MANASSAS
At midsummer, 1861, there occurred near Manassas Junction in Virginia a
battle which must always be regarded as one of the most remarkable of
conflicts whether we consider its unusual event or its extraordinary
sequences.
The battle was utterly untimely in its happening. It was a contest
of the unready with the unready. It was brought about by influences
peculiarly unmilitary and in defiance of the judgment of all the
military men who had aught to do with it. We shall see hereafter in
how strange a way it produced effects precisely the opposite of those
that were legitimately to be expected of it; how to the victors in it
it brought a paralysis of enterprise far greater than disaster itself
could have wrought.
The Confederates lay at Manassas Junction thirty miles or so southwest
of Washington, with a force numbering by official report 21,833 men
and twenty-nine guns. The Federals had in front of Washington a total
available force of 34,000 men. On both sides the men were volunteers,
unused to the ways of war and unfit to enter upon a great battle. In
this respect, as has been already said, the Confederates had somewhat
the advantage in the fact that their volunteers were accustomed to
outdoor life and to the use of firearms, while those on the Federal
side were largely drawn from the counter, the bookkeeper's desk,
the factory, the farm, and the village. But on both sides they were
untrained, undisciplined, unlearned in the arts of war, and so loosely
organized that their organization could scarcely at all be considered
as an element of strength.
To offset this small Confederate advantage the Federals had behind them
supply departments almost perfect, while the Confederates were very
nearly starved to death by official incompetency in those departments
even at that early period of the war.
At Manassas they were perilously short not only of provisions and
forage, but even of water, all by reason of an extraordinary incapacity
on the part of supply departments that began their careers by
strangling themselves and their armies with red tape.
The facts of this matter have been set forth in detail in General
Beauregard's official reports, and in other authoritative publications.
Only a synopsis of them is necessary in this history. The Confederate
army lay at Manassas in the midst of a country abounding in supplies,
but its quartermasters and commissaries were not permitted to draw upon
that source of supply even in the smallest way. For months, before and
after the battle of Manassas, an entirely unused railroad--the Manassas
Gap line--lay idle. It penetrated a country to the west of the army
whose granaries were full, whose smoke-houses were rich in food, and
whose fields were laden with ripening corn. A country similarly rich
in food lay to the north, between the Federal and Confederate lines.
Its supplies were sure to fall into Federal hands presently if not
seized upon by the Confederates while they had opportunity. But the
Confederate supply departments at Richmond absolutely forbade their
own lieutenants at Manassas to feed and forage the army from such
easily available sources. They forbade any food or forage purchases to
be made in that region except by purchasing agents of their own, and
they required that all food and forage so purchased in the immediate
neighborhood of the army should be shipped to Richmond over the already
overburdened, single track Virginia Central railroad, and shipped back
again in such meager doles as the broken-down railroad could carry.
This peculiar imbecility of management continued till very nearly
the end of the war to keep the Confederate armies half starved or
wholly starved even when their camps lay in the midst of available
plenty. The difference between the admirable management of the supply
departments at the North and the phenomenally stupid management of the
like departments at the South was, from beginning to end, the full
equivalent of an army corps' difference in the number of fighting men.
Besides Beauregard's army there was a small force at Fredericksburg
from which Beauregard was able to draw 1,355 men and six guns in time
for the battle. In the last preceding chapter it has been shown how
Johnston succeeded in transferring a large part of his army--6,000
men and twenty guns--to Manassas in time for the battle, while none
of Patterson's regiments or batteries succeeded even in placing
themselves within supporting distance of the Federal army there
engaged.
Thus, according to the official reports, the Confederates had in all
29,188 men and fifty-five guns with which, in a strong position of
their own selection, to meet the advance of McDowell's force estimated
by the best Northern authorities at about 34,000 men.
If Patterson had not been sent to the valley at all, but to Washington
instead, the Federal force would have been swelled to 55,000 or 60,000
men, while Beauregard's strength could not have been increased by more
than a few thousands at most. In that case the result of the first
great battle of the war might or might not have been different from
what it was--for with wholly untrained troops strength is not always
to be accurately measured by numbers. But in any case the probability
would have been greatly increased that the first battle of the war
should be the last and that the country by quick and complete victory
should be spared four years of desolating war that threw homes by
scores of thousands into the shadow.
