(July 21, 1861, and August 29-30, 1862)
The First Battle of Bull Run, also called First Manassas, was the first major engagement of the Civil War. The battle took place on July 21, 1861. Southern troops inflicted a humiliating defeat on Northern forces. The Second Battle of Bull Run, or Second Manassas, was fought on August 29 and 30, 1862, with Confederate forces once again defeating the Union troops. Northerners named the battles after Bull Run Creek, while Southerners referred to it by the name of the nearby town of Manassas.
Following the Confederate capture of Fort Sumter in April 1861, both sides spent the next three months preparing their troops for action in the eastern theater. Men from the North and South responded to the call to arms, and the ranks of both armies swelled with thousands of new and untrained recruits. Northern soldiers enlisted for 90 days, and by July, those enlistments were nearly done. President Abraham Lincoln pushed his commanders to fight the Confederates before the Union army lost its recruits. Although Union general Irvin McDowell, head of the eastern Union army, was not sure that his men were truly ready for combat, he complied with Lincoln’s wishes.
On July 21, McDowell set out with about 28,000 troops to capture the Confederate capital of Richmond,
First Battle of Bull Run, July 21, 1861 (Library of Congress)
Virginia. Only 2,000 of his men were experienced soldiers, while the remainder had volunteered at the outbreak of hostilities. A good indication of his army’s raw condition is that it required two and a half days to cover 22 miles to get as far as Centreville, while another two days elapsed bringing up the requisite supplies. In concert with this movement, Gen. Robert Patterson’s 18,000 men were ordered to tie down Confederate forces in the nearby Shenandoah Valley and prevent them from sending reinforcements. McDowell expected to encounter about 20,000 Confederate soldiers under the command of Gen. Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard. McDowell did not know that 12,000 additional Southern troops had reinforced Beauregard’s troops. Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, who commanded these troops, had cleverly duped Union forces at Shenandoah with a cavalry screen and shipped nearly his entire force by rail to join Beauregard. Johnston outranked Beauregard but as a military courtesy allowed the latter to maintain tactical control of the engagement. Word reached Washington, D. C., that the two sides would meet near the town of Manassas, about 25 miles southwest of the Union capital. A number of Washington residents traveled out to watch what most Yankees expected would be a rout of the Confederate troops.
McDowell, a competent staff officer with many years of experience, had formulated an excellent battle plan for turning the Confederate left flank using numerous feints. It might have succeeded in the hands of veteran troops, but it proved too complicated for inexperienced men and officers to carry out. Ironically, Beauregard himself also intended to turn his opponent’s left flank, but his marching orders were garbled or misinterpreted so that the bulk of Confederate forces remained stationary. Had both sides succeeded in their strategy, numerous onlookers would have watched two armies simultaneously turn each other’s flank and reverse positions. The contest commenced at 5:00 A. M. on the morning of July 21, as Union troops moved out against the stone bridge spanning Bull Run Creek.
McDowell’s men launched several attacks, pushing back the Confederate forces. Then Confederate resistance stiffened, led by Gen. Thomas J. (Stonewall) Jackson. One Confederate commander told his men, “Look, there is Jackson standing like a stone wall,” giving the general his famous nickname. After halting the Union advance, Beauregard ordered a counterattack. The inexperienced Federal troops broke under the pressure and fled the battlefield in a panic that became derisively known as the “Great Skedaddle.” The observers from Washington also ran back toward the capital, amazed that the Confederates had defeated the Union forces. Toward the end of the fighting, President Jeeeerson Davis arrived on the field and encouraged Beauregard and Johnston to pursue McDowell, but both generals realized that their own army was as disorganized as the enemy’s. The victorious rebels had suffered 1,982 casualties: 387 killed, 1,582 wounded, and 13 missing. Northern losses were greater: 460 killed, 1,124 wounded, and 1,312 missing, for a total of 2,896. President Lincoln responded to the embarrassment by removing McDowell and replacing him with Gen. George B. McClellan. The battle also revealed that defeating the South would be much more difficult than many in the North had expected.
