by Bruce Catton
These two regiments belonged to Sykes's division. Except for them the division was composed solidly of regulars, and when they had first been brigaded with it the volunteers had not known quite how to act. They remembered how General Sykes, cold and unemotional, with a fine bushy beard and a crusty regular-army manner, had greeted them when they had joined his command. He had them lined up on parade and read to them McClellan's order which made them part of his division. Then he said: "You have heard what our commander-in-chief General McClellan says. I only add that if there is any hard work to be done you have got to do it." The soldiers gulped, then gave three cheers, and after that they belonged to the family.7
Right now they belonged to a forlorn hope. The 10th New York had been placed in front as a heavy skirmish line, and Longstreet's advance rolled over it and crumpled it and ground it aside (one participant remembered "a fat little major" in the 10th whacking the Federals with the flat of his sword to hold them to their work) and came on up the hill to capture the battery. The 5th New York were dressed as Zouaves—bright red baggy pants, white canvas leggings, broad red sash at the waist, short blue jacket, tasseled red caps; it appears that they were the soldiers who had taunted Gibbon's boys the day before. They hung on now long enough to let the regulars get the guns away, and then they retired—what was left of them, anyway. In their brief fight they had lost 124 men killed and 223 wounded out of 490 present—the highest percentage of loss, in killed, suffered by any Federal regiment in one battle during the entire war. As they pulled out they could see Sykes's regular battalions, north of the pike, wheeling out of line and into column under a merciless fire as only the regulars could do. Whatever else might happen, Porter's men had lived up to the boast they had made to the Black Hat Brigade: they had shown any and all straw-feet how to fight.
Pope and McDowell saw the danger now and worked frantically to get protection over on the left. Some of Sigel's men were sent there, and they took with them a battery of mountain howitzers-funny little guns that were carried into action on the backs of mules, to be taken down and assembled on diminutive gun carriages when it was time to fight. Some of Hooker's boys saw these howitzers for the first time that day as Sigel's Germans took them forward into action, and they jeered loudly and asked what in the world sort of battery that was. "The shackass battery, by Gott—get out mit der way or we blow your hets off!" cried the Germans.
Ricketts sent a couple of brigades over from the far right, and they took possession of a little swale beside the Germans and slugged it out with Hood's Texans. In one of these brigades was the 12th Massachusetts, a kid-glove regiment commanded by Colonel Fletcher Webster, son of the great Daniel. This outfit had left Boston a year earlier amid impressive ceremonies, carrying an elaborate flag of white silk presented by "the ladies of Boston," the silk being edged in blue and gold and bearing the coat of arms of Massachusetts on one side and on the other a quotation from the famous orator—"Not a stripe erased or polluted, not a single star obscured."
In addition to a fancy flag and the admiration of the ladies of Boston, the 12th Massachusetts had brought a song to war—a fine, swinging song with a deep roll of tramping feet and ruffled drums in it, a song to which a woman later gave tremendous words, so that it lives on as the nation's greatest battle hymn, with something in it that goes straight down to the deepest emotions of the country's heart. During its training-camp days the 12th had been stationed at Fort Warren, in Boston Harbor, where the 2nd U.S. Infantry was also stationed; and the regulars had picked up a snappy tune—a camp-meeting revival hymn, written in Charleston, South Carolina, around 1850, entitled "Say Brothers Will We Meet You Over on the Other Shore?" What a battalion of U.S. regulars was doing knowing a gospel hymn is beyond imagination, but they did know it, and because it was a fine song to march to they had fitted new words to it: "John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave . . . and we go marching on." The 12th liked the song and learned to sing it, and they had a fine band to provide the accompaniment. There was a big review on Boston Common on a bright summer afternoon, with Edward Everett delivering an oration, and a feminine committee presenting the silk flag, and an open-air dinner on the Beacon Street mall afterward. When the dinner had been eaten the regiment paraded back to Fort Warren, going down State Street singing the John Brown song with the band at the head of the column, and the war was all youth and music and bright flags and heroism.