The battle was brought about not in answer to any consideration of
military propriety but solely in response to ignorant but irresistible
popular clamor. The people of this country knew nothing of modern war
or of the conditions that govern success or failure in it. The latest
national recollection of war was of the unequal conflict with Mexico
nearly a decade and a half before. The American people had never seen
assembled in their name and behalf an army half so great as that with
which their patriotism had now responded to the country's call. In
front of Washington and in the near-by valley of Virginia they had
between fifty and sixty thousand men, while their adversaries could
muster there only a little more than half as many.
Knowing little of the difference between uniformed men with arms
in their hands and seasoned soldiers, the people at the North grew
violently impatient of the delay. They had furnished their Government
twice as many armed men as the enemy could count, and they could not
understand why the double force thus created should not go on at once
to make an end of what they regarded as the "nonsense down there in
Virginia."
So confident had been the conviction at the North that this was a petty
outbreak to be suppressed easily and quickly, that a large part of the
enlistments were for no more than three months. That period seemed to
them more than adequate to the task in hand, and it had been deemed
needless to take young men away from their homes and their employments
for a greater length of time.
It is plain enough that the administration at Washington at first
shared this conception of the case. Otherwise it would neither have
called for nor accepted three months volunteers.
But the three months were now nearly expired, and nothing had been
done to make an end of the "nonsense." The terms of service of many
regiments were soon to expire and there seemed to be no general
disposition on the part of the men composing them to enter into new
enlistments. It was obvious that unless the "army" at and near
Washington should go forward at once, crush Beauregard's greatly
inferior force, march on to Richmond and make an end of the difficulty,
new levies must be called for and a new strain put upon the endurance
and the patience of the people.
All this impatience found daily and often intemperate expression in
the newspapers, whose rivalry in clamor fanned the flame of discontent
among the people. Desk strategists who knew nothing of war's conditions
had an easy task in figuring out with their blue pencils an absolutely
certain victory for the Federal arms, if only the Federal generals
could be persuaded or compelled by public opinion to avail themselves
of their matchless opportunity. "Are not two more than one? And have
not we the two to our enemy's one? What dullards and laggards our
generals must be to delay for a day or an hour!" So ran the editorial
argument, and that argument seemed to the people conclusive and
convincing, for the reason that the people generally were as ignorant
as the strategists of the editorial rooms themselves concerning the
conditions that govern battle and the training necessary to convert
civilian volunteers into soldiers fit to face a fire of musketry and
cannon.
The military men knew better, of course. Except the superannuated
commander-in-chief, General Scott, not one of them had ever commanded
so much as a brigade in battle, but at least they had been taught in
a military school and many of them had seen fighting. They knew the
peril of hurling ill-organized regiments of utterly untrained and
undisciplined civilians upon the chosen positions of an armed foe,
even when that foe's forces were in a like condition of undisciplined
inefficiency. The arithmetical argument in no degree deceived them.
They knew that with such men as they had under their command strength
could not be safely reckoned by a mere numerical count, that under
certain easily imagined conditions, indeed, strength must often be in
inverse ratio to numbers. They perfectly knew that for them to advance
against the Confederates with an army in such condition as theirs was
at that time was to take a fearful risk of defeat, disastrous and
demoralizing to the army and dangerously discouraging to the country
behind the army.
But the demand on the part of press, pulpit and people for an immediate
advance was too insistent, too clamorous, and was rapidly becoming too
angry to be longer resisted. It was reinforced by an almost equally
insistent demand on the part of the civilian authorities at Washington,
whose ignorance of military conditions was scarcely less pronounced
than that of the excited editors and orators of the country.
It was decided therefore to advance the army and bring on the hazardous
battle against the better judgment of every trained military man at
Washington.
General Scott was still in supreme command of the army, but he was much
too old and too feeble to conduct the perilous enterprise in person.
General Irwin McDowell was chosen to plan the battle and fight it. He
had never commanded an army before or conducted a campaign, but neither
had any other officer then available, and his technical knowledge
of strategy was thorough. On this occasion his plan of battle was
admirable, one of the best, General Sherman has said, that was formed
at any time during the war. It was essentially identical with that
afterwards adopted by General Lee at the Seven Days' Battles and again
at Chancellorsville.
