THE SECOND MANASSAS CAMPAIGN
Lee had now accomplished the first of his two purposes. He had raised
McClellan's siege of Richmond. He had not succeeded in capturing
or destroying McClellan's army as he had hoped to do, but he had
completely baffled its endeavor. He had driven it out of its strongly
fortified positions. He had kept it in an enforced and continuous
retreat for a whole week. He had compelled it to fight losing battles
by day, and to spend the nights in painful and exhausting efforts to
escape, which McClellan himself, as his grieved and angry official
reports clearly showed, regarded as efforts of extremely doubtful
outcome.
McClellan's campaign against Richmond had disastrously failed. He had
saved his army indeed without a repetition of the Manassas panic,
but he had been baffled in all his purposes and driven for seven
days and nights like a hunted stag seeking safety in flight. All his
combinations had come to naught, all his elaborately constructed
earthworks had failed him even as means of holding his position as an
assailant. All his siege guns had proved of no avail.
But he had organized a great army so well disciplined that it could
fight with determination, lose with a calm mind, and retreat before a
pursuing enemy without losing cohesion or falling into panic. That
service of his was emphasized during all the brilliant future history
of the Army of the Potomac. It made itself manifest at Antietam, at
Fredericksburg, at Chancellorsville, at Gettysburg, and later at the
Wilderness, Spottsylvania, Cold Harbor and Petersburg. But with all his
splendid ability as an engineer, and his still more conspicuous gifts
as an organizer of raw material into an effective force, McClellan was
manifestly unfit to command an expedition in which he must try his wits
against the genius of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. A historian
most friendly to him, Dr. Rossiter Johnson, has written: "He was an
accomplished engineer and a gigantic adjutant, but hardly the general
to be sent against an army that could move and a commander that could
think."
Lee had driven a splendid army, nearly double his own in numbers, to
a position where it lay cowering on the river-bank, under protection
of the gunboats and no longer depending upon its own prowess even for
self-defense.
But Lee had not destroyed McClellan's army, or captured it, or even
weakened it in any conspicuous degree. That army, splendidly organized,
superbly equipped, and strengthened rather than weakened in morale,
lay securely at rest on the James river, within easy striking distance
of Richmond. There was no knowing at what moment McClellan might hurl
it again upon Richmond or upon that commanding key to Richmond--the
Petersburg position. In the hands of a capable commander McClellan's
army would at this time have been a more serious menace than ever to
the Confederate capital, for it now had an absolutely secure and
unassailable base of operations, while its fighting quality had been
improved rather than impaired by its seven days of battling.
Thus the second part of Lee's military problem remained still to be
solved, and it was very greatly the more difficult part--the part
that most imperatively called for the exercise of strategic genius of
a high order. He must prevent a junction between Pope's army, which
was now advancing by way of Manassas Junction, and McClellan's force
on the James river. He must overthrow Pope on the one hand and compel
McClellan to retire on the other.
For the accomplishment of this Lee relied confidently upon the
positively morbid dread of the loss of Washington which at that time
filled the Northern mind and inspired every order given at the Federal
capital. His problem was to put Washington in peril without losing
Richmond, and thus to compel the withdrawal of McClellan's army for the
defense of the Federal capital and to meet a threatened invasion of the
North.
To that end Lee boldly risked a division of his force as he afterwards
did on several occasions in presence of an enemy who already
outnumbered him.
On the thirteenth of July he detached Jackson, with his own and Ewell's
commands, to operate against Pope in northern Virginia, himself holding
Richmond with the rather scant remainder of his army.
Jackson moved at once to Orange Court House, confronting Pope. This
movement threatened Washington only in a rather remote way and not very
seriously, but it had the desired effect. A part of McClellan's force
was at once withdrawn from the position at Harrison's Landing and sent
by water to the national capital as a reserve and reinforcement for
Pope in case that general should be beaten in the field.
Promptly--near the end of July--Lee sent A. P. Hill's corps to Jackson,
and, thus strengthened, Jackson pushed his column across the Rapidan
river and encountered a part of Pope's forces at Cedar Mountain on the
ninth of August. The action was not a decisive one, but it served Lee's
purpose of compelling the early and complete withdrawal of McClellan
from his threatening position below Richmond.
Two days after the battle at Cedar Mountain Jackson retired to the
south bank of the river to await the reinforcements which Lee was
sending to him as rapidly as McClellan's withdrawal rendered it
measurably prudent for him to deplete the army defending Richmond.
By August 14, Lee had transferred practically all of his army from
Richmond to the line of the Rapidan, leaving only a meager garrison at
the Confederate capital. On that day he joined the army and assumed
direct personal command.
Pope was a good and active officer, unfortunately given to vainglorious
boasting. He dated his orders "Headquarters in the saddle, Army in the
field," and set forth in them the assertion that he had so far seen
only the backs of the rebels. He announced his policy in the phrase,
"bayonets to the front, spades to the rear." In brief, he jauntily
and with ridiculous boastings, undertook to meet one of the finest
fighting forces that had ever been organized in the world, commanded
by the most brilliant and the ablest general of the South. He thus
prepared for himself a peculiar humiliation in the event of defeat,
stripping himself in advance of all excuses and all pleas in abatement
of failure, and in advance minimizing the glory of victory should he
succeed in overcoming Lee.
