Coming Fury, Volume 1 (75 page)

McDowell still had troops fit for service. Colonel Theodore Runyon’s division, 5000 men or more, had been held in reserve east of Centreville, and it was brought forward to this little town and posted on the hill there, along with twenty guns. Blenker’s brigade, bringing up the rear, was in good order, and there were other usable formations from what had been the extreme left. Major George Sykes came in with his battalion of regulars, men dead on their feet but still in good order. A little before six in the evening McDowell sent a wire to Washington, explaining that he had been driven from the battlefield and adding that “we have now to hold Centreville until our men can get behind it.” But the men who got
behind Centreville refused to stop, and a little later McDowell was compelled to report: “The larger part of the men are a confused mob, entirely demoralized. It was the opinion of all the commanders that no stand could be made this side of the Potomac.” Still later he had to admit that efforts to pull the army together at Fairfax Court House had failed; “many of the volunteers did not wait for authority to proceed to the Potomac but left on their own decision.” There was nothing for it, he confessed, but to fall back all the way to Arlington and dig in to hold the Potomac River bridges.
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By far the bigger part of his army had simply gone out of existence and it would be days before it could be reconstituted.

In Washington, General Scott sent word to McDowell that he was getting reinforcements and wrote stoutly: “We are not discouraged.” But the dimensions of the disaster were visibly expanding, and the old general became genuinely alarmed. The navy was asked to send a warship over to Alexandria to command the Potomac with its guns. Authorities in New York and Pennsylvania were urged to send troops forward as quickly as possible. The commander of troops at Baltimore was alerted, lest that city rise in open revolt. To McClellan, far off in the Virginia mountains, went an order to move over into the Shenandoah Valley at once “and make head against the enemy in that quarter.” This was countermanded, a few hours later, and McClellan was told to stay where he was until further notice; reinforcements would be sent to him from Ohio. Then, at two o’clock in the morning, a third wire went to McClellan: “Circumstances make your presence here necessary. Charge Rosecrans or some other general with your present department and come hither without delay.” McDowell’s defeat was beyond remedy. The government wanted a winner.
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Meanwhile the jubilant Confederates were taking stock of their victory and were trying to see whether it could not be made even bigger. The last of the beaten Federals were driven from the field of battle, cavalry was ordered forward to harass the retreat, and from the extreme right, troops were told to move up to Centreville with all speed. Yet there was a good deal of confusion, most of it arising from the fact that to an untrained army, overwhelming victory can be almost as great a shock as overwhelming defeat. False reports of a Union counter-stroke caused the troops on the
right to do a good deal of useless maneuvering, and when the misunderstanding was cleared up it was too late and too dark to do anything. On the main highway the “black horse cavalry” which had caused so much panic was not actually strong enough to overpower McDowell’s rear guard. The squadrons reached the site of the original traffic jam at Cub Run, seized the military booty which had been abandoned there, captured large numbers of stragglers (including one life-sized U. S. Congressman, who was sent off to Richmond), and in the end could do little more than speed the departing Federals on their way. At Johnston’s headquarters President Davis met with Johnston and Beauregard and other officers to appraise what had been gained and to see whether anything more could be done.

The victory looked big enough, in all conscience. Mr. Davis wired the War Department that “our forces have won a glorious victory,” saying without exaggeration that “the enemy was routed and fled precipitately” with heavy loss. Beauregard recorded the capture of twenty-eight guns, thirty-seven caissons, a huge quantity of ammunition, and seemingly endless amounts of small arms, accouterments, blankets, hospital stores, haversacks, wagons, ambulances, and other valuable items. Something like 1300 prisoners had been taken. There were a great many dead Yankees on the field—close to 500 of them, it would develop, when all the returns were in—and there was something about the way in which McDowell’s offensive had collapsed which led the more hopeful to feel that Southern independence had been just about gained.
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The high command was not deceived. Both Beauregard and Johnston knew that their army had had a very rough time of it; to organize, within an hour or two, an effective force that could drive on through the night in real pursuit seemed to them out of the question. Still, if the President ordered it, they would try it.

