Senators Picnicked at the First Battle of Bull Run. Then They Fled.

On July 21, 1861, Washington's elite rode out with picnic baskets and opera glasses to watch what they were sure would be the war's only battle. By sundown they were caught in a stampede, the Union army was in ruins, and the next day Abraham Lincoln called up half a million men for three years.

On the morning of Sunday, July 21, 1861, a strange parade rolled out of Washington toward Centreville, Virginia, about thirty miles southwest. The destination was a little creek called Bull Run, where the first major land battle of the Civil War was about to begin. The travelers came in stylish carriages and city hacks, on horseback and even on foot, carrying picnic baskets and opera glasses, expecting to watch the Union army crush the rebellion and open the road to Richmond. Captain John Tidball of the Union artillery watched the crowd approach his battery and wrote afterward that "all manner of people were represented in this crowd, from the most grave and noble senators to hotel waiters." The London Times correspondent William Howard Russell stood on a hill beside a woman with an opera glass who, at a burst of cannon fire, cried out, "That is splendid, Oh my! Is not that first rate? I guess we will be in Richmond to-morrow." Among the sightseers were senators Ben Wade of Ohio, Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, and Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, a future vice president, the photographer Mathew Brady, and other members of Congress. They had come because almost everyone believed the war would be over in weeks. Most of the Union soldiers had enlisted for only ninety days, and those ninety days were running out.

The Union commander, Brigadier General Irvin McDowell, had been pushed into action by newspapers and congressmen shouting "Forward to Richmond!" He led about 35,000 green volunteers against a Confederate force under P.G.T. Beauregard guarding the rail junction at Manassas. For most of the morning McDowell's flanking plan worked, and Union troops pushed the rebels back off Matthews Hill toward a rise called Henry Hill. But Beauregard had been reinforced. General Joseph E. Johnston had slipped out of the Shenandoah Valley and rushed his brigades east by rail on the Manassas Gap Railroad, arriving in time to tip the fight. On Henry Hill a Virginia brigade under a relatively unknown general, Thomas J. Jackson, held its ground. When a fellow brigadier, Barnard Bee, saw the line hold, he shouted to his own broken men, "There stands Jackson like a stone wall!" Bee was mortally wounded and died the next day, but the name stuck. By late afternoon a Confederate counterattack, helped by fresh arrivals and Jeb Stuart's cavalry, broke the Union right, and the retreat began.

It started in order, then came apart at a bridge over Cub Run, where an overturned wagon blocked the road and a shell touched off panic. Soldiers threw down their rifles and ran, abandoning wagons and guns. The fleeing army ran straight into the carriages of the congressmen and sightseers who had driven out to watch. A group of senators eating lunch looked up to see the road filled with soldiers, horses, and wagons, all headed the wrong way. "Turn back, turn back, we're whipped," soldiers cried as they ran past. Senator Chandler tried to block the road; Senator Wade picked up a discarded rifle and threatened to shoot any man who kept running; Senator Wilson was handing out sandwiches when a shell smashed his buggy and he escaped on a stray mule. One congressman, Alfred Ely of New York, strayed too close and was captured, spending the next five months in a Richmond prison. The only civilian killed was an eighty-five-year-old bedridden widow, Judith Henry, whose house was swallowed by the fighting on Henry Hill. The Southern press called the rout "the Great Skedaddle."

Nearly 4,900 Americans fell, killed, wounded, or captured, the heaviest toll on American soil in the nation's history to that point, and a figure that would soon look small. The next day, July 22, Lincoln signed a bill authorizing up to 500,000 volunteers for as long as three years. The ninety-day war was finished. Bull Run was the first and last time Americans turned out to treat a battle as a day's outing; the carnage ended the idea that war was a spectacle. The harder lesson, that wars are rarely as short or as cheap as the people who start them expect, is one every generation has had to learn again.

Also on this day

1873: The James-Younger Gang pulled off the West's first robbery of a moving train, derailing a Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific locomotive near Adair, Iowa and netting about $3,000. (Adair County, Iowa)
1899: Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois; he would win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 for a spare prose style that remade American fiction. (Nobel Prize)
1954: The Geneva Accords ended the First Indochina War and divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel, a line declared "provisional" that became the fault line of the Vietnam War. (Britannica)
1970: Egypt's Aswan High Dam, a billion-dollar Nile project begun in 1960, was completed; it tamed the river's annual floods and drowned the ancient cycle of drought. (HISTORY)
1983: The lowest air temperature ever recorded at the surface of the Earth, minus 89.2 degrees Celsius, was logged at the Soviet Vostok Station in Antarctica. (British Antarctic Survey)