A reconnoissance in force was made against the Confederate lines along
Bull Run on Thursday, the eighteenth of July, which disclosed the fact
that the Confederates were fully entrenched in a strong position which
commanded the crossings of the stream and the plateau over which it
must be approached.
Having found out all this, General McDowell decided to bring on a
battle on Sunday, July the twenty-first.
It is not the purpose of the present writer to tell the story of
Manassas or that of any other battle in military detail. That has been
done too often already, to the hopeless confusion of the civilian
reader's mind. Only an intelligible outline is attempted here, with
no effort to locate this or that division or brigade or regiment or
battery upon the field or to follow out the details of any movement
made by any of them.
Beauregard held his line along the stream known as Bull Run, over a
space of several miles. This line had been established in defense
of the railroad "junction" at Manassas where the line of the Orange
and Alexandria railroad joined that of the Manassas Gap railroad.
This position was suggested by the artificial geography of railroad
construction. It was defended by the natural physical geography of Bull
Run, which furnished the Confederates a comparatively good, though by
no means a strategically satisfactory, line of defensive fighting.
McDowell's purpose was to assail the Confederates on their extreme
right, there making a feint as if to force a crossing of Bull Run
at that point which he did not at all intend; to march his stronger
battalions to his own right along roads substantially parallel with
Bull Run; here and there to divert a force to the Bull Run line and
make fighting there by way of preventing Confederate concentration at
any point and finally to hurl all his force with irresistible fury
upon the extreme left of the Confederate line, which he intended and
confidently expected to turn and overwhelm with his superior numbers.
It was McDowell's plan to deceive the Confederates as to his point of
decisive attack, to keep them busy all along the Bull Run line and,
late in the day, to envelop their left wing, crush it by superior
force, capture the railroad and perhaps compel Beauregard's surrender
for lack of a line of retreat.
The plan worked well for a time. The attacks of McDowell's divisions
upon the Confederate right and center were stoutly and successfully
resisted at every point, but they were made with determination and
they served their purpose of deceiving the Southern commander or at
least of preventing him from withdrawing heavy forces from that part of
the field for the defense of his left against the final and crushing
assault which McDowell intended to make there, and in preparation for
which he was all day moving his heaviest columns in that direction
along roads not visible from the Confederate lines.
When at last that assault was made, it found Beauregard inadequately
prepared for it; but, with the determination and energy which were the
dominant traits of his character, the Confederate general held his
ground obstinately and hurriedly moved troops from the right to the
left of his line.
The fighting raged furiously at this critical point and for a
considerable time its result was in doubt, with the chances strongly in
favor of the Federals. Three times the tide of battle ebbed and flowed
across the disputed field, both sides fighting with a courage and
obstinacy that were scarcely to have been expected of troops so little
inured to the work of war.
When the struggle was at its fiercest, and at the moment when the
promise of it seemed to be that the Federals would overwhelm and crush
their sorely outnumbered adversaries, a strong detachment of Johnston's
troops from the Valley, long delayed on their railroad journey, reached
the field. Their orders were of the vaguest, but they plainly saw an
overmastering Federal force pressing the Confederates very hard in
their immediate presence. So, following the Napoleonic instruction to
go to the point of heaviest firing the officers commanding the arriving
Confederates went at once into the thick of the fight.
It was the work of a brief time for these fresh men to envelop the
advancing Federal right wing and crush it to pulp.
In the meanwhile the sorely beset left wing of the Confederates had
been enabled to hold its ground and save itself for a time from
complete disaster, only by the obstinate courage of a brigade of
Virginians under General Thomas Jonathan Jackson--a West Pointer who
had long ago resigned from the old army to become a professor in the
Virginia Military Institute, and who had now become a brigadier-general
of Virginia volunteers. He had already so completely won the hearts and
dominated the minds of his men that--raw volunteers as they were--they
had no thought of faltering or flinching in the presence of any danger,
so long as their chieftain bade them stand fast. One after another the
battalions with which they had touched elbows were beaten back before a
leaden hailstorm, or torn to shreds by cannon fire at murderously short
range, or fairly forced to the rear by bayonet-armed phalanxes, while
their own brigade line was steadily withering under the destructive
fire. But they were under inspiration of a leader whom they loved and
whose courage was inspired by a religious faith as unfaltering as that
of any Mussulman fanatic, and so they stood steadfast in spite of all.
