bridge were firing cannon now and then, and one shell—it may have been the one fired by old man Ruffin himself—came arching in over everything and wrecked a wagon in the middle of the little bridge by which the main highway crossed Cub Run.
The bridge was blocked. Drivers on the Centreville side of it whipped up their horses to get out of danger, and drivers on the Bull Run side incontinently did the same, getting guns and wagons and carriages into a complete tangle, with horses rearing and kicking, teamsters swearing, ladies from Washington beginning to scream, the press of civilian vehicles constantly feeding in new elements which killed any faint hope that this traffic jam could be resolved. Some carriages trundled down to the little stream, lurched up on the far side, and made off for Washington as fast as maddened horses could take them. Here and there a mounted officer took fire along with all the rest and tried to ride through everything at a bucketing gallop. People who were moving on foot began to run, and off to the rear frightened men were yelling that Confederate cavalry was coming up to kill and maim— and, all at once, utter panic descended on everybody in sight.
The great drifting mass of fugitive soldiers, already out from under what little discipline they had ever known, moved faster and faster and became a wild, frantic, scrambling mob which generated its own unendurable pressure. Teamsters cut their horses loose and scrambled on their backs to ride to safety, leaving guns, caissons, and military supplies for anyone who cared to pick them up. Ambulances carrying wounded men to hospitals were left by the roadside. Soldiers who had thought they were too exhausted to do more than put one heavy foot in front of another found they could run very nimbly, and they dropped whatever they were carrying —muskets, haversacks, canteens, anything—so that they could run even faster. It was gabbled up and down the wild rout that armed Rebels were close behind; for some odd reason, the pursuing Confederates, believed to be as ruthless as Cossacks, were all thought to be riding black horses and frightened men were forever shouting: "Black horse cavalry! Black horse cavalry!"2
McDowell still had troops fit for service. Colonel Theodore Runyon's division, 5000 men or more, had been held in reserve east of Centreville, and it was brought forward to this little town and posted on the hill there, along with twenty guns. Blenker's brigade, bringing up the rear, was in good order, and there were other usable formations from what had been the extreme left. Major George Sykes came in with his battalion of regulars, men dead on their feet but still in good order. A little before six in the evening McDowell sent a wire to Washington, explaining that he had been driven from the battlefield and adding that "we have now to hold Centreville until our men can get behind it." But the men who got behind Centreville refused to stop, and a littie later McDowell was compelled to report: "The larger part of the men are a confused mob, entirely demoralized. It was the opinion of all the commanders that no stand could be made this side of the Potomac." Still later he had to admit that efforts to pull the army together at Fairfax Court House had failed; "many of the volunteers did not wait for authority to proceed to the Potomac but left on their own decision." There was nothing for it, he confessed, but to fall back all the way to Arlington and dig in to hold the Potomac River bridges.3 By far the bigger part of his army had simply gone out of existence and it would be days before it could be reconstituted.
In Washington, General Scott sent word to McDowell that he was getting reinforcements and wrote stoutly: "We are not discouraged." But the dimensions of the disaster were visibly expanding, and the old general became genuinely alarmed. The navy was asked to send a warship over to Alexandria to command the Potomac with its guns. Authorities in New York and Pennsylvania were urged to send troops forward as quickly as possible. The commander of troops at Baltimore was alerted, lest that city rise in open revolt. To McClellan, far off in the Vhginia mountains, went an order to move over into the Shenandoah Valley at once "and make head against the enemy in that quarter." This was countermanded, a few hours later, and McClellan was told to stay where he was until further notice; reinforcements would be sent to him from Ohio. Then, at two o'clock in the morning, a third wire went to McClellan: "Circumstances make your presence here necessary. Charge Rosecrans or some other general with your present department and come hither without delay." McDowell's de
feat was beyond remedy. The government wanted a winner.4
Meanwhile the jubilant Confederates were taking stock of their victory and were trying to see whether it could not be made even bigger. The last of the beaten Federals were driven from the field of battle, cavalry was ordered forward to harass the retreat, and from the extreme right, troops were told to move up to Centreville with all speed. Yet there was a good deal of confusion, most of it arising from the fact that to an untrained army, overwhelming victory can be almost as great a shock as overwhelming defeat. False reports of a Union counter-stroke caused the troops on the right to do a good deal of useless maneuvering, and when the misunderstanding was cleared up it was too late and too dark to do anything. On the main highway the "black horse cavalry" which had caused so much panic was not actually strong enough to overpower McDowell's rear guard. The squadrons reached the site of the original traffic jam at Cub Run, seized the military booty which had been abandoned there, captured large numbers of stragglers (including one life-sized U. S. Congressman, who was sent off to Richmond), and in the end could do little more than speed the departing Federals on their way. At Johnston's headquarters President Davis met with Johnston and Beauregard and other officers to appraise what had been gained and to see whether anything more could be done.