A few days later they marched through Boston to take the train for Washington, and again they sang the song. When they got to New York they had a big parade up Broadway, and thousands of people lined the sidewalks and leaned out of the windows and heard the John Brown song for the first time—1,040 young men singing it, with a brass band playing and a great roll of drums and all the feet rhythmically tramping on the pavement. And in Washington they sang it again, and in no time at all the song was famous from the seacoast to the Mississippi Valley, and all the troops around Washington were singing it. Then one afternoon Julia Ward Howe sat in a carriage, heard a marching brigade singing it—the Black Hat boys claim it was their brigade, which is as it may be—and regretted that so fine a tune did not have better words. Early next morning she sat by an open window and wrote the mighty battle hymn, which has been a heritage of Americans ever since. And the 12th Massachusetts had started it all—or, if one goes back farther, the workaday 2nd regiment of regulars, aided by a pious hymnographer from the deepest south.8
But the dandy 12th was a long way from the ladies of Boston now, and Colonel Webster was killed, and the 12th was finally forced back, along with the rest of Ricketts's men and the Germans.
For whatever it might be worth to them, they had at least made Confederate John B. Hood pause and call for help before they retreated—a thing not too many Union troops were able to do, then or at any other time.
Dusk came, and the field dissolved in a blur of retreating regiments, bewildered stragglers, defiant batteries firing canister to stay the advancing Confederates, and heavy waves of assault crashing against the last hills this side of Bull Run Bridge, over which the entire army had to retreat. John Gibbon found himself on one of these hills, bringing his brigade and steady old Battery B back step by step in such fine order that General McDowell, riding up, told him to take charge of the whole rear guard and be last man over the bridge. McDowell rode away and Phil Kearny came up, furious with the shame of defeat.
"I suppose you appreciate the condition of affairs here, sir?" said Kearny savagely. Gibbon looked at him inquiringly. "It's another Bull Run, sir, it's another Bull Run!"
Gibbon hoped it was not as bad as that.
"Perhaps not," said Kearny. "Reno is keeping up the fight. He is not stampeded. I am not stampeded. You are not stampeded. That is about all, sir, my God, that's about all!"9
The sun went down, and in the twilight the air was so full of smoke that the Union Army could not see the men who had beaten it. But the bullets and the shell kept coming, and the rear guard hung on and let the wreckage stream back across the bridge, and the Pennsylvanians and Sykes's regulars and some of Sigel's Germans stayed grimly on the Henry House Hill, where Stonewall Jackson had won his nickname the summer before, and at last it was time to go. Gibbon's men got across, finally, and formed line of battle along the far side of the stream, but there was no further pursuit. The battle was over. Hungry Federals scrabbled among the wreckage of overturned wagons near the bridge to collect hardtack.
Late that night Phil Kearny overtook his headquarters wagon and sat down to write out his report. He had a writing pad on his knee, and since he had but one arm an aide stood by, steadying the pad with one hand. The aide was young, and what he had been through that day had shaken him, and he trembled, making the pad quiver.
Kearny looked up and asked him what was the matter. Frankly the youngster confessed that he was afraid.
Kearny gave him a long, sober look.
"You must never be frightened of anything," he said.10
4. Man on a Bl
ack Horse
The stone bridge and the road leading across it were a tangle of lost soldiers, sutlers' wagons, jolting guns and caissons, and weary regiments and brigades striving to keep some sort of formation as they forced their way through the confusion. A dozen long wagon trains were trying to get on the road simultaneously—some of them had been called from Centreville that morning, when the army thought it was going to pursue someone, and they arrived just in time to turn around and join in the flight—and there was a huge traffic jam. The sutlers' wagons seemed to be an especial problem; their drivers were almost frantic in their desire to get on the road and be gone, for in a jam like this, with discipline loosened, everybody hungry, and pitch-darkness prevailing, the soldiers were all too likely to consider them fair game and start indiscriminate looting. Now and then one of these wagons would succeed in getting on the highway and the driver would force his distracted horses to a gallop, careening ahead through infantry detachments and sending the men flying, and winding up, as likely as not, in a ditch.
