His problems began with the combat order itself, a muddled, contradictory, and occasionally nonsensical document, later famous as the single most confusing order of the war. It had set no time for the attack, confused brigades with divisions, invented two-brigade divisions where none existed, and implied that the army would be split into two corps, consisting of those nonexistent multibrigade divisions, each with its own corps commander. (The Confederate army had neither corps nor divisions, and would not have a two-corps structure until fourteen months later.) One of those mythical corps was to be commanded by General T. H. Holmes, though Holmes himself had not been informed of this assignment. There was also the problem of language. Many of the orders were blatantly contradictory. One dispatch to General D. R. Jones, for example, consisted of such atrocious grammar that, strictly interpreted, it actually instructed Jones to attack his Confederate colleague Richard Ewell. All of this was very bad warfare, but no one had done anything like it before and there was nothing to measure it against. The generals and their staffs simply blundered ahead, unchecked by anyone who might know better.4
Soon the reality of Union plans and Union guns collided with this somewhat dreamy world of things as Beauregard wished them to be. At 5:00 a.m. the Federals opened fire—nothing in earnest, mostly rolling volleys of musketry aimed at the far bank. But the attack rattled Beauregard, who now began issuing a new stream of orders to answer it. One of these went to Brigadier General Richard Ewell, on the far right of the line, who had originally been ordered to lead off the Confederate advance across Bull Run. Now Beauregard gave him an entirely new order, directing Ewell to prepare to “make a diversion against the enemy’s intended attack on Mitchell’s Ford and, probably, Stone Bridge.”5 This, of course, superseded the earlier orders for the attack on Centreville. For some reason—neglect or sheer staff incompetence—other generals were not told about those changes.
Beauregard was clearly losing his grip, and Johnston, a recent arrival who had been forced to defer to the Creole’s knowledge of the troops and terrain, could do nothing about it. Bory began shifting his brigades to his left, creating even more confusion as couriers rode forth from headquarters with a stream of ever-changing orders. Jackson was one of the principal victims of this, receiving instructions to move in behind three different brigades.6 At 8:00 a.m., while thunder from the Federal guns still rolled down the line, and musket fire rattled in the wooded areas at the Stone Bridge and at Mitchell’s Ford, the indomitable Creole had one final inspiration: having strengthened his own left, he now decided that he would go ahead and mount his cherished offensive against Centreville and the Union left anyway. He got approval from Johnston, who must have had some sense of how crazy and chaotic the battle plan was becoming, then issued yet another string of orders directing brigades under Generals Ewell, D. R. Jones, Longstreet, and Milledge L. Bonham to move forward across Bull Run. It was in keeping with everything else that happened that morning that Richard Ewell, who was to lead the advance, never received this order. Longstreet, who had never received the second set of orders issued at 5:30, had crossed Bull Run in obedience of the original battle order, and sat there wondering what to do with himself.
Beauregard, meanwhile, waited for his decisive, Napoleonic counterstroke to commence. He was waiting, and watching, at about 9:00 a.m., listening nervously to the firing upstream of his position, when a courier arrived with a remarkable piece of news.
• • •
Edward Porter Alexander was a young man when the war started, but he had already had an exceptional career in the army. Born into a distinguished Georgia family, he had excelled at West Point, graduating third in his class in 1857, and in the late 1850s had helped develop a new signal system for the US Army. The system—sometimes called “wigwag”—consisted of flagmen waving flags or torches back and forth to create codes that represented letters of the alphabet.7 Corpsmen would use field glasses to read the signals, write them down, and deliver them to officers in the field. When the Civil War started, Alexander resigned his commission in the US Army to fight for the Confederacy, and by this means both armies came to use the same signal system.
Alexander had been directed by General Beauregard to build a signal system that would improve communication within Confederate lines. The slender, bearded Alexander had thus built four stations, a task he had finished less than two weeks before the battle. The main one was erected a mile east of Manassas at Wilcoxen’s Hill. Others were situated in Centreville, on a hill on Van Pelt’s farm east of the Stone Bridge, and at Confederate headquarters at McLean House, behind the center-right part of the Bull Run line. On this still Sunday morning, Alexander’s system was going to receive its first combat test.