Mr. Davis was disposed to order it. Around eleven o’clock a staff officer came in bearing a report from another officer who said that he had gone all the way to Centreville and who reported that the Yankees were rushing through that hamlet in a state of total panic; and Mr. Davis dictated an order for immediate pursuit. Then came second thoughts. Someone recalled that the officer who sent in this report was an old army man whose nickname had always
been “Crazy”—an eccentric, given to wild excitement, not altogether to be trusted. The dictated order was not issued. It was agreed, finally, that at dawn infantry should be sent forward to make a reconnaissance in force, and the conference came to an end. The victorious army would rest. Later it could move on and occupy the territory which the Federals were so hastily abandoning.
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There was much argument about this, later on. In the light of fuller knowledge it came to seem that the war might really have been won then and there if the routed Federals had been pressed vigorously. Stonewall Jackson had said that with 5000 fresh troops he could be in Washington by the next day, and although he went unheard at the time—and even if he had been heard, he then lacked the stature to make his words listened to—many Confederates eventually came to believe that inaction on the night of July 21 had wasted a glorious victory. In the end it was even held that it was President Davis who was chiefly responsible.

The thing can be seen more clearly now, with much hindsight, than it could be seen then, and it appears that the Confederacy really lost very little. Washington was not actually open to a sudden easy capture by any force that could have been brought against it on July 22 or July 23. Most of McDowell’s army had indeed been blown apart, but even on the night of the disastrous retreat he still had close to 10,000 men who had fought little or not at all, who were still responsive to as much discipline as any volunteer army then possessed, and who had not given way to panic. The Potomac at Washington is wide and deep, and if Johnston’s army was to enter the capital, it would have to use the bridges. Enough troops were at hand to hold those bridges until reinforcements could come down from the North. Johnston could have had his army follow on McDowell’s heels, but almost certainly he could have done little more than he finally did do—occupy the Centreville ridge in force, build fortifications there, hold the place throughout the winter, and keep his outposts close enough to the Potomac so that on clear days they could see the unfinished dome of the Capitol building. The notion that the Confederate army could have walked into Washington within twenty-four hours will hardly bear analysis.
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Yet it was the wild, unreasoning panic of the Union army that was remembered, and the memory of it became an important factor
in the war which had at last begun. Because there had been this panic, publicly displayed for all to see, burning deep into the consciousness of an overconfident people, things hereafter would be done differently. Nothing less than this, probably, could have stirred the North so profoundly. When the helpless fighting lines sagged away from the murky slopes of the Henry house hill and streamed off to look for safety, the country at last began to wake up to reality.

Washington saw the worst of it. The sorry picnic crowd which came back all bedraggled and frightened had seen none of the valor and endurance which the soldiers had displayed on the field of battle. They had seen only the disgraceful runaway, to which by their own presence they had contributed so greatly, and their stories lost nothing in the telling. Most of the newspaper correspondents had been caught up in the rout—among them Mr. Russell, of the London
Times
, who wrote so graphically about what he had seen that Northerners denounced him as a defeatist and a pro-Confederate—and their accounts showed the beaten army at its worst. Furthermore, all of the broken troops hurried straight to Washington, where everyone could see them. They came shambling in all through July 22 while a sullen rain came down, each man a visible proof of disaster, sauntering in singly, in disordered squads, downcast, streaked with dirt, almost out of their heads with weariness, a huge audience watching each and all.

