The Time Travel Series - Daily Episode Guide.
The First Battle of Bull Run
The Civil War had begun. On the hot morning of July 21, 1861, about 60,000 men — most of them young volunteers who had never been in battle — gathered near a small Virginia stream called Bull Run, close to the town of Manassas. Union General Irvin McDowell, pushed by politicians and newspapers to act, led 35,000 soldiers south from Washington. He planned to defeat the 22,000 Confederate troops under General P.G.T. Beauregard and end the rebellion quickly.
But McDowell and many people in the North did not know that a Confederate spy, Washington socialite Rose O’Neal Greenhow, had been secretly sending Union troop numbers and plans to the South. Because of her help, General Joseph E. Johnston was able to bring 12,000 more Confederate soldiers by train to Manassas just before the battle.
Among these reinforcements was General Thomas Jonathan Jackson, a serious and deeply religious former teacher. He had unusual habits and prayed before every battle. By the end of that day, he would earn the famous nickname “Stonewall” Jackson. The battle showed Americans that the war would not end quickly, but would last for years and cost countless lives.
July 21, 1861 — 3:45 A.M. — Confederate bivouac near Blackburn’s Ford, Bull Run, Virginia
You cannot sleep. You have not slept well since Harpers Ferry. The ground is hard clay under a thin wool blanket, and the Virginia humidity sits on your chest like a wet coat. You rise in the dark, kneel on bare earth beside a fence rail, and pray — lips moving, eyes shut, the words inaudible to the sentry ten feet away. Around you, 2,600 men of the First Brigade lie in rows beneath the tree line: the 2nd, 4th, 5th, 27th, and 33rd Virginia Infantry, most of them Shenandoah Valley boys — farmers, clerks, students from Lexington and Staunton and Winchester. They smell of wood smoke, unwashed wool, and the rank sweat of men who have marched hard for days. A whippoorwill calls from the creek bottom. Somewhere a man coughs in the consumptive, rattling way that will follow this army for four years. You finish your prayer, stand stiffly, and feel in your coat pocket for the lemon you saved from yesterday’s ration.
July 21, 1861 — 5:40 A.M. — Confederate line near Mitchell’s Ford, Bull Run
The first guns break the dawn. A low, rolling concussion from the northeast — Tyler’s Union division opening a demonstration bombardment at the Stone Bridge, two and a half miles away. You stand at the edge of the tree line, field glasses raised, watching the white smoke blossom above the distant tree canopy. The sound reaches you a full second after the flash. Your staff gathers: Captain John Imboden of the Staunton Artillery is already asking whether to unlimber his guns. You say nothing for a long moment. Your jaw works silently — a habit your cadets at VMI knew well. “We will wait for orders,” you say, and lower the glasses. The men are stirring now, rolling blankets, gnawing on cold cornbread and raw bacon. A private from the 5th Virginia vomits behind a wagon wheel — nerves, not illness. No one mocks him. The light is coming up copper-pink through river mist. Bull Run itself is barely visible below, a brown, slow-moving creek fringed with willows. The temperature is already 70 and climbing.
July 21, 1861 — 8:30 A.M. — Confederate reserve position south of Bull Run
Three hours of waiting. The cannonade at Stone Bridge continues, but it is subdued somehow — a feint, maybe, though you say nothing. The sun is fully up now and brutal. Men have stripped to sleeves, but you remain in your frock coat buttoned to the throat. You sit on Little Sorrel — a small, unremarkable, dark reddish-brown gelding you took from a captured Federal supply train near Martinsburg last month — and the horse stands motionless. You produce the lemon from your pocket, bite into it through the rind, and suck the juice without expression. Word passes down the line that the commanding general, Beauregard, expects the main attack at Mitchell’s Ford. You are not convinced. The sound from the northwest — from beyond the Stone Bridge, from Sudley Ford — is growing. Not guns. Something lower, more diffuse. The sound of thousands of men moving through woods.
July 21, 1861 — 10:45 A.M. — En route from the Confederate right to the left flank