There was no more ridiculous spectacle seen from beginning to end of
the war than this. It invited all the wits of the newspapers to facile
jestings, and when Pope's failure was complete, one of them said, in
reference to his "headquarters in the saddle" phrase, that he had
"placed his headquarters where his hind-quarters ought to have been."
Nevertheless, General John Pope was a very able and a very enterprising
officer, as he had demonstrated at the West. He knew how to handle an
army effectively, and he had an army of great effectiveness under his
command, with seasoned and battle-trained reinforcements coming to
him every hour from McClellan's splendidly behaving force. He boldly
challenged Lee's advance and baffled it for a time. He had all that
could be imagined of equipment and of limitless supplies. Had he been
even in a measurable degree the commanding military genius that he
confidently believed himself to be, he must have hammered Lee's forces
into confusion at the first encounter and driven the great Confederate
back to his half-hopeless task of defending Richmond behind a barrier
of earthworks. The result of the encounter was quite other than this,
as we shall see.
Having at last brought up a force slightly superior to Pope's, Lee's
plan was to attack as quickly as possible and before Pope should be
strengthened by the heavy columns of reinforcements that were hurrying
to his support from McClellan's army and from every other quarter
whence reinforcements could be drawn. But before Lee's dispositions for
attack could be completed, Pope penetrated his design and fell back to
the stronger line of the Rappahannock.
The two armies confronted each other with that river between. Lee moved
by his left flank up the river while Pope kept pace with him, alertly
meeting him at every available point of crossing, with his army in
discouragingly strong positions, and prepared to resist to the utmost
any attempt the Confederate general might make to force a crossing.
To Lee this was a lamentable waste of time, while to Pope it was a
matter of hourly gain in strength. For while Lee already had with him
all the forces that he could hope to concentrate in that quarter,
regiments and brigades and divisions were constantly pouring forward
from Washington to strengthen Pope's command.
Finally Lee succeeded in outwitting his adversary. At a place
near Warrenton Springs he came to a halt and made ostentatious
demonstrations of an intention to force a crossing of the river at that
point. Pope stood ready to meet him, with all his army strongly posted,
and with hourly strengthening field works to make the assault of the
Confederates the more difficult and the more perilous.
But Lee in fact had no intention of joining battle on such unequal
conditions and risking the fate of his campaign upon his ability to
carry such a position, so strongly defended. While occupying Pope's
attention there with a simulated purpose of forcing the fords he
resorted to that tactical device which served him so often and so well
later in the war. He detached Jackson, sending him with a strong force
to march around Bull Run Mountain, cross through Thoroughfare Gap, and
threaten Pope's depots at Manassas and his lines of communication north
and south of that now historic point.
Jackson's movement was completely concealed and altogether successful.
On the twenty-sixth of August he fell like a thunderbolt upon Pope's
depots at Manassas and captured them. Meanwhile, under Lee's orders,
Longstreet was following Jackson, and on the twenty-ninth he formed a
junction with him at or near the point where the first important battle
of the war had been fought.
But Pope had not been idle or inattentive during these pregnant days.
As soon as Jackson's descent upon his supply depots was made known to
him, he abandoned his position on the Rappahannock and fell back to try
conclusions on the historic field of Manassas. Having received still
further reinforcement from McClellan, his army now slightly exceeded
Lee's in numbers and considerably exceeded it in other elements of
strength. Accordingly, being a commander of great enterprise and vigor,
he at once assailed Lee at Manassas in full force. For two days he
hurled his heavy battalions upon the Confederates, severely taxing
and testing their resisting power. For these were armies of veteran,
battle-seasoned soldiers that were fighting each other now, and not
the raw levies of a year before. They fought with order and system and
their minds were open to no such panic impulses as those that had put
McDowell to rout and reduced what had been placed under his command as
an army to the condition of an insanely frightened mob.
But on the other hand the Southerners were commanded now not by a pair
of inexperienced ex-captains of the Engineer Corps, but by Robert E.
Lee himself, with Stonewall Jackson and James Longstreet and R. S.
Ewell and the two Hills for his lieutenants.
The attack was determined; the defense obstinate; the fighting heroic;
the result bloody in an extreme degree.
The field was contested for two days with a heroic stubbornness on
either side which showed clearly how great a change had been wrought in
the conditions of the war by the disciplining of the troops, by their
experience in the brutally bloody work of war, and by the training such
experience had given to their officers.
The end of it was that Lee drove Pope across Bull Run and back to
Centreville. Immediately he followed up his victory as Johnston and
Beauregard had not done a year before on the same field. He turned the
position at Centreville and compelled Pope to retreat hurriedly, but in
tolerably good order, upon Washington.
It was in this conflict that a gallant and hard-fighting Federal
general, Fitz-John Porter, had the ill luck to encounter criticism
which resulted in his trial by court martial and his dismissal from
the army in disgrace. It was not until many years afterwards that the
actual facts of the fighting were clearly and convincingly made known
with the result of relieving General Porter of the stigma he had so
long unjustly borne, and rehabilitating his high reputation in the
minds of his countrymen.
The story of it all is one of pitiable and long-continued suffering
under misapprehension and falsehood. It is fully told in other
publications than this, and it has no proper place except that of
casual mention, in a simple chronicle of events such as the present
work is.