There was no doubt that McClellan detested Pope and would have been happy to see him fail. His correspondence is full of the wish that his rival might be defeated and the hope that his own fortunes would thus be bolstered. His letters drip with contempt, jealousy, and naked ambition. On July 22 he wrote his wife, Ellen, “I see that the Pope bubble is likely to be suddenly collapsed—Stonewall Jackson is after him, & the paltry young man who wanted to teach me the art of war will in less than a week either be in full retreat or badly whipped. He will begin to learn the value of ‘entrenchments, lines of communication & retreat.’ ” On August 10: “I have a very strong idea that Pope will be thrashed during the coming week—& very badly whipped he will be and ought to be—such a villain as he is ought to bring defeat upon any cause that employs him. . . . I am inclined to believe that Pope will catch his Tartar [Jackson] within a couple of days and be disposed of.26 On August 23: “I take it for granted that my orders will be as disagreeable as it is possible to make them—unless Pope is beaten, in which case they may want me to save Washn again.”27
The question—argued over in detail by memoir writers and historians for the last one hundred fifty years—was whether he withheld reinforcements out of pure malice and self-interest or because he was simply being his old cautious, conservative self. Here the picture becomes murkier, mainly because of the cynical and cowardly machinations of his superior, General in Chief Henry W. Halleck. In the wake of Jackson’s rout of the small force under Brigadier General George Taylor, McClellan’s natural conservatism had asserted itself. In a long meeting with Halleck on the night of August 27 he insisted that, because there was obviously a large Confederate force between Pope and Washington, the capital itself was in danger, and thus General Edwin V. Sumner’s 2nd Corps was needed to defend it. He also argued that the eleven thousand men in William B. Franklin’s command should not move to Pope’s aid until they had their full artillery with them. They might otherwise be beaten in detail. (Bringing up artillery would take at least several days.) Pope, moreover, already had sixty-seven thousand men, including elements of McClellan’s army, to face fifty-five thousand Confederates. Such assertions were perfectly McClellan-like in their caution and aversion to risk, and he wrote to his wife to say that he was pleased that he and Halleck were in agreement. Halleck, moreover, had already seemingly abdicated his proper role as arbiter between the two rival generals, telling Little Mac in a letter earlier that day that he (Halleck) “had no time for details” and “you will therefore, as ranking general in the field, direct as you deem best.” Halleck had not only agreed with McClellan’s strategy; he was also trusting him to make his own decisions.
But Halleck was buffeted by stronger winds. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton—looking for information with which to discredit McClellan—had demanded pointedly of Halleck whether McClellan had promptly obeyed his orders to quit the James River, and, more tellingly, if Franklin had been ordered to Pope’s relief and whether those orders had been obeyed. Halleck, afraid that his own neck was on the block, now wrote a long, untruthful reply saying that he had done everything possible to prod McClellan into action. Then, to McClellan’s astonishment, at 12:40 p.m. on August 28—the day of Jackson’s Groveton fight—Halleck bypassed Little Mac and personally ordered Franklin to march to Manassas Junction. He got back a plaintive note from McClellan saying, “The moment Franklin can get started with a reasonable amount of artillery he shall go.” Halleck, now going all out to cover himself, wrote, “Not a moment must be lost in pushing as large a force as possible toward Manassas.” McClellan, perhaps now realizing that there was considerable subtext to his correspondence with Halleck, replied flatly: “Your dispatch received. Neither Franklin nor Sumner’s corps is now in condition to fight a battle. It would be a sacrifice to send them now.”28 This of course looked like McClellan was simply refusing, out of spite, to obey orders.
