by S. C. Gwynne
Jackson disembarked, obtained directions to army headquarters, then rode off to receive his new orders. When he arrived, General Beauregard was holding a meeting with a group of pipe-smoking generals and colonels bedecked with an assortment of epaulets, sashes, and sabers and seated on the shaded lawn in front of a farmhouse belonging to a man named Wilmer McLean. They were deep in conversation when Jackson, unimposing in his rumpled blue VMI uniform and stiff as ever, approached, saluted, and reported that he had just come from the Shenandoah Valley with 2,600 men, the vanguard of Johnston’s army. Instead of a warm welcome—or even a perfunctory welcome—from Beauregard, Jackson was greeted with a mixture of shock and surprise, the general gist of which was: What on earth was he doing there? Unbeknownst to Jackson, Beauregard had the day before suggested to Joe Johnston—he could not issue an order because Johnston outranked him—a grand plan of battle in which Johnston, instead of coming to Manassas Junction, would take his army on a wide swing to the north through the Bull Run Mountains, then head east and fall upon the flank and rear of the Federal force at Centreville. Beauregard, meanwhile, would attack the army in front, creating a viselike movement that would send the Yankees reeling back to Washington. Beauregard had thought the plan ingenious, and was quite pleased with it.
Johnston had found it foolish. “I did not agree to the plan,” he wrote later, and charitably, “because, ordinarily, it is impracticable to direct the movements of troops so distant from each other, by roads so far separated, in such a manner as to combine their action on a field of battle. . . . I preferred the junction of our armies at the earliest time possible.”4 The problem was that either he had never bothered to tell Beauregard that or his message had not gotten through.
Beauregard had been describing this ambitious flanking movement to his officers, explaining that Johnston was crossing the Blue Ridge that very day and would attack the enemy’s right flank the next morning, when Jackson walked in to announce that a significant portion of Johnston’s army, at least, was doing no such thing. And now Jackson was the target of unfriendly questioning. Was Johnston planning to march with the rest of his army on the enemy’s flank? Beauregard demanded.5 Jackson, who was tight-lipped anyway in the presence of other general officers, now replied, in formal tones, that as far as he knew such a flanking march was not likely, since Johnston was coming east with his column on the same train Jackson had taken. Beauregard found Jackson so lacking in credibility, such a worthless officer, that he simply refused to believe him. He told the brigadier where to camp his brigade, and dismissed him.6 Jackson returned to the junction and marched his weary men three miles through pouring rain to a pine thicket near a creek called Bull Run.
Beauregard, meanwhile, resumed addressing his officers as though this inconvenient interruption had not happened. “The information received from General Jackson was most unexpected,” wrote Jubal Early, then a brigade commander, “but General Beauregard stated that he thought Jackson was mistaken, and that he was satisfied General Johnston was marching with the rest of his troops and would attack the enemy’s right flank as before stated. . . . He stated that the effect would be a complete rout, a perfect Waterloo, and that we would pursue, cross the Potomac and arouse Maryland.”7 Jackson was, of course, right: the Creole general would very quickly be disabused of these plans for a second Waterloo.
Beauregard’s plan had indeed been a bad idea, coming at a time when green armies with neophyte officers could barely execute a ten-mile march at route step on a clear road, let alone a fifty-mile turning maneuver through unknown terrain, out of touch with the main body of the army, where the timing of the attacks would be everything. But Beauregard, as it turned out, the dashing hero of the South, the man who had brought Sumter to its knees, was full of bad ideas. On July 14 he had sent an emissary to the Confederacy’s first council of war, held at the Spotswood Hotel in Richmond, where he had presented a plan for a slashing offensive against the North that was Napoleonic in its grandeur and ambition. Beauregard would begin by uniting with Johnston and his “20,000” men. They would fall upon the Federals in front of Washington and, as Beauregard put it, “thus exterminate them or drive them into the Potomac.”8 Johnston would then return to the Shenandoah Valley with his original 20,000, plus another 10,000 from Beauregard’s army, and destroy the smaller Union army under Robert Patterson, all within a week. After a side trip to eliminate McClellan’s irksome 12,000-man column in western Virginia, Johnston would turn, march through Maryland, and attack Washington from the rear, while Beauregard assailed what remained of its defenses in front. The result: in what Beauregard confidently asserted would be a campaign of fifteen to twenty-five days, the South would not only win a crushing victory, but would then, in effect, dictate peace to a beaten and bereft Lincoln in the White House.