They looked for their orders only to that great, calm, passionless
leader, and from him alone they took their impulse. Scarcely at any
time during a war that abounded in illustrations of heroism, was there,
on either side, a more conspicuous example of the courage that endures,
than that which was afforded by Jackson and his Virginians at that most
critical moment of the first great battle. It excited admiration and
inspired others with courage even in that hour of seemingly hopeless
defeat. General Bee, who was destined a few minutes later to become
a martyr to his own courage, seeing it, cried out to his wavering
men: "There stands Jackson like a stone wall," and appealed to them to
emulate the example of their comrades and "rally on the Virginians."
From that hour to this the title "Stonewall" has clung to the fame and
memory of Jackson more closely than his own proper name has done.
Under the fierce onset of Johnston's fresh men, supported by rallying
brigades that had for a time faltered and yielded ground, and
reinforced from the Confederate right, the Federal assailing column was
quickly crushed and forced to retire, the Confederates pressing hotly
upon their heels.
Then occurred that insane panic in the Federal army which has never
been explained or accounted for except upon the insufficient ground
that its victims were men without discipline and wholly unused to
war. The explanation leaves much to be desired. The men who yielded
to that panic impulse had already on that day proved themselves brave
fellows, quite capable of doing soldiers' work right gallantly. They
had fought with vigor, determination and high courage through long and
bloody hours. They had been the assailants where assault required a
greater courage than defense and they had done their soldierly work
altogether well. They had been baffled of victory in the crowning
hour of the battle, but they perfectly knew that their columns still
outnumbered those of their adversary, and they must have known that in
an orderly withdrawal from the scene of the conflict they were not in
the least degree likely to be destructively assailed in their turn.
Nothing was more unlikely indeed, than that the Confederates, having
exhausted their freshness of vigor in the battle and having achieved
their immediate purpose by repelling their enemy's assault, would in
their turn advance upon that enemy, still outnumbering them, if he had
withdrawn in good order and taken up a strong defensive position at
Centreville, only a few miles away. Had the Federal Army done that,
preserving its cohesion and presenting a determined front, it is indeed
certain that the Confederates would not have cared to convert their
successful defense into a more than doubtful offense; and even had that
happened through Confederate over-confidence, the opportunity of the
Federals to convert their own defeat into a conspicuous victory would
have been as tempting as any that an army could desire.
Later in the war after the two armies had been molded into
effectiveness by the stern discipline of service, some such course as
this would undoubtedly have been pursued. But at Manassas the event was
startlingly different. No sooner did the Federal troops that had fought
so gallantly on the right of their line find their assault repelled and
themselves forced back than all cohesion, all discipline, all soldierly
qualities went out of them. They broke ranks and fled in a positively
demented panic, which unfortunately proved to be instantly and
universally contagious. The whole army fell into confusion. Even those
parts of it which had successfully held their own in severe conflicts
throughout the battle hours broke ranks and ran as an unorganized mob
might at the advance of a force of regulars armed with bayonets.
The Confederates, flushed with unexpected victory achieved in the
moment of defeat, pursued them with all the quick-moving forces
available, chief among these being Stuart's small body of Virginia
cavalry.
There was a report current in the Federal army that J. E. B. Stuart had
under his command thirty thousand of the finest and most desperately
daring horsemen that had been known in the world since the days of
the Mamelukes. As a matter of fact, he had under his orders five or
six hundred young Virginians. They knew how to ride their horses,
they knew how to use their revolvers, and they knew in some degree at
least how to handle their sabers. They had been trained to all that
all their lives and perfected in it at the camp of instruction at
Ashland. But beyond that they had no skill and no superiority and it
was their constant wonder after the battle of Manassas, that during
the chase they almost nowhere met the cavalry of the other side. They
met and quickly dispersed artillery and infantry, but nowhere did they
encounter men of their own arm of the service. They had met and fought
horsemen in the Valley of Virginia--for Stuart had been with Johnston
there--but they encountered none such now.
The simple fact is that the Union army was in an insane panic and
utterly disorganized. The sole thought of every man in it was to
escape with a whole skin if that should be in any way possible. The
cavalry men having horses under them put spurs to their steeds and led
instead of protectingly following a confused and confusing retreat upon
Washington. Artillery men cut their horses out of their gun carriages
and caissons, mounted them, and fled bareback at such speed as the
horses could make.