Walt Whitman wrote that the downtown streets were crowded with civilians, who stared in silence at this formless procession. At least half of the lookers-on, he said, were secessionists, grinning triumphantly. By noon Washington was “all over motley with these defeated soldiers—queer-looking objects, strange eyes and faces, drench’d (the steady rain drizzles on all day) and fearfully worn, hungry, haggard, blister’d in the feet.” Some people set out food and drink, standing in the rain for hours to give hungry men refreshment; yet most of the soldiers seemed to want rest more than anything else. They flopped down on sidewalks, on the steps of houses, on vacant lots, in the lee of fences and store buildings, and fell asleep in the rain. The barrooms meanwhile began to fill with officers, each one reciting his own story of catastrophe, each one (since men are human) putting the guilt off his own shoulders and
blaming other people. The crush at Willard’s roused Whitman’s special wrath. “There you are, shoulder-straps!” he wrote. “But where are your companies? Where are your men? Incompetents! never tell of chances of battle, of getting stray’d, and the like. I think this is your work, this retreat, after all. Sneak, blow, put on airs, there in Willard’s sumptuous parlors and barrooms, or anywhere—no explanation shall save you. Bull Run is your work; had you been half or one-tenth worth your men, this would never have happened.”
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There was some point to Whitman’s remarks. The Union army had actually done as well as anyone had any right to expect, and if at last it had collapsed, the fault lay much more with its company and regimental officers than with the men in the ranks. More than a fourth of the army had never been put into action at all. The ones who did fight lost between 450 and 500 in killed, more than 1100 men wounded, and between 1500 and 1800 missing in action—captured, most of these latter, many of them wounded, a few of them killed. By the bloody standards of later battles these losses were not excessive, but they were not light, either; for troops that were almost totally unready for battle, they were extremely impressive. Confederate losses were smaller, but they were equally impressive. Between one fourth and one third of the Confederate army had not fought at all; the casualty list ran to about 400 killed, more than 1500 wounded, and thirteen missing. The battle had lasted for more than seven hours. On both sides it had been fought by men so poorly trained that it was almost impossible for them to maneuver under fire. The wonder is, not that the affair broke up in a rout, but that it lasted as long as it did and was fought with so much courage and determination.
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What Washington saw the whole country saw. To timid people, the defeat and the rout looked like the end of everything. Horace Greeley, who had shouted “Forward to Richmond!” so long and so hard that McDowell’s advance had come to seem a move undertaken to satisfy an editor, was unhinged by the news. A week after the battle he wrote Lincoln a letter full of almost incoherent woe. He suspected that the cause was lost. “On every brow,” he cried, “sits sullen, scorching, black despair.… If it is best for the country and for mankind that we make peace with the
Rebels at once and on their own terms, do not shrink even from that.” He confessed himself “hopelessly broken,” and begged the President to tell him what he should do. His state of mind was all the worse, perhaps, because for two days his New York
Tribune
had been playing up the battle as a great Union victory. When he got around to editorializing on the subject, he wrote: “We have fought and been beaten. God forgive our rulers that this is so; but it is true, and cannot be disguised.” He demanded that the cabinet be dismissed so that the President could have better advisers, and concluded with an optimism which he did not feel: “Our banner, now drooping, will soon float once more in triumph over the whole land. With the right men to lead, our people will show themselves unconquerable. Onward, then, to victory and glory.”
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Fortunately for the Union cause, Greeley’s reaction was not typical. A Connecticut clergyman, in a sermon delivered a week after Bull Run, preached from a text in Proverbs, asserting that “adversity kills only where there is a weakness to be killed,” and paid his respects to the likes of Greeley in bitter words: “We want, no newspaper government, and least of all a newspaper army.… Let the government govern, and the army fight, and let both have their own counsel, disturbed and thrown out of balance by no gusty conceit or irresponsible and fanatical clamor.”
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The government would govern: its first task being to make certain that the panic which had broken up first the army and then Horace Greeley should not also infect the administration. This task it met quickly. On the night after the battle, when President and cabinet members sat down with General Scott to assess the news, somebody brought in a report that the victorious Rebels had occupied Arlington and would soon be in Washington itself, and old General Scott met this head-on. “It is impossible, sir!” he exploded. “We are now tasting the first fruits of a war and learning what a panic is. We must be prepared for all kinds of rumors. Why, sir, we shall soon hear that Jefferson Davis has crossed the Long Bridge at the head of a brigade of elephants and is trampling our citizens under foot! He has no brigade of elephants: he cannot by any possibility get a brigade of elephants!” Lincoln himself spent a sleepless night, but his first-hand knowledge of disaster simply strengthened his determination to get on with the war. John Nicolay reflected
the President’s attitude when he wrote to his wife, two days after the defeat: “The fat is all in the fire now 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.”
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