The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville (129 page)

He did go forward, onto the knoll at any rate, and what he saw encouraged him still more. Where bayonets had glittered yesterday along the bed of the unfinished railroad, the goal of so many charges that had broken in blood along its base, today there was stillness and apparent vacancy. Only a few gray riflemen contested the sniping from Federal outposts. Combined with the knowledge of Hood’s withdrawal down the turnpike after midnight, this intelligence led Pope to believe that Jackson had pulled out, leaving only a skeleton force to discourage the blue pursuit. Still, anxious though he was to garner the utmost fruits of victory, Pope curbed his tendency toward rashness. In the end, he knew, more would be gained if the chase was conducted in a well-coördinated fashion than if he took off half-cocked and over-eager. While he stood there on the headquarters knoll, wreathed in cigar smoke as he chatted with his staff, orders went out prescribing the dispositions for pursuit. McDowell would be in general charge of the two-pronged advance. Porter’s corps and two divisions from McDowell’s would move directly down the pike; Heintzelman’s corps, supported by McDowell’s other division, would move up the Hay Market road. With Stonewall’s getaway thus contested in both directions, troop commanders were expressly instructed to “press him vigorously during the whole day.”

All this took time, but Pope felt he could afford it now that he had a full-scale victory under his belt. Careful preparations, with strict
attention to details, would pay dividends in the long run, when the rebels were brought to bay and the mopping-up began. Noon came and went. A heavy silence lay over the heat-shimmered field, broken from time to time by sputters of fire exchanged by the men on outpost. At 2 o’clock, informed that all was in order at last, Pope gave the signal and the pursuit got under way.

Deliberate though these preparations were, the pursuit itself—or anyhow what Pope conceived as such—was probably the briefest of the war. Jackson was by no means retreating; he had merely withdrawn his troops for some unmolested and hard-earned rest in the woods along the base of Sudley Mountain just in his rear, leaving a thin line to man the works and give the alarm in case the Yankees showed signs of advancing. He doubted that they would do so, after their failures yesterday, but he was perfectly willing to meet them if they tried it. Longstreet—who was very much on hand with all five of his divisions, no matter what evidence Pope had received (or deduced) in denial of the fact—was more than willing; he was downright eager. In fact, now that Porter’s corps had been shifted from its threatening position off his flank, he desired nothing in all the world quite so much as that the Federals would launch a full-scale attack across his front, though he too doubted that Fortune’s smile could ever be that broad.

Lee, who doubted it most of all, began to be concerned that Pope would get away unsuppressed, having suffered only such punishment as Jackson had managed to inflict while receiving his headlong charges the day before. As the long morning wore away, marked by nothing more eventful than the occasional growl of a battery or the isolated sputter of an argument between pickets, Lee took the opportunity to catch up on his correspondence. “My desire,” he wrote the President, “has been to avoid a general engagement, being the weaker force, and by maneuvering to relieve the portion of the country referred to.” By this he meant the region along the Rappahannock, whose relief had been accomplished by forcing Pope’s retreat on Manassas. Now his mind turned to the possibilities at hand. If Pope would not attack, then he would have to be “maneuvered.” About noon, while Lee was working on a plan for moving again around his opponent’s right, crossing Bull Run above Sudley Springs in order to threaten his rear, Stuart came to headquarters with an interesting report. He had sent a man up a large walnut tree, Jeb said, and the man had spotted the bluecoats massing in three heavy lines along Jackson’s front. Quickly Lee sent couriers to warn of the danger. Jackson alerted his troops but kept them in the woods. He had been observing the Federal activity for some time, but, concluding that nothing would come of it, had remarked to the colonel commanding the Stonewall Brigade: “Well, it looks as if there will be no fight today.…”

Shortly before 3 o’clock he found out just how wrong he was. Suddenly, without even the warning preamble of an artillery bombardment, the blue infantry came roaring at him in three separate waves, stretching left and right as far as the eye could see. Buglers along the unfinished railroad gobbled staccato warnings, and the startled troops came running out of the woods to man the line. This was far worse than yesterday. Not only were the attacking forces much heavier; they seemed much more determined, individually and in mass, not to be denied a lodgment. Immediately Jackson began to receive urgent requests for reinforcements all along the front. One officer rode up to report that his brigade commander had been shot down and the survivors were badly shaken. They needed help.

