by Bruce Catton
It was a strange battle—a straightaway,- slam-bang, stand-up fight with no subtleties and no maneuvering, no advancing and no retreating. Some of the Confederates found cover around a little farmhouse, and the 6th Wisconsin got some protection because the ground sagged in an almost imperceptible little hollow right where it was posted, so that most of the bullets that came its way went overhead. But for the most part the men did not seek cover—did not even lie down on the ground, which was the way many fire fights took place in those days, but simply stood facing each other in even, orderly ranks, as if they were on parade awaiting inspection, and volleyed away at the murderous range of less than one hundred yards.
On the right, Battery B fired rapidly and accurately, and some other brigade had brought another battery into action off on the left, and before long General Doubleday sent up the 56th Pennsylvania and the 76th New York—virgin regiments, like those of Gibbon—to join in the fight; and this amazing combat of two dress-parade battle lines at point-blank range sent its echoes resounding across the Manassas plain, while a dense cloud of acrid smoke went rolling up the evening sky. Years later General Gibbon remarked that he heard, that evening, the heaviest musket fire he heard during the entire war.
The fight lasted for an hour and a half. When it ended both sides were exactly where they were when it began, except that a Confederate brigade which tried a flanking movement around the Federal right had got tangled up in a ravine full of underbrush, in the smoky dusk, and couldn't find its way out, while the 19th Indiana had been edged off to the left rear to cope with what looked like a flank attack from that direction. Gibbon was proud of the way his Hoosiers managed this maneuver while under fire. Toward evening, with the Confederate fieldpieces out of action, Stuart's incredible artillerist, John Pelham, brought a section of guns up to within seventy paces of Gibbon's line and opened fire, without any visible effect whatever except to add to the total of killed and maimed.
Night came at last, mercifully, and put an end to it, the rival battle lines slowly drew apart, and, as General Gibbon wrote, "everything except the groans of the wounded quieted down." The Black Hat boys could call themselves veterans now; they had had their baptism of fire—baptism by total immersion, one might say. The 2nd Wisconsin—which, over the length of the war, was to win the terrible distinction of having a higher percentage of its total enrollment killed in action than any other regiment in the United States Army—had taken 500 men into this fight and left 298 of them dead or wounded on the field; it got a leg on the record that evening. The 7th Wisconsin and the 19th Indiana had lost nearly as heavily. The 6th Wisconsin had been lucky by comparison, losing 72 men out of 504 engaged. A regimental historian wrote later that to the end of the war this brigade was always ready for action, "but we were never again eager."
All in all, more than a third of the Federal soldiers who went into action that evening had been shot. Over on the Confederate side, though the Federals didn't know it at the time, the story was about the same. The famous Stonewall brigade had lost 33 per cent of its numbers, the 21st Georgia had lost 173 out of 242 in action, and two division commanders had gone down, one of them the famous General Dick Ewell. Next morning one of Jeb Stuart's staff officers came out to take a casual look at the scene of action. "The lines were well marked by the dark rows of bodies stretched out on the broom-sedge field, lying just where they had fallen, with their heels on a well-defined line," he wrote. "The bodies lay in so straight a line that they looked like troops lying down to rest. On each front the edge was sharply defined, while towards the rear it was less so. Showing how men had staggered backward after receiving their death blow."5
The Federals drew a line of battle in the woods next to the turnpike, sent out parties to bring in as many of the wounded as possible, established crude field hospitals under the trees, and in general tried to catch their breath. A staff officer, coming up the pike from the rear, found a campfire blazing in the road, with the generals grouped around it, staff officers seated outside the inner circle, orderlies holding the reins of saddled horses still farther out, the firelight gleaming on tanned faces, a ribbon of wood smoke climbing up out of the glow to disappear in the arching branches above. The brigadiers were assembled and the division commander, General King, who had been taken ill that afternoon and had had to seek shelter back at Gainesville and so had not been present during the fight, came up to join them, weak and pale. His division was part of McDowell's corps, but nobody could find McDowell, who had ridden off in mid-afternoon to seek General John Pope in the vicinity of Manassas and who, it developed later, had got completely lost in the woods and found neither Pope nor anyone else until the next day. Since neither King nor McDowell had been around while the fighting was going on, the battle had really been fought under nobody's direction—except Gibbon's, and he was responsible only for his own brigade. Now that the generals were in council nobody knew quite what to do, for King's original orders were to march to Centreville, and it was painfully obvious that before he could do that he would have to drive Stonewall Jackson out of the way, which was clearly too much of a task for any single division.
