George Devlin/GEORGE DEVLIN/MINIATURE WORLD - ’The Battle of Bull Run’ diorama, built by Don Ray and Paul Henderson, can be viewed at Miniature World in Victoria B.C.
William Howard Russell, the London Times war correspondent, went to the Battle of Bull Run in a rented buggy with a bottle of tea, a flask of Bordeaux and a container of brandy.
Sen. Henry Wilson, of Massachusetts, attended with a load of sandwiches to give out to the soldiers from his state.
Civil War Battles and Casualties Interactive Map
Civil War 150
Washington Judge Daniel McCook, from the family soon to be known as “the fighting McCooks,” grabbed his rifle, some politician friends and a picnic hamper and went out to join his soldier son, Charles, 18.
Despite the stifling summer weather — never mind the prospect of bloody combat — scores of onlookers, with parasols and opera glasses, in carriages and on horseback, flocked from Washington to the fields near Manassas for the first big battle of the Civil War.
They expected it to be the only big battle.
Instead, it became one of the most bizarre affairs of the long conflict — warfare as spectator sport, followed by a wild dash for safety — and it happened on July 21, 1861, 150 years ago Thursday.
This week thousands of reenactors, spectators and history buffs are returning to the fields around the once-remote railroad junction to remember the day the fledgling armies from North and South first met in 1861 — shadowed by picnickers, unaware of the dark future ahead.
Dozens of members of Congress went. Rep. Alfred Ely of New York, armed with a pistol, wound up captured by the rebels and was nearly shot by an enraged Confederate officer. Reporters, illustrators and a Union general’s father-in-law attended. A Rochester attorney went, was captured and later died in prison.
Mathew Brady, the vision-impaired photographer, put on a straw hat and long white “duster,” and went out in his equipment wagon with the British sketch artist Alfred R. Waud.
There were even a few vendors, hawking pies and snacks.
The site, amid fragrant grasslands baking in the heat 30 miles from Washington, was just southwest of a murky creek called Bull Run. It was quiet, gorgeous country with the hump of the Bull Run Mountains in the distance, tiny pink wildflowers in the fields and majestic turkey buzzards soaring on the thermals overhead.
The Union’s main general, Irvin McDowell, commanded a force of 35,000, probably the largest army ever assembled to that point in North America. The Southern force was slightly smaller, about 32,000.
Such a pageant, with some men in parade ground uniforms so gaudy one scholar says they resembled Robin Hood, could not be missed.
In the end, the battle of Bull Run — or Manassas as it’s often called in the South — became a bloody defeat for the Union. It turned out to be modest in size; a second battle over the same ground the following year involved much larger forces.
As for the pageantry, the event turned into a confused stampede of terrified politicians, picnickers, horses, wagons and defeated Union soldiers back to Washington.
Chaos had ruled the battlefield, as some Southern soldiers showed up in blue uniforms, some Northerners in gray, and the red-white-and-blue flags of both sides were almost impossible to tell apart.
The Post Most: LifestyleMost-viewed stories,videos, and galleries in the past two hours
_1337038921.jpg)
Loading...
Comments