In its breathless optimism, and its assumption that the Federal armies would happily cooperate with the Confederate plan, Beauregard’s scheme—the product of a restless, energetic, impulsive nature—managed to sound less like a calculated military strategy than something a child might concoct on his bedroom floor with toy soldiers. His proposal was heard by President Jefferson Davis, his military assistant Robert E. Lee, and Adjutant General Samuel Cooper, all of whom found it ridiculously impractical, starting with Beauregard’s wishful assumption that Johnston had twenty thousand men. This rejection had a larger meaning, too, for the opening gambit of the war. Beauregard’s proposal, vainglorious and overblown though it was, had been offensive in nature. But the Confederate approach to this first big test of strength, as developed by Davis and Lee, would be fundamentally defensive. They would wait for McDowell to come out of his camps in front of Washington; then they would protect their land and their country with everything they had.
Having been ignored first by Davis and Lee, and then by Johnston, Beauregard finally proceeded to do what his bosses wanted him to do, which was to put in place the first large-scale defensive position of the war, an eight-mile-long line made up of the bulk of his 32,000 troops along the lethargic, debris-clogged Bull Run, which wound, snakewise, in a northwest-to-southeast arc roughly perpendicular to a straight line between Manassas Junction and Centreville. It was here, Beauregard had said, that he would make his “desperate stand.” He had moved all of his troops back from forward positions nearer to Washington, and now his line extended from the Warrenton Pike and its stone bridge on the north, and the Orange and Alexandria’s bridge at Union Mills on the south. Between those two points were seven fords, only one of which was considered easy to cross. On July 18 these defenses had been tested halfheartedly by a Union reconnaissance in force at a place called Blackburn’s Ford, and the attack had been sharply and convincingly rebuffed. But neither side had gained any tactical advantage. In any case, by July 20, reinforced by Johnston’s brigades from Winchester, including Jackson’s, Beauregard had his line fully in place.
• • •
McDowell, meanwhile, had more to worry about than the constant indigestion he was suffering from eating his multicourse meals. As he saw it, he was being goaded into attacking the Confederacy, quite against his will, by what seemed a vast alliance of howling news editors, congressmen, cabinet officers, rank-and-file soldiers, and Lincoln himself, and he was feeling more and more uncertain about the whole enterprise. His men were simply not ready, he argued. Many of his soldiers had been in the army less than a month, had only the most basic training in such skills as marching and shooting, and were in such poor physical shape that they were likely to wilt in the blazing summer heat and humidity of northern Virginia. For all his inexperience with command, McDowell recognized that no one on either side had ever managed such large numbers of men in a single body, not even the legendary Winfield Scott. This was a new kind of war: troops would move by train; orders would move by telegraph wire; and tens of thousands of soldiers would have to be moved to, from, and around battlefields. Simply inserting so many regiments into a battle was beyond the ken of even the West Pointers. �
�I had no opportunity to test my machinery,” McDowell complained later, “to move it around and see whether it would work smoothly or not. There was not a man there who had ever manoeuvred troops in large bodies. There was not a man in the army. I wanted very much a little time; all of us wanted it. We did not have a bit of it. The answer [from Lincoln] was: You are green, it is true, but they are green also; you are all green alike.”9
If he had been uneasy on the subject of troop management before the middle of July, McDowell was horrified by what happened when, after seemingly endless delay that had held him up more than a week, his men finally marched out of their camps on July 16 toward Centreville and Manassas. The war’s first great troop movement had started splendidly, fifty regiments of infantry and ten batteries of field artillery wheeling about in the hot dust, regimental colors flying, bayonets flashing, and band music rising on the wind. They had marched before the president. There were so many fancy carriages, members of Congress, senators, and fashionable ladies that it seemed more like the return of a triumphant army than the dispatching of a green and untried one toward an uncertain fate. Still, the army was superbly equipped and commanded by experienced soldiers: the four division commanders and eight of the eleven brigade commanders had been regular army men. The first day’s march went rather well.
