Original subtitles

A stillness graces this hallowed ground today, where once, a century ago, these

tranquil fields blazed with fire.

It was here that a long-dead generation clashed in a struggle that pitted

neighbor against neighbor, brother against brother.

It is here on these battlefields that the ghosts of that generation linger.

Along their tree-lined lanes, cloaked in the passage of time, there can be found

all the agony, tragedy, and trauma of war.

Only by understanding these things can the true commitment of that generation

be seen, for it was their beliefs that sustained them through this terrible

ordeal.

Come with us as we unlock the secrets of these amazing places, for in these

battlefields one will not only find the keys to our heritage, but will find the

very focal point of America's vast strength.

From its founding in the flames of the American Revolution more than 80 years

before the Civil War, the United States had grown from a small collection of

colonies to a strong and prosperous nation.

bound by a common history and language.

Yet even as the country flourished, it began to drift apart.

Cultural, geographic, political, and economic differences forged the first

cracks in the Union, but slavery would be the ultimate catalyst for the

disaster that tore America apart only eight decades after its birth.

There have been a lot of attempts over the years to

not say that the Civil War was about slavery, that it was about other issues

that revolved around other important factors of the day, economically,

culturally, and so forth. But the bottom line, I really believe, is it all comes

back to slavery.

The Southern way of life had long been structured around slavery, the peculiar

institution that drove the economy and provided cheap labor for white

plantation owners.

To remove it would have been ruinous to the region's economy.

Naturally, southern politicians spent the years after the Revolution

protecting slavery in their states.

In contrast, the northern states became increasingly industrialized after the

Revolution, and almost all abolished slavery by the early 1800s. The key

issue behind the Civil War has to be slavery.

Yes, there are many other issues.

There's the fact that we have a...

two completely different cultures. We have a northern industrial culture, a

southern agrarian culture.

There is ongoing disagreements on many things.

All of these are the kind of things that politicians are able to hammer out a

compromise. The issue that keeps coming back that they cannot find a compromise

on is the issue of slavery.

All the other differences, and they were certainly abundant between North and

South, could have been worked out, could have been negotiated.

they didn't provoke an emotional response slavery did but it was not the

existence of slavery that divided northern and southern politicians so

much as the question of whether it should be allowed to expand beyond

existing boundaries in 1819 22 states composed america 11

were free and 11 were slave states and in the ensuing years many vicious

political battles would rage over the preservation of that balance

As the United States expanded westward, the country's physical growth came to

endanger its very existence.

With each new state came the threat that the delicate balance of 1819 would be

upset.

The Compromise of 1820 really speaks to one of the major defining issues of this

whole pre-Civil War era, and that was how slavery was going to fit into the

context of westward expansion.

As the territories from the Louisiana Purchase were organized, this really

came to the forefront of national attention.

were they going to be slave states as they were organized into states, or were

they going to be free states?

And if they were one or the other, it was going to upset the balance of power

in Washington and Congress.

So the Missouri Compromise structured a deal so that that delicate balance would

be maintained.

The basic elements of this deal were Missouri came into the Union as a slave

state. To counterbalance that, Maine was admitted as a free state.

Anything south of the southern Missouri border would become ultimately slave

states, and everything north of that would become ultimately free states.

And it was this guiding premise that defined the next 30 years in American

politics.

Americans hoped that the issue of slavery had finally been put to rest.

It was not to be.

John Quincy Adams later called the compromise the title page to a great

tragic volume.

In 1846, the United States provoked a war with Mexico in a bid to extend its

territorial possessions in the Southwest and West.

Characterized by historian Clement Eaton as an adventure in imperialism of the

South in partnership with the restless inhabitants of the West, the Mexican

army stood little chance of defeating the invaders.

The Mexican Army really does a pretty good job of fighting in a stand-up

fight. The difficulty is they're almost consistently outmaneuvered by the

American forces, especially in Scott's move on the Capitol.

The real impact of the Mexican War in a military sense is that it becomes the

training ground for the officers of the United States Army.

It's the refining fire that they go through.

And it's the first opportunity for many of these men, men like Lee and Grant,

who will later lead the armies in the Civil War, to actually lead men in

combat under fire and experience that for themselves firsthand.

