Terrible Swift Sword

by Bruce Catton

  “There is enough and more than enough for all of us to do, although none of us can do exactly what we would wish. That Lee is moving on Pope with his main army I have no doubt. Unless we can unite most of your army with Burnside and Pope, Washington is in great danger. Under these circumstances you must pardon the extreme anxiety (and perhaps a little impatience) which I feel. Every moment seems to me as important as an ordinary hour.”6

  In all of this General Pope was caught in a squeeze. He understood very well that the Army of the Potomac was moving deliberately, and he knew what this meant; but he did not yet see that the Army of Northern Virginia was moving with lightning speed, and to understand what this meant was altogether beyond him. Beset in front and in rear, he was simply in over his depth, and he continued to think that he had the initiative even after Lee had thrown him squarely on the defensive; now he was beginning to strike at shadows.

  Jackson began his deadly flank march on the morning of August 25, and by evening of that day Pope had been told about it. But he could see only what he wanted to see, and he concluded now that Jackson’s men were heading for the Shenandoah Valley once more. It seemed probable, as well, that the rest of Lee’s army might follow Jackson, and so Pope notified Washington that he would send a force across the Rappahannock the next day to see about it. If his suspicions were correct he would pitch into the Confederate rear. He was beginning to see that he had problems. Of the three corps which made up his army, he believed that only McDowell’s corps really amounted to much. Sigel, who led the men once commanded by Frémont, struck Pope as an incompetent who ought to be replaced, and Banks’s corps had been roughly handled at Cedar Mountain, contained no more than 5000 men, and must be kept in the rear until it could be “set up again.” Of the Army of the Potomac, Philip Kearny’s division from Heintzelman’s corps had joined him. It was a good division and Kearny was a first-rate combat soldier who did not share in the feeling that the government was conspiring darkly against McClellan; still, this was only one division, and for his riposte to Lee’s feint Pope felt somewhat shorthanded.7

  Except that it showed a dim awareness of coming trouble, Pope’s dispatch gave an imperfect picture. Its appraisal of Sigel and Banks was correct enough: Pope’s own army was not yet really an army and it badly needed an overhaul. Still, help was at hand. Heintzelman was coming in with his other division under Joe Hooker, another hard fighter who did not belong to the McClellan clique. Reno was on hand with most of Burnside’s force, John F. Reynolds’s excellent division from Porter’s corps had joined McDowell, and the rest of Porter’s corps was drifting about just off the Federal left flank, ready to be used as soon as Porter and Pope learned one another’s whereabouts. There were soldiers enough along the Rappahannock but Pope did not seem to know exactly where all of them were, and it was going to be uncommonly hard to mass them for a co-ordinated blow. Finally, and most important of all, Lee’s movement was no feint.

  This began to dawn on Pope within twenty-four hours. Instead of crossing the river on August 26 to see what Lee was doing, Pope held his position, believing that Halleck wanted him to stand on the defensive until all of McClellan’s army arrived; and that evening Stonewall Jackson swept in out of the shadows to strike the Orange & Alexandria Railroad at Bristol Station, twenty miles behind the Rappanhannock, moving on to seize the huge Federal supply base at Manassas Junction.

  Jackson had made a prodigious march—more than fifty miles in forty hours—going north from his original position all the way to the town of Salem and then swinging southeast through Thoroughfare Gap to strike Pope’s base while Pope still believed that he was moving toward the Shenandoah Valley. With one swift blow he had cut Pope off from his supplies, from his superiors and from his reinforcements, and the first half of Lee’s incredible gamble had paid off.

  It was only the first half. Jackson was in position to make immense trouble for the Federals, but he was also where he could be in immense trouble himself. He had 24,000 men, Lee and Longstreet with more than 30,000 were far away on the other side of the Bull Run mountains, and John Pope could get between them with 75,000 if he moved promptly. Twenty-five miles northeast of Jackson was the city of Washington, where two corps from the Army of the Potomac were coming ashore prepared to march to Bull Run. Unless he moved fast and befuddled his enemies completely, Jackson and his whole command might well be wiped out.