“What brigade, sir?” Jackson asked, not having caught the name.

“The Stonewall Brigade.”

“Go back,” Jackson told him. “Give my compliments to them, and tell the Stonewall Brigade to maintain her reputation.”

For the present, reduced though it was to a ghost of its former self, the brigade managed to do as its old commander asked; but how long it would be able to continue to do so, under the strain, was another question. Rifle barrels grew too hot to handle, and at several points the defenders exhausted their ammunition. At one such critical location, the enemy having penetrated to within ten yards of the embankment, the graybacks beat them back with rocks. All along the two-mile front, the situation was desperate; no sooner was the pressure relieved in one spot than it increased again in another. Broken, then restored, Hill’s line wavered like a shaken rope. He was down to his last ounce of strength, he reported, and still the bluecoats came against him, too thick and fast for killing to do more than slow them down. Whereupon Jackson, who had no reserves to send in response to Hill’s plea for reinforcements, did something he had never done before. Outnumbered three to one by the attackers, whose bullets he was opposing with flung stones, he appealed to Lee to send him help from Longstreet.

In the Federal ranks there was also a measure of consternation, especially at the brevity of what they had been assured was a “pursuit.” Recovering from the shock of this discovery, however, the men fought with redoubled fury, as if glad of a chance to take their resentment of Pope out on the rebels. As usual, McDowell came in for his share of their bitterness—as witness the following exchange between a gray-haired officer and a wounded noncom limping rearward out of the fight:

“Sergeant, how does the battle go?”

“We’re holding our own; but McDowell has charge of the left.”

“Then God save the left!”

For the better part of an hour they came on, running hunched
as if into a high wind, charging shoulder to shoulder across fields where long tendrils and sheets of gunsmoke writhed and billowed, sulphurous and “tinged with a hot coppery hue by the rays of the declining sun.” One among them was to remember it so, along with the accompanying distraction of rebel shells “continually screeching over our heads or plowing the gravelly surface with an ugly rasping whirr that makes one’s flesh creep.” Still they came on. Time after time, they faltered within reach of the flame-stitched crest of the embankment, then time after time came on again, stumbling over the huddled blue forms that marked the limits of their previous advances. They battered thus at Jackson’s line as if at a locked gate, beyond which they could see the cool green fields of peace. Determined to swing it ajar or knock it flat, they struck it again and again, flesh against metal, and feeling it tremble and crack at the hinges and hasp, they battered harder.

Longstreet stood on the ridge where his and Jackson’s lines were hinged. This not only gave him a panoramic view of the action, it also afforded an excellent position for massing the eighteen guns of a reserve artillery battalion which had arrived at dawn. The batteries were sighted so that they commanded, up to a distance of about 2000 yards to the east and northeast, the open ground across which the Federals were advancing. For the better part of an hour the cannoneers had watched hungrily while the blue waves were breaking against Stonewall’s right and center, perpendicular to and well within range of their guns. This was the answer to an artillerist’s prayer, but Old Pete was in no hurry. He was saving this for a Sunday punch, to be delivered when the time was right and the final Union reserves had been committed. Then it came: Jackson’s appeal for assistance, forwarded by Lee with the recommendation that a division of troops be sent. “Certainly,” Longstreet said. He spoke calmly, suppressing the excitement he and all around him felt as they gazed along the troughs and crests of the blue waves rolling northward under the muzzles of his guns. “But before the division can reach him, the attack will be broken by artillery.”

So it was. When Longstreet turned at last and gave the signal that unleashed them, the gunners leaped to their pieces and let fly, bowling their shots along the serried rows of Federals who up to now had been unaware of the danger to their flank. The effect was instantaneous. Torn and blasted by this fire, the second and third lines milled aimlessly, bewildered, then retreated in disorder: whereupon the first-line soldiers, looking back over their shoulders to find their supports in flight, also began to waver and give ground. This was that trembling instant when the battle scales of Fortune signal change, one balance pan beginning to rise as the other sinks.