In the end it was agreed that the command had better withdraw in the direction of Manassas Junction, which lay several miles to the east, and it was so ordered. Sometime after midnight the tired troops withdrew and tramped silently off down a country road in the blackness, all the gay banter of their earlier marches quite forgotten; and in a cloudy dawn they dropped down in a field near Manassas to get a little sleep, while the staff hurried off to try to find Pope, McDowell, or somebody who could tell them what the brigade was supposed to do next.
The soldiers didn't get much sleep. Orders came in presently: Fitz-John Porter and his V Corps from the Army of the Potomac were coming up and would be backtracking along the road toward Gainesville, and King's division—now commanded by General John Hatch, for King's illness had put him out—would go with them. So the men drew up in marching order by the roadside, and pretty soon the head of Porter's corps came along, marching with an indefinable swagger even in the informal route step of the cross-country hike, and the young Westerners cheered mightily in boyish hero worship—this was the Army of the Potomac, these were veterans of the fabulous fighting around Richmond, McClellan's men were joining Pope's, and everything would be all right now.
Porter's men received the cheers with high disdain. They included a solid division of regulars, plus some volunteer regiments which had acquired much esprit de corps, which means that they looked down on practically all soldiers who did not belong to their own outfit. They had taken the worst the Confederates had to give at Gaines's Mill, and at Malvern Hill they had seen the furious Southern assault waves break up in a swirling foam of bloody repulse on the hard rock of massed artillery and rifle fire, and their immeasurable contempt for John Pope was quite broad enough to include all of his troops. They called out loftily: "Get out of the way, straw-feet—we're going to go up to show you how to fight." ("Straw-foot" was the Civil War term for rookie. The idea was that some of the new recruits were of such fantastic greenness that they did not know the left foot from the right and hence could not be taught to keep time properly or to step off on the left foot as all soldiers should. The drill sergeants, in desperation, had finally realized that these green country lads did at least know hay from straw and so had tied wisps of hay to the left foot and straw to the right foot and marched them off to the chant of "Hay-foot, straw-foot, hay-foot, straw-foot." Hence: straw-foot— rookie, especially a dumb rookie.) Gibbon's boys were hurt—after last evening they felt entitled to join any brotherhood whose entry fee was courage under fire—and they yelled back: "Wait until you've been where we've been—that'll take some of the slack out of your pantaloons"; but they still admired those hard veterans and were glad to be with them. After a while they swung into column and followed the V Corps along the road, heading back toward what they had just marched away from—perfectly ready to fight again, but not hankering for it
any longer.
3. You Must Never Be Frightened
If any of Gibbon's boys had had the speculative bent to sit down and figure out just what their prodigious valor had bought for the Union cause, a most dismaying fact would have come to light. The chief result of that desperate fight in the meadow was that the befuddlement of General John Pope became complete instead of only partial.
General Pope had been having his troubles for some time. He had not been entirely sure where his own army was, and he had not in the least known where the enemy was, and he had been frantically trying to use the one to find the other. For several days he had been holding the line of the Rappahannock, guarding the fords, dueling with his artillery whenever Rebel forces showed themselves on the far side of the river, sending his cavalry dashing about with vast energy, and he had about concluded that a great battle would be fought soon in the vicinity of Warrenton. It would be a desperate encounter, because he was outnumbered, or at least believed that he was. As he understood the top strategy in Washington, he was supposed to hold the line at all costs until McClellan's army could join him, whereupon General Halleck would ride down from Washington and take active command in the field of both Pope and his troops and McClellan and his—Pope and McClellan then becoming, as Pope believed, wing commanders under the general-in-chief.