When the Mexican War ended in 1848, the United States gained vast territories

south of the Mason-Dixon line.

The great irony to emerge from the Mexican War.

Was the fact that the American victory almost destroyed the United States as a

nation and once again The root cause was slavery and how it would fit into the

newly conquered territories So for the two years following the Mexican War the

political tension grew in Washington to the point where disunion and secession

was was a Major issue and it looked like it was going to happen

So at the 11th hour, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster came together, these two

great rivals, came together and hammered out a compromise solution, which Daniel

Webster proposed before the Senate.

And his speech is one of the great speeches in American history. He stood

before his countrymen and said, gentlemen of the Senate, I speak to you

today, not as a northern man, not as a Massachusetts man, but as an American.

And it was his force of oratory that led to the Compromise of 1850 and averted

war for another 11 years.

And essentially the Compromise was very simple.

It strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act. It allowed California to come into the

Union as a free state. And this is the key. It allowed New Mexico...

and Utah to determine their own fate, if they were going to be slave or free.

And this laid the seeds for popular sovereignty, which unfortunately,

ultimately, would destroy the Union.

For a brief time, the fires of sectional strife appeared to have been

extinguished, but resentment smoldered beneath the surface.

In 1854, it flamed to life once again.

Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act,

which did away with the Missouri Compromise, and introduced the concept

of popular sovereignty, which would allow the people of the territory to

decide the issue themselves.

Popular sovereignty, when it was actually executed and implemented in

Kansas, became a nightmare that destroyed the Franklin Pierce

administration and ultimately destroyed the Buchanan administration.

What happened was in 1856, open warfare broke out between the pro-slavery and

the anti-slavery factions.

Lots of people died.

Rival competing legislatures were established.

And fraudulent votes, all sorts of election violations took place.

And ultimately what came out of this was a constitution called the Lecompton

Constitution that included pro-slavery provisions that was sent to Congress to

be ratified.

And this happened in 1857 right after Buchanan became president.

And he bet the farm on the Lecompton Constitution.

He felt that if this thing could be passed, not only would it quell southern

antipathy towards the north, but it would also lead to a stabilization

of the situation in Kansas.

And Kansas by this point had become a bleeding ulcer for the nation.

So he wanted to put this to rest, and he bet everything, every ounce of his

political energy went into passing the Lecompton Constitution.

Well, it turned out to be a disaster.

It passed in the Senate. It didn't pass in the House of Representatives, in part

because most of the Northern Democrats fled.

and voted with the Republicans.

In fact, there was a point where in the Senate, Stephen Douglas was considered

to be a candidate for conversion to the Republican Party because of his

opposition.

In the end, Lecompton got thrown back to Kansas to be re-voted on

and done so with federal supervision.

And it was just absolutely roundly defeated.

And thus, Kansas did not actually become a state until 1861.

And this betting the farm on this one issue that Buchanan did doomed

his administration and in the process wiped out the strength of the northern

wing of the Democratic Party and set the stage for the disaster in 1860. The

midterm elections in 1858 resulted in almost all of the pro-LeCompton northern

Democrats. losing their seats in the House and in the Senate. It was a

disaster, and it destroyed the party structure in the United States and set

the stage for the Civil War.

In 1856, John C. Fremont became the first Republican candidate for president

on a platform denouncing the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Fugitive

Slave Law.

Though he was defeated by Democrat James Buchanan, the election clearly

demonstrated the sharp political divisions in the country.

Northerners voted for Fremont.

Southerners voted for Buchanan.

By the time the voters went to the polls in 1860, the rift between North and

South would prove too wide a gulf for any political party to bridge.

During the Republican convention, Fremont and Lincoln were vying for

delegates and eventually Fremont's support began to drain away and Lincoln

picked up his delegates and ultimately won the nomination.

Now when he was nominated, that absolutely petrified the South because

of the Lincoln-Douglas debates and Lincoln's approach to slavery in the

territories was...

considered radical in the South. So they were absolutely terrified that if he

were elected president, their entire way of life would be destroyed.

As a former Illinois congressman, Lincoln proposed that slavery be kept

out of the new federal territories and believed it must be tolerated where it

already existed.

