FIRST BLOOD Part Three

I think the most concise description of the problems General Irwin McDowell (above)  faced on the Tuesday, 16 July, 1861, as he began his 30 mile march from Alexandria and the Arlington Heights down to Bull Run creek, was given in Bruce Catton's, 1961 history of the war. Catton wrote, “Latter...when the troops knew how to march, and the generals and their staffs knew how to handle them, this (4 days) would have been more than time enough, but at this time no one knew anything: from general down to 90 day private, everybody was green...when the column started out the wagon trains that had to carry all of its supplies were still in process of getting organized...when the head began to move the tail of it was still being put together.” McDowell was unable to even start his 3 divisions, some 35,000 men - the largest single military force gathered in North America up to that time, and outnumbering the population of most Virginia counties - until after 2 in the afternoon.

“Coming down from Washington,” wrote Catton, “the Warrington Turnpike ran a little south of west, a dusty straight road (above) that passed through the looted Fairfax Courthouse, climbed the slopes around Centerville and then dropped to the valley of the Bull Run, where a brown river moved southeast in slow loops with a fringe of marshy underbrush, brier patches, and spindly trees on each bank. The turnpike crossed Bull Run on an arched stone bridge...”

William C. Davis tried to describe the march a century and thirty-one years later. “The three columns of Federals were in no hurry”, he wrote, “The men trekked through the thinly populated region of low rolling hills, with dense forests and cultivated fields, with many creeks, few bridges, and soft bottoms that bogged wagons to their axles...The soldiers dragged their feet, sang and bragged, chocked on dust, sweltered in the heat and humidity. The enlisted men casually broke ranks and stopped for drinks of water, or to wash the caked grime from their faces, or to forage for chickens...a kilted officer of the 79^th New York Highlanders went running after a pig...he leaped over a rail fence, presenting what a comrade called “such an exhibition of his anatomy as to call forth a roar of laughter...It was 10 p.m. Before most troops...were allowed to bivouac ( for the night). None had hiked more than six miles.”

Shelby Foote described it as a “...lark, lending the march a holiday air of an outing. They not only broke ranks for berry-picking; they discarded their packs and “spare” equipment, including their cartridge boxes and ate up their rations intended to carry them through the fighting... Re-issuing ammunition and food cost him ((McDowell) a day of valuable time, in addition to the one already lost in wretched marching...”  It was not until the second morning, says Davis, that the center division “began to trickle into Fairfax Courthouse around 10 o'clock.”  Nobody went any further.

That night McDowell ordered central division commander, General Daniel Tyler, to push right through Centerville on Thursday, 18 July, and threaten a direct attack on Manassas Junction. McDowell reminded Tyler “Do not bring on an engagement, but keep on the impression we are moving on Manassas”. McDowell expected the real work would be done by General Samuel Heintzelman's 10,000 men. They were marching directly down the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, aiming for Union Mills and the ford over Bull Run. Heintzekman's orders were then to brush past the rebels' right flank and cut the rail line south of Manassas Junction. If communications to Richmond were cut, McDowell believed, the rebels would retreat.

But McDowell had lost touch with Heintzelman's division during Tuesday, and was forced to ride out on Wednesday morning, looking for him. By the time he found his wayward subordinate, McDowell discovered the key division was so fouled up, it was unfit to launch an attack this day. So McDowell ordered Heintzelman to instead wheel to his troops to the right, and concentrate his men at the crossroads of Centerville.  Meanwhile, out McDowell's sight, General Tyler, thought he sniffed an opportunity down the Warrington Pike at Blackburn's and at Mitchell's fords across  Bull Run.

Daniel Tyler (above) was a civil engineer, the son of a Revolutionary War veteran, an 1819 West Point graduate, who had left the army in 1834 and made a fortune saving railroads on the brink of bankruptcy. And gazing through the summer haze from the high ground around Centerville, his old eyes could still see the smoke and flashes at Manassas Junction, just two miles beyond Bull Run. And he could not see many rebels between him and that tempting target. When a couple of artillery rounds fail to generate a response, Tyler sent a regiment of Massachusetts men to cross Bull Run at Blackburn's ford.

It might have worked too, if Tyler's opponent had not been General James Longstreet, one of the most competent soldiers in either army. Longstreet had concealed his men well on both sides of Bull Run, and when the Massachusetts men stepped into the open at the ford, the Virginians blasted them from three sides at once. Just as the firing was building, Captain Fry, McDowell's chief of staff arrived, and urged Tyler to pull back. Instead Tyler sent another regiment forward, this one of New York men. And these men were then hit by the reinforcements Longstreet had also rushed forward. After 30 minutes of this hailstorm of lead, the New Yorkers broke for the rear. And when Longstreet's men rushed across Bull Run, they pushed the Massachusetts regiment back with them. Tyler was forced to push his own reinforcements forward, and regroup behind the crest of the Centerville high ground.