The victory looked big enough, in all conscience. Mr. Davis wired the War Department that "our forces have won a glorious victory," saying without exaggeration that "the enemy was routed and fled precipitately" with heavy loss. Beauregard recorded the capture of twenty-eight guns, thirty-seven caissons, a huge quantity of ammunition, and seemingly endless amounts of small arms, accouterments, blankets, hospital stores, haversacks, wagons, ambulances, and other valuable items. Something like 1300 prisoners had been taken. There were a great many dead Yankees on the field—close to 500 of them, it would develop, when all the returns were in—and there was something about the way in which McDowell's offensive had collapsed which led the more hopeful to feel that Southern independence had been just about gained.5
The high command was not deceived. Both Beauregard and Johnston knew that their army had had a very rough time of it; to organize, within an hour or two, an effective force that could drive on through the night in real pursuit seemed to them out of the question. Still, if the President ordered it, they would try it.
Mr. Davis was disposed to order it. Around eleven o'clock a staff officer came in bearing a report from another officer who said that he had gone all the way to Centreville and who reported that the Yankees were rushing through that hamlet in a state of total panic; and Mr. Davis dictated an order for immediate pursuit. Then came second thoughts. Someone recalled that the officer who sent in this report was an old army man whose nickname had always been "Crazy"— an eccentric, given to wild excitement, not altogether to be trusted. The dictated order was not issued. It was agreed, finally, that at dawn infantry should be sent forward to make a reconnaissance in force, and the conference came to an end. The victorious army would rest. Later it could move on and occupy the territory which the Federals were so hastily abandoning.8
There was much argument about this, later on. In the light of fuller knowledge it came to seem that the war might really have been won then and there if the routed Federals had been pressed vigorously. Stonewall Jackson had said that with 5000 fresh troops he could be in Washington by the next day, and although he went unheard at the time— and even if he had been heard, he then lacked the stature to make his words listened to—many Confederates eventually came to believe that inaction on the night of July 21 had wasted a glorious victory. In the end it was even held that it was President Davis who was chiefly responsible.
The thing can be seen more clearly now, with much hindsight, than it could be seen then, and it appears that the Confederacy really lost very little. Washington was not actually open to a sudden easy capture by any force that could have been brought against it on July 22 or July 23. Most of McDowell's army had indeed been blown apart, but even on the night of the disastrous retreat he still had close to 10,000 men who had fought little or not at all, who were still responsive to as much discipline as any volunteer army then possessed, and who had not given way to panic. The Potomac at Washington is wide and deep, and if Johnston's army was to enter the capital, it would have to use the bridges. Enough troops were at hand to hold those bridges until reinforcements could come down from the North. Johnston could have had his army follow on McDowell's heels, but almost certainly he could have done little more than he finally did do—occupy the Centreville ridge in force, build fortifications there, hold the place throughout the winter, and keep his outposts close enough to the Potomac so that on clear days they could see the unfinished dome of the Capitol building. The notion that the Confederate army could have walked into Washington within twenty-four hours will hardly bear analysis.7
Yet it was the wild, unreasoning panic of the Union army that was remembered, and the memory of it became an important factor in the war which had at last begun. Because there had been this panic, publicly displayed for all to see, burning deep into the consciousness of an overconfident people, things hereafter would be done differently. Nothing less than this, probably, could have stirred the North so profoundly. When the helpless fighting lines sagged away from the murky slopes of the Henry house hill and streamed off to look for safety, the country at last began to wake up to reality.
