Second Battle of Bull Run

• 1. Introduction

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  The Second Battle of Bull Run was fought August 28-30, 1862, on the same Virginia ground where Union forces had already suffered a humiliating defeat a little over a year earlier. This time, the scale was far larger. Confederate General Robert E. Lee had positioned roughly 55,000 men against a Union force that would eventually number some 70,000. And yet, in three days of fighting, Lee's Army of Northern Virginia would shatter their opponents and send them fleeing back toward Washington in a retreat that, while not quite as chaotic as the first, left no doubt about who had won.

  How did this happen? How did Union General John Pope, commanding an army with a numerical advantage, manage to lose so decisively? The answer lies in a chain of miscalculations, misdirected orders, and Confederate deceptions so successful that Pope believed, right up until the final hours, that he was on the verge of a great victory. The story of this battle is ultimately a story about two commanders: one who saw the battlefield with clear eyes, and one who did not.

• 2. The Setup

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  After the collapse of Major General George B. McClellan's Peninsula campaign in the Seven Days Battles of June 1862, President Abraham Lincoln appointed John Pope to command the newly formed Army of Virginia. Pope had achieved some success fighting in the Western Theater, and Lincoln wanted a more aggressive general.

  Robert E. Lee, having just fought McClellan to a standstill, drew a different conclusion from those same battles. He judged that McClellan posed no further threat from the Virginia Peninsula. That freed him to act boldly. Lee sent Stonewall Jackson to Gordonsville to block Pope and protect the Virginia Central Railroad, then committed Major General A.P. Hill to join Jackson with 12,000 men. His larger ambition was to destroy Pope before McClellan could reunite with him.

  The armies fought minor skirmishes along the Rappahannock River through late August, with heavy rains keeping Lee from forcing a crossing. Faced with Union reinforcements arriving from the Peninsula, Lee needed a new plan. He sent Jackson and cavalry commander Jeb Stuart on a sweeping flanking march to cut Pope's supply line, the Orange and Alexandria Railroad. Jackson departed on August 25, reached the town of Salem that night, and by August 27 his forces had captured and largely destroyed the massive Union supply depot at Manassas Junction. The move forced Pope into an abrupt retreat from his defensive line.

• 3. Brawner's Farm

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  On the evening of August 28, Jackson revealed himself. A Union column from Brigadier General Rufus King's division was marching east along the Warrenton Turnpike. Its commander was not present; King had suffered a serious epileptic attack earlier that day. Jackson, watching the column pass, rode his horse conspicuously alongside the marching Federals dressed as a farmer. His aides were horrified. The Union troops paid no attention to what appeared to be a harmless civilian.

  Concerned that Pope might be slipping away, Jackson issued the order: "Bring out your men, gentlemen." At about 6:30 p.m., Confederate artillery opened on the column. The brigade in its path was John Gibbon's Black Hat Brigade, later to be named the Iron Brigade. Gibbon, a former artilleryman, answered with fire from Battery B, 4th U.S. Artillery. He initially assumed the guns were merely horse artillery from Jeb Stuart's cavalry.

  Gibbon sent his staff officer Frank A. Haskell to bring up the 2nd Wisconsin Infantry. The regiment, 430 men under Colonel Edgar O'Connor, advanced through the woods and emerged onto John Brawner's farm. When they reached the plateau, 800 men of the Stonewall Brigade, commanded by Colonel William S. Baylor, unleashed a heavy volley from a distance of 150 yards. The 2nd Wisconsin absorbed the blow without breaking, then returned a devastating volley at close range. From there, more units poured in on both sides, and the lines fought at distances as close as 80 yards for more than two hours.

  Confederate Brigadier General William B. Taliaferro afterward described the engagement plainly: "In this fight there was no maneuvering and very little tactics. It was a question of endurance and both endured." Taliaferro himself was wounded in the battle. Major General Richard S. Ewell, one of Jackson's division commanders, had his left leg shattered by a Minie ball and required amputation, removing him from action for the next ten months. The 2nd Wisconsin lost 276 of its 430 men engaged. The Stonewall Brigade lost 340 out of 800. Two Georgia regiments each lost more than 70 percent of their men. In total, one in every three soldiers who fought at Brawner's Farm was shot.