At about four that afternoon, General McDowell arrived on the scene, and with the frustrations of the day, he unloaded on General Tyler. The proud businessman did not take the criticism well. By the numbers it had not been such a bad day.  The federal troops had suffered at the "battle" of Blackburn's ford (above) 19 dead, 38 wounded and 26 missing, while the rebels had 15 dead, 53 wounded and 2 missing. But the psychology was far more one sided. Captain Fry noted, “The Confederates...were encouraged. The federal troops, on the other hand, were greatly depressed.” And Tyler''s wounded pride would fester.

General McDowell spent the next day, Friday, 19 July, camped around Centerville (above) resting and resupplying his men's  “haversacks” with another 2 days ration of hard tack, which his men had eaten on the march down from Washington.  And he spent the day assessing the condition of his army. A Pennsylvania regiment and a battery of New York artillery had to be sent back because their 90 day enlistments were almost up, and they refused to remain. McDowell further weakened his force when by sending 5,000 men back to guard his supply lines through Fairfax Courthouse. On Saturday, 20 July, he sent engineers out to the west, checking the roads beyond the rebel left. It took until late afternoon before he knew the roads to Sudley Springs could support a flanking move by over 10,000 men.

On the Confederate side, the soldiers might be “encouraged”, as Captain Fry had noted, but on the night of 18 July, their commanders were worried.  Beaurguard knew, thanks to Rose Greenhow, that a federal division of 10,000 men was marching directly down the Alexandria and Orange railroad line on his right. He could not know, at this point, that they had been redirected to Centerville.  Beaurguard was still outnumbered , and he expected to be struck by the heavier force anywhere along the line from Union Mills to Blackburn's ford.  If pressed, he knew he could not hold.  He pleaded with Confederate President Jefferson Davis for reinforcements.

Davis had no men to send, except the soldiers under Johnston in the Shenandoah Valley (above). And as long as Patterson was still threatening Winchester, those men could not be spared. But after the skirmish on 16 July at Bunker Hill, the federals had stopped dead in their tracks, and on 17 July Patterson had moved sideways to Charles Town. Johnston was certain by the afternoon of 18 July that there was no chance of any further aggressive action from Patterson. That afternoon, when Jefferson Davis forwarded Beaurguard's urgent appeal, Johnston could now shift his men to the east.

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FIRST BLOOD Part One

I believe that Maria Rosetta O'Neal (above) was no hero. She was, in fact, insane. Her affliction poisoned everything and everyone she touched, until it infected a nation of 31 ½ million people and killed over 750,000 of them over four years -  2 people out of every 100 Americans alive in 1860 . She was not personally responsible for all those deaths. But Rose did her part. Her justification was that when she was four years old her father had been murdered – by one of the slaves on his Maryland plantation. And his death and the loss of emotional and financial security he had provided, fueled Rose's life long hatred and fear of the black slaves who surrounded her and on whom she depended and whom she despised. Courage and sacrifice in service of a delusion is not heroic. It is pathological.

“Wild” Rose grew into one of the most beautiful women in Washington, D.C., with flashing “tempestuous eyes” and soft olive skin "delicately flushed with color". She was also smart and witty and skilled in the bitter social wars of the small southern town that Washington has always been. But her lack of a dowry meant she did not marry until 1835, at the advanced age of 18.  Robert Greenhow was twice her age but could match her intelligence and whit, and he was wealthy enough to provide her with security. After Robert died suddenly while in San Francisco in 1854, the widow won a $10,000 lawsuit against that town, and returned to Washington independently wealthy and having entered the Victorian no man's land between virgin and wife.  The combination of wealth, political connections and sexual availability made her one of the most powerful women in the capital.

In 1860 this “...southern woman, born with revolutionary blood in my veins”, viewed Abraham Lincoln's election as an attack upon “our domestic institution”, by those “ignorant...of the benign and paternal manner in which it was conducted in the South.”  As part of this “paternal” institution, there were at least six “stinking and reeking” slave pens and sales lots where human beings were bought and sold like cattle, within walking distance of the White House and Capital Hill, in Washington.  It was Rose Greenhow's devotion to that  “paternal institution”  that made her an eager  recruit for the Confederacy of the Slave States. Rose Greenhow served as a conduit for one of the three spy rings collecting and dispatching intelligence to the Confederate army in Virginia, and the capital in Richmond, 100 miles to the south.