Washington saw the worst of it. The sorry picnic crowd which came back all bedraggled and frightened had seen none of the valor and endurance which the soldiers had displayed on the field of battle. They had seen only the disgraceful runaway, to which by their own presence they had contributed so greatly, and their stories lost nothing in the telling. Most of the newspaper correspondents had been caught up in the rout—among them Mr. Russell, of the London Times, who wrote so graphically about what he had seen that Northerners denounced him as a defeatist and a pro-Confederate—and their accounts showed the beaten army at its worst. Furthermore, all of the broken troops hurried straight to Washington, where everyone could see them. They came shambling in all through July 22 while a sullen rain came down, each man a visible proof of disaster, sauntering in singly, in disordered squads, downcast, streaked with dirt, almost out of their heads with weariness, a huge audience watching each and all.
Walt Whitman wrote that the downtown streets were crowded with civilians, who stared in silence at this formless procession. At least half of the lookers-on, he said, were secessionists, grinning triumphantly. By noon Washington was "all over motley with these defeated soldiers—queer-looking objects, strange eyes and faces, drench'd (the steady rain drizzles on all day) and fearfully worn, hungry, haggard, blister'd in the feet." Some people set out food and drink, standing in the rain for hours to give hungry men refreshment; yet most of the soldiers seemed to want rest more than anything else. They flopped down on sidewalks, on the steps of houses, on vacant lots, in the lee of fences and store buildings, and fell asleep in the rain. The barrooms meanwhile began to fill with officers, each one reciting his own story of catastrophe, each one (since men are human) putting the guilt off his own shoulders and blaming other people. The crush at Willard's roused Whitman's special wrath. "There you are, shoulder-straps!" he wrote. "But where are your companies? Where are your men? Incompetents! never tell of chances of battle, of getting stray'd, and the like. I think this is your work, this retreat, after all. Sneak, blow, put on airs, there in Willard's sumptuous parlors and barrooms, or anywhere—no explanation shall save you. Bull Run is your work; had you been half or one-tenth worth your men, this would never have happened."8
There was some point to Whitman's remarks. The Union army had actually done as well as anyone had any right to expect, and if at last it had collapsed, the fault lay much more with its company and regimental officers than with the men in the ranks. More than a fourth of the army had never been put into action at all. The ones who did fight lost between 450 and 500 in killed, more than 1100 men wounded
, and between 1500 and 1800 missing in action—captured, most of these latter, many of them wounded, a few of them killed. By the bloody standards of later battles these losses were not excessive, but they were not light, either; for troops that were almost totally unready for battle, they were extremely impressive. Confederate losses were smaller, but they were equally impressive. Between one fourth and one third of the Confederate army had not fought at all; the casualty list ran to about 400 killed, more than 1500 wounded, and thirteen missing. The battle had lasted for more than seven hours. On both sides it had been fought by men so poorly trained that it was almost impossible for them to maneuver under fire. The wonder is, not that the affair broke up in a rout, but that it lasted as long as it did and was fought with so much courage and determination.9
What Washington saw the whole country saw. To timid people, the defeat and the rout looked like the end of everything. Horace Greeley, who had shouted "Forward to Richmond!" so long and so hard that McDowell's advance had come to seem a move undertaken to satisfy an editor, was unhinged by the news. A week after the battle he wrote Lincoin a letter full of almost incoherent woe. He suspected that the cause was lost. "On every brow," he cried, "sits sullen, scorching, black despair. . . . If it is best for the country and for mankind that we make peace with the Rebels at once and on their own terms, do not shrink even from that." He confessed himself "hopelessly broken," and begged the President to tell him what he should do. His state of mind was all the worse, perhaps, because for two days his New York Tribune had been playing up the battle as a great Union victory. When he got around to editorializing on the subject, he wrote: "We have fought and been beaten. God forgive our rulers that this is so; but it is true, and cannot be disguised." He demanded that the cabinet be dismissed so that the President could have better advisers, and concluded with an optimism which he did not feel: "Our banner, now drooping, will soon float once more in triumph over the whole land. With the right men to lead, our people will show themselves unconquerable. Onward, then, to victory and glory."10