A war expected to be short
The Confederate States of America formed between December 1860 and May 1861, as 11 Southern states seceded after decades of sectional tension. With Abraham Lincoln's election in November 1860 and the attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, war seemed inevitable. Both sides raised armies, trained troops and heated their rhetoric.
At first Americans saw the conflict romantically, as a great adventure — almost a crusade, to be settled by one climactic battle that would return North and South to peace, as one nation or two. Federal troops enlisted for only 90 days, which Northern leaders thought ample time to rout the Southern army and end the rebellion.
The Union's first goal was Richmond, the new Confederate capital, only 100 miles from Washington. To reach it, the army first had to take Manassas Junction, a key rail junction 30 miles southwest of Washington, where the Orange & Alexandria Railroad met the Manassas Gap Railroad running west to the Shenandoah Valley.
Central and eastern Virginia, Maryland and Delaware, about 1861. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.
The upper Potomac, 1861. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.
July 21, 1861
General Irvin McDowell's army of 35,000 Union troops left Washington for Manassas on July 16. So naive was the country that 200 or so Washington civilians went along, hoping to watch and be entertained by a once-in-a-lifetime event. 22,000 Confederates under General Pierre G.T. Beauregard waited to meet them, and on July 20 and 21, 10,000 more arrived by the Manassas Gap Railroad.
The armies met on the morning of July 21 on the fields above a small stream called Bull Run — the name the North generally gave the battle. For ten hours, green troops on both sides fought bravely and held their ground, and the fighting came to its climax on the fallow fields of the widow Judith Henry. By late afternoon the newly arrived Southern units had forced the exhausted Union soldiers — and many of the sightseers — back toward Washington.
Almost 5,000 soldiers and bystanders were casualties. So was the hope of a quick, easy victory, and the romantic way most Americans had seen the war. The battle mattered less for ground won or lost than for the realization that the struggle would be longer and more costly than anyone had imagined — for the armies and for the nation.
The battlefield today. A second, much larger battle was fought here too; both are commemorated at Manassas National Battlefield Park, though few reminders of them remain. NPS.
Two soldiers' letters
On July 14, 1861, a week before he was mortally wounded, Major Sullivan Ballou, a 32-year-old lawyer from Providence serving with the 2nd Rhode Island Infantry, wrote to his wife Sarah. He felt ready to die for his country and a debt owed to those who fought the Revolution, yet torn by what it would cost her and their two small boys, Edgar and Willie. "Sarah, my love for you is deathless," he wrote, but "my love of country comes over me like a strong wind, and bears me irresistibly on with all those chains, to the battlefield." If he did not come back, he told her, "never forget how much I love you, nor that, when my last breath escapes me on the battlefield, it will whisper your name."
Private J.W. Reid of the 4th South Carolina Infantry wrote home in the days after the battle. "I cannot give you an idea of the terrors of this battle," he began. For ten hours "it literally rained balls, shells, and other missiles of destruction"; the cannon were "nothing more than pop guns" beside the thousands of muskets. He described the dead and wounded of both sides lying together, some crying for water, some praying, and a field "yet quite red with blood" when he walked it the next evening.
Before the battle, soldiers like Ballou wrote in flowery, poetic terms. After it, they saw the war as Reid did: terrifying.
A civilian in the crossfire
Judith Carter Henry, elderly and bedridden, lived at Spring Hill Farm with her daughter Ellen and a hired girl, Lucy Griffith; her son John had ridden over that day. As shells began falling near the house, the family thought of moving her to Portici, the Lewis home a mile away, but the confusion made it impossible. They carried her to a spring house in a hollow nearby, but she begged to go back to her own bed, and they took her back when the spring house proved no safer.
Union and Confederate soldiers both entered the house's hall, and a Union soldier was shot there, falling almost at Ellen's feet. To drive out Confederate sharpshooters, Ricketts' battery shelled the house, as its commander later testified before Congress. Mrs. Henry's bed was shattered and she was thrown to the floor, wounded in the neck and side, one foot partly blown off. She died that afternoon or evening. Ellen, who took shelter in the big fireplace chimney, was left deaf. Years later a visitor to the battlefield remembered finding a man lying face down in the yard after the fighting, who looked up and said his mother had been killed.
The Henry House soon after the first battle of Manassas. Manassas National Battlefield Park, NPS.
The Henry House, March 1862. Library of Congress.
The Civil War was the first major event in American history to be widely photographed. Newspapers could not yet print photographs, so artists copied them into sketches for the papers — letting people at home see the war's destruction for themselves.
The Stone House, home of the Henry Matthews family, which served as a hospital after the battle, March 1862. Library of Congress.
After Manassas
Though they could have gone home, most Union troops reenlisted for three years. By the war's end in April 1865, more than 620,000 soldiers had died. Families near the battlefields, like the Henrys, lost their livelihoods; families far away, like the Ballous, lost loved ones. Americans would never again think of the war as an entertaining spectacle.
Sources
Based on "First Battle of Manassas: An End to Innocence," Teaching with Historic Places, National Park Service, and its full lesson plan; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The lesson quotes Sullivan Ballou's letter from Henry S. Burrage, Brown University in the Civil War: A Memorial (1868), and J.W. Reid's letters from his History of the Fourth Regiment, South Carolina Volunteers (1891); the account of the Henry family is paraphrased from an unpublished manuscript in the park's files, "Some Events Connected with the Life of Judith Carter Henry"; rewritten in hubnx's own words. The lesson's questions and activities are left out. Ballou's "irresistably" is spelled "irresistibly" here.
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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