  In the Shenandoah Valley, Jackson had escaped from a similar peril by marching swiftly back out of danger while his enemies were clumsily trying to get at him. But to march away now would be to admit failure. He was not simply making a raid to confuse the enemy, as he had done in the Valley; he was trying to force the unprepared Federals to fight a decisive battle against the united Army of Northern Virginia as far to the north as possible. He could neither wait nor run away; he had to stay, provoke a fight big enough to pin Pope down but not big enough to crush Jackson’s own command, and do it all before the gathering Federal hordes came together. The second half of Lee’s gamble would not work unless Jackson made no mistakes at all and the Federal generals made several.

  That was just what finally happened.

  By August 27 Pope realized that the campaign was beginning to turn upside-down. He sent word to Halleck that Lee (who had moved north the day before) had taken position northwest of the Bull Run mountains and had thrust “a strong column” forward to Manassas. Pope accordingly would retire from the Rappahannock and draw up his army on a line going roughly from the hamlet of Gainesville, five miles east of Thoroughfare Gap, to the vicinity of Warrenton Junction; reinforcements coming up from Washington should therefore march toward Gainesville. Lee’s own intentions were far from clear, but Pope suspected that the Confederates might try “to keep us in check and throw considerable force across the Potomac in the direction of Leesburg.”8

  As a first step, this was good. The gap between the halves of Lee’s army was well over twenty miles wide, and Pope was going to move into it with all his force. But he would need to call on many separate units to do some rapid marching, and as he learned more about the movements of Jackson and Lee he would undoubtedly have to countermand many orders and issue new ones, and this was just the kind of situation that was apt to lead to large-scale confusion. Furthermore, Pope’s dispatches to Washington were not getting through because Jackson had broken the line of communications, and General Halleck had only a dim idea of what was actually happening out beyond Manassas. If Pope himself should misread his enemies’ movements; if his orders to corps and division commanders went astray, or were imperfectly understood and obeyed; if delay took the place of rapid movement anywhere between the Rappahannock and Washington—in short if any of the things that were likely to go wrong in a case like this did go wrong—then the mistakes Lee was counting on would occur and Lee’s gamble would probably win.

  As the only man east of the Bull Run mountains who knew what was going on, Stonewall Jackson was cool and unhurried. He stayed at Manassas all through August 27, to destroy the Federal supplies there and to make certain that Pope understood that it was time to retreat. Since Jackson could carry off only a minute fraction of the tremendous stock of captured Federal goods, the destruction was on a large scale, with huge warehouses and long rows of loaded freight cars set on fire; and after the captured whiskey had been carefully put out of reach Jackson’s soldiers were turned loose on the piles of foodstuffs and were told to help themselves. The result was a gigantic picnic whose echoes a century has hardly dimmed. All soldiers are always hungry, and Jackson’s were hungrier than most; in the best of times they were usually underfed, and now they had just finished a hard march on exceptionally skimpy rations—and here were all of the edible riches of the earth, from bacon and coffee and hardtack on to sutler’s stocks of canned lobster and boned turkey and pie, free to all, without money and without price. For once in their military careers, these soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia were able to eat beyond their means, and they made the most of
it. Fortunately, the overstuffed army was able to march away that evening without leaving behind more than a scattering of moaning stragglers.

  When it marched Jackson’s force did not go far, but it went around corners in order to confuse the Yankees. Part of the men crossed Bull Run and marched north to Centreville, another part also crossed Bull Run and then sidled upstream, and the rest moved northwest from Manassas, west of Bull Run; and all three parts came together next day, August 28, on a long wooded ridge on the northwestern fringe of the old Bull Run battlefield, a few miles west of the stream itself and a little way north of the turnpike that came down from Washington to Warrenton. It was a good place to defend and also a good place to hide. Jackson got his men in position, pulled them back into the shade out of sight, and awaited developments.

