On the Northern and Southern home fronts, news of episodic exchanges and skirmishes filled the press with foreboding and declarations of crisis but not many reports of casualties. The most serious fighting was occurring in the West. In western Virginia, a Union army under General George B. McClellan occupied the mountain counties of western Virginia and pursued a successful campaign to drive Confederate forces out of the newly created pro-Union state of West Virginia. Meanwhile, in Missouri, Governor Claiborne Jackson, the pro-Confederate “border ruffian,” refused Lincoln’s call to raise state militias and kept his militia in spring quarters at Boonville, near St. Louis.
Under Lincoln’s authorization, a small Union regiment led by the highly volatile and possibly insane Nathaniel Lyon compelled Jackson’s proslavery militia to surrender their arms. Soon a sympathetic crowd gathered around Jackson, shouting insults. In an impetuous move, Lyon opened fire and killed twenty-eight civilians in cold blood. He was never charged by the Lincoln administration. 15 This “victory” helped the Union control the Missouri River, but at the cost of unending internecine disputes and guerrilla warfare that resulted in even higher civilian casualties.16
Ongoing violence in Missouri, pitting neighbor against neighbor, would only grow more savage as time passed. In effect, a civil war was erupting within its own borders. Lyon declared war on Sterling Price, commander of the pro-Southern militia, and chased him to the southwest corner of the state. In the process, Price set in motion pro-secession guerrilla bands—little more than common criminals—who ambushed and murdered anyone in their path, including women and children.
Three-fourths of Missouri residents were Unionists, and the guerrillas would stop at nothing to intimidate and terrorize these private citizens. In the process, they pushed the region into a virtual state of anarchy. Under their reign of violence, blood revenge trumped all sane considerations on both sides. Pro-Southern “bushwhackers” like William Quantrill, George Todd, “Bloody Bill” Anderson, and brothers Jesse and Frank James faced off against Unionist “Jayhawkers” (also guerrillas) like Charles Jennison, James Montgomery, and James Lane. In the orgy of killing that followed, there were no innocents and no limits on the extent of depredations they would enact. More than any other state, Missouri offered a chilling preview of what would happen if guerrilla warfare were to erupt on a grander scale.
Though strategically important, none of the spring encounters in the West had, in West Point terms, “risen to the dignity of a battle.” As in most wars, the shooting would come first and the war plans would follow. With the exception of Winfield Scott, no American commander on either side had any experience commanding a brigade of two or more regiments in the Mexican War (about eight hundred men). And no one had commanded units as large as divisions (about five regiments) or corps (consisting of three divisions).
Based on modest experiences, initial military objectives were also modest. Northern generals strove to fight a traditional campaign on land and sea designed merely to force Southerners to accept the legitimacy of the Union government and come back into the Union with slaves and property intact. Winfield Scott’s noncombative “Anaconda” strategy sought gradually to blockade the entire South, cutting off their access to ports and strangling them into early submission. Like Lincoln, Scott presumed a strong Unionist presence in the South that would soon sue for peace.
On the other side, Confederate leaders planned to march on Washington, picking up supposed legions of Maryland loyalists along the way. In time it would become clear that Maryland would not flock to the Confederacy any more than supposed masses of Southern Unionists would flock to the Union. But in 1861 hopes burned bright on both sides and promised quick victories. A “clean” and decisive Confederate victory in the field would win European recognition, which meant Northern blockades could not stand, and Lincoln would have to let them go.17
PART II ROMANTICIZATION
THE MAKING OF HEROES
JULY 1861 TO MARCH 1862
CHAPTER 7
THE BATTLE OF BULL RUN: “A TOTAL AND DISGRACEFUL ROUT”
The Civil War began with the attack on Fort Sumter, but the first significant battle would wait three long months.1 In the interim, armies had to be raised, logistical infrastructures created, munitions manufactured, officers commissioned, and battle plans laid. Neither the Union nor the Confederacy was prepared for war, and while everyone knew war had begun, no one knew what it meant. The ninety-day enlistment periods confirm that most leaders assumed the war would be brief and the costs minimal. Northerners, confident in a strong Unionist yeomanry, assumed the planters would capitulate without popular support. Southerners, well aware of Northern Whig opposition to the Mexican War and of abolitionist pacifists like Wendell Phillips, assumed the North would cut and run once the bullets flew. Hardly anyone thought a war would last longer than six months. Patriots on both sides remained confident that triumph would soon be theirs and victories glorious. Armies passed in review, volunteers lined up to fight, and civilians mixed easily with the commanders and local soldiers around the camps.
The politics of this war—aimed at reunion and reconciliation—dictated minimal civilian deprivations and fair fights by armies in the field. Leaders on both sides assumed that civilian property would be protected and, of course, civilians left untouched in any way. Above all, the code of jus in bello—just conduct—gave highest priority to the protection of innocents and civilians, even at the cost of heightened risk for the combatants.
