General Winfield Scott recommended a blockade of the South—Northern warships would prevent Southern ships from coming or going from Southern ports. This would make it hard for the South to export cotton, or import guns. Lincoln agreed to try the blockade, but he knew it would be years before the North had enough ships to make it really work.
In the meantime, he asked General Irving McDowell to come up with a plan for attacking the Confederate army right away. Known as a pretty good soldier, McDowell was more famous for his massive appetite. After eating an enormous meal, he had once gulped down an entire watermelon for dessert, smacking his lips and declaring the fruit to be “monstrous fine!”
McDowell asked Lincoln for more time, explaining that his soldiers were still “green”—untrained and inexperienced. But Lincoln demanded immediate action. “You are green, it is true,” he said. “But they are green also; you are all green alike.”
So on July 16, 1861, General McDowell led his untrained army across the Potomac River. They began marching southwest through Virginia.
The Wild Rose of Washington
The Confederate army was ready and waiting—thanks to a spy by the name of Rose O’Neal Greenhow.
Greenhow was a forty-four-year-old widow, a mother of four daughters. As a child in Maryland, she had been known as “Wild Rose.” Now she was one of the most popular figures in the busy social scene of Washington, D.C., and was known all over town for her elegance, charm, and humor. She had high-ranking friends in the government and military. They knew she was a strong supporter of the South. But they did not suspect that she was running a spy ring out of her house—just a few blocks from the White House!
Greenhow developed secret codes and put together a team of spies that included store owners, lawyers, her banker, and even her dentist. Through what she called a “reliable source,” she learned the details of General McDowell’s plans. Then she wrote out a coded message and gave it to one of her secret agents, a young woman named Betty Duvall. Duvall traveled south with Greenhow’s message hidden in her long black hair. It read, “McDowell has certainly been ordered to advance on the sixteenth. ROG.”
“Yours was received at eight o’clock at night,” wrote back a grateful Confederate officer. “Let them come, we are ready for them. We rely upon you for precise information.”
Greenhow sent another coded message, this one describing McDowell’s attack plans in detail. Confederate generals used this information to prepare an attack of their own.
Picnic at Bull Run
McDowell planned to attack the Confederate army near a creek called Bull Run. But he never expected it would take his army three days to get there.
It was only a thirty-mile march, but McDowell’s new soldiers were simply out of shape. They kept stopping to lie down on the side of the road, panting in the harsh July heat. Some ran off to pick blackberries. Others broke into houses along the way, stealing ridiculous things like a giant mirror and a feather bed. A few grabbed piles of underwear and put them on over their uniforms.
Finally, by the early morning of July 21, McDowell had his men ready to attack. The sun began to rise as they marched toward their first battle.
A large crowd of people watched the action from the tops of nearby hills. Hundreds of fancy folks (including sixteen members of Congress) had driven down from Washington, excited to see a real live war. Many even brought picnic lunches. They cheered when they saw the Union soldiers march out into the open field, their metal bayonets sparkling in the morning sunlight. One woman lifted her opera glasses to her eyes and exclaimed about the excitement: “That is splendid! Oh, my! Is not that first-rate? I guess we will be in Richmond this time tomorrow!”
This woman was not alone. On that early morning in July, most Americans believed this was going to be a quick and fairly painless little war.
That was all about to change.
This Is Going to Be Serious
A nineteen-year-old Confederate soldier from Georgia named Berrien Zettler never forgot the night before the first major battle of the Civil War. An officer came to talk to the men, telling them to be ready to attack at daylight. “Remember, boys,” he cautioned, “battle and fighting mean death, and probably before sunrise some of us will be dead.” Zettler lay down on his blanket. He spent a homesick night beneath the bright summer stars.
Confusion on the Battlefield
The battle of Bull Run began early the next morning—July 21, 1861. Berrien Zettler’s regiment (a group of about seven hundred soldiers) marched through the woods to the edge of a cornfield. They were told to stop, load their guns, and wait for the order to attack the Union forces.
While waiting, the men noticed a big apple tree full of ripe red fruit. Some of them ran to the tree, climbed up, and started tossing down apples. Then a Union bomb came screaming over their heads and exploded nearby. “The boys dropped from the apple tree like shot bears,” Zettler remembered. They wriggled on their hands and knees back to their places.
Zettler experienced a rush of terror as he realized the battle was starting. “If my hair at that moment had turned as white as cotton it would not have surprised me,” he said. But there was no time to think about it—he charged forward with his regiment.
You’ll remember that the Union general, Irving McDowell, planned to attack the Confederate army. But thanks to Rose O’Neal Greenhow, the Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard knew this, and planned an attack of his own. The result was that two huge, untrained armies stumbled into each other across miles of fields and woods and streams. This was not like a battle in a textbook, where one neat line of soldiers marches toward another neat line of soldiers. This was one enormous, confusing mess. As Berrien Zettler later wrote:
“No one can see a battle, for it covers miles … . The excitement is so great that many soldiers do not even see what is going on within a few steps of them.”