In the grass and briars off the road there were little groups of men gathered about flags—each group the nucleus of some lost regiment trying to reassemble—and over all the noise of the retreat could be heard the cries of these men, plaintively chanting their regimental numbers: "Twenty-fourth New York! . . . Third Maine—Third Maine! . . . Bucktails!" Acrid smoke tainted the night air, and as the darkness deepened a steady rain set in. A soldier in the 27th New York remembered that his regiment was drawn square across the road with fixed bayonets to halt the flood; but blows, bayonets and threats were of no avail—"the disorganized and demoralized mob rushed recklessly around our flanks."1 Later, he added, the disorder subsided, and the regiments marched by in more regular order. A war correspondent who had witnessed the headlong departure from the field after the first battle of Bull Run insisted that there was "little or none" of the panic that attended the first retreat, and felt that, all things considered, this retreat was fairly orderly; but it stood out in the memory of the men who had to five through it as one of the gloomiest, most miserable nights of the war.
And if there was no sustained panic there was a smoldering, unreasoning anger, and there was ugly talk. Luckless General McDowell sat his horse and watched the army struggle past, and as they went by men called out "Traitor!" and "Scoundrel!" A private in the 11th Massachusetts, from Hooker's division, turned to another and growled: "How guilty he looks, with that basket on his head!" This was in reference to poor McDowell's fancy summer headpiece. In the surviving photographs it does look somewhat like a battered coal scuttle, but the men's objections were not based on aesthetic grounds; somehow the army had acquired the remarkable conviction that for an obscure and traitorous purpose McDowell had designed this hat as a distinguishing mark for the enemy to see and recognize. As they trudged along the road the men of the 11th told each other how a brigadier in Hooker's division, meeting a non-com who was staggering wounded to the rear during the heat of the day's combat, had asked how things were going up front.
"We're holding our own now, but McDowell has charge of the left," said the non-com.
"Then God save the left!" said the brigadier bitterly.
At one stage during the battle, the men insisted, one of McDowell's regiments fired a random volley and then turned and ran for the rear, shouting to its officers: "You can't play it on us!" A diarist explained: "General McDowell was viewed as a traitor by a large majority of the officers and men . . . and thousands of soldiers firmly believed that their fives would be purposely wasted if they obeyed his orders in the time of the conflict." A stout partisan of Joe Hooker, this writer added: "General Pope acted like a dunderpate during the day, and scorning the wise advice of abler generals like Hooker and Kearny allowed General McDowell to maneuver the troops upon the field." One man was heard to say during the retreat: "I would sooner shoot McDowell than Jackson." Some uniformed reader of Horace Greeley, passing General Pope, sang out: "Go west, young man, go west!" A member of the Black Hat
Brigade noted that "open sneering at General Pope was heard on all sides," and a veteran of the 3rd Wisconsin, in Banks's corps, wrote that "the feeling was strong in the army against Pope and McDowell," adding: "All knew and felt that as soldiers we had not had a fair chance."2
The one chuckle anyone recorded for that dreary evening came early in the proceedings, when a pallid artillery officer, groaning with pain from a wound, was being carried to the rear on a stretcher. Suddenly a covey of shells sailed low overhead and burst a few yards beyond. With one bound the disabled officer leaped from the stretcher and ran to the rear on nimble and undamaged legs, his stretcher-bearers running after him but quite unable to overtake him, while the troops along the road whooped derisively.