For him it would be a day of extraordinary luck. That good fortune began in the early dawn. Of his four signal stations, Alexander preferred the vantage point of the station at Van Pelt’s, where he had pitched his tent, so he was upset when Beauregard ordered him back to the station at Wilcoxen’s Hill, miles in the rear. Unbeknownst to Alexander, as he packed his haversack with the day’s rations and prepared to leave, a gargantuan Federal cannon with a greater range than any other Federal artillery piece that fired thirty-pound conical, rifled shells was being wheeled, by herculean effort, into place east of the Stone Bridge on the Warrenton Pike, where the Union was about to begin the demonstration that would cover its flank march. At about 6:00 a.m. the gun was loaded with a percussion shell (which would explode upon impact) and, to the great glee of the Federal cannoneers, who believed it was likely to scare the Confederates to death, trained on the most visible target, which happened to be the Van Pelt house, a mile and a half away on the other side of Bull Run. Seconds later, a lieutenant yelled, “Fire!” and the historic First Shot of the Battle of Manassas went whistling through the still dawn air, over the heads of the rebel troops defending the Stone Bridge, and scored a direct hit. This was so much fun that the Union gunners fired two more shots at the house, each coming to earth in the same vicinity, each with the same satisfying blast. One of those shells hit Alexander’s tent, and would probably have killed him if he had not left just a few minutes before, in disgust, to obey the order he did not want to obey.8
The second piece of luck came several hours later, and was equally extraordinary. After arriving at the station at Wilcoxen’s Hill, Alexander began to scan the other signal stations. He soon saw the flags wigwagging from the Van Pelt station, and focused his field glasses to receive the message. But as he did so something strange happened. Somewhere off in the lush, green distance several miles northwest of the Van Pelt house, he saw a “little flash of light . . . a faint gleam, indescribably quick.”9 Though the flash was gone in an instant, he knew immediately that he had seen something very specific, as he put it, “the reflection of the morning sun from a brass field piece.” He had no doubt about what he had seen. But what could a cannon possibly be doing there? Curious, he ignored the wigwags from the Van Pelt house and focused his glass on the spot, fully eight miles away, where the glint of light had originated. Now he could see, in the gaps of the trees, not only cannons but “the glitter of bayonets,” too. There were large numbers of soldiers moving up there, miles from where they were supposed to be. He realized that he was looking at a massive Federal flanking march, far beyond the end of the Confederate line at Stone Bridge, which was commanded by a hard-drinking colonel named Nathan “Shanks” Evans and his small force.
It was 8:45 a.m. Alexander immediately signaled to Evans via the Van Pelt house, saying simply, “Look out for your left. You are turned.” He then wrote out a longer note for Beauregard, because the general was not near a signal station at the time. “I see a body of troops crossing Bull Run about two miles above the Stone Bridge,” wrote young Alexander, deliberately containing his wild excitement.10 “The head of the column is in the woods on this side. The rear of the column is in the woods on the other side. About half a mile of its length is visible in the open ground in between. I can see
both infantry and artillery.”11
It would seem impossible to conclude from this description—of a column so large that a half-mile-wide gap in the woods revealed only part of it—that an enormous Federal turning operation was not under way. Amazingly, both Johnston and Beauregard did just that. They decided that, though this flanking march was both surprising and worrisome, it was nothing that a few brigades, shifted upstream to the Stone Bridge, could not handle. They continued to wait hopefully near Mitchell’s Ford for the rolls of gunfire from their downstream brigades that would signal the beginning of Beauregard’s grand, war-ending advance on the Union left.
