Terrible Swift Sword (63 page)

Except that it showed a dim awareness of
coming trouble, Pope's dispatch gave an imperfect picture. Its appraisal of
Sigel and Banks was correct enough: Pope's own army was not yet really an army
and it badly needed an overhaul. Still, help was at hand. Heintzelman was
coming in with his other division under Joe Hooker, another hard fighter who
did not belong to the McClellan clique. Reno was on hand with most of
Burnside's force, John F. Reynolds's excellent division from Porter's corps had
joined McDowell, and the rest of Porter's corps was drifting about just off the
Federal left flank, ready to be used as soon as Porter and Pope learned one
another's whereabouts. There were soldiers enough along the Rappahannock but
Pope did not seem to know exactly where all of them were, and it was going to
be uncommonly hard to mass them for a co-ordinated blow. Finally, and most important
of all, Lee's movement was no feint.

This began to dawn on Pope within
twenty-four hours. Instead of crossing the river on August 26 to see what Lee
was doing, Pope held his position, believing that Halleck wanted him to stand
on the defensive until all of McClellan's army arrived; and that evening
Stonewall Jackson swept in out of the shadows to strike the Orange &
Alexandria Railroad at Bristol Station, twenty miles behind the Rappahannock,
moving on to seize the huge Federal supply base at Manassas Junction.

Jackson had made a prodigious march—more
than fifty miles in forty hours—going north from his original position all the
way to the town of Salem and then swinging southeast through Thoroughfare Gap
to strike Pope's base while Pope still believed that he was moving toward the
Shenandoah Valley. With one swift blow he had cut Pope off from his supplies,
from his superiors and from his reinforcements, and the first half of Lee's
incredible gamble had paid off.

It was only the first half. Jackson was
in position to make immense trouble for the Federals, but he was also where he
could be in immense trouble himself. He had 24,000 men, Lee and Longstreet with
more than 30,000 were far away on the other side of the Bull Run mountains, and
John Pope could get between them with 75,000 if he moved promptly. Twenty-five
miles northeast of Jackson was the city of Washington, where two corps from
the Army of the Potomac were coming ashore prepared to march to Bull Run.
Unless he moved fast and befuddled his enemies completely, Jackson and his
whole command might well be wiped out.

In the Shenandoah Valley, Jackson had
escaped from a similar peril by marching swiftly back out of danger while his
enemies were clumsily trying to get at him. But to march away how would be to
admit failure. He was not simply making a raid to confuse the enemy, as he had
done in the Valley; he was trying to force the unprepared Federals to fight a
decisive battle against the united Army of Northern Virginia as far to the
north as possible. He could neither wait nor run away; he had to stay, provoke
a fight big enough to pin Pope down but not big enough to crush Jackson's own
command, and do it all before the gathering Federal hordes came together. The
second half of Lee's gamble would not work unless Jackson made no mistakes at
all and the Federal generals made several.

That
was just what finally happened.

By August 27 Pope
realized that the campaign was beginning to turn upside-down. He sent word to
Halleck that Lee (who had moved north the day before) had taken position
northwest of the Bull Run mountains and had thrust "a strong column"
forward to Manassas. Pope accordingly would retire from the Rappahannock and
draw up his army on a line going roughly from the hamlet of Gainesville, five
miles east of Thoroughfare Gap, to the vicinity of Warrenton Junction; reinforcements
coming up from Washington should therefore march toward Gainesville. Lee's own
intentions were far from clear, but Pope suspected that the Confederates might
try "to keep us in check and throw considerable force across the Potomac
in the direction of Leesburg."
⁸

As
a first step, this was good. The gap between the halves of Lee's army was well
over twenty miles wide, and Pope was going to move into it with all his force.
But he would need to call on many separate units to do some rapid marching, and
as he learned more about the movements of Jackson and Lee he would undoubtedly
have to countermand many orders and issue new ones, and this was just the kind
of situation that was apt to lead to large-scale confusion. Furthermore, Pope's
dispatches to Washington were not getting through because Jackson had broken
the line of communications, and General Halleck had only a dim idea of what was
actually happening out beyond Manassas. If Pope himself should misread his
enemies' movements; if his orders to corps and division commanders went astray,
or were imperfectly understood and obeyed; if delay took the place of rapid
movement anywhere between the Rappahannock and Washington—in short if any of
the things that were likely to go wrong in a case like this did go wrong—then
the mistakes Lee was counting on would occur and Lee's gamble would probably
win.