At 2:30 p.m. on August 29, while the battle raged in front of Jackson’s railroad embankment and successive Union assaults were being repulsed and no reinforcements from McClellan’s army were in sight, Lincoln sent McClellan an innocently hopeful wire: “What news from direction of Mannassas [sic] Junction?” McClellan replied that he believed the enemy to be in retreat and that “I am clear that one of two courses should be adopted: first, to concentrate all of our available forces to open communication with Pope; second, to leave Pope to get out of his own scrape, and at once use all our means to make the capital perfectly safe. No middle course will now answer. Tell me what you wish me to do, and I will do all in my power to accomplish it.” Lincoln answered that he preferred the former, but in any case left the ultimate decision to Halleck. Halleck, in turn, sent his own deeply hedged reply to McClellan, saying that Sumner’s column should remain to defend Washington and that Franklin should advance, but that he really need to go only far enough to reconnoiter the enemy’s location and strength. “Perhaps he may get such information at Anandale as to prevent his going farther,” Halleck wrote. He was most concerned about a strike on Washington, so Franklin should probably stay close to home. This hardly amounted to “prodding” McClellan to order an advance. Halleck was clearly trying to have it both ways.
Thus were large numbers of reinforcements kept from the Army of the Potomac. Though when taken out of context the phrase “leave Pope to get out of his own scrape” sounded faintly treasonous—and would haunt McClellan for a long time, especially in the 1864 presidential election—in fact McClellan was guilty only of infelicitous language. He was right: those were the two options. And Henry Halleck had been perfectly complicit in retaining Sumner’s and Franklin’s forces near Washington. In McClellan’s mind, his orders were now clear. He ordered Franklin to move forward but to stop at Annandale, well short of the battlefield. Halleck, meanwhile, shifting once more to cover himself, wrote a note to McClellan at 7:50 p.m., saying, indignantly, “I have just been told that Franklin’s corps stopped at Annandale . . . this is contrary to my orders; investigate and report the facts of this disobedience.” But Halleck’s dizzying duplicity had another consequence. Now Lincoln and Stanton became enraged at McClellan, believing that he was deliberately refusing to help Pope. “He has acted badly toward Pope,” Lincoln told his secretary John Hay. “He really wanted him to fail.” While the latter was almost certainly true, there is little hard evidence that McClellan, acting from pure enmity, actually wanted his country to fail, too.29
• • •
Pope had made several telling mistakes in the campaign, but the most harmful was to misinterpret—almost willfully, it seemed to his subordinates—the stream of intelligence he received about the presence of James Longstreet. Hatch had encountered a piece of his corps, as had Porter and Reynolds, and there was no shortage of reports of a large Confederate force crossing Thoroughfare Gap. Porter had even told Pope personally on the night of August 29 that there was a body of men sitting precariously on the Union left. Pope, who had become convinced that Porter, a McClellan protégé, was the head plotter in a McClellan-led cabal to thwart him, refused to believe it. Pope decided that Longstreet, instead of extending Jackson’s existing line, had moved in behind Jackson in a position of support. No one knows quite why he thought this. Just as it is difficult to understand why, on the hot, still morning of August 30, Pope continued to believe that his enemy was retreating.
That conviction had put him in an expansive mood. He had once again persuaded himself that he was on the brink of victory. That morning he stood on a treeless knoll at his headquarters, smoking a cigar and exchanging jokes and pleasantries and congratulations with his generals. Just before noon he ordered another massive pursuit of the supposedly retreating rebel army. Porter would lead it, Hatch and Reynolds would follow; Hooker and Kearny would follow a parallel path to the north. The men were assembled, the artillery rolled up, and the chase after the retreating rebels began in earnest. Predictably, it lasted less than an hour, the time it took for skirmishers to discover that something big and mas
sed and threatening was still sitting back in those woods by the railroad embankment. Jackson’s men had not gone anywhere. That was the end of Pope’s delusion.
Lee had decided against a morning offensive. He would wait for Pope to attack, then look for a weakness to exploit. If Pope did not attack, Lee had a backup plan: late that afternoon Longstreet would advance eastward across the open fields toward Chinn Ridge and engage Union forces, while Jackson pulled out from behind the embankment and marched around the Union right, striking deep in the Union rear, a miniature version of his march to Manassas Junction.