  The mistakes Lee had been anticipating were being made.

  A man of action rather than of thought, Pope had been responding to all of this with much vigor. Jackson was burning Manassas, so Pope ordered his troops to go there and smash him. But at Manassas the Federals found nothing but a square mile of smoldering debris, a powerful odor of burned provisions, and evidence that Jackson had gone to Centreville. Pope ordered his columns to converge on Centreville, but Jackson was not there, either. He had vanished, going apparently off toward the west, and it seemed to Pope that Jackson was trying to make his getaway, as a sensible man would; and so new orders went out to the weary Federal columns, designed to head him off, to overtake him and to smite him in the flank. In the effort to accomplish this Pope apparently lost sight of the fact that Lee and Longstreet were still west of the Bull Run mountains, and he concentrated on Jackson so zealously that his troops were pulled away from Thoroughfare Gap, leaving that all-important gateway open for Confederate use. And at last, late on the afternoon of August 28, Jackson decided that it was time to make Pope stand and fight.

  The sun was just about to set, and one of McDowell’s divisions was plodding eastward along the Warrenton Pike within musket shot of the ridge where Jackson’s soldiers were hidden. It reached Groveton crossroads, and Jackson himself rode out into the open, all unnoticed, to have a look. There were long intervals between the Federal brigades; he watched one brigade go by and disappear on the way toward Bull Run, and then he suddenly wheeled and spurred his horse back to the ridge at a pounding gallop. His concealed soldiers had been watching and they knew what came next; an officer remembered that as they fell into ranks the woods rang with “a hoarse roar like that from cages of wild beasts at the scent of blood.”9 Confederate artillery trotted out, unlimbered and opened fire. Then brigade after brigade of Jackson’s infantry marched from the woods and came down the long slope in parallel columns, battle flags bright in the late afternoon sun; and presently the infantry swung into line of battle beside the guns and began to shoot.

  The Federals were surprised but they did not panic. They were westerners led by Brigadier General John Gibbon, and although they had not fought before they had an aptitude for it; they formed their own line of battle without lost motion, Gibbon got some artillery to help and sent off for more infantry. Brigadier General Abner Double-day’s brigade came over to help, and the wild crash of battle echoed across the Manassas plain and a long cloud of dusty smoke drifted down over the Warrenton Pike while Yankees and Rebels fought an engagement that would go into the books as the Battle of Groveton.

  It was a strange fight. The opposing battle lines simply stood and fired at each other at close range. Nobody charged and nobody retreated; everyone held his ground and fired as long as he could see anything to fire at, and when full darkness at last made it impossible to fight any longer the battle lines sagged apart by mutual consent, and that night the Federals went sullenly off toward Manassas. Some 2300 young men had been shot—close to one out of every three in action, on the Union side—and nothing whatever had been accomplished; except that in the only way open to him Stonewall Jackson had made certain that there would be a much bigger battle next day.10

  2: The Terrible Weariness

  By the time General Pope learned where Jackson had gone into hiding it was too late. He had already lost himself. No matter what sort of battle his enemies might inflict on him Pope would be unable to handle it because he had lost track of what was really happening, and he was moving troops in the light of faulty information. Some first-rate fighting men would do his bidding, but he would send them into action according to a map traced by fantasy; while he contended with shadows they would have to fight real live Confederates, and a great many of them would die of it.