As
the only man east of the Bull Run mountains who knew what was going on,
Stonewall Jackson was cool and unhurried. He stayed at Manassas all through
August 27, to destroy the Federal supplies there and to make certain that Pope
understood that it was time to retreat. Since Jackson could carry off only a
minute fraction of the tremendous stock of captured Federal goods, the
destruction was on a large scale, with huge warehouses and long rows of loaded
freight cars set on fire; and after the captured whiskey had been carefully put
out of reach Jackson's soldiers were turned loose on the piles of foodstuffs
and were told to help themselves. The result was a gigantic picnic whose echoes
a century has hardly dimmed. All soldiers are always hungry, and Jackson's were
hungrier than most; in the best of times they were usually underfed, and now
they had just finished a hard march on exceptionally skimpy rations—and here
were all of the edible riches of the earth, from bacon and coffee and hardtack
on to sutler's stocks of canned lobster and boned turkey and pie, free to all,
without money and without price. For once in their military careers, these
soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia were able to eat beyond their means,
and they made the most of it. Fortunately, the overstuffed army was able to
march away that evening without leaving behind more than a scattering of
moaning stragglers.

When
it marched Jackson's force did not go far, but it went around corners in order
to confuse the Yankees. Part of the men crossed Bull Run and marched north to
Centreville, another part also crossed Bull Run and then sidled upstream, and
the rest moved northwest from Manassas, west of Bull Run; and all three parts
came together next day, August 28, on a long wooded ridge on the northwestern
fringe of the old Bull Run battlefield, a few miles west of the stream itself
and a little way north of the turnpike that came down from Washington to
Warrenton. It was a good place to defend and also a good place to hide. Jackson
got his men in position, pulled them back into the shade out of sight, and
awaited developments.

The mistakes Lee had been anticipating were
being made.

A man of action rather than of thought,
Pope had been responding to all of this with much vigor. Jackson was burning
Manassas, so Pope ordered his troops to go there and smash him. But at Manassas
the Federals found nothing but a square mile of smoldering debris, a powerful
odor of burned provisions, and evidence that Jackson had gone to Centreville.

Pope ordered his columns to converge on
Centreville, but Jackson was not there, either. He had vanished, going apparently
off toward the west, and it seemed to Pope that Jackson was trying to make his
getaway, as a sensible man would; and so new orders went out to the weary
Federal columns, designed to head him off, to overtake him and to smite him in
the flank. In the effort to accomplish this Pope apparently lost sight of the
fact that Lee and Longstreet were still west of the Bull Run mountains, and he
concentrated on Jackson so zealously that his troops were pulled away from Thoroughfare
Gap, leaving that all-important gateway open for Confederate use. And at last,
late on the afternoon of August 28, Jackson decided that it was time to make
Pope stand and fight.

The sun was just
about to set, and one of McDowell's divisions was plodding eastward along the
Warrenton Pike within musket shot of the ridge where Jackson's soldiers were
hidden. It reached Groveton crossroads, and Jackson himself rode out into the
open, all unnoticed to have a look. There were long intervals between the
Federal brigades; he watched one brigade go by and disappear on the way toward
Bull Run, and then he suddenly wheeled and spurred his horse back to the ridge
at a pounding gallop. His concealed soldiers had been watching and they knew
what came next; an officer remembered that as they fell into ranks the woods
rang with "a hoarse roar like that from cages of wild beasts at the scent
of blood."
⁹
Confederate artillery trotted out, unlimbered and
opened fire. Then brigade after brigade of Jackson's infantry marched from the
woods and came down the long slope in parallel columns, battle flags bright in
the late afternoon sun; and presently the infantry swung into line of battle
beside the guns and began to shoot.

The Federals were surprised but they did
not panic. They were westerners led by Brigadier General John Gibbon, and
although they had not fought before they had an aptitude for it; they formed
their own line of battle without lost motion, Gibbon got some artillery to help
and sent off for more infantry. Brigadier General Abner Doubleday's brigade
came over to help, and the wild crash of battle echoed across the Manassas
plain and a long cloud of dusty smoke drifted down over the Warrenton Pike
while Yankees and Rebels fought an engagement that would go into the books as
the Battle of Groveton.