  Jackson had not achieved a decisive victory, but he had achieved his strategic purpose. Pope now believed he had trapped Jackson and could destroy him before Longstreet arrived. Pope's dispatch to Major General Philip Kearny that evening stated, in part, that Jackson "must be captured" unless he escaped by back roads during the night. The trap Pope thought he had sprung was, in fact, already closing on him.

• 4. Pope's Blunders

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  At daybreak on August 29, Pope discovered that two of his divisions, under Ricketts and King, had withdrawn south during the night without orders. Brigadier General John Gibbon, who had himself recommended the retreat, arrived at Centreville and told Pope it was a mistake, without mentioning his own role. When Pope learned that Major General Irvin McDowell had spent most of the previous day wandering around Prince William County without coordinating with anyone, Pope's response was unambiguous: "God damn McDowell! He's never where he's supposed to be!"

  Despite all of this, Pope remained convinced that Jackson was nearly trapped. He issued complicated attack plans that, by mid-morning, had collapsed into a simple frontal assault by Franz Sigel's I Corps, described by the source as widely considered one of the army's weakest units. In just 20 minutes of fighting, one brigade under Brigadier General Robert H. Milroy took 300 casualties.

  The most consequential confusion involved the Joint Order Pope sent to Fitz John Porter and McDowell. Historian John J. Hennessy described this document as a "masterpiece of contradiction and obfuscation that would become the focal point of decades of wrangling." The order never explicitly directed Porter to attack, and it concluded with a clause allowing commanders to depart from its instructions, effectively making it no order at all.

  Meanwhile, Confederate cavalry under Colonel Thomas Rosser dragged tree branches behind horses to raise clouds of dust, simulating the movement of large columns. A genuine intelligence report did reach McDowell from his cavalry commander Brigadier General John Buford, who reported 17 regiments of infantry, one battery, and 500 cavalry moving through Gainesville at 8:15 a.m. This was Longstreet arriving from Thoroughfare Gap. McDowell did not forward Buford's report to Pope until around 7 p.m. For the rest of that day, Pope operated on the assumption that Longstreet was not on the battlefield.

  At 4:30 p.m., Pope finally sent an explicit order to Porter to attack. His aide, who happened to be his own nephew, lost his way and did not deliver the message until 6:30 p.m.

• 5. Jackson Holds the Line

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  While Pope's attack plans dissolved into confusion, Jackson had positioned 20,000 men in a 3,000-yard defensive line south of Stony Ridge. His position rested on a railroad grade that had been dug out by the Manassas Gap Railroad Company in the 1850s and abandoned before the war began. In places, the cuts and fills of the unfinished grade served as ready-made earthworks.

  The fighting on August 29 was brutal and repetitive. Union brigades attacked, broke through or came close, and were then driven back by Confederate counterattacks. Cuvier Grover's brigade charged directly into Edward Thomas's Georgia brigade at 3 p.m., reached the railroad embankment, and unleashed a near-point-blank volley followed by a bayonet charge. The Georgians fell back. Then Maxcy Gregg's South Carolinians arrived, followed by Dorsey Pender's North Carolinians, who hit Grover's men in the flank and sent them fleeing with over 350 casualties.

  By late afternoon, A.P. Hill's division was near collapse. Gregg's brigade had defended against two major assaults over eight hours and was nearly out of ammunition. General Gregg reportedly lopped some wildflowers with a Revolutionary War scimitar he carried and told his men: "Let us die here my men, let us die here." Hill sent an urgent message to Jackson calling for reinforcements. Jubal Early's brigade and Lawrence O'Bryan Branch's brigade counterattacked and drove back the final Union assault of the day.

  Confederate officer casualties had been heavy. Three brigade commanders were wounded: Trimble, Field, and Colonel Henry Forno. But Jackson's line held. That evening, Pope wired his superior Henry Halleck that his losses were 7,000-8,000 men and estimated Confederate losses at twice that figure, a severe overestimate given that Jackson had spent most of the day fighting defensively.

• 6. Longstreet's Assault

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  On the morning of August 30, Pope ordered another attack, still convinced the Confederates were retreating. Probes of the Confederate line around 10 a.m. showed Stonewall Jackson's men firmly in position. John F. Reynolds told Pope there were Confederates in great strength south of the turnpike. Fitz John Porter arrived with similar intelligence. Pope chose to attack anyway, partly because he worried that if he waited for McClellan's reinforcements, McClellan would take credit for any victory.