  Jackson was in the woods just north of the Warrenton Pike, a short distance west of Bull Run: this was solid fact, unearthed at a price by the fight at Groveton, and after two days in which rumor had been piled on baseless rumor a solid fact was doubtless very welcome. Yet to reason from this fact was difficult, because Pope had already convinced himself that Jackson was running away. Thus it was necessary to bring the Federal Army together with all possible haste, at the price of no matter how much confusion, lost motion, and weariness, because if there was any delay at all Jackson would escape. Pope exulted that if his people moved fast enough “we can bag the whole crowd,” and units whose orders had already been changed two or three times in twenty-four hours got additional orders setting new destinations and demanding instant execution. One of Pope’s staff officers visited General Porter at dawn with such orders: Porter went to his desk to revise his instructions to his own subordinates, and as he wrote he paused once to ask the staff man how to spell “chaos.” The staff man told him, and considered the question most timely.1

  In one way Pope’s instinct was sound. He tried to concentrate his army along the Warrenton Pike, between Gainesville and the Bull Run bridge, in order to overwhelm Jackson, and he had men enough to do the job: between 60,000 and 70,000 within immediate reach. But because he supposed that his task was to head off, round up, and capture an enemy who was making a desperate retreat he attacked before he was ready. On August 29, the day after the fight at Groveton, Pope got hardly more than half of his troops into action.

  Jackson had more than 20,000 men in place, and they held an exceedingly strong position. Along most of Jackson’s front, which was about two miles long, there was the line of an unfinished railroad, a long embankment and a series of cuts, with the wooded ridge just behind; an ideal position for a defensive fight, made to order for a tough army whose sole function was to hold on and wait for reinforcements—which, as it happened, were not far away. Lee and Longstreet with 30,000 men marched from Thoroughfare Gap early that morning (the gap being open because Pope was concentrating against Jackson) and around noon the head of this column began to come up just behind Jackson’s right flank. By early afternoon the Army of Northern Virginia was solidly united and Lee was preparing for a counterstroke. Believing himself in the act of winning a great victory, Pope was floundering blindly into a shattering defeat.

  Coming up from Centreville and establishing headquarters on a hill near the famous Stone House that had been a landmark in the first battle of Bull Run, Pope got his battle started without delay. Most of his divisions were still on the road—these soldiers had done a lot of marching in the last forty-eight hours—but Pope was in a hurry, and he opened the fight with the troops that were at hand, sending Franz Sigel and his 11,000 men in a headlong assault on Jackson’s center north of the turnpike. Sigel’s men vigorously shelled the woods in front of Jackson’s main line, drove out the Rebel skirmishers and then made a slightly incoherent but valiant assault on the railroad embankment. The going was rugged. Jackson once said grimly that although his men sometimes failed to capture a position they never failed to hold one, and today his veterans made his word good. The Federals came up through a killing storm of musketry and artillery fire, some of the brigades drifted apart as they struggled through the woods, and Jackson’s men lashed out with sharp counterattacks that threw the assaulting lines into disorder. But a few units pulled themselves together an
d went on again, reaching the embankment and, for the briefest moment, driving its defenders away.

  These men in blue had done better than anyone had a right to expect—after all, they were supposed to be low-morale troops, indifferently led—but they were exhausted and disorganized and when they reached the embankment their attack had spent its force. Jackson’s men drove them back, and Sigel asked Pope for permission to withdraw them for a rest and regrouping. Since he had no one to put in their place, Pope refused, and the men hung on in the fringe of the woods, maintained a sporadic fire, and did the best they could.

  Then the first team came up—Kearny and Hooker, with 12,000 veterans from the Army of the Potomac, and Reno, with 8000 of Burnside’s men, seasoned fighters under first-rate leaders; and Pope ordered a massive assault on Jackson’s left, which was posted in a wood over near the Sudley Springs ford. The attack was imperfectly organized; the troops were sent into action piecemeal, and the full weight of a massed blow was lost. Also, Jackson had his own first team in line here, A. P. Hill and his famous “light division,” and although the Confederate line was bent backward and in one place was temporarily broken, Jackson’s boast was justified once more. Six separate Federal assaults were desperately beaten off, there were flurries of vicious hand-to-hand fighting, Hill’s ammunition was almost exhausted and one of his brigades lost all but two of its field officers—officers, that is, of higher rank than captain—but at last, toward dusk, the fighting died down. Hill had just managed to hold his position.