Yet his nomination sent shivers of dread through the South.

Their worst fears were realized when the Democratic Party split into two

factions, one northern and one southern, and each nominated their own

presidential candidates.

Stephen A. Douglas accepted the nomination of the northern Democrats,

while the southern Democrats picked John C. Breckinridge as their candidate.

The split devastated the party and ensured the Republicans would win the

election.

Though he garnered just 40% of the popular vote, Lincoln easily

outdistanced his Democratic rivals, and in November 1860, he became the 16th

president of the United States.

Lincoln's election repelled the South and set the stage for rebellion.

On December 20, 1860, South Carolina seceded from the Union.

Mississippi joined South Carolina on January 9, with Florida and Alabama

following a few days later.

By early February, Louisiana and Texas had also seceded.

Together, these breakaway states formed their own government, meeting in

Montgomery, Alabama, where they proclaimed the new Confederate States of

America. If you look at the Confederate Constitution, which was modeled on the

United States Constitution, they had a very short time to come up with their

government, so they adopted most of the same things as was already in place in

the North.

There were only a few things that were different. One, the president could

serve for six years instead of four, and states did have the right to secede from

the national union, although they then didn't like it when West Virginia

seceded from Virginia. That got into another whole ball of wax.

But basically it was that they had the right to own African Americans. That was

the bottom line, and that's what they were separating for.

I mean, I can't imagine anyone wanted to die just because their president could

serve six years instead of four, or that you could secede. No matter how

important that was, the way of life, the culture, everything was based upon the

slavery issue, even people who didn't own slaves.

often aspired to because it was a sign of wealth. It was property just like

anything else. So even a poor dirt farmer thought about one day being able

to own slaves in the South where he could do that.

And they felt their way of life was under attack and they resented the North

and a lot of other factors come in. But basically it all boils down to slavery

being the primary concern and cause.

Jefferson Davis was elected president and quickly issued a call for 100,000

volunteers to serve in the new Confederate Army.

Federal arsenals in the new Confederacy were soon raided. One by one, nearly

every fort was taken or surrendered to the new Southern nation.

Only a few garrisons stubbornly resisted, including the man at Fort

Sumter, a fortress that guarded Charleston Harbor.

Commanded by Major Robert Anderson, a southerner who remained loyal to the

Union, the federal stronghold stood as an insult to the Confederacy, which

meant to obtain it by negotiation or force.

Early in 1861, the federal government dispatches a supply ship, the Star of

the West, to Fort Sumter to bring in supplies and reinforcements that are

needed by the garrison there.

The Confederate forces who are surrounding Fort Sumter fire on the Star

of the West and turn it back.

At this point, with that failure of that resupply mission, Fort Sumter becomes

the focal point of all Americans as they hold their breath about whether or not

there'll be actual conflict.

In spite of the failure of the Star of the West, the federal government

resolved to maintain its garrison at Fort Sumter.

Calls to surrender were stubbornly refused, and by mid-April...

the situation had reached the breaking point.

The Confederates got into a very bad confrontational situation there, and

although there were clear-headed people saying, you know, we really shouldn't

fire on the federal government because it will put us in the wrong, despite the

fact there were cooler heads, there were a lot of people pushing to have the

final match, the final explosion that would finally plunge the country into

war because so many people seemed to want it.

On April 12, 1861, Confederate General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard

ordered his guns to open fire on Fort St.

George's Garris. With that first cannonade, the flames of war quickly

spread to consume all of America.

The South attacked the North, and the perception in the North...

was that this put the South in the wrong.

They had their rights, yes.

They had rights to own slaves.

They had rights to even argue that they could secede. But they did not have the

right to attack, fire upon the national flag.

And that really gave Lincoln the kind of boost he needed politically to rally

the North and to get people to volunteer to put down the rebellion.

The Confederate guns that compelled Fort Sumter into submission served as a

clarion call to arms.

Across the north and south, thousands of eager young men flocked to the colors,

and soon citizen armies sprang up all across the north and south.

At the same time, following Lincoln's post-Sumter call for volunteers, several

more southern states seceded from the Union and joined the Confederacy.

Border states caught in the middle of a fracturing nation were facing severe

pressure from both sides.