The second, on July 17, was a full-scale disaster. It began with the fact that officers, who did not yet know that the rebel army had withdrawn from its forward positions, were terrified of ambush. They saw nonexistent breastworks and shadow batteries in the woods. Stray shots at phantom pickets would prompt the “long roll” of drums, signaling an enemy attack.10 That meant frequent stops, and the men quickly learned what frequent stops did to marching columns totaling thirty-five thousand men. The main effect was an accordion-like action, on a giant scale, that alternately froze men in place, in the heat and dust of a miles-long traffic jam, or caused them literally to have to run to catch up, sweating profusely while their equipment clanked around them. In the prodigious delays, the men hooted at passing officers, stopped at every creek to fill their canteens, and undertook excursions that involved everything from berry picking to chasing pigs and chickens.11 They often discarded their packs, and even left their cartridge boxes behind. This was a volunteer army, after all—there was as yet no draft—and the men still cherished the illusion that they were individuals with individual rights and privileges.
When the Union forces reached Fairfax Courthouse and saw that the Confederates had abandoned it, they indulged in a celebration so wild one might have thought the war was over. Bands played, stores were looted, and soldiers were rampant in the streets. “Our dirty fingers were plunged into their jam pots,” wrote one soldier from Rhode Island, “and we drank their whiskey, tea and coffee and ate their sardines and pickles with gusto.”12 It had taken the Federals a full two and a half days to travel twenty-two miles—a delay that allowed Johnston to steal his march on Patterson and join his troops with Beauregard’s. When they finally arrived at camp near Centreville, officers discovered that the rank and file were out of food. The next day was spent correcting this problem. Saturday was consumed by reconnaissance, the reading of local maps, and efforts to scout a ford over the creek on the far rebel left. All of this was weirdly leavened by the presence of senators, congressmen, and cabinet officers, who hovered about McDowell’s headquarters, passing out cigars and delivering opinions on the outcome of the battle. By Saturday evening, after seemingly endless delays for the most astounding variety of reasons had stalled his advance nearly two weeks, McDowell’s Union army was out of excuses. They would have to fight.
That night—the last night—was lovely, soft and bright and experienced to the fullest degree by thousands of soldiers on both sides who could not sleep. “This is one of the most beautiful nights that imagination can conceive,” wrote one Union soldier from his camp. “The sky is perfectly clear, the moon is full and bright, and the air is as still as if it were not within a few hours to be disturbed by the roar of cannon.” In the Union camps regimental bands played, and the men sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” One newspaper correspondent, riding through the camp, called the scene “the picture of enchantment.”13
That enchantment was cruelly brief. The first of the bugles began sounding reveille at two o’clock the next morning.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE BULLET’S SONG
“The first of all maxims for the conduct of a campaign,” wrote Edward Porter Alexander, who would later become a Confederate general and who, this day, as a young captain of engineers serving in the Signal Corps, would play a critical role in the battle, “is to oppose fractions of the enemy’s army with the whole unit of your own. In other words, compel the enemy to divide while you unite and strike him divided. Or, as our General [Nathan Bedford] Forrest put it in plain Confederate vernacular: ‘Git thar first with the most men.’ ”1
The outcome of the Battle of Manassas—or as Northerners, who liked to name battles after watercourses, had it, Bull Run—turned on this very same tactic, in this case a secret and stunningly successful Federal march around the left wing of the Confederate army. The movement followed the military maxim, bringing a large mass of Union troops to confront a small rebel force. By the late morning of July 21, the Union tactic had created a mismatch so extreme that it should have resulted in the wholesale rout of the Confederate army and the triumphant arrival that day of the Union army at Manassas Junction. Richmond, ninety miles away, ought to have been trembling in mortal terror.