It was a strange
fight. The opposing battle lines simply stood and fired at each other at close
range. Nobody charged and nobody retreated; everyone held his ground and fired
as long as he could see anything to fire at, and when full darkness at last
made it impossible to fight any longer the battle lines sagged apart by mutual
consent, and that night the Federals went sullenly off toward Manassas. Some
2300 young men had been shot—close to one out of every three in action, on the
Union side—and nothing whatever had been accomplished; except that in the only
way open to him Stonewall Jackson had made certain that there would be a much
bigger battle next day.
¹⁰

2.
The Terrible Weariness

By the time General
Pope learned where Jackson had gone into hiding it was too late. He had already
lost himself. No matter what sort of battle his enemies might inflict on him
Pope would be unable to handle it because he had lost track of what was really
happening, and he was moving troops in the light of faulty information. Some
first-rate fighting men would do his bidding, but he would send them into
action according to a map traced by fantasy; while he contended with shadows
they would have to fight real live Confederates, and a great many of them would
die of it.

Jackson was in the woods just north of
Warrenton Pike, a short distance west of Bull Run: this was solid fact,
unearthed at a price by the fight at Groveton, and after two days in which
rumor had been piled on baseless rumor a solid fact was doubtless very welcome.
Yet to reason from this fact was difficult, because Pope had already convinced
himself that Jackson was running away. Thus it was necessary to bring the Federal
Army together with all possible haste, at the price of no matter how much
confusion, lost motion, and weariness, because if there was any delay at all
Jackson would escape. Pope exulted that if his people moved fast enough
"we can bag the whole crowd," and units whose orders had already been
changed two or three times in twenty-four hours got additional orders setting
new destinations and demanding instant execution. One of Pope's staff officers
visited General Porter at dawn with such orders: Porter went to his desk to

revise his instructions to his own
subordinates, and as he wrote he paused once to ask the staff man how to spell
"chaos." The staff man told him, and considered the question most
timely.
¹

In one way Pope's instinct was sound. He
tried to concentrate his army along the Warrenton Pike, between Gainesville and
the Bull Run bridge, in order to overwhelm Jackson, and he had men enough to do
the job: between 60,000 and 70,000 within immediate reach. But because he supposed
that his task was to head off, round up, and capture an enemy who was making a
desperate retreat he attacked before he was ready. On August 29, the day after
the fight at Groveton, Pope got hardly more than half of his troops into
action.

Jackson had more than 20,000 men in
place, and they held an exceedingly strong position. Along most of Jackson's
front, which was about two miles long, there was the line of an unfinished
railroad, a long embankment and a series of cuts, with the wooded ridge just
behind; an ideal position for a defensive fight, made to order for a tough
army whose sole function was to hold on and wait for reinforcements—which, as
it happened, were not far away. Lee and Longstreet with 30,000 men marched from
Thoroughfare Gap early that morning (the gap being open because Pope was
concentrating against Jackson) and around noon the head of this column began
to come up just behind Jackson's right flank. By early afternoon the Army of
Northern Virginia was solidly united and Lee was preparing for a counterstroke.
Believing himself in the act of winning a great victory, Pope was floundering
blindly into a shattering defeat.

Coming up from Centreville and
establishing headquarters on a hill near the famous Stone House that had been a
landmark in the first battle of Bull Run, Pope got his battle started without
delay. Most of his divisions were still on the road— these soldiers had done a
lot of marching in the last forty-eight hours—but Pope was in a hurry, and he
opened the fight with the troops that were at hand, sending Franz Sigel and his
11,000 men in a headlong assault on Jackson's center north of the turnpike.
Sigel's men vigorously shelled the woods in front of Jackson's main line, drove
out the Rebel skirmishers and then made a slightly incoherent but valiant
assault on the railroad embankment. The going was rugged. Jackson once said
grimly that although his men sometimes failed to capture a position they never
failed to hold one, and today his veterans made his word good. The Federals
came up through a killing storm of musketry and artillery fire, some of the
brigades drifted apart as they struggled through the woods, and Jackson's men
lashed out with sharp counterattacks that threw the assaulting lines into
disorder. But a few units pulled themselves together and went on again,
reaching the embankment and, for the briefest moment, driving its defenders
away.

These men in blue had done better than
anyone had a right to expect—after all, they were supposed to be low-morale
troops, indifferently led—-but they were exhausted and disorganized and when
they reached the embankment their attack had spent its force. Jackson's men
drove them back,
and
Sigel asked Pope for permission to withdraw them for a rest and regrouping. Since
he had no one to put in their place, Pope refused, and the men hung on in the
fringe of the woods, maintained a sporadic fire, and did the best they could.