The obvious choice to command the federal army charged with crushing this pro-slavery revolt should have been the highest ranking officer, "Old Fuss and Feathers", General Winfield Scott. He was a brave decorated veteran of the War of 1812 and the Mexico war of 1848.  But by 1861, he was 74 years old , and weighed 300 pounds (above). General Scott had become “Old Fat and Feeble”.  Scott's plan for dealing with the rebellion was to capture southern ports and blockade the coast line, forcing the southern radicals to eventually face the reality that the south was not financially nor culturally independent.  But the northern public, insulted by the April attack on Fort Sumter, was in no mood to slowly constrict the south like an anaconda snake. The northern public wanted the rebels punished now, this summer of 1861

Given the demand for immediate action, Scott's choice to lead the troops in the field was Colonel Robert E. Lee (above), “the ablest soldier I know” according to Scott.. But Lee was hesitant about attacking his home state of Virginia.  Offended, “Fuss and Feathers” barked, “I have no place in my army for equivocal men.” So Lee resigned and went to work for the Confederacy. Only then did Scott pick the next ranking officer, commander of the expanding Washington garrison, Irwin Mcdowell.

Born to money, and married to it as well, McDowell was the patrician in uniform, most often described as “odd”. His personality almost sounds like a mild form of autism. He could not remember faces or names, he was better at numbers than people, and was so painfully shy that when forced to speak his face would flush and his speech would slur, which some mistook for drunkenness. In fact the general was a teetotaler. He fed his insecurities with food. “At dinner he was such a Gargantuan feeder...he had but little time for conversation.” And the only thing he was certain of was that the 55,000 militia gathered in Washington that spring were not yet an army.

McDowell must have felt at times like a sane man trapped in a mad house. “I wanted very much a little time,” he wrote later, “an opportunity to test my machinery, to move it around and see whether it worked smoothly or not.” But the press for action, the drum beat for invasion, the demands for a march on Richmond had reached a frenzy. The majority of the troops in Washington (above)  were 90 day militia, called up on April Fools day, and due to be released on the first of August, adding the pressure for McDowell to use them before he lost them. The new President seemed to agree. Lincoln urged McDowell, “You are green, it is true, but they are green also; you are all green alike.” Still, McDowell resisted a march on Richmond. Instead, he decided, “The first object should be to reach as soon as possible the Manassas Junction...”

By 1850 it was already obvious that railroads so simplified supply problems, that all future wars would be fought along rail lines. And because of that, the little village of Centerville, Virginia, which had no railroad, loomed large in McDowell's plans. The tiny village of about 200 sat on a plateau dominating the surrounding terrain, including, 27 miles south of Alexandria, the junction of the north/south Orange and Alexandria railroad and the east/west Manassas Gap railroad. Occupy Centerville, and it was a short step across Bull Run creek to cut the Manassas Gap railroad. This would seperate  the 10,000 rebels in the Shenandoah Valley from the 21,000 rebels in northern Virginia. Once federal troops had out flanked the Manassas Junction rail yards (below), the rebels would be forced to retreat another 40 miles south to the Rappahannock River.  And that would put the Federal army just 30 miles outside of Richmond.

This was the plan approved by Lincoln and his cabinet, and the Congressional Republicans, the last week of June, 1861. And on Tuesday, 9 July 1861, Rose Greenhow composed a warning for the rebel commanders. She wrote that in one week (on 16 July),  McDowell's entire force of upwards of 55,000 men, would advance along a line from Alexandria and Arlington Heights toward Fairfax Courthouse and Centerville. Their ultimate goal, she wrote, was to capture Manassas Junction.

This encoded message was folded and sewn into a silk packet no larger than a silver dollar. Rose entrusted this missive to 19 year old Betty Duvall (above), who tucked it into the hair bun at the back of her head.

Dressed as a farm woman, Miss Duvall drove a single horse cart across the Chain Bridge (above) over the Potomac River and canal.  Switching to a  horse at a safe house on the Virginia shore, Miss Duvall followed the turnpike around Arlington Heights and Robert E, Lee's plantation, and trotted down the dark road for another ten miles, to the Rebel outpost at Fairfax Courthouse (below).

Here, a rebel picket stopped the woman, who demanded to see an officer. When South Carolinian General Milledge L. Bonham appeared, the young lady announced she had an urgent message for the over all commander of rebel forces in northern Virginia.  Bonham agreed to see that it was delivered as quickly as possible. "Whereupon," wrote Bonham,  “she took out her tucking comb and let fall the longest and most beautiful roll of hair I have ever seen. She took then from the back of her head, where it had been safely tied, a small package..” By breakfast on Wednesday, 10 July,  Rose's warning was being read in Manassas Junction by Louisiana native, General Gustave Toutant-Beauregard , and before lunch in Richmond by Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy.

It was Davis who ordered the commander of the 10,000 rebels at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, General Joe Johnston (above), to, transfer his troops 50 miles east via the Manassas Gap railroad, to support Beauregard in defending Manassas Junction, as soon as he could safely do so.  Now all the rebels at Harper's Ferry (below) needed was for the Union army to make a mistake. They did not have long to wait.

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