Pope was deceived in this belief: the last thing Halleck wanted was to command troops in the field against Robert E. Lee; but at the moment no one but Halleck knew this. So on August 26 Pope had been drawing his forces together near Warrenton, spattering the landscape with galloping couriers, as he called outlying divisions to his rendezvous. From McClellan's army, grumpily returning from the peninsula, Fitz-John Porter and the V Corps were coming up the river from Fredericksburg, and General Ambrose Burnside and the IX Corps had landed at Aquia Creek and presumably were making their way to him overland, while the rest of McClellan's men were coming in via Alexandria. A few days more and the reunion would be complete and the responsibility would pass from his shoulders.
But then things started to happen. First Stonewall Jackson disappeared from Pope's front. He was detected marching off to the northwest, and it seemed likely he was heading for his old haunts in the Shenandoah Valley, but on second thought Pope considered a flank attack on his lines at Warrenton probable, and he sent out new orders to hurry the concentration. Then, after dark, the telegraph wire to Washington went dead, and it appeared that Confederate cavalry was up to its old trick of jumping the supply lines. Joe Hooker— who had at last caught his train and got to the front—was ordered to take his division up the railroad and attend to it. Next day it developed that it was Jackson, not cavalry, on the supply line, and the tired couriers galloped off with new orders: concentration at Gainesville, now, with the cavalry under Buford swinging west through Thoroughfare Gap to see what had become of the rest of Lee's army. Toward evening Hooker collided with Confederate infantry at Bristoe Station and chased it north across Broad Run after a sharp fight, and orders were changed once more: the army will concentrate at Manassas, Jackson has delivered himself into our hands, and if we move fast we shall "bag the whole crowd."
Pope rode in haste to Bristoe, set out next morning for Manassas, lost Jackson's trail, and changed orders still further: concentrate at Centreville now, Jackson is somewhere near here, if we are alert we can destroy him. And finally, late that night, Pope got news of the fight Gibbon and Doubleday had stumbled into near Gainesville, and the picture became very clear to him—or so he thought. Jackson, having raided the Union supply depot, was trying desperately to get away. King's division had intercepted his retreat and rebuffed him (as Pope conceived), and Jackson was caught squarely between the two wings of the Union Army and could be crushed the very next day. Pope sat down at Centreville, to which place he had by now gyrated, sent jubilant messages to Washington, and made ready for his apotheosis: triumph, confusion to the enemies of the Republic, and a brilliant demonstration that Pope had the secret of victory which McClellan lacked.
The only trouble with this picture was that it was completely false. Jackson was not trapped and he was not trying to get away. On the contrary, he very much wanted to stay and fight, and while Pope's troops had been countermarching so feverishly he had found a good position near the old Bull Run battlefield, had established himself there, and had waited to be discovered. Pope being quite unable to find him, Jackson had moved out to give a prod to the first Union troops that came within reach—King's division—as a means of calling attention to his whereabouts. Jackson's primary mission was not simply to loot and destroy Pope's base of supplies, enjoyable though that task had been. General Lee had determined that Pope must be beaten ("suppressed" was his contemptuous word for it) before all of McClellan's army could join him, and he had reached out with the long, muscular arm of Stonewall Jackson to pin the Northerner down on some good fighting ground suitably remote from the Rappahannock. Now, with Pope rushing to fall on Jackson, Lee was coming up with all speed. Pope, who believed himself to be casting a cunning net, was walking straight into one.
The soldiers whom General Pope was bringing up to Bull Run were by no means happy. Knowing nothing of the high strategy involved, they were perfectly aware that they had been marched back and forth to no good purpose for the better part of a week, and they had been around long enough to understand that this meant the high command was confused and jittery. They had outmarched their supplies, in all the confusion, and most of them were hungry, and the shuttling back and forth, uphill and down dale, had brought many to the point of exhaustion. The cavalry was deadbeat: some detachments came in from outpost duty on foot, leading horses that were too worn to carry weight even at a walk. The colonel of one regiment reported that his men had not had their coats off for three weeks, and in many squadrons there were not half a dozen men who could get their horses up to a trot.