These border states become critical in a variety of ways. For instance, the

District of Columbia is in Maryland, so there's a big effort to keep Maryland in

the federal camp.

But probably the most critical of these states is Virginia.

So when she joins the Confederacy, taking with her...

uh people such as robert e lee and all the industrial capacity of the state

that has an incredible effect on the confederacy's ability to wage war in an

act of defiance the confederate congress moved from alabama to richmond virginia

only a few days march from the union capital at washington d.c soon fresh

-faced regiments in a gaudy array of uniforms gathered around both capitals

ready to defend these vital centers.

In the spring of 1861, as all these volunteers were flocking to the colors,

both the North and the South felt that this was going to be a short war decided

by one battle.

And it was their own ethnocentric views that the other side was morally bankrupt

that led them to this conclusion.

Outside Washington, D.C., about 35,000 short-term enlistees had arrived by the

end of May.

Under the command of General Urban McDowell, this motley collection of

militia units with a meager stiffening of about 2,000 Army regulars became the

backbone of the Union effort in the East.

McDowell, a native of Ohio, was a professional soldier who had graduated

from West Point in 1838.

A solid officer, he realized that his half-trained mob of militia could not be

counted on in a stand-up fight.

But the Union demanded action.

Lincoln himself appealed directly to McDowell, calling on him to move south.

A lot of people criticize Abraham Lincoln for pushing the armies before

they were ready.

But you have to remember that Lincoln is under a tremendous political pressure to

do something. He couldn't just sit there and do nothing in the first year of the

war after getting all these enthusiastic volunteers into the ranks. He had to at

least try something.

And he did point out to the generals who were nervous about these untrained green

troops, that the Confederates were fighting with the same sort of untrained

green troops, and that they were operating under the same difficulties.

Well, it's more difficult to do an offensive operation than defensive, and

the Union did get defeated.

But you know, politically, and I don't know whether Lincoln was thinking this

way, he certainly never admitted it, but the North could afford a defeat.

whereas the South had less of a chance to defend Richmond, because the North

was not going to lose Washington as a result of the battle at Manassas or

first bull run.

But if the Confederates had been thoroughly trashed, there's a chance

that their newly installed government in Richmond might have fallen, in which

case there might have been an early end of the war. So Lincoln was correct.

Strategically, he was correct, and more important, politically, he was correct.

He had to do something.

In June, McDowell bowed to the pressure and began to plan an attack.

He was aware that the Confederates had two large forces defending northern

Virginia. About 22,000 men manned the Manassas Line under the command of the

hero of Fort Sumter, Major General Beauregard.

In the Shenandoah Valley, another force of 12,000 men was deployed around

Winchester, led by General Joseph E. Johnston.

a capable and quick-minded man who had been the highest-ranking pre-war officer

to offer his sword to the Confederacy.

McDowell first decided to move his army from Alexandria to establish a base of

operations at Centerville.

From there, he would make a last-minute assessment of Confederate strength and

intentions, then formulate a final attack plan.

He intended to drive Beauregard back from his lines of communication.

in this case the railroad junction at Manassas.

But to do so, he had to make sure Johnston's men in the valley did not

come to Beauregard's aid, in which case he would face an almost equal foe.

McDowell knew the Confederate armies had to be kept separated at all costs.

To pin Johnston down around Winchester, McDowell relied on the generalship of

the aging Robert Patterson.

A veteran of both the War of 1812 and the Mexican War, General Patterson

gained his command through his political connections in Washington.

With 18,000 men under his command, his force was ample to keep Johnston busy in

the Shenandoah. Yet in the coming days, he would prove incapable of performing

his task.

On July 16th, the Union armies took to the roads.

McDowell moved toward Centerville, while Patterson moved down from Harper's Ferry

to Winchester.

Patterson soon grew convinced he faced an army of at least 36,000.

Not wanting to be swamped by Johnston, he meekly moved back to Harper's Ferry

and called for reinforcements.

The next day, after Confederate spies reported McDowell's movements, Johnston

began sending the bulk of his army via railroad to unite with Beauregard.

For the next four days, dozens of trains arrived at Manassas Junction, where

eager regiments climbed out ready to give battle to the oncoming Yankees.