Berrien Zettler
Zettler kneeled behind a tree, loading and firing as quickly as he could. “But it was impossible to see if my shots hit anyone,” he said. Bullets were zooming in all directions and bombs were exploding everywhere. The hot air was filled with smoke and dust. But was anyone actually winning?
The picnickers up on the hills had a pretty good view of the whole thing. And they saw the Northern soldiers slowly driving the Southern troops back. The Union was winning! Members of Congress shook hands and said things like:
“Bravo!”
“Didn’t I tell you so?”
“Bully for us!”
Thomas Gets a Nickname
But not all the Southern troops were retreating. The Confederate general Thomas J. Jackson held his soldiers firmly in line. “Steady, men,” he told them. “All’s well.”
This was an encouraging sight to other Confederate troops, some of whom were beginning to panic. General Barnard Bee pointed to Jackson and shouted to his own men:
“Look! There is Jackson standing like a stone wall! Rally behind the Virginians!”
Jackson—soon to be known as Stonewall Jackson—gave his men new orders: they were to wait for the Union soldiers to get close, then fire and charge at the enemy with their bayonets. “And when you charge,” he told them, “yell like furies!”
As Jackson’s men charged, they let loose a high-pitched shriek that was part anger and part fear. This Southern scream became known as the “rebel yell,” and it terrified Northern soldiers in battles throughout the war.
Now the Union army started tripping backwards. Groups of Union soldiers got separated from their commanders and had no idea what they were supposed to be doing. One by one, and then in large groups, Union soldiers started turning from the battle, tossing their guns, and sprinting away.
Up on the hills, the picnickers were getting very nervous. One of them, a newspaper reporter, asked a retreating Union soldier what was happening.
Reporter: What is the matter, sir? What is this all about?
Soldier: Why, it means we are pretty badly whip
ped, that’s the truth.
Reporter: Can you tell me where I can find General McDowell?
Soldier: No! Nor can anyone else.
The picnickers jumped into their wagons and whipped their horses and rattled down the hill. They sped onto the road and quickly got tangled up with long lines of shouting soldiers, causing the last thing anyone needed—a terrible traffic jam.
Northerners called this the battle of Bull Run. Southerners called it the battle of Manassas. Either way, 625 Union and 400 Confederate soldiers were killed. It was the bloodiest battle the country had ever seen. And it was nothing compared with what was still to come.
At this point, though, Jefferson Davis felt that the South just about had the war won. “We have taught them a lesson,” Davis told the cheering crowds in Richmond.
The scene was very different in Washington, D.C., where exhausted soldiers staggered back into town under a heavy rain, collapsing in the muddy streets. Abraham Lincoln spent a sleepless night on a couch in the White House, listening to the bad news from the battlefield and taking notes on what to do next.
One thing was obvious to Lincoln: defeating the Confederacy was going to be much harder and much bloodier than he had hoped. Lincoln called on the Northern states to deliver 1 million new soldiers. And not for three months this time, but for three years.
Little Mac Takes Command
Lincoln also named a new leader for the Union army: thirty-four-year-old General George McClellan. Thrilled with the opportunity, McClellan wrote to his wife, Ellen:
“Who would have thought, when we were married, that I should so soon be called upon to save my country?”
McClellan got right to work. He spent long days riding around Washington and whipping the army into shape, giving the soldiers a new level of pride and confidence. The men loved him and affectionately nicknamed him “Little Mac” (he was five foot six). “You have no idea how the men brighten up now when I go among them,” he told his wife.
George McClellan
The big question was: When was this new and improved army going to march out of Washington and get on with winning the war? Lincoln started urging McClellan to go on the attack. But Little Mac did not exactly respect the president’s military opinions. In fact, he wasn’t a Lincoln fan at all. “The president is nothing more than a well-meaning baboon,” McClellan said. (He was also known to refer to Lincoln as “the original gorilla.”)
One night Lincoln walked to McClellan’s house, hoping to have a quick meeting with the general. A servant told Lincoln that McClellan was at a wedding but would be back soon. So Lincoln sat down and waited. About an hour later, McClellan came home and the servant explained that the president was waiting to see him. McClellan shrugged and went upstairs and got into bed. Lincoln sat patiently for another half hour, then asked the servant when McClellan was expected home. McClellan was already home, the servant said—he was upstairs, fast asleep.
Lincoln’s advisors considered this a terrible insult. But Lincoln didn’t take this kind of thing personally. “I will hold McClellan’s horse if he will only bring us success,” he said.
Stuck in Washington
Would Little Mac bring Lincoln success? First he would have to actually leave Washington, which he showed no signs of wanting to do. He kept saying his army needed more training. And he became convinced the Confederates had a much bigger army than he did. They didn’t.
Another problem was that the spy Rose O’Neal Greenhow was still sneaking intelligence to the Confederate army in Virginia. She regularly got her hands on news from McClellan’s meetings, even copies of his notes.
Determined to break up her spy ring, government detectives began watching Greenhow’s house day and night. Sometimes the detectives climbed on each other’s shoulders to peek in the window. One day, on a street near her house, Greenhow noticed she was being followed. She quickly took a piece of paper from her pocket and ate it, destroying a coded message. The men then hurried up to Greenhow, led by a detective named Allan Pinkerton.