Then the first team
came up—Kearny and Hooker, with 12,000 veterans from the Army of the Potomac,
and Reno, with 8000 of Burnside's men, seasoned fighters under first-rate
leaders; and Pope ordered a massive assault on Jackson's left, which was posted
in a wood over near the Sudley Springs ford. The attack was imperfectly
organized; the troops were sent into action piecemeal, and the full weight of a
massed blow was lost. Also, Jackson had his own first team in line here, A. P.
Hill and his famous "light division," and although the Confederate
line was bent backward and in one place was temporarily broken, Jackson's boast
was justified once more. Six separate Federal assaults were desperately beaten
off, there were flurries of vicious hand-to-hand fighting, Hill's ammunition
was almost exhausted and one of his brigades lost all but two of its field officers—officers,
that is, of higher rank than captain—but at last, toward dusk, the fighting
died down. Hill had just managed to hold his position.

Some of the fighting
on this day was as severe as these armies ever had. If Pope had been able to
co-ordinate his attacks properly the story might have been different, but coordination
was lacking; indeed, there were upwards of 30,000 Federal infantrymen who were
close enough to the battle all day long to hear it but who never effectively
got into it.

Pope had intended to use these men, but
this was a day when good intentions did not count. The 30,000 belonged to McDowell
and Porter, who that morning were under orders to march to Gainesville and
strike Jackson's right flank; and for various reasons, some of them good and
some of them bad, this movement was never made. Porter, moving up from
Manassas, saw dust clouds ahead and concluded that a large body of Confederates
lay in his path. He seems also to have been oppressed by the signs of chaos
which he had noted earlier in the day; and in any case he strongly disliked
General Pope. So in midmorning he halted his corps behind a little stream and
there he took root, two miles from the Federal left, remaining completely inert
all day long while the clamor of battle resounded off beyond his right.
McDowell did little better, although he at least kept moving. It is hard to
feel certain that one knows what any Federal general had in mind on this
confused day, but McDowell seems to have felt that he could best support the
advance which he supposed Porter was going to make if he backtracked and got
north of the turnpike; so he turned his troops around, moved back to the
Sudley Springs Road, and then marched north, and by the end of the day only a
few of his men had got into any sort of action. In effect, these two corps were
wasted. What might have happened if they had actually executed the planned
movement is beyond telling; all that is certain is that on this day of battle
they were of very little use to John Pope and the Union cause.
²

Another force which
listened to the battle without getting into it was James Longstreet's corps of
30,000 Confederates.

By noon or a little
later, Longstreet was getting his troops massed just south of the turnpike,
ready for action, and Lee's immediate impulse had been to order an attack. But
Longstreet wanted to wait, on the not-illogical theory that the confused
Federals would present an even better opening if they were just given more
time—and after long discussion and a careful study of the situation Lee let
Longstreet have his way. There were times when Lee was strangely reluctant to
impose his own will on this stubborn, deeply trusted subordinate, and this may
have been one of them; yet it is possible that another consideration was involved.
It was clear by now that at least a substantial part of McClellan's army had
reached Pope, and the plan to defeat Pope before this happened looked a little
different than it had looked a few days earlier. A glimpse at Lee's mind is
given in a dispatch he wrote to President Davis after the fighting died down.

So
far, Lee said, the campaign had been successful; it had compelled the Federals
to leave the Rappahannock and to concentrate between Manassas and Centreville.
Meanwhile: "My desire has been to avoid a general engagement, being the
weaker force, & by maneuvering to relieve the portion of the country
referred to—I think if not overpowered we shall be able to relieve other
portions of the country, as it seems to be the purpose of the enemy to collect
his strength here."
³
Perhaps, in other words, the moment for
a decisive battle had passed; perhaps, after all, this must be a campaign with
limited objectives, winning a breathing space rather than trying for a
knockout; the general would wait and see how things looked before he made up
his mind.

Things looked better before long,
largely because certain routine Confederate troop movements brought additional
confusion to the mind of General Pope.

Late
on the evening of August 29 Longstreet had sent one division down the turnpike
on a reconnaissance, and his men skirmished briskly with some of McDowell's
troops. After dark these Confederates were withdrawn, and at the same time Hill
retired some of his own men who had gone out beyond their own lines after
repulsing the attacks Pope had made from his extreme right. These withdrawals
were noted in the Federal camp, and to Pope they meant that the Confederates
were in retreat. On the morning of August 30 he ordered a vigorous pursuit,
detailing part of his army to overrun Jackson's position and forming the rest
for an advance straight west along the turnpike. It took time to get everything
organized, and the action did not begin until around noon. When it did begin
the full truth about the entire battlefield situation was at last made manifest
to the Federal commander.
⁴