By the Second Battle of Bull Run, fought in August 1862, both armies were battle-tested. Gen. Robert E. Lee was now in command of Confederate forces. Having driven a huge Union army from the gates of Richmond, during the Peninsular campaign, he sought to defeat a Union army under the command of Gen. John Pope. Lee knew that two separate Union forces threatened his troops in Virginia. Pope commanded about 55,000 men in central Virginia, while George B. McClellan had about 100,000 men near Washington. President Lincoln had ordered the two Union forces to unify under McClellan’s command, a fact known to the Confederates. Realizing that his forces would be outnumbered three to one if the Union plan succeeded, Lee determined to give battle at once to destroy Pope’s army before it could join with McClellan’s.
Lee sent Stonewall Jackson to observe the Federals, and Jackson won a battle on August 9 at the Battle oe Cedar Mountain. The Confederate victory did not provoke an immediate Union response, so Jackson led a raid that resulted in the destruction of Pope’s supply depot at Manassas on August 27. His hard-marching and celebrated “foot cavalry” covered more than 50 miles in two days, completing one of the war’s most impressive forced marches. The next day Jackson ambushed the brigade of Gen. John Gibbon at Groveton, but with far less success:
Burnside, Ambrose E. 51
Gibbon’s famous “Iron Brigade” fought the Confederates to a bloody standoff in which Gen. Richard Stoddert Ewell lost a leg and Gen. William Taliaferro was also seriously injured. Meanwhile, Pope, angered at the loss of supplies, moved against Jackson’s positions and launched his 55,000 troops against Jackson’s 12,000 on August 29. The Southerners held out against Pope’s poorly coordinated attacks while Lee and Gen. James Longstreet, commanding the remainder of Lee’s 50,000 men, hurried to join forces with Jackson. Pope refused to believe reports that Longstreet had arrived with reinforcements and launched a new attack against Jackson’s troops on the morning of August 30. The V Corps under Gen. Fitz John Porter, which had detected Longstreet’s approach, disobeyed the order to attack and hung in reserve. This inaction cost Porter his military career but probably saved the Union army from destruction. Longstreet’s men raked the advancing Northerners with artillery fire, breaking the attack. Lee then ordered Longstreet to attack and outflank the Union forces. The Confederate troops turned the Union left flank and forced them to retreat. Complete disaster was averted when the divisions of Generals George Sykes and John Reynolds conducted a determined rearguard action that allowed the bulk of Pope’s army to withdraw safely to Centreville. Unlike the First Battle of Bull Run, Northern troops retreated in good order and remained intact. During the campaign, the South recorded 9,200 dead, wounded, or missing in action, while Union casualties numbered 16,000. The Confederate victory dashed Northern hopes for conquering Virginia quickly. The scope of the defeat had immediate consequences for Pope, whom President Lincoln relieved from duty and exiled to a quiet post in Minnesota. It also signaled the return of Gen. McClellan to command of the demoralized Army of the Potomac, which he quickly and efficiently reorganized. Meanwhile, Lee and his army, coming off a string of victories in the summer and fall of 1862, decided to take the war North and invaded Maryland in September.
Further reading: Ted Ballard, Battle of Fir. st Bull Run (Washington, D. C.: Center of Military History, 2004); William C. Davis, Battle at Bull Run: A History of the First Major Campaign of the Civil War (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1977); David Detzer, Donnybrook: The Battle of Bull Run, 1861 (Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 2005); Larry Hama, The War Is On! Battle of Bull Run (Oxford: Osprey, 2006); John J. Hennessy, Return to Bull Run: The Campaign and Battle of Second Manassas (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993); Charles P. Poland, The Glories of War: Small Battles and Early Heroes of 1861 (Bloomington, Ind.: Author House, 2004).
—Matthew G. McCoy
Burnside, Ambrose E. (1824-1881) Union army general
Inventor of the Burnside carbine, a Union general, and three-time governor of Rhode Island, Ambrose Everett Burnside was the commander of the Army of the Potomac between November 1862 and January 1863.