Pinkerton: You’re Mrs. Greenhow?
Greenhow: Yes. Who are you? What do you want?
Pinkerton: I’ve come to arrest you.
Greenhow: I can’t stop you, but if I were in my house I’d have killed one of you before I’d have submitted to this.
Greenhow was taken to her house and held there under arrest for weeks. Even then, surrounded by guards, she continued sneaking out notes describing McClellan’s plans.
By October, McClellan’s huge army (which he named the Army of the Potomac) had more than 160,000 men. Still, he wasn’t ready to attack. Mac had boldly vowed to “crush the rebels.” But now winter was coming and it was clear he wasn’t going to do any crushing that year.
Which gives us time to meet two very unusual soldiers.
Two Soldiers: Frank and Harry
Frank Thompson was living in Michigan when the Civil War began. “What can I do?” Thompson wondered. “What part am I to act in this great drama?” Friends marched off to join the Union army. Thompson longed to join them. There was only one difficulty: Frank Thompson was actually a nineteen-year-old woman named Sarah Emma Edmonds.
Two years earlier, Sarah had been living with her family in Canada. One day her father announced that he had picked out a husband for her—a much older man she didn’t really like. Sarah dressed up as a man, crossed the border into the United States, and told Americans she was Frank Thompson. Soon she found a job as a traveling book salesman.
In May 1861 “Frank Thompson” enlisted in the Union army. Doctors were supposed to carefully examine all volunteers, but they usually didn’t bother. One Union soldier described a typical army exam.
Doctor: You have pretty good health, don’t you?
Volunteer: Yes.
Doctor: You look as though you did.
That was the whole exam. Which explains how Sarah Edmonds became part of the Second Michigan Regiment.
Others members of the Second Michigan looked at Sarah’s smooth, hairless face and figured they were seeing a young boy who had lied about his age to get into the army—that was pretty common. Soldiers didn’t actually change their clothes very often, which made it easy for Sarah to remain in disguise.
About five hundred women served as soldiers in the Civil War. Some did it for the excitement, others to escape a bad home life. Some joined for the money—the soldier’s salary of thirteen dollars a month was much more than young women could earn in jobs that were open to them.
Loreta Janeta Velazquez was one of the women who joined the army in search of adventure. “I was perfectly wild on the subject of war,” she remembered. At age nineteen she decided “to enter the Confederate service as a soldier.”
Velazquez was living with her husband in Tennessee when the war started. He quickly set off for Richmond to join the army. “My husband’s farewell kisses were scarcely dry upon my lips,” she said, “when I made haste to attire myself in one of his suits, and to otherwise disguise myself as a man.”
She entered the Confederate army as Harry T. Buford. “This is the kind of fellow we want,” said an officer, shaking her hand. “And with a few more of the same sort, we will whip the Yankees inside of ninety days.”
Everything went fine for “Lieutenant Buford” until one scary moment at a crowded dinner table. She took a big gulp of buttermilk, soaking her fake mustache. When she tried to wipe the mustache, it started to come off. “To say that I was frightened, scarcely gives an idea of the cold chills that ran down my back,” she later said. She described eating the rest of the meal with “my hand up to my mouth all the time … doing my best to hold the mustache on.”
Velazquez made it through the meal. And a little while later she marched off to war.
Loreta Janeta Velazquez
Attack of the Floating Barn
Meanwhile, Abraham Lincoln was having a rough winter. McClellan was still camped in Washington, still claiming he needed more time to get ready.
In
February 1862, Lincoln’s eleven-year-old son Willie became ill with typhoid fever. Abraham and Mary watched their son get weaker and weaker and finally die.
“It is hard, hard, hard to have him die!” Lincoln cried at Willie’s bedside.
Then, in early March, an alarming report sent Lincoln and his advisors into a panic. A strange new Confederate ship was cruising around Virginia. The ship, Lincoln learned, was once a wooden warship called the Merrimac. But the Confederate navy had attached thick sheets of iron to its sides and a long iron beak to its front. They renamed it the Virginia. The Virginia was so heavy that it had a top speed of just five miles per hour—and it took a half an hour to turn around. Still, it had a huge advantage over the Union’s wooden warships.
On the morning of March 8, 1862, several of those Union ships were guarding the mouth of the James River in Virginia, blocking Confederate ships from getting out to sea. It was a warm morning and Union sailors were splashing and swimming in the river. They looked up and saw what appeared to be a giant barn, with just its slanted roof sticking out above the water. This was the Virginia, steaming toward the Union ships in a slow-motion charge.
Union sailors scrambled onto their ships and opened fire on the Virginia. The men were amazed to see their eighty-pound cannonballs bouncing off their target like “peas from a pop-gun,” one sailor said. The Virginia’s chief engineer, H. Ashton Ramsey, described the scene. “We were met by a … storm of shells … . They struck our sloping sides, were deflected upward to burst harmlessly in the air, or rolled down and fell hissing into the water.”
Two Miserable Presidents Page 5