Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (73 page)

7
. The Union and Confederacy gave different names to several Civil War battles:

In each case but one (Shiloh) the Confederates named the battle after the town that served as their base, while the Union forces chose the landmark nearest to the fighting or to their own lines, usually a river or stream. In the case of Shiloh (Pittsburg Landing), the South named the battle after a small church near the spot of their initial attack; the North named it after the river landing they fought to defend. In the cases of Shiloh, Perryville, and Winchester the North eventually accepted the Confederate name for the battle, and those names are used in this book. For each of the other battles, neither name has any intrinsic superiority over the other, so the names are used interchangeably.

the battle did postpone for eight months any further Union efforts to invade Virginia's heartland. And the price in casualties was small compared with later battles. About 400 Confederates were killed and 1,600 wounded, of whom some 225 would die of their wounds. The Union forces also lost about 625 killed and mortally wounded, 950 non-mortally wounded, and more than 1,200 captured.
⁸

Perhaps the most profound consequences of the battle were psychological. But these consequences were full of paradox. The South's gleeful celebration generated a cockiness heedless of the Biblical injunction that pride goeth before a fall. Manassas was
"one of the decisive battles of the world,"
wrote political leader Thomas R. R. Cobb of Georgia. It
"has
secured our independence." Edmund Ruffin considered "this hard-fought battle virtually the close of the war." He thought Beauregard's next step should be "a dash upon Philadelphia, & the laying it in ashes . . . as full settlement & acquittance for the past northern outrages."
⁹
The
Mobile Register
predicted that the Union army would "never again advance beyond cannon shot of Washington." The
Richmond Whig
went even further: "The breakdown of the Yankee race, their unfitness for empire, forces dominion on the South. We are compelled to take the sceptre of power. We must adapt ourselves to our new destiny."
¹⁰

Immediately after the battle the shame and despair of many northerners almost caused them to agree with these southern assessments. "Today will be known as
BLACK MONDAY
," wrote a New Yorker when he heard the news. "We are utterly and disgracefully routed, beaten, whipped." Horace Greeley, whose
New York Tribune
had done so much to prod the government into premature action, endured a week of self-reproachful, sleepless nights before writing a despondent letter to Lincoln: "On every brow sits sullen, scorching, black despair. . . . If it is best for the country and for mankind that we make peace with the rebels, and on their own terms, do not shrink even from that."
¹¹

8
. Civil War casualties cannot be known with exactitude because of incomplete or faulty reports. The figures cited here represent the best approximation from available evidence. Some of the Union captured were wounded. In Civil War battles about 15 percent of the wounded subsequently died of their wounds.

9
. E. Merton Coulter,
The Confederate States of America
1861–1865 (Baton Rouge, 1950), 345;
The Diary of Edmund Ruffin
, Vol. II,
The Years of Hope April
1861–
June
1863, ed. William K. Scarborough (Baton Rouge, 1976), 96, 98.

10
.
Mobile Register
quoted in J. Cutler Andrews,
The South Reports the Civil War
(Princeton, 1970), 92;
Richmond Whig
quoted in Nevins,
War
, I, 221.

11
. Strong,
Diary
, 169; Greeley to Lincoln, July 29, 1861, Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress.

Yet the deep, long-lasting impact of Bull Run on the North was not defeatism, but renewed determination. The London
Times
correspondent predicted such a result the day after the battle: "This prick in the great Northern balloon will let out a quantity of poisonous gas, and rouse the people to a sense of the nature of the conflict on which they have entered." In a sermon on a text from Proverbs—"adversity kills only where there is a weakness to be killed"—one of the North's leading clergymen expressed this new mood of grim resolution. It was echoed by a soldier in the ranks: "I shall see the thing played out, or die in the attempt." Even as Greeley was writing despairingly to Lincoln, an editorial in the
Tribune
by another hand maintained that "it is not characteristic of Americans to sit down despondently after a defeat. . . . Reverses, though stunning at first, by their recoil stimulate and quicken to unwonted exertion. . . . Let us go to work, then, with a will."
¹²

Lincoln agreed with this editorial rather than with Greeley's letter. Though shaken by the news of Bull Run, the president and General Scott did not panic. They worked through the night to salvage some order from the chaos of defeat. "The fat is in the fire now," wrote Lincoln's private secretary, "and we shall have to crow small until we can retrieve the disgrace somehow. The preparations for the war will be continued with increased vigor by the Government." The day after Bull Run, Lincoln signed a bill for the enlistment of 500,000 three-year men. Three days later he signed a second bill authorizing another 500,000.
¹³
Volunteers thronged recruiting offices during the next few weeks; offers of new regiments poured in from northern governors; and soon the regiments themselves began to crowd into the training camps surrounding Washington, where they found a dynamic, magnetic general to command them: George B. McClellan.