• • •
Brigadier General Thomas J. Jackson, camped with his brigade on a gentle slope about half a mile behind Mitchell’s Ford, rose hours before sunrise on the morning of the battle, knelt in his tent, and prayed. He prayed every morning. But on this day, the Sabbath, a day when he normally refused to have anything to do with secular matters, even refusing to write or post mail, he had much to pray for. There was his wife, Anna, whose thirtieth birthday it was that very day, for whom God’s blessing and protections were sought, as always. There were the many benedictions of Jackson’s own life, which he never failed to give thanks for, most recently his promotion, which he believed had come from “our kind Heavenly Father” and would allow him, as he had written to Anna, “[the opportunity] of serving my country more efficiently.”12 Jackson, deep inside himself, was an ambitious man and he knew it; part of the purpose of prayer was to restrain such vanity.13
And then there was the looming fight. Though we do not know what Jackson said to God in his prayers that morning, his correspondence around that date reveals his frame of mind. It was clear, first of all, that he believed that the outcome of the battle rested entirely in the hands of the Almighty. Mortal men were merely His instruments, vehicles through which His will manifested itself in the world. Jackson believed, without the slightest doubt, that in his fight against an unholy invader whose object was the “degradation” of his homeland, God was with him and with the righteous Confederate cause.14 In this belief he was not unlike many other generals in the world, before and after him. Jackson’s God, moreover, was like the protective, paternal God of the 118th Psalm, the sixth and seventh verses of which read, “The Lord is on my side; I will not fear. What can man do unto me? The Lord is on my side as my helper; I shall look in triumph on those who hate me.”15 God and God alone would choose the hour of his death. Since his life was in God’s hands, there was no reason to be afraid.
Jackson’s brigade awoke at about 3:00 a.m., ate a hasty breakfast, and then fell into ranks in the warm, windless early-morning darkness. The soldiers had no idea what they were about to do, where they were to go, or what role they might have in someone’s battle plan. The rank and file never did. Those problems were left to Old Jack and the high command. For five hours they did nothing but shuttle back and forth behind Bull Run, according to Beauregard’s inexplicable impulses. They were impatient. They were hoping that they would be lucky enough to do some fighting before the war was over. Jackson, too, waited. A young artilleryman who had been assigned to his brigade found the general wearing a shabby gray coat and a cap pulled over his eyes, “half sitting and half lying against the trunk of a small pine tree. . . . He did not move as we approached. When we reported, only his lips moved with this brief and characteristic order. ‘When the infantry moves, follow.’ We had not long to wait.”16 At 9:30 they were ordered to march northwest to the Stone Bridge.
They would never get there. En route, Jackson learned from a courier that Confederate troops under a general from South Carolina named Barnard Bee were “hard-pressed” in a fight well to the west of the Stone Bridge. Jackson’s men could already hear the noise of battle, which meant that, whatever else may have been happening, the true Confederate left was miles from where it was supposed to be. Acting without orders—there was no one around to issue any, and fighting west of the Stone Bridge was in no one’s battle plans anyway—Jackson set the men on a brutally fast march. One artilleryman recalled that they were “running that distance like panting dogs with flopping tongues, with our mouths and throats full of the impalpable red dust of that red clay country, thirsting for water almost unto death.”17 As they approached the battlefield on a narrow woodland road, with the sounds of musket fire and artillery fire ringing in their ears, they beheld a sight that was both shocking and bewildering: large numbers of Confederate soldiers moving in the opposite direction, broken, bloody, and in full retreat. Their commands were all cut to pieces, the men told the wide-eyed Virginians. The day was lost.18
Soon the beleaguered General Bee appeared, and rode to meet Jackson at the head of the column. “General, they are driving us!” he said. The two men knew each other. They had attended West Point at the same time and had fought side by side in the Mexican-American War. Though it is impossible from this distance to know the tone of Jackson’s reply or the expression on his face as he delivered it, his words would seem to speak for themselves. “Sir,” he said to Bee, “we will give them the bayonet.”
• • •
The men Jackson saw retreating through the woods were the end product of McDowell’s massive flank march, a maneuver that had seemed for hours like a disaster in the making but had instead turned out to be a brilliant success. The marching itself had been horrific: more than eighteen thousand men, along with horses, wagons, caissons, and artillery, had hit the road at 2:00 a.m. and had marched ten miles in seven hours, much of it in darkness. Men who had had an hour of sleep or had not slept at all stumbled over logs and roots and into brambles and were stabbed by branches of trees they could not see. As on the seventeenth, the weird accordion-like action happened again, alternately forcing the men to run with full packs to catch up or to stand stock still breathing the hot dust, waiting for who knew what logjam in the road three miles ahead to be cleared up. In the lulls, some soldiers picked blackberries and even took naps. Heintzelman’s whole division, which was supposed to cross at Poplar Ford, had gotten lost, and had ended up merely trailing behind Hunter, lengthening the line and worsening the stops and starts. There was rising heat and great thirst. “We scrambled along through the dense woods and thickets, the darkness so intense that, literally, you could not see your hand in front of your face,” wrote one of the men who made the march. They were supposed to arrive in full force at Sudley Ford at 7:00 a.m. but actually arrived at 9:30 a.m., bone weary and so thirsty that when they arrived many fell on their faces in the muck of Bull Run, sucking in the filthy water.
