Today marks the anniversery of the battle of 2nd. Manassas. The following article was posted to me by American Heritage Magazine. The Texas Brigade, including the 18th Ga., was in the thick of Longstreet;s charge. Stan
Posted Tuesday August 28, 2007 07:00 AM EDT
The Disaster at Second Bull Run
By Jack Kelly
Soldiers sit by a pontoon bridge at Bull Run, 1862.
(National Archives)
“Fall in, boys. We’re going to whip them before breakfast.” So Union Gen. Robert Milroy exhorted his men 145 years ago tomorrow morning, on August 29, 1862. Milroy’s brigade was about to attack the Confederate troops of Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, who were entrenched behind an unfinished railroad bed on the plains of northern Virginia. The next 48 hours would see a battle whose ferocity outstripped the imagination of hardened veterans and a disaster for Union forces that could easily have been avoided. It was the beginning of the clash known as Second Bull Run (and in the South as Second Manassas).
Milroy’s men were part of the 60,000-man army of Gen. John Pope. After the setbacks of the previous year, which included the Federal debacle on this very battleground in July 1861 and the inability of Gen. George McClellan’s forces to attack Richmond, the Confederate capital, from the Virginia peninsula, a frustrated President Lincoln had brought Pope from the West to breathe fire into the Union war effort.
Pope—a “blatherskite,” some said—did indeed talk tough. In the West, he said, “we have always seen the backs of our enemies.” He told his subordinates to discard ideas of lines of retreat and bases of supply. “Success and glory are in the advance.”
During the summer, Pope’s Army of Virginia massed between the Rapidan and Rappahannock Rivers, threatening a move on Richmond. Gen. Henry Halleck, who commanded all Union forces, ordered McClellan to give up the peninsula campaign and unite his Army of the Potomac with Pope’s force. McClellan, as usual, took his time complying. In his private correspondence he even yearned for Pope’s defeat, hoping to regain overall field command himself.
Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee decided to try outmaneuvering Pope before he could be reinforced. Throwing away the textbook admonition not to divide his own forces, he left Gen. James Longstreet’s divisions facing Pope across the Rappahannock and sent Jackson’s corps on a daring sweep around the Union right and rear. The hard-marching Southern troops were able to get behind Pope’s men and seize or destroy large quantities of provisions at Manassas Junction. Pope wheeled his army and thought he smelled an opportunity to, as he put it, “bag” Jackson.
Action erupted on the evening of August 28 when Jackson fired on a Federal column crossing his front. The ensuing fight was so hot that it seemed “as if the heavens was a furnace,” as a Wisconsin soldier recalled. “It is now sundown,” a soldier of the 10th Virginia wrote in his final journal entry. “They are fighting on our right. Oh, to God it would stop.”
Darkness brought an end to the shooting and left the field littered with dead and unattended wounded. The scene was set for the two armies to confront each other at dawn.
Pope stationed Fitz John Porter’s corps, one of the early arrivals from McClellan’s command, on his left; but he failed to convey to Porter clear orders to attack. All day on August 29, Milroy’s and other brigades pounded the well-positioned Confederate left wing and were repulsed with shocking casualties on both sides. A cautious Lee was content to fight a defensive battle that day. He was relieved to see the Confederate force reunited when Longstreet’s corps arrived on the Confederate right.
Bad intelligence convinced Pope that the Confederates were retreating. He vowed a hot pursuit in the morning. He still didn’t suspect that Longstreet had moved his men to within yards of the Union lines.
On the morning of August 30, “General Pope seemed wholly at a loss what to do and what to think,” a staff officer observed. For most of the morning, he dithered. “Pope issued no orders,” the historian John J. Hennessy observes in his detailed account of the battle, Return to Bull Run. “He sought no new information. He rejected what information he did receive. Why he did so ranks as one of the mysteries of the campaign.”
Finally Pope sent Porter’s corps off on an attack directly into the Confederate center. It was a colossal blunder. He could easily have withdrawn to strong defenses across Bull Run Creek and waited for the arrival of the rest of McClellan’s army to give him an overwhelming numerical advantage.
Confederate artillery was well positioned to lacerate Porter’s advancing men. The fighting surpassed the savage level of the previous day. The collision of the two lines included several bayonet attacks, rare in the Civil War because of the accuracy of rifled muskets. At one point, Confederates lacking ammunition took to flinging rocks at the Federal troops. A soldier “saw a Federal flag hold its position for half an hour within ten yards” of a Confederate position.
Finally Porter’s troops were forced to retreat. Gen. Irvin McDowell, who had had the misfortune to lead the Union force routed at First Bull Run, feared for the Union center. To plug the gap, he made the mistake of calling in the division on his left, the only one guarding the army’s flank.
Lee and Longstreet immediately sensed an opportunity. In less than 45 minutes they organized the most massive Confederate attack of the war. Longstreet’s 25,000 men advanced against the 2,200 soldiers holding the Union left.
One of the units in the path of this onslaught was the 5th New York Zouaves, a regiment that embodied the romantic notions that held sway early in the war. Dressed in white leggings, red pantaloons, blue jackets, and fezzes, these well-drilled troops faced a hurricane of fire and lead. “War has been designated as Hell,” one said afterward, “and I can assure you that where the Regiment stood that day was the very vortex of Hell.” They finally gave way and were cut down as they fled. Of 525 men in the regiment, nearly 300 were shot, 120 of them fatally. It was the largest loss of life in a single battle for any regiment in the war—and it happened in 10 minutes.
Longstreet’s attack came close to cutting off Pope’s retreat and destroying the Federal Army. A valiant rearguard effort allowed the Union men to cross Bull Run and reach a defensible position. But it was, as Lee wrote to the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, “a signal victory” for the Confederacy.
Pope had chosen to fight an unnecessary battle and had exercised poor judgment in logistics, reconnaissance, planning, and command. “A splendid army almost demoralized,” was how another Union general summed it up, “millions of public property given up or destroyed, thousands of lives of our best men sacrificed for no purpose.” Two weeks after the battle, John Pope was relieved of his command and sent to put down a Sioux uprising in Minnesota.
Lee stood on the brink of a tremendous opportunity. He had only a spent force with which to grasp it—his men were in rags, hungry and battle-weary—but he could not pass up the chance. He boldly marched north into Maryland, causing more consternation in Washington. His rebel force would finally be checked at the battle of Antietam a little more than two weeks later.
Second Bull Run shocked and discouraged the North. The Union Army had lost 14,000 men killed, wounded, or captured. The nation was waking to the fact that this conflict had become a nightmare. Such carnage had not been seen in any previous war—and there was plenty more to come.
—Jack Kelly writes often for American Heritage magazine and is the author of Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics—A History of the Explosive That Changed the World (Basic Books).