These days of late August are Battle Days. One hundred fifty years ago Union and Confederate armies were settling in for a major multi-day battle in northern Virginia. It was the bloody culmination of a campaign that had begun with the appointment of John Pope, on June 26th, 1862, as general of the newly constituted Army of Virginia, tasked by President Lincoln with moving south to take Richmond, something his cautious commander of the Army of the Potomac, George McClellan, had been unable to accomplish over the past months from the Peninsula. By late July McClellan had been beaten back from the gates of Richmond and Pope's army lay between Culpepper and the Rapidan River to the south. Robert E. Lee, the relatively new commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, as it came to be called, freed from the threat of McClellan, decided to move north against Pope in order to push Union troops out of northern Virginia and open a way for a campaign into Maryland.
Out of this would come the Second Battle of Manassas, or the Battle of Second Bull Run, which began late on the 28th of August, and ended on the 30th with the utter defeat of John Pope. It was a campaign of brilliant strategy & maneuver executed by Lee's subordinate, Stonewall Jackson, before the final crushing battle on the old ground of Bull Run, the first battlefield of the Civil War.
In a previous post on this blog I mentioned poring over the panoramic battle maps in
The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War back in my youth. These days I've been reading selected battle histories and other books about the Civil War in sync with the 150th anniversary of that conflagration. This year its the 1862 battles and I read a history of Shiloh in the spring. These past couple of weeks I've been working through John J. Hennessy's superb account of Second Manassas,
Return to Bull Run. But it's been difficult reading, especially as the campaign gave way to the actual battle. The carnage in the fields and woods of northern Virginia on those days in late August was unbelievable, with some of most intense, close-up fighting of the war. Soldiers wrote home describing what they had seen and experienced, such as one infantryman from the 7th Wisconsin who fought against the Confederates of the Stonewall Brigade: "We advanced to within hailing distance of each other, then halted and laid down, and, my God, what a slaughter! No one appeared to know the object of the fight, and there we stood one hour, the men falling all around; we got no orders to fall back, and Wisconsin men would rather die than fall back without orders." ... Dawes of the 6th Wisconsin wrote: "Our one nights experience . . . . eradicated our yearning for a fight. In our future history we will always be found ready, but never again anxious."
I have been moved to grief over these accounts of Americans killing other Americans, and the cacophony of death seems to ring deep in my soul, like brutal . It makes me want to visit the battlefield--and mourn. I wonder if I can complete Hennessy's book--I've only got around one hundred pages left--but I know I will. But more death is waiting. Longstreet's division is moving for the final devastating charge against Pope's left flank. Soon his army will be swept from the field, leaving only the dead and dying in the thousands covering the ground. Quiet. A brief respite. Then, three weeks from now, armies will clash again near a stream in western Maryland on an even bloodier day.
