Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

Although the South had actually been an early pioneer in railroad construction in the 1830s, the Southern rail lines had been built mostly with a view toward moving cotton from the interior to the coastlines. It had never been necessary for the southern states to create interlocking east-west rail networks, and so the best Southern railroads ran north-south toward the Gulf coast, such as the Mississippi Central (which ran from New Orleans to Memphis, with the help of the Memphis & Tennessee line) and the Nashville & Chattanooga (which used connector lines to link Louisville and Nashville with Atlanta). Nor was there much likelihood that new railroad systems could now be built, since Virginia was the only Confederate state with the facilities to build locomotives. William Howard Russell watched in disbelief as a Confederate troop train arrived in a camp north of New Orleans: “Our car was built in Massachusetts, the engine in Philadelphia, and the magnifier of its lamp in Cincinnati. What will the South do for such articles in future?”28

There was, however, a silver lining to these logistical clouds. The South’s shortages of manpower and military material dictated that the Confederacy adopt a basically defensive posture, and taking the strategic defensive would allow the Confederacy, as Winfield Scott had foreseen, to operate along interior lines. The broad heartland of the Confederate states would give the Southern armies room enough to draw the Federal armies in after them, string out their supply lines, and thus render them vulnerable to counterattack on unfriendly territory. Above all, it would force the real expense of waging war onto the Federal army, and if the Confederacy made that expense high enough through delay and resistance, the government in Washington would be forced to give up simply out of exhaustion. No matter what other material shortages the Confederacy suffered from, it was still the world’s leading supplier of cotton, and Southerners fully expected that the voracious demand of European textile manufacturing for Southern cotton would draw Great Britain and France to the Southern side, as suppliers of weapons or perhaps even as open allies.

At first this Confederate war strategy seemed amply justified. By mid-July, the public outcry in the North for an invasion of Virginia had reached a pitch where Generals Scott and McDowell could afford to wait no longer. Moreover, the three-month militia enlistments would run out by the end of July, so if the militia were going to be of any use at all, it had to be now. Thus on July 16, 1861, McDowell’s poorly trained, gaudily dressed, and marvelously disorganized army of newly minted volunteers and restless militia (with a sprinkling of regulars and a battalion of Marines scratched up from the Washington Navy Yard) happily marched out of Washington to crush the rebellion.

Scott and McDowell had before them two basic choices for an invasion of Virginia. They might do as Scott had done in the Mexican War and use the Federal navy to transport the army down Chesapeake Bay, deposit it on the James River peninsula on the east side of Richmond, and lay siege to the new Confederate capital without risking a pitched battle. Or they could march overland, using the Orange & Alexandria Railroad as a supply line, cross the Rappahannock River, and attack Richmond from the north, with the certainty that somewhere along the route, a stand-up, knock-down fight would have to be fought with the Confederates.

The first choice was wiser in strictly military terms, since the army was too poorly organized as yet to fight a large-scale battle, and even if they should win such a battle, the impact would disorganize the army so badly that it might have to withdraw anyway. Besides, it had been one of the first lessons of the Crimean War that it was not the one-off impact of battles that decided the outcomes of war but the fatal, unremitting grind of sieges that destroyed enemy armies. “It was in these siege-works that the strength of the Russians was worn down,” wrote Sir Evelyn Wood; “the battles, glorious as they were,” were “merely incidents in the struggle.”29 The second choice was what the newspapers and Congress were demanding: a sensational and decisive confrontation, straight out of a picture book of battles, that would put an end to the war at one stroke. So the long columns of Union soldiers straggled out of their Washington encampments onto the roads of northern Virginia, headed in a more or less straight line south for Richmond.

The result was a thundering humiliation for the Federal army. To defend Richmond, the Confederate government had concentrated approximately 20,000 of its own volunteers under P. G. T. Beauregard, the hero of Fort Sumter, near the village of Manassas Junction, squarely across the track of the Orange & Alexandria railroad and behind a meandering little stream called Bull Run. There, on July 21, the hapless McDowell attempted to clinch Beauregard’s army in its front with an initial punch at Beauregard’s main lines behind Bull Run, and then swing a clumsy flanking maneuver around the left flank of Beauregard’s defenses. It might have succeeded had not some 12,000 Confederate reinforcements under Brigadier General Joseph E. Johnston shown up at the last minute to stagger the oncoming Federals with one blow and send them reeling back to Washington. The effect of the battle of Bull Run on Union morale was crushing: more than 500 Union volunteers were dead, another 2,600 wounded or missing.

The poet Walt Whitman watched the defeated army drag itself back through the streets of Washington under a sullen and rainy sky. “The defeated troops commenced pouring into Washington over the Long Bridge at daylight on Monday, 22nd,” Whitman recalled. “During the forenoon Washington gets all over motley with these defeated soldiers—queer-looking objects, strange eyes and faces, drench’d (the steady rain drizzles on all day) and fearfully worn, hungry, haggard, blister’d in the feet.” Whitman found “the magnates and officers and clerks” in Washington