McDowell had been greatly worried about the pace of his march. He knew, too, that when his troops arrived at Sudley Ford rebel columns were already moving toward him. But because his maneuver had not been detected until Porter Alexander saw the gleam of a Union cannon at 8:45, McDowell’s men now faced only a small Confederate force, a few brigades under “Shanks” Evans and Barnard Bee, who, acting on Alexander’s tip, had hustled, without orders, west from the banks of Bull Run. McDowell’s tactic had worked splendidly: he had gotten there first with the most men. Now those men turned south, out onto the open ground of Matthews Hill, where they found South Carolina colonel Nathan “Shanks” Evans and nine hundred Confederates waiting for them.
Even among an officer corps conspicuous for its striking, flamboyant, and eccentric characters, Evans stood out. He got the nickname Shanks at West Point for having extremely skinny legs, though that name might have been the only thing that suggested any relationship with that elite educational institution. Evans, an odd-looking man with a high, wide forehead and penetrating light blue eyes, was crude, gruff, insubordinate, and profane. He was a braggart, too, especially when he was drinking, which was nearly all the time, an activity made possible by a Prussian orderly who followed him about, carrying a gallon jug of whiskey that Evans called his “barrelita.”19
But Evans was also a fearless fighter. He had positioned his small force directly in front of the Federal ad
vance, and soon the battle exploded along a quarter-mile front. For an hour he and his nine hundred Louisianans and South Carolinians battled numerically superior Federal forces to a standstill—an astonishing display of prowess for men who had never seen anything like this before, and had never before heard the sickening thuds produced when .58-caliber bullets slammed into human flesh and human bone. Guns blazed from both lines as deafening noise and banks of dirty white smoke filled the air. Men fell, screaming. Some tried to take cover behind rocks or trees, but there was little cover anywhere. It was mostly an open fight. Two full Union brigades—under Ambrose Burnside and Andrew Porter—were brought against Evans, and still Evans repulsed them, even ordering a charge against a weak point in the Federal line by his first Louisiana battalion, one of the more remarkable assemblages of soldiers in either army. They were an assortment of dockworkers, stevedores, wharf rats, “the lowest scum of the lower Mississippi,” who wore red fezzes and blue striped pantaloons and, under the command of soldier of fortune Roberdeau Wheat, were some of the toughest fighters in the Confederacy. In the heat of the battle, some of Wheat’s Tigers, as they were known, dropped their guns and charged with bowie knives. Burnside was convinced that he was facing six regiments of infantry instead of the barely two he was fighting.
But Evans could not hold his position much longer. Just as his men were falling back, a collection of Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi regiments under the command of General Bee and Colonel Francis Bartow had arrived to reinforce him. Bee was the beau ideal of the Southern officer. Tall, strikingly handsome, and well dressed, he had been a mediocre and mischievous but highly popular cadet at West Point, and had compiled a glittering record in the Mexican-American and Seminole Wars. Bartow was a criminal lawyer from Savannah, Georgia, who had studied law at Yale. Like Evans, Bee and Bartow had moved to the fighting without orders, and now they brought 2,800 fresh troops to help Evans in his desperate fight on Matthews Hill, giving the rebels about 3,700 men north of the Warrenton Pike. Still, that was less than half of the forces immediately ranged against them. Amid what one of his men called “a perfect storm of shot and shell,” Bee now threw his men against the long blue line in front of him. Withering fire erupted from both sides, and the Federals raked the thin rebel lines with their artillery. At one point, seeking to flank the enemy, the 7th and 8th Georgia Regiments occupied a thicket, which instead of offering cover soon became a “whirlwind of bullets,” or, as one of them called it, “a place of slaughter.” One company alone (usually 100 men) suffered 30 killed and wounded. The 8th Georgia suffered 200 casualties.