But Pope did attack. At 3:00 p.m. Porter’s ten-thousand-man corps, which Pope had made sure was going to do the fighting this day, was sent forward, en masse, against Jackson’s right. Men who saw it remembered it as one of those picture-book assaults: the Federal lines advancing in perfect order, bayonets and musket barrels flashing like heliographs in the slanting afternoon sun, battle flags streaming above the regiments. There was a strangeness to the movement, too, for those who could see it. They were hitting Jackson’s right, literally under the noses of Longstreet’s watchful thirty thousand. “Evidently Pope supposed I was gone,” wrote Longstreet later, “as he was ignoring me entirely. His whole army seemed to surge up against Jackson as if to crush him with an overwhelming mass. I could plainly see the Federals as they rushed in heavy masses against the obstinate ranks of the Confederate[s].”30
What followed was desperate, furious combat, much of it conducted as before at close range. Rebels fired from cover behind the cuts and fills of the excavation; Federals used anything they could find—rocks, trees, dead horses, even dead comrades. Along one part of the line Confederates quickly ran out of ammunition and began to throw stones at the enemy. Some they threw hard and straight, others they lobbed over the edge of the embankment onto the Federals huddled below, severely injuring some of them. Some of the Union boys threw them back. The fighting became so intense at the “Deep Cut” that Jackson was worried his lines might break. He later wrote, “As one line was repulsed, another took its place, and pressed forward, as if determined, by force of numbers and fury of assault, to drive us from our positions. So impetuous and well-sustained were these onsets as to induce me to send to the Commanding General for reinforcements.”31 Unlike the previous day, Jackson had no uncommitted reserves to bring forward.
Longstreet, upon receiving Jackson’s request, realized two things at once: first, that his reinforcements would never reach Jackson in time, and second, that the battlefield presented his batteries with a clear opportunity for enfilading fire. He ordered more guns forward to supplement the batteries that were already blasting away. Their combined fire now tore into the second and third waves of the Union assault and pinned many attacking Federals against the unfinished railroad. The effect was immediate and devastating.32 Three times Porter’s forces rallied. Three waves of assault crashed and disintegrated against the insurmountable Confederate wall. They finally broke altogether. Some withdrew gracefully, others did not, as the Confederates piled out of their trenches in pursuit. In Jackson’s words:
Soon a general advance of my whole line was ordered. Eagerly and fiercely did each brigade press forward, exhibiting in parts of the field scenes of close encounter and murderous strife not witnessed often in the turmoil of battle. The Federals gave way before our troops, fell back in disorder, and fled precipitately, leaving their dead and wounded on the field. During their retreat the artillery opened with destructive power upon the fugitive masses.33
Many just ran rearward in a confused, chaotic mass, a retreat that bordered on panic and took Porter and other commanders time to quell—some of it at the points of bayonets. Eventually order was restored.34 But not before Irvin McDowell managed to overreact to the danger. Sensing an impending First Manassas–style rout, he ordered Brigadier General John F. Reynolds forward with his 7,000 men from his position behind the Union lines, moving it north of the turnpike. This might have seemed sensible enough if there had been no danger on the Union left. But there was enormous, catastrophic danger on the Union left. Reynolds’s advance meant that the Federal left was now virtually wide open and vulnerable. There were only 2,200 Union troops in place south of the turnpike, essentially an open field for Longstreet’s advance.
Lee and Longstreet were not immediately aware of McDowell’s mistake, but they understood that Porter’s frontal assault had failed, that his ranks were shattered, and that the large force that had been on their right—Porter again—was no longer there. They decided, simultaneously and while the smoke was still rising from the last of Jackson’s volleys, that the moment had come for Longstreet’s corps to finally rise from the woods and move against Pope’s left. It was not completely clear what was ahead of them, but Lee knew he was burning daylight, and he knew he had an opportunity, straight from classical military textbooks, to envelop and possibly destroy Pope’s army. Longstreet, who had argued persuasively for a full day against an advance, was now ready. He was fully aware that he was in the pivot of one of the battle’s—and the war’s—great climactic moments. In his own words, “As [Porter’s line] broke the third time, the charge was ordered,” and then “twenty-five thousand braves moved in line as by a single impulse.”35
And now the rebel wave rolled forward, to the astonishment of the Union command, especially John Pope. With Hood’s Texans in the lead, it crushed everything in front of it, including a full brigade and battery. For thirty minutes Hood bulled straight ahead, unstoppable. The rebel goal was Henry Hill, the center of the fight at First Manassas. If the Confederates possessed it they could cut off a Union retreat down the Warrenton Turnpike. But first they had to cross Chinn Ridge, where hastily assembled Union forces put up a surprisingly tenacious defense, allowing time for Pope to place some seven thousand troops on Henry Hill, which lay only three hundred yards behind it. At about 6:00 p.m. Chinn Ridge finally fell. The Confederate victory there meant that Longstreet had finally demolished the Union left.