Burnside was born in Liberty, Indiana, in 1824. Originally from South Carolina, his father had freed the family’s slaves and moved north shortly before Ambrose’s birth. Burnside entered the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1843. Graduating 18th in the class of 1847, he saw action in the Mexican-American War. Remaining in the regular army after the war, he was wounded by Apache warriors while guarding the Southwestern border area.
In 1853 Burnside resigned his army position and moved to Rhode Island. There he started a manufacturing company that produced a breech-loading rifle he himself had designed. When Burnside failed to secure a crucial government contract, his creditors took ownership of his patents. Thousands of Burnside carbines would be produced for the army during the Civil War.
In the late 1850s Burnside moved from one job and state to another. He worked for George B. McClellan, a fellow West Pointer and future commander, on the Illinois Central Railroad, and for the Rhode Island Militia. At the beginning of the Civil War, Burnside rejoined the army and was appointed colonel in the First Rhode Island
Ambrose E. Burnside (National Archives)
Volunteers. He fought at the First Battle of Bull Run and shortly thereafter was elevated to brigadier general by President Lincoln. Burnside’s successful campaigns in North Carolina led to the capture of Roanoke Island, New Bern, Beaufort, and Fort Macon.
Promoted to major general in 1862, Burnside commanded the IX Corps in the Army of the Potomac, which he led during the Battle of Antietam in September 1862. On the day of the battle, September 17, Burnside’s orders from Gen. George B. McClellan were to move against Lee’s right side, which had been seriously weakened during the terrible fighting. Seized with indecision, Burnside delayed moving his corps over a stone bridge (now known as “Burnside’s Bridge”) that crossed Antietam Creek. That delay allowed Confederate reinforcements to strengthen the lines, and one of the great opportunities for a smashing Union victory was lost forever.
Burnside’s boss, George B. McClellan, lost his command a month later, and Lincoln appointed a reluctant Burnside in his place. Burnside had declined Lincoln twice before, not only out of loyalty to his friend but because of an accurate assessment of his lowly generalship capabilities. Predictably, Burnside’s command of the Army of the Potomac was a disaster. First, he lost a costly battle in December 1862 at Fredericksburg, Virginia, against Lee’s vastly outnumbered army. Then, in a vain attempt to redeem his reputation and uplift his demoralized army, Burnside decided to go “on to Richmond” in the middle of the winter. His troops were dry when they started their march out of the Washington, D. C., camps on January 19, but soon the rains came, and “Burnside’s Mud March” became the laughingstock of the nation.
In January 1863 Lincoln removed Burnside from command of the Army of the Potomac and replaced him with Gen. Joseph Hooker. By March he had been given command of the Department of the Ohio. Away from the battlefield, Burnside proved more successful. He arrested and tried Democratic congressman Clement L. Val-landigham, a notorious copperhead. He also managed to direct the capture of Confederate John Hunt Morgan, whose cavalrymen were threatening southern Ohio. Toward the end of the year, Burnside ably defended Knoxville against Confederate forces, saving the city for the Union.
Burnside joined the 1864 spring campaigns under Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. He was placed in charge of his old IX Corps and saw fighting at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and North Anna. During the siege of Petersburg, Burnside devised a bold plan that went wrong in the Battle of the Crater, causing the senseless loss of many lives. This time he was gone for good. Burnside resigned from the army on April 15, 1865.
Burnside’s postwar years were very successful. He became a prosperous businessman and achieved a solid record in Rhode Island’s political history. He was elected three times to the governorship, and in 1874 he was elected to the U. S. Senate, where he served until his death on September 13, 1881, in Bristol, Rhode Island. He is buried in Providence.
Further reading: Edward Hull, Burnside Breech Loading Carbines, 1853-1866 (Lincoln, R. I.: A. Mowbray, 1986); William Marvel, Burnside (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
—Fiona Galvin
World History