Down on the flat, just after remarking calmly to one of his staff as he watched a line of wagons pass to the front, “I observe that some of those mules are without shoes; I wish you would see to it that all of
the animals are shod at once,” Lee heard the uproar and divined its meaning. Without a change of expression, he sent word to Longstreet that if he saw any better way to relieve the pressure on Jackson than by sending troops, he should adopt it. Headquarters wigwagged a signal station on the left: “Do you still want reinforcements?” When the answer came back, “No. The enemy are giving way,” Lee knew the time had come to accomplish Pope’s suppression by launching an all-out counterstroke to compound the blue confusion. An order went at once to Longstreet, directing him to go forward with every man in his command. It was not needed; Old Pete was already in motion, bearing down on the moil of Federals out on the plain. A similar order went to Jackson, together with a warning: “General Longstreet is advancing. Look out for and protect his left flank.” But this also was unnecessary. When Stonewall’s men saw the bluecoats waver on their front, they too started forward. Right and left, as the widespread jaws began to close, the weird halloo of the rebel yell rang out.

Porter’s corps was on the exposed flank, under the general direction of McDowell, and Porter, who had been expressing dark forebodings all along—“I hope Mac is at work, and we will soon get ordered out of this,” he had written Burnside the night before—had taken the precaution of stationing two New York regiments, the only volunteer outfits in Sykes’ division of regulars, on his left as a shield against disaster. Facing west along the base of a little knoll on which a six-gun battery was posted, these New Yorkers caught the brunt of Longstreet’s assault, led by Hood. One regiment, thrown forward as a skirmish line, was quickly overrun. The other—Zouaves, nattily dressed in white spats, tasseled fezzes, short blue jackets, and baggy scarlet trousers—stood on the slope itself, holding firm while the battery flailed the attackers, then finally limbered and got away, permitting the New Yorkers to retire. They did this at a terrible cost, however. Out of 490 present when the assault began, 124 were dead and 223 had been wounded by the time it was over: which amounted to the largest percentage of men killed in any Federal regiment in any single battle of the war. Next morning, one of Hood’s men became strangely homesick at the sight of the dead Zouaves strewn about in their gaudy clothes. According to him, they gave the western slope of the little knoll “the appearance of a Texas hillside when carpeted in the spring by wild flowers of many hues and tints.”

The respite bought with their blood, however brief, had given Pope time to bring up reinforcements from the right, and they too offered what resistance they could to the long gray line surging eastward along both sides of the pike. This was undulating country, with easy ridges at right angles to the advance, so that to one defender it seemed that the Confederates, silhouetted against the great red ball of the setting sun, “came on like demons emerging from the earth.” There
was delay as Longstreet’s left became exposed to enfilading fire from some batteries on Jackson’s right, but when these were silenced the advance swept on, tilted battle flags gleaming in the sunset. On Henry Hill, where Stonewall had won his nickname thirteen months ago, Sykes’ regulars stood alongside the Pennsylvanians of Reynolds’ division—he had been exchanged since his capture near Gaines Mill—and hurled back the disjointed rebel attacks that continued on through twilight into darkness.

There was panic, but it was not of the kind that had characterized the retreat from this same field the year before. The regulars were staunch, now as then, but there was by no means the same difference, in that respect, between them and the volunteers. Sigel’s Germans and the men with Reno also managed to form knots of resistance, while the rest withdrew across Stone Bridge in a drizzle of rain. McDowell, seeing the Iron Brigade hold firm along a critical ridge, put Gibbon in charge of the rear guard and gave him instructions to blow up the bridge when his Westerners had crossed over.

After McDowell left, Phil Kearny rode up, empty sleeve flapping, spike whiskers bristling with anger at the sudden reverse the army had suffered. “I suppose you appreciate the condition of affairs here, sir,” he cried. “It’s another Bull Run, sir. It’s another Bull Run!” When Gibbon said he hoped it was not as bad as that, Kearny snapped: “Perhaps not. Reno is keeping up the fight. He is not stampeded; I am not stampeded; you are not stampeded. That is about all, sir. My God, that’s about all!”