  Lee, meanwhile, had positioned 18 artillery pieces under Colonel Stephen D. Lee on high ground northeast of Brawner Farm, trained on the open fields in front of Jackson's position. When Butterfield's division stepped off to attack, they had to cross 600 yards of open pasture owned by widow Lucinda Dogan, the final 150 yards of which were steeply uphill.

  In one of the most vivid moments of the three-day battle, Confederate soldiers in Bradley T. Johnson's and Leroy A. Stafford's brigades fired so much that they exhausted their ammunition entirely and began throwing large rocks at the 24th New York. Some of the New Yorkers threw them back.

  At 4 p.m., Longstreet's wing of 25,000 men in five divisions launched what became the largest simultaneous mass assault of the entire war. The lead division, John Bell Hood's Texans, swept forward on the left, supported by Nathan G. Evans's South Carolinians. Within the first ten minutes of contact, the 500 men of the 5th New York had suffered almost 300 casualties, 120 of them mortally wounded. One of Hood's officers wrote that the bodies lying on the hill reminded him of the Texas countryside when the wildflowers were in bloom.

  Pope, at his headquarters behind Dogan Ridge, was occupied reading a message from Henry Halleck announcing that two more full corps and an additional division were on the way, giving him a total of 41 brigades. He did not yet realize his left flank was disintegrating.

  Commanders fell one after another. Colonel Fletcher Webster was killed by an artillery shell. Colonel John Koltes was killed by an artillery shell. Brigadier General Zealous B. Tower was shot from his horse. Colonel Martin Hardin was wounded; the officer who replaced him was shot down within minutes, and a lieutenant colonel took over. Nathaniel McLean's Ohioans were assailed on three sides simultaneously.

  George Sykes's division of regular army troops, along with several brigades on Henry House Hill, held off the final Confederate push long enough for the rest of the army to withdraw across Bull Run. At 8 p.m., Pope ordered a general withdrawal to Centreville. Unlike the First Battle of Bull Run, the retreat was quiet and orderly. Stonewall Jackson, whose delays historian John J. Hennessy called "one of the battle's great puzzles," launched a supporting attack north of the turnpike at 6 p.m. but could not prevent the Union withdrawal.

  Union casualties across the three days totaled about 14,462, against approximately 7,387 Confederate casualties. Lee had won a decisive tactical victory. He had not, however, destroyed Pope's army.

• 7. Aftermath and Consequences

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  Pope was relieved of command on September 12, and his army was merged into the Army of the Potomac. He spent the remainder of the war in the Department of the Northwest in Minnesota, dealing with the Dakota War of 1862. Looking for someone to blame, he had Fitz John Porter arrested and court-martialed on November 25. Porter was found guilty on the 10th of January 1863, of disobedience and misconduct, and dismissed from the Army on January 21. Porter spent most of the rest of his life fighting the verdict. In 1878, a special commission under General John M. Schofield exonerated him, finding that his reluctance to attack Longstreet had probably saved what remained of Pope's army from an even greater defeat. Eight years after the commission's findings, President Chester A. Arthur formally reversed Porter's sentence.

  George B. McClellan's role in the battle generated a separate controversy. Two full corps of the Army of the Potomac had arrived in Alexandria during the battle, but McClellan refused to advance them to Manassas. He had written to his wife on August 10 that Pope would "be badly thrashed within two days" and that they would then be glad to turn matters back over to him. He told President Lincoln on August 29 that it might be wise to "leave Pope to get out of his scrape."

  James Longstreet faced a different kind of criticism. Lost Cause writers after the war blamed his reluctance to attack on August 29 as an early sign of the disobedience they accused him of at Gettysburg on the 2nd of July 1863. Lee's biographer Douglas Southall Freeman wrote: "The seeds of much of the disaster at Gettysburg were sown in that instant, when Lee yielded to Longstreet and Longstreet discovered that he would."

  The battle's most immediate consequence was geographical. Lee, emboldened by the victory, began his Maryland campaign on September 3, when the vanguard of the Army of Northern Virginia crossed the Potomac River. That march would lead, within weeks, to the Battle of Antietam.