Somehow the army got back to Centreville and began to sort itself out behind the entrenchments there in the cheerless dawn of a chilly, rainy morning. Franklin's corps came up from Alexandria at last and moved down the road to form line of battle along Cub Run, a small stream that cuts across the highway halfway between Centreville and Bull Run Bridge. Pope recovered his powers of undaunted speech and wired Halleck that the enemy was badly whipped, concluding bravely: "Do not be uneasy. We will hold our own here." But this was too obviously a whistle to keep up his own courage to be believed, and anyway, General Lee had no intention whatever of attacking him behind his entrenchments. Instead, Lee sent Jackson's men slipping around to the north through the drizzle, striking for a road that would put them once again in Pope's rear. The exhausted Union cavalry detected the move and notified Pope, and Kearny and Reno hauled their men out of the muddy camp and started back toward Washington, turning sharply to the left when they reached the Little River turnpike, to thwart the move.
Next afternoon there was a wild, brief, and bloody fight near the country house of Chantilly, with a mad, gusty wind and a driving rain, and an overpowering thunderstorm which made so much noise that the gunfire itself could not be heard at Centreville, three miles away. Jackson was repulsed, and Phil Kearny—galloping through the dark wood with the lightning gleaming on the wet leaves, his sword in his hand and the bridle reins held in his teeth—rode smack into a line of Confederate infantry and was shot to death. The Confederates took his dead body to a farmhouse and laid it out with decent care, and A. P. Hill came to pay his tribute to the stout warrior his men had killed. Lee later sent the body through the lines in an ambulance under a flag of truce, "thinking that the possession of his remains may be a consolation to his family." The boys of Kearny's battle-torn 3rd Michigan Regiment wept unashamedly when they heard the news.
Also killed in this fight was General Isaac Stevens, division commander under Reno: a little swarthy man who had come out of West Point years earlier to be an engineer officer, left the army to become governor of Washington Territory, and was beginning to be recognized as a soldier of more than ordinary ability and promise.
This fight might have developed into something fairly big if it had not been for the storm. Pope had two fresh army corps at hand-Franklin's, and Sumner's, which had arrived this day—and an opportunity to handle Jackson's men pretty roughly appears to have been developing. But it was just naturally too stormy to fight that evening. Most of the men's cartridges were wet ("If your guns won't go off, neither will the enemy's," Jackson sternly told a brigadier who wanted to leave the line), and the rain was coming into the men's faces so hard they couldn't see each other, and anyway, Pope had finally been persuaded that he was licked. So the armies drew apart, and the Federals evacuated the bleak bivouac at Centreville—leaving fires burning smokily in the rain to deceive lurking Rebels—and moved back toward the lines around Alexandria.
This was the final, formal admission that the campaign had ended in flat failure. The rain kept coming down, the men knew Phil Kearny was dead, and the mood of hopeless depression deepened.
The 55th New York, just up from the peninsula—the same whose colonel, landing at Alexandria, had heard much talk of treason—was
sent up against the tide on some obscure mission requiring its presence at Fairfax Courthouse. The colonel left his record of what they got into on the day of the action at Chantilly:
"Soon the road became a mud hole, in which one could with difficulty direct his steps by the flashes of lightning. Disorder began to affect the ranks. The soldiers advanced painfully through the sticky earth, from which they could hardly lift their feet. The middle of the road was soon monopolized by an interminable file of wagons, retreating toward Alexandria. Mingled with them were batteries of artillery, which, endeavoring to pass by the wagons, blocked the road. The orders of officers, the cries of the teamsters, the oaths of the soldiers, were mingled with peals of thunder. All this produced a deafening tumult, in the midst of which it was difficult to recognize each other, and from the confusion of which we could not free ourselves without leaving behind us a large number of stragglers."
At Fairfax Courthouse it was a great deal worse, and there was a miserable, rain-soaked confusion: "By the light of the fires kindled all around in the streets, in the yards, in the fields, one could see a confused mass of wagons, ambulances, caissons, around which thousands of men invaded the houses, filled up the barns, broke down the fences, dug up the gardens, cooked their suppers, smoked, or slept in the rain. These men belonged to different corps. They were neither sick nor wounded; but, favored by the disorder inseparable from defeat, they had left their regiments at Centreville, to mingle with the train escorts, or had come away, each by himself, hurried on by the fear of new combats; stragglers and marauders, a contemptible multitude, whose sole desire was to flee from danger."