At a little stream a caisson in mad flight was presently overturned,
obstructing a bridge. A great cloud of panic-stricken soldiers and
citizens seeking an avenue of flight was collected there almost in an
instant. Then up came Kemper of the cannon, powder-grimed and weary
but flushed with the victory. Using two guns he opened fire upon the
confused crowd at short range, with an effect like that produced
upon a flock of partridges when a charge of shot is fired into its
midst. Then a little squad of Stuart's cavalry men--ten or a dozen in
number--drew sabers and charged, and a minute later the creek was full
of struggling and drowning men, but no organized force remained to be
charged except a body of eighty infantry men fully armed, with bayonets
fixed, who stood away on the left. Upon these the insignificant squad
of cavalry men made a dashing charge, calling out as they galloped:
"Throw down your arms or we'll put you to the sword!" And so completely
demoralizing had the panic become that these eighty who could instantly
have swept the little band of cavalry men off the face of the earth,
not only dashed their arms to the ground but broke ranks and ran, every
individual man seeking such escape as might be possible to him.
The men who were so panic-stricken on that fateful Sunday were not
cowards. Many of them fought valiantly and stalwartly later in the
war. They were simply victims of an insensate and highly contagious
panic. They were not yet soldiers. They had not yet learned the first
lesson of the soldier, namely, the imperative necessity of preserving
organization, fighting every force encountered, and waiting for orders
that must be obeyed at all costs, especially before giving way to the
enemy. Their imaginations had been inflamed by the stories related
at their camp fires respecting Stuart's mythical Mamelukes and their
terrible skill in horsemanship.
In brief all courage, all cohesion, and all soldierly quality
had completely gone out of the Federal army. Men who had fought
courageously an hour before had become as hares fleeing from pursuing
hounds, and their flight knew no halting until they had passed the long
bridge into the streets of Washington, where they paused only to gather
breath for a still further flight if such should become necessary.
In all this the confusion was increased and multiplied by the
presence among the fugitives of a multitude of panic-stricken
picnickers--Congressmen, civilians of every sort, and lavishly dressed
women--who had gone out in carriages and carryalls to see the spectacle
of a Federal army walking over the Confederates, and to follow the
fleeing rebels all the way to Richmond, feasting meanwhile upon the
champagne, the boned turkey, the sandwiches and the truffled game with
which they had so lavishly supplied themselves that the Confederates
fed fat for days afterwards upon the provisions that the picnickers
abandoned in their flight.
The presence of these people within the lines of a fighting army was
in itself a conspicuous illustration of the utterly unmilitary and
undisciplined condition of that army. Imagine, if it be possible to
imagine, such a horde of sightseers attempting to follow Grant into the
Wilderness, or Sherman on his march to the Sea! But the war was very
young when the battle of Manassas was fought, and so these people were
permitted to be there, to add to the completeness of a rout that could
never have been equaled in its insanity at any later period of the
conflict.
As to the total number of men engaged on either side at Manassas, the
statistics are varying and untrustworthy. It is certain that there
was no very great or decisive disparity of numbers. The Federal army
outnumbered that of the Confederates by only three or four thousand
men. General Beauregard has estimated his total force, including the
necessary garrison of the works, which of course was not actually
engaged, at a total of 29,188 men. According to Dr. Rossiter Johnson,
an unusually accurate and conscientious historian on the Northern side
whose means of information are of the very best, McDowell's total
force, including those detached to guard the line of retreat upon
Washington, was about 34,000 men.
Exact statistics in such a case are of no moment. Where armed mobs,
undisciplined, ill-organized, and unused to the strenuous work of war,
meet in battle quite other things than numbers are apt to be decisive.
The Federal commanders reported a loss of 470 killed, 1,071 wounded
and 1,793 missing--a total loss of 3,334 men. The Confederate loss was
officially reported at 387 killed, 1,582 wounded and 13 missing, making
a total of 1,982.
If greater attention is here given to this first important battle than
to others of larger magnitude to be treated in future pages of this
work, it is because of the extraordinary effect the battle had, as will
be set forth in the next chapter, and because of the peculiar danger to
which the Confederate victory for a time subjected the Federal cause.