To make things worse, what Pope was commanding was not an army but simply a thrown-together collection of troops. Technically, Pope's army—named, for its brief life, the Army of Virginia—consisted of three army corps: those of Franz Sigel, Nathaniel P. Banks, and Irvin McDowell. Sigel's men included a large number of German regiments—immigrants, for the most part, who had had German army training and should have been first-rate soldiers, but who somehow seemed to lose their effectiveness under the loose discipline of the American volunteer army. They had originally belonged to the famous but unmilitary General John Charles Fremont, who had ingloriously led them to failure in the mountain country to the west. Their morale was low, and Sigel was by no means the man who could pull them together. Banks was a political general—a distinguished Massachusetts businessman and politician, former Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, a man who, by the strange custom of that war, was "entitled" to a major general's commission because of his importance as a political leader and a public figure. He was a good man and devoted to the cause, but he was no soldier; up in the valley Stonewall Jackson had routed him and run rings around him, and the Confederates had consumed his stores so regularly that they derisively dubbed him "Old Jack's commissary general." He had first-rate soldiers in his command—Easterners, mostly, with a fair number of Ohioans and a sprinkling from Indiana and Wisconsin—and they would do well if they ever got competent leadership.
McDowell was the only real soldier in the group, and he commanded excellent troops. King's division, now led by Hatch and later to go to Doubleday, contained some of the best soldiers in the army, and John Reynolds led a solid division of Pennsylvanians, who were good men under a good general. Ricketts, commanding the third division, had been an artillerist at the first battle of Bull Run. His division included a number of men who had fought well under poor leaders in the valley. All in all, this army corps was basically as good as any in either army, but it suffered from the fact that McDowell, a good man and a capable general, was one of those soldiers born to bad luck. Nothing ever went right for him. The aura of failure, born of that first fight at B
ull Run, trailed after him. The men disliked him violently—even a special hat which he had devised for his summer comfort, a cool but rather weird-looking contrivance of bamboo and cloth, they chalked up as a point against him—and for some unaccountable reason they widely believed that he was in cahoots with the enemy. He and McClellan disliked each other, and McClellan blamed him for not coming down from Fredericksburg to help him during the Seven Days' fighting, although McDowell himself had protested against the administration strategy that had held him north of the Rappahannock and considered that his proper place was with the army on the Chickahominy.
Pope made McDowell his first lieutenant and leaned on him heavily, but cursed him behind his back ("God damn McDowell! He's never where I want him!" Pope had cried on the eve of the battle), and Pope ignored him when McDowell gave him the advice that might have saved him from the snare Lee and Jackson were setting. A staff officer in King's division wrote after his first meeting with him: "I liked McDowell's looks; he seemed to me strong, self-contained, ready for responsibility and able to sustain it. I had yet to learn how much his too frequent forgetfulness of the courtesy due even to a common soldier was to impair his usefulness and injure his popularity."1 And a young officer of engineers who dined with McDowell late in 1861 left the following appraisal:
"He was at that time in the full flush of mature manhood, fully six feet tall, deep chested, strong limbed, clear eyed, and in every respect a fine and impressive soldier, but at dinner he was such a Gargantuan feeder and so absorbed in the dishes before him that he had but little time for conversation. While he drank neither wine nor spirits, he gobbled the larger part of every dish within reach, and wound up with an entire watermelon, which he said was 'monstrous fine!' . . . As we rode back to the city in the afternoon, McPherson"—later General James B. McPherson, commander of the Army of the Tennessee—"and I discussed him freely, and, allowing him every professional qualification, we agreed that no officer who was so great a gourmand as he could by any chance prove to be a great and successful leader of men."2