By June Confederate soldiers were guarding the three major invasion routes into Virginia. Brigadier General Joseph E. Johnston’s forces stood at the mouth of the Shenandoah Valley; Brigadier General Pierre G. T. Beauregard remained just above Manassas guarding the railroad; and Colonel John (“Prince John”) Bankhead Magruder guarded the Peninsula between the James and York rivers. All were West Point graduates with experience in the Mexican War. Faced with the lack of a general in chief, President Davis assumed both the title and the responsibilities of commander in chief. The decision would prove costly.
In Washington, D.C., one thing was clear. Lincoln intended to fight rather than let the South go peacefully. And he would not wait for congressional consultation to increase the size of the regular army. When he assumed office, the professional army numbered under 20,000, spread out over seventy-nine frontier outposts. By July 4, when Congress was called into session, Lincoln had increased the Union forces to 235,000 men. Virtually all of the troops were already under arms—volunteers spoiling for a fight and a quick victory. There was a general staff and commanding general, the tall and imposing Winfield Scott. Scott had led America to victory in the war with Mexico. While a cadet at West Point, a young Ulysses S. Grant had stood in formation while Scott passed in review. Now at the head of the Union forces, Scott had one overarching objective: “Forward to Richmond.”2 The North, he knew, enjoyed an enormous advantage in sea power and shipbuilding capacity. But that would not immediately help a land campaign, which this war threatened to be.
Many voluntary companies were led by incompetent amateurs who would factor largely in early battles. But looming over them were the professional soldiers who had fought in Mexico and graduated from the service academies. Campaign strategies began to take shape immediately after Sumter. Both armies were served by the hundreds of talented West Point graduates trained both to command the armies and to lead by courageous example. Their powers in the field were virtually unchallenged. In the calculus of this looming war, the importance of generals would be difficult to overestimate. Civil War generals fought at the front and their instantaneous and instinctive decisions literally meant victory or defeat. Raw physical courage also determined outcomes. This was a time when generals still fought, unlike modern wars in which commanding generals function more like congressmen than warriors immediately in harm’s way
The key to the offensive was, in the Swiss tactician Antoine-Henri Jomini’s term, “vivacity”—a single spirited charge of such intensity th
at the intimidated defenders, trapped in their inadequate entrenchments, would be rolled over and destroyed. Along with vivacity came romance. The greatest “art” of the offensive was the bayonet charge, a romanticized moment of individual—up close and personal—bravery and glory. One Confederate manual carried as its motto: “The bayonet is the weapon of the brave.”3 If forced to take a defensive position, commanders were trained to return to the offensive as fast as possible, preferably with a bayonet charge. These tactics had proved irresistible in the Mexican War. The question was not raised as to whether they would succeed in the coming war.
But times had changed greatly since the Mexican War. By the mid-1850s, old smoothbore muskets had been replaced by expandable minié balls that were easier to load, more accurate to fire, and capable of killing at much greater ranges. When placed in strategic defenses alongside heavy artillery with canister and heavy entrenchments, they allowed defenders to destroy attacking enemies massed in close-order formations before they ever reached defended lines.
Northern and Southern commanders understood the new technology, to be sure, but traditional West Point culture blinded them to the need to alter battlefield tactics. The vast majority of amateur non—West Point officers knew even less about technology and tactics, and had only the dimmest idea of how to manage combat under fire.4 They did not anticipate the scope or duration of the burgeoning conflict. Nor, at first, did they contemplate a war on civilian populations. They knew only that armies had to be destroyed in the field en masse for the war to be deemed successful.5 Technological advances, however, rendered tactical offenses meat grinders. Fueled in no small measure by the vivacity of a West Point education, the commanders had to see thousands of lives slaughtered before finally drawing the appropriate tactical lesson: in this war, the side that mounted the most effective defense against frontal assaults ultimately won.6
By mid-July, General Irvin McDowell’s grand army of more than thirty thousand Federal troops advanced on Virginia soil and prepared to attack Brigadier General P. G. T. Beauregard’s Confederate force of over twenty thousand rebels. To civilian and soldier alike the spectacle of a massed army was sublime. One eyewitness described the advancing Federal army in characteristically romantic terms: “The stirring mass looked like a bristling monster lifting himself by a slow, wavy motion up the laborious ascent.”7 The citizen spectators were even more excited about the coming battle than the citizen soldiers. But soldiers and observers alike were struck by the sheer, animal majesty of an army in the field.
For Northern newspapermen in the field, such as E. C. Stedman of the New York World, the whole affair took on the air of violent entertainment. In a letter to his wife he wrote: “We had a perfectly magnificent time to-day. I never enjoyed a day so much in my life. Was in the van throughout, at the head of the army, and it was exciting and dramatic beyond measure.”8 Right down to the last moment, the thrill of battle outweighed any sense of horror. Even religious newspapers such as the Christian Instructor could not help but marvel: “An army is truly a great machine. A locomotive; all its varying parts, living, intelligent, and working in harmony with one another.... Never has it been my lot to witness so general a display of order and strength, beauty and romance, as to-day.”9
As the “great machines” faced each other by the town of Manassas, thirty miles southwest of Washington, crowds of spectators dotted the hillside with picnic lunches. McDowell signaled his intent to end the war in one decisive blow leveled against outnumbered and undersupplied rebel troops. So confident was he in his own superiority that he hardly bothered with a comprehensive plan of battle, nor did he consider the possibility of Confederate reinforcements that might overwhelm his army Presidents Lincoln and Davis were likewise naive, fancying themselves accomplished military minds with overarching strategies in hand for a speedy resolution to the conflict.