It was at about this time, too, that Pope as much as conceded defeat. Some Union regiments and brigades were already streaming eastward down the Warrenton Pike. At five fifty he gave orders to the rest of his army to retreat to the line of Henry Hill. He also ordered Nathaniel Banks to destroy all public property at Bristoe Station—completing Jackson’s work—and retreat with his corps to Centreville. A brisk defense on Henry Hill—where Federals held off an advance of three thousand Georgians—spared the Union army the sort of headlong, panicked flight of the First Manassas. Jackson’s troops might have made a difference there. But for some reason Lee never ordered Jackson’s eight fresh brigades forward. Jackson had been told only to “look out for and protect [Longstreet’s] flank,” most likely because his brigades and divisions had been so badly wounded, scattered, shuffled, and commingled with each other while absorbing the repeated assaults over three days, that Lee believed he was in no shape to attack.36
Pope’s army, in any case, was quite soundly beaten. (The casualties—10,000 Union and 8,300 Confederate—gave no indication of the thoroughness of the beating Pope took.) At 8:00 p.m. Pope ordered a full retreat of all his units to Centreville. By 11:00 p.m. most of his army had retreated across Bull Run. There was no panic this time, just heartbreak and humiliation. At Centreville, they encountered soldiers of General William B. Franklin’s corps, who instead of cheering or sympathizing with their bloodied comrades, mocked them. Some said plainly they were happy that Pope had been beaten, echoing the sentiments of their leader. In doing so they were acting out the larger drama of the Union army, with, as one soldier put it, all of “the arrogance, jealousy, and hatred which then was the curse of Union armies in Virginia.”37 Soon Pope and his generals decided that staying at Centreville was a bad idea, too, since the rebels would simply march around them. For once he was not wrong. This was exactly what Jackson tried to do. On September 1 he slipped away and marched north and east around Pope’s flank, hoping to cut off the Federal retreat. Anticipating
this, two divisions under Pope clashed with Jackson in the Battle of Chantilly, a quick, violent, rain-drowned affair fought in a riotous thunderstorm that ended in stalemate and cost the life of the remarkable Major General Phil Kearny. He had mistakenly galloped into rebel lines, then, realizing his error, had turned and ridden away. One observer recalled that “as he galloped off lying prone on his horse’s neck, [he] was killed. No trace of a wound was to be found, the bullet having entered the anus.”38
There would be no more Confederate pursuit of the Union army. By this point it hardly mattered. Lee could not destroy the Union army, and he could hardly demoralize it any more than he already had. After the battle Pope’s men resumed their retreat, slogging through the mud and rain to Alexandria. Those who participated in it remembered great disorder and confusion, vast snarls of wagons, ambulances, caissons, and wounded men—in the words of historian Bruce Catton, “the disorder inseparable from retreat.”39 The men walked with heads down, disheartened as much by the knowledge of how badly they had been mishandled by their own generals as from their shameful retreat from the field.
Though Chantilly had been largely a pointless afterthought—Jackson had not wanted to fight it—the idea of a victorious rebel army loose on the outskirts of Washington put yet another major scare into the capital. Stanton ordered the weapons and ammunition in the national arsenal transported to New York. He also ordered a steamer held in readiness to help the president escape, if necessary. Henry Halleck, the leader of the Union war effort, seemed on the verge of a breakdown, battered from his fight with McClellan, suffering from a painful case of hemorrhoids, and horrified by his army’s precipitous retreat that he had been powerless to stop.40