by Bruce Catton
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 Lincoln 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
Fortunately for the Union cause, Greeley’s reaction was not typical. A Connecticut clergyman, in a sermon delivered a week after Bull Run, preached from a text in Proverbs, asserting that “adversity kills only where there is a weakness to be killed,” and paid his respects to the likes of Greeley in bitter words: “We want, no newspaper government, and least of all a newspaper army.… Let the government govern, and the army fight, and let both have their own counsel, disturbed and thrown out of balance by no gusty conceit or irresponsible and fanatical clamor.”11
The government would govern: its first task being to make certain that the panic which had broken up first the army and then Horace Greeley should not also infect the administration. This task it met quickly. On the night after the battle, when President and cabinet members sat down with General Scott to assess the news, somebody brought in a report that the victorious Rebels had occupied Arlington and would soon be in Washington itself, and old General Scott met this head-on. “It is impossible, sir!” he exploded. “We are now tasting the first fruits of a war and learning what a panic is. We must be prepared for all kinds of rumors. Why, sir, we shall soon hear that Jefferson Davis has crossed the Long Bridge at the head of a brigade of elephants and is trampling our citizens under foot! He has no brigade of elephants: he cannot by any possibility get a brigade of elephants!” Lincoln himself spent a sleepless night, but his first-hand knowledge of disaster simply strengthened his determination to get on with the war. John Nicolay reflected the President’s attitude when he wrote to his wife, two days after the defeat: “The fat is all in the fire now and we shall have to crow small until we can retrieve the disgrace somehow. The preparations for the war will be continued with increased vigor by the Government.”12
The first task was to make Washington safe and to reassemble the army. The War Department established rallying points for the nucleus of each broken regiment and announced that rations would be issued at those points and nowhere else—on the sensible theory that the hungry men would at least go to the spots where they knew they would be fed. State governors sent forward new troops in response to urgent appeals, and within twenty-four hours Secretary Cameron was able to reassure a citizens’ committee in New York: “The Department is making vigorous efforts to concentrate at this point an overwhelming force, and the response from all quarters has been truly patriotic. A number of regiments have arrived since last evening. There is no danger of the capital nor of the Republic.” Lincoln and Seward crossed the river to inspect the troops that held the Arlington lines. When they returned to Washington, Lincoln got pencil and paper and wrote out his own program for the immediate future—the basis of it, apparently, a set of notes he had scribbled on the night the news of the defeat first reached him. He was an unmi
litary man, called on now to solve an immense military problem, and his memorandum reflected his own inexperience and his insistence that the country get itself organized for a real war. It read:
“1. Let the plan for making the Blockade effective be pushed forward with all possible despatch.
“2. Let the volunteer forces at Fort Monroe & vicinity—under Genl. Butler—be constantly drilled, disciplined, and instructed without more for the present.
“3. Let Baltimore be held, as now, with a gentle, but firm, and certain hand.
“4. Let the force now under Patterson, or Banks, be strengthened, and made secure in its position.
“5. Let Gen. Frémont push forward his organization, and operations in the West as rapidly as possible, giving rather special attention to Missouri.” [John Charles Frémont, the famous “Pathfinder” of the West and the Republican party’s candidate for President in 1856, had been made major general and ordered to St. Louis to take charge of the western theater of operations.]
“6. Let the forces late before Manassas, except the three months men, be reorganized as rapidly as possible, in their camps here and about Arlington.
“7. Let the three months forces, who decline to enter the longer service, be discharged as rapidly as circumstances will permit.
“8. Let the new volunteer forces be brought forward as fast as possible, and especially into the camps on the two sides of the river here.”
Four days later he wrote a postscript to this program:
“When the foregoing shall have been substantially attended to—
“1. Let Manassas Junction (or some point on one or the other of the railroads near it) and Strasburg, be seized, and permanently held, with an open line from Harper’s Ferry to Strasburg—the military men to find the way of doing these.
“2. This done, a joint movement from Cairo on Memphis; and from Cincinnati on East Tennessee.”13
Some of these things could be done at once, and some of them could not be done for a long time, but at least the President was blocking out a program for action. Stanton might indeed be writing, as he was, to ex-President Buchanan that “the imbecility of the Administration” had brought on misfortune and disgrace, and that the administration probably would not be reorganized properly “until Jefferson Davis turns out the whole concern,”14 but things were beginning to move. Out of catastrophe the government, with the support of the people back home, was settling down to make real war.
It was the beginning of wisdom; wisdom paid for by tragedy and disillusionment, with later increments to be bought in the same way. Scott had complained that the thrust at Manassas was an attempt to make war by piecemeal, but he had not been listened to; too many men had supposed that the war would be won by the ninety-day recruit, the fabulous minute man who would leave his plow in the furrow, rush out to smite the foe, and then go back and get on with his plowing as if nothing had happened. That hope had been trampled to death by the mob that came streaming back from Cub Run to the sidewalks of Washington, and it was dead beyond hope of resurrection. Never again would the country rely on the minute man. It would have to rely hereafter on its own strength and endurance, taking the time to organize the strength, finding the patience to use it, summoning up from the depths of its collective soul the dedication to go on to the end no matter what the end might be. Out of Bull Run would come an effort so prodigious that simply to make it would change America forever. In the dust and smoke along the Warrenton Road an era had come to an end.