At 2:00 a.m. on the morning after Bull Run, a telegram summoned McClellan to take command of this new army of three-year volunteers, soon to be named the Army of the Potomac. When McClellan arrived in Washington on July 26 he found "no army to command—only a

12
. William Howard Russell,
My Diary North and South
, ed. Fletcher Pratt (New York, 1954), 234; sermon by Horace Bushnell cited in Bruce Catton,
The Coming Fury
(New York, 1961), 468; soldier quoted in William C. Davis,
Battle at Bull Run
(Garden City, N.Y., 1977), 255;
New York Tribune
, July 30, 1861.

13
. John Nicolay to his wife, July 23, 1861, quoted in Catton,
Coming Fury
, 469. The two enlistment laws are printed in
O.R
., Ser. Ill, Vol. 1, pp. 380–83.

mere collection of regiments cowering on the banks of the Potomac, some perfectly raw, others dispirited by the recent defeat."
¹⁴
Whatever self-serving overtones one might detect in these words, McClellan did accomplish all that was expected of him in his first two months of command. His military police rounded up stragglers and combed their officers out of Washington barrooms. His examining boards weeded incompetent officers out of the army. McClellan was a superb organizer and administrator. He was a professional with regard to training. He turned recruits into soldiers. He instilled discipline and pride in his men, who repaid him with an admiration they felt toward no other general. McClellan forged the Army of the Potomac into a fighting machine second to none—this was his important contribution to ultimate Union victory—but he proved unable to run this machine at peak efficiency in the crisis of battle.

Not all southerners shared the post-Manassas conviction of Confederate invincibility. Mary Boykin Chesnut perceived that the victory "lulls us into a fool's paradise of conceit" while it "will wake every inch of [northern] manhood." A diary-keeping clerk in the Confederate War Department fumed a month after the battle: "We are resting on our oars, while the enemy is drilling and equipping 500,000 or 600,000 men." With the benefit of hindsight, participants on both sides agreed after the war that the one-sided southern triumph in the first big battle "proved the greatest misfortune that would have befallen the Confederacy." Such an interpretation has become orthodoxy in Civil War historiography.
¹⁵

This orthodoxy contains much truth, but perhaps not the whole truth. The confidence gained by the men who won at Manassas imbued them with an
esprit de corps
that was reinforced by more victories in the next two years. At the same time the Union defeat instilled a gnawing, half-acknowledged sense of martial inferiority among northern officers in the Virginia theater. Thus the battle of Manassas, and more importantly the collective southern and northern memories of it, became an important part of the psychology of war in the eastern theater. This psychology helps explain why McClellan, having created a powerful army, was

14
. Quoted in Kenneth P. Williams,
Lincoln Finds a General
, 5 vols. (New York, 1949–59), I, 113.

15
. Woodward,
Chesnut's Civil
War, 111; Jones,
War Clerk's Diary
(Miers), 43; Edward A. Pollard,
The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederacy
(New York, 1866), 152.

reluctant to commit it to all-out battle. He always feared, deep down, that the enemy was more powerful than he. And the Confederates, armed with the morale of victory, enjoyed an edge that went far toward evening the material odds against them in Virginia.
¹⁶
Hence the paradox of Bull Run: its legacy of confidence both hurt and helped the South; the humiliation and renewed determination both hurt and helped the North.

II

Two days after Bull Run, Lincoln penned a memorandum on future Union strategy. Efforts to make the blockade effective were to be pushed forward; Maryland was to be held "with a gentle [!], but firm, and certain hand"; Union troops in Virginia were to be reinforced, thoroughly trained, and prepared for a new invasion; the inept Patterson was to be replaced by a new commander of the army at Harper's Ferry (Nathaniel P. Banks); Union armies in the western theaters were to take the offensive, "giving rather special attention to Missouri."
¹⁷

Lincoln had high expectations of his newly appointed commander of the Western Department (mainly Missouri), John C. Frémont. Famed as the Pathfinder of the West, Frémont's eleven years' experience in the army's topographical corps gave him a military reputation unmatched by most other political generals. But the formidable difficulties of a Missouri command—a divided population, guerrilla warfare, political intrigue, war contract profiteering, impending Confederate invasions from Arkansas and Tennessee—quickly brought out the weaknesses in Frémont's character. He was showy rather than solid. His naiveté and his ambition to build quickly a large army and navy for a grand sweep down the Mississippi made him easy prey for contractors whose swollen profits produced a new crop of scandals. Frémont could have survived all this if he had produced victories. But instead, soon after he arrived in St. Louis on July 25, Union forces in Missouri suffered reverses that came as aftershocks to the earthquake at Bull Run.