Jackson had not retreated, and the attempt to
sweep across his position brought on a tremendous fight. Once again, Federal
storming columns charged up to the railroad embankment, hitting so hard that
for a short time it looked as if this mishandled battle might turn into a
Federal victory. Much against his will, Jackson was obliged to notify Lee that
he had to have help if he were to hold his ground. Help was ready. Pope's advance
had stripped the Federal left flank nearly naked in front of Longstreet, and
when Lee ordered Longstreet to attack that officer obeyed with high enthusiasm
and complete competence. With his massed artillery he cut the props out from
under the attack on Jackson's line; then he ordered his entire corps to advance
and his 30,000 men went rolling eastward on the south side of the turnpike,
overwhelming the inadequate Federal force that was posted there and driving on
toward the Bull Run bridge. Now Pope was beaten, beyond remedy, and the only
question was whether he could save his army . . . that, and the final size of
the casualty list.
⁵

Longstreet's men never reached the
bridge. Now that his illusions were gone Pope handled his army about as well as
a man could under the circumstances; at the very least he got everybody into
action, and although he could not prevent defeat he was able to avert complete
disaster. The battlefront had suddenly doubled in size, and from the Sudley
Springs ford all the way down to the hills and fields south of the Warrenton
Pike the exultant Confederates were driving forward. In the end, Federal
troops were moved over to slow down Longstreet's advance, and toward evening
elements from various army corps made a stand around the Henry House hill—the
spot where Jackson had made his legendary stand in the first battle of Bull
Run, more than a year ago— and there they brought the Southern offensive to a
full stop. Slowly, painfully, the battle-sputtered out in the twilight. The bridge
was safe; Pope could get his men away.

His men were at the
point of total exhaustion. They had done much marching and fighting, and in a
fortnight's campaigning the army had lost 14,500 men in killed, wounded, and
missing. During the night of August 30 they went back to Centreville, numb,
dejected, stumbling under the weight of defeat. At Centreville the retreat
stopped, and Pope formed a new battle line, rimming the town in a huge
semicircle, well entrenched; if Lee proposed to follow up his victory the Federals
would make a new fight here. And at Centreville, too, the beaten army saw
welcome reinforcements—General William B. Franklin's corps, just up from the
peninsula by way of Alexandria, three or four days late but ready for action at
last. It was known that General Edwin Sumner's army corps was not far behind.

Pope's men were glad to see these stout
fighting men. Now the battle losses at Bull Run would be made good, with
strength to spare. Yet there was something deeply disillusioning, almost ominous,
about the meeting. Franklin's men had nothing but scorn for the men to whose
rescue they had come, and they openly exulted in the fact that these men had
been defeated. The spirit that led McClellan to remark that disaster to Pope
might mean triumph for himself had seeped down through all ranks, and an
officer in one of Pope's brigades remembered that although "our hearts
leaped with joy" at the sight of the troops from the peninsula the joy was
quickly chilled.

"To them,"
he wrote, "we were only a part of Pope's beaten army, and as they lined
the road they greeted us with mocking laughter, taunts and jeers on the
advantages of the new route to Richmond; while many of them in plain English
expressed their joy at the downfall of the braggart rival of the great soldier
of the peninsula."
⁶

Pope's soldiers made no response to the
jeers. They wanted nothing except a chance to get a little rest. There was a
sullen all-day rain, a good many men had straggled away from their commands,
and a Wisconsin soldier spoke for all when he wrote a note to his people to say
that he had lived through the battle and added: "I cannot give you
particulars or write more now. The terrible weariness of long fight is upon
me." '

The terrible weariness was also upon the
Confederates, for they too had marched and fought to the limit of human endurance,
and they had suffered more than 9000 casualties. Lee had no intention of
attacking Pope's position at Centreville, but he did think he might flank Pope
out of it, and he ordered Jackson to swing out on a wide circling movement to
get behind Pope's right. Jackson put his tired men on the road, crossed Bull
Run at the Sudley Springs ford, and went north; and although his "foot
cavalry" could march so fast, on this day they went at a crawl—the unpaved
roads were deep in mud, rations had gone short so that everyone was hungry, the
men were all but completely worn out, and not even merciless Jackson could get
any speed out of them. They reached the Little River turnpike, which ran eastward
toward Alexandria, and turned right to get in Pope's rear, and at last had to
camp for the night several miles short of their goal. The next day, September
1, they went on again, and Pope got wind of the move and sent troops out to
meet them; and late that day, with a thunderstorm breaking, two Federal
divisions attacked