In Richmond the victory was received with deep but quiet thanksgiving. The cheering crowds, the clanging church bells, and the thunderous salutes that had greeted the fall of Fort Sumter and the act of secession were not in evidence; the sense of relief and reborn confidence apparently went too deep. The Confederate Congress solemnly resolved “that we recognize the hand of the Most High God, the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, in the glorious victory with which He hath crowned our arms,” and Editor E. A. Pollard felt that the look in men’s eyes and the joy in men’s hearts “composed an eloquence to which words would have been a mockery.” Generals Johnston and Beauregard issued a joint statement thanking the people of the South “for that patriotic courage, that heroic gallantry, that devoted daring” which had won the day. The Charleston Courier admitted that “the enemy fought bravely and well,” but asserted that “their valor could not resist the courage of men under the inspiration of a grand and holy cause.” Savoring the victory, many Southerners felt that everything they wanted had practically been gained.15
Too many felt that way, perhaps. Bull Run gave the North a reawakening, but it gave the South overconfidence; the legend of the minute man seemed here to have been verified, and there was a good deal of feeling that he now might get back to his plowing. President Davis wrote long afterward that “members of Congress, and notably the Vice President” (between whom and Mr. Davis there was at last little love lost) “contended that the men should be allowed to go home and attend to their private affairs while there were no active operations, and that there was no doubt but that they would return whenever there was to be a battle.” General Johnston wrote confidentially to Davis that the victory had temporarily disorganized his army: “Everybody, officer & private, seemed to think that he had fulfilled all his obligations to country— & that before attending to any further call of duty, it was his privilege to look after his friends, procure trophies, or amuse himself. It was several days after you left us before the regiments who really fought could be reassembled.” Mr. Trescot, who had held a watching brief for South Carolina in Washington early in the winter, said angrily that the victory would be the country’s ruin.16
Yet there was, under this, a growing understanding of the terrible reality of war. Robert E. Lee wrote to a cousin that the South would continue the war “as long as there is one horse that can carry his rider & one arm to wield a sword.” He added, grimly: “I prefer annihilation to submission. They may destroy but I trust will never conquer us.”17 Wounded men were brought back to Richmond: only a few, compared with the dreadful floods to come later in the war, but many more than the people of Richmond had ever expected to see. The first ambulance trains entered the city at twilight in a pelting rain, and men and women who knew only that there had been a glorious victory came out and saw for themselves what glory and victory could cost. The walking wounded were stumbling along beside the ambulances, heads bandaged or arms in slings, sometimes helped by a comrade. Then the men on stretchers were carried out, maimed and soiled, pallid, staring at nothing, gripping the side bars of their stretchers to keep from crying out; and the people stood and watched, while lanterns flickered in the wet dusk and there was little sound but the ambulance wheels on the stones, the unbroken drip of the rain, and here and there a quick exclamation from someone in the crowd who saw a friend.18
There were the dead to be brought back as well: the dead, and the news of their dying. Even while the city hummed with the talk of victory, Varina Davis had to go and tell Mrs. Bartow that Colonel Bartow had been killed. (It seems the man had had a premonition; before the battle he told Tom Cobb he knew that he would die.) Mrs. Bartow saw the truth in her caller’s eyes and sank down on a chair, pulling a shawl over her face, asking quietly: “Is it bad news for me?… Is he dead?” A day or two later the colonel’s body was carried through the streets to the cemetery, a military band playing a dirge, riderless horse with stirrups crossed in an empty saddle following the coffin, Mrs. Bartow fainting at the sight. There were many funerals; Mary Chesnut wrote that “it seems we are never out of the sound of the Dead March in Saul.”19
On the Northern side, too, there had been men who had foreknowledge of their own death, and there were women to mourn. Major Sullivan Bullen, of Illinois, was killed in the battle, and just before it he had written to his wife, Sarah, to tell her that he believed he was going to be killed and to express a tremulous faith that could see a gleam of light in the dark: “But O Sarah! if the dead can come back to this e
arth and float unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you in the gladdest days and in the gloomiest nights, advised to your happiest scenes and gloomiest nights, always, always, and if there be a soft breeze upon your chest it shall be my breath, as the cool air fans your throbbing temple it shall be my spirit passing by. Sarah do not mourn me dead; think I am gone and wait, for we shall meet again.”20
Hundreds of thousands of women, before the war ended, would feel as Mrs. Bartow and Mrs. Bullen felt. Bull Run was an incident, a beginning, a warning that people all across the land must draw on their deepest reserves of strength. The South would in time rise above the victory just as the North would rise above the defeat; and rising thus, they without realizing it found a desolate but illimitable common ground. They had to learn the same lesson together, sharing, despite their angry separation, in the experience of a tragedy that knew no sectional limits. Denied all other unity, they would come at least to the desperate enforced unity of men and women caught up by suffering and hope, by courage and despair; this much would belong to everyone. The war had become national.
NOTES
CHAPTER ONE: Springtime of Decision