But McDowell and Lincoln were in for a cruel surprise. In a pattern that would plague Union forces in the bloody years to come, Confederate commanders had closely followed newspaper accounts and intelligence reports documenting the exact progress of McDowell’s advance and prepared to surprise the invading foe.
If any commander could calmly and forthrightly survey the fray and stand his ground, the battle would be his. Sadly for the Union, that leader stood on the other side, among General Johnston’s reserves. As Union forces advanced ragtag on the Confederates at the Warrenton turnpike on Sunday, July 21, a brigade of rebels massed at Henry House Hill and stood their ground under the command of a dyspeptic former Virginia Military Institute professor-turned-general named Thomas J. Jackson.
As Jackson ordered “no retreat,” General Barnard Bee of South Carolina looked to Jackson at Henry House and rallied his troops, (supposedly) crying out: “There is Jackson standing like a stone wall! Rally behind the Virginians!” Jackson’s brigade stopped the Union assault in its tracks and, in the process, established the legend of the indomitable “Stonewall” Jackson.10 The war’s first warrior hero had been incarnated.
When a Confederate shell hit a wagon on Cub Run Bridge, blocking the Federal retreat, Federal troops panicked and soon became ungovernable. Soldiers mingled with congressmen and sightseers in a frantic retreat. Only a spirited rearguard defense, hastily organized by a grizzled Mexican War veteran and former banker, Colonel William Tecumseh Sherman, prevented a wholesale rout of Federal forces. Unlike the “political” generals with no formal training, the West Point-hardened Sherman held on. In doing so, his brigade suffered higher casualties than that of any other Union commander.11
A jubilant President Davis turned up on horseback at the battlefield to witness the capture of hundreds of Union prisoners and savor “his” victory. Instead of celebrating victory (and in the process setting off a fight for bragging rights with General Beauregard), Davis should have been urging his soldiers on. But that would have required an experienced military mind that Davis only thought he possessed. Fortunately for the Union, the Confederates were equally unprepared for a real battle and failed to pursue and destroy McDowell’s army. Davis’s failure to order a night pursuit into Washington cost him the Confederacy’s best opportunity to end the war on Confederate terms. The Confederate army was as disorganized by its victory as McDowell’s was by its defeat. Heavy rains the next day erased all opportunity for a Confederate knockout victory, and Washington, D.C., remained safely in Federal hands.12
In the North, the shame of defeat proved bitter beyond anticipation. The disappointment was all the more galling, following as it did the premature news of victory. By late afternoon, John Nicolay observed, “The President has been receiving dispatches at intervals of 15 minutes from Fairfax station.... For half an hour the President has been somewhat uneasy as these reports seemed to indicate that our forces were retiring.”
Awakened from his nap, General Winfield Scott assured the president that this could not be the case, and Lincoln went out for a ride. The rest is described dramatically by Nicolay:At six o-clock, the President having in the meanwhile gone out to ride, Mr. [William] Seward came into the Presidents room, with a terribly frightened and excited look, and said to John [Hay] and I who were sitting there
“Where is the President?”
“Gone to ride,” we replied.
“Have you any late news?” said he.
I began reading [Simon P.] ] Hanscom’s [optimistic] dispatch to him.
Said he, “Tell no one. That is not so. The battle is lost. The telegraph says that [General Irvin] McDowell is in full retreat, and calls on General Scott to save the Capitol” &c Find the President and tell him to come immediately to Gen. Scotts.
In about half an hour the President came in. We told him, and he started off immediately.... It is now 8 o’clock, but the President has not yet returned, and we have heard nothing further.
Besides capturing the pain of defeat, Nicolay’s account provides an early illustration of the indispensability of the telegraph in this civil war. With generals, statesmen, and j
ournalists all crowding telegraph offices, it was not always clear who got the news first. But in the next several days, the whole country knew, with one side left deliriously joyful and the other disillusioned, grief stricken, and profoundly embarrassed. A dispirited Nicolay was forced to concede that “[o]ur worst fears are confirmed ... a total and disgraceful rout of our men. The whole army is in retreat.” As for President Lincoln, an assistant described a conversation with the goverment printer John D. Defrees in which an agitated Lincoln exclaimed: “John, if Hell is [not] any more than this, it has no terror for me.”13
Lincoln would soon enough see more hell than he ever imagined, but the first cut was the deepest. When General Scott learned that McDowell had been defeated and that his army was in full retreat, he imposed a strict censorship on the telegraph so that word would not go out over the wires until Monday morning.
With news of the victory at Manassas emanating from Richmond, predictable jubilation and self-righteousness erupted. On July 24, the Charleston Mercury brought the glad tidings of victory and confidence: “The battle of the 17th, at Bull’s Run, has inspired the greatest confidence in the superiority of our generals and their troops, and our power, with decent executive energy in receiving enough for the field, to defeat the mercenary hordes of the North; and compensates for our losses west of the mountains.”14
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