That the Federals failed to accomplish any of these things—in fact, failed so completely and miserably that almost the exact reverse happened—is the story of the first great battle of the Civil War. It is a story that features, as one of its prominent heroes, an unknown brigadier general named Thomas J. Jackson.
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All battles take on a logic of their own. In this case that logic was supplied by the Union forces, since it was their plan that determined where and how most of the fighting took place during the nine-and-a-half-hour battle. General Irvin McDowell’s scheme was simple in theory, difficult in execution. He had four divisions that totaled 35,000 men a few miles from Bull Run in Centreville, Virginia. His idea was to bring just enough force against a few sections of Beauregard’s eight-mile-long, 32,000-man defensive line along the creek to occupy its attention and make it think an advance was in the offing, while the main Union column made a sweeping march to the north and west, unseen, under cover of woodland and dale. In other words, so far around the end of the Confederate line at the Stone Bridge, so far upstream on Bull Run that the rebels would not detect it until it was too late.
To create his diversion, McDowell planned to send two brigades (a Civil War brigade usually consisted of 2,000 to 2,500 men—though this could vary widely) to Mitchell’s and Blackburn’s Fords, where they would feign attack, and three brigades under Brigadier General Daniel Tyler to the Stone Bridge, the terminus of the Confederate left, where they would likewise lob shells and fire muskets, and otherwise pretend that they intended to mount a full-scale assault. Meanwhile, two full divisions under Brigadier Generals David Hunter and Samuel Heintzelman, some 18,000 men and thirty guns, would leave at 2:00 a.m., cross Bull Run at Sudley and Poplar Fords at about 7:00 a.m., then drive southward. Thus flanked, the Confederates would be forced out of their defensive position at the Stone Bridge, allowing Tyler’s division to move west down the Warrenton Pike and into the fight, delivering the final blow that would send the Confederate army staggering in retreat toward Manassas Junction and Richmond beyond. On paper, the plan was perfectly sound. Its principal weakness could have been predicted from the logistical horrors of July 17: these green soldiers and officers did not yet know how to march, and certainly not over unknown roads in darkness.
Beauregard, remarkably, wanted to do the same thing to his adversary, only in reverse. His mirror-image plan was to unleash the forces on the right side of his line to turn the U
nion’s left flank. This was in spite of the curious fact that Beauregard fully expected that his West Point classmate Irvin McDowell was going to hit the Confederate left.2 But instead of strengthening his forces there in expectation of a defensive fight, the Creole general’s answer to the expected Union advance was to beat McDowell to the punch, and do it so effectively that the rest of McDowell’s army would have no choice but to break off its own attack. Beauregard had already concentrated the bulk of his force in his center and on his right. Now he would swing them into action and, in his words, “by a rapid and vigorous attack on McDowell’s left flank and rear at Centreville, rout him and cut off his retreat on Washington.”3 It was an audacious plan, forsaking defense for an aggressive offense. At 4:30 a.m. Beauregard handed his final combat order for approval to Johnston, the ranking officer in the field, who had not yet had time to learn the local terrain. Johnston signed it. All that remained was to give the order to advance.
Or so it must have seemed to Beauregard, peering into the cottony darkness across Bull Run in the early-morning hours. The scheme, as it unfurled, was a disaster. No advance was ever made, and the promised tactical movements never came close to happening. The entire elaborate pantomime is noteworthy mainly because it failed to provide any deterrent to McDowell’s own maneuver, and because it is such a perfect example of the almost comical incompetence of Beauregard and his staff.