This early in the war, neither side has really figured out the potential of rail

lines. And partially that's because railroads are new technology, relatively

new, and it's never really been utilized in warfare to this point.

We'll see both sides in the Civil War are going to move men and material over

great distances very rapidly utilizing rail lines.

It's probably more important for the Union, which has a centralized system of

command and control for the armies and a national strategy.

than it is for the Confederates who never really seem to capitalize on their

potential as a nation because of the issue of states' rights that is at the

very core of the Confederacy.

But rail lines are going to become just extremely critical to the way the war is

prosecuted.

Thanks to the railroad, McDowell would soon face an army almost equal in size

to his own.

After a brief skirmish on July 18th at Blackburn's Ford, the Union troops

paused at Centerville while scouts reconnoitered the Confederate lines.

Then on the night of July 20th, McDowell held a council of war with all his

generals.

Spreading a large map out on the dirt floor of his tent, McDowell sketched his

plan.

General Daniel Tyler would take three brigades down the Warrington Pike and

make a demonstration in front of the Stone Bridge across Bull Run.

This would keep the Confederate left busy while two divisions under Generals

Hunter and Heinzelman looped around further to the Confederate left, crossed

Bull Run at Sudley Springs, then pushed south into the exposed Confederate left

flank.

To tie down the main Confederate force, General Israel Richardson would take a

brigade and make a feint attack at Blackburn's Ford.

If all went according to plan, the Confederates would be pinned in place by

Richardson and Tyler, setting the stage for Hunter and Heinzelman to sneak up on

their left and deliver the knockout blow.

Orders were written, and by 2 a.m. on the morning of the 21st, McDowell's army

was once again on the move.

Destination, the Manassas Line.

On the other side of Bull Run, Beauregard was busy planning his own

offensive. He wanted to take the bulk of his force and strike across Bull Run at

the Union right flank.

But a confused chain of command, conflicting orders, and other problems

caused repeated delays until finally Beauregard reluctantly canceled the

operation.

Meanwhile, after an early morning march through the dark Virginia countryside,

General Dan Tyler's three brigades reached the Stone Bridge shortly after 5

a.m.

Sporadic rifle and artillery fire soon broke out from either side of the

stream.

Confederate Colonel Nathan Evans and his brigade of some 1,500 men defended the

Stone Bridge against Tyler's probing attacks.

From just after 5 until about 9 a.m., this little private battle raged between

the two commands.

Tyler refused to press his attack, and Evans surmised that the action taking

place at the Stone Bridge was merely a demonstration.

His hunch was soon proven to be correct.

Sometime between 9 o'clock and 9.30, while Evans was waiting for Tyler to

attack across the stone bridge, he gets some semaphore signals coming from a

Confederate tower to his rear, warning him of McDowell's flanking maneuver

coming down Sudley Springs Road.

And that sets the stage for Evans' great moment in the Battle of Manassas.

Knowing his command risked being taken in the flank and rear, Evans reacted

quickly. Just before 10 a.m., he moved all but four companies away from the

Stone Bridge and marched north up the slope of Matthews Hill.

Initially, he deployed his command across a road about 400 yards from the

Carter House, facing north.

He would meet the Union attack face-to-face and hold as long as he

could. A short time later, he realized his troops could not cover the main road

from Sudley Springs.

So he scooted his line to the left and anchored it on the main road along the

slopes of Matthews Hill.

Evans had placed his men in an excellent position.

His regiments now blocked the road south to the Confederate flank and rear.

Any Union force would have to batter its way through his men before they could

even get to the Stone Bridge and the Warrington Pike.

With artillery supporting his double line of infantry, Evans settled down to

absorb the Union attack he knew would come.

He did not have long to wait.

At Sudley Springs, the 1st Brigade of Hunter's Division crossed at about 9.30

a.m.

Commanded by Colonel Ambrose Burnside, the four regiments in the brigade had

been marching nonstop for almost seven hours.

Exhausted and thirsty, They paused at Sudley Springs to rest.

This pause at Sudley Springs really highlights the fact that this is an

untrained, essentially undisciplined force of militiamen that is approaching

this battle.

And it's not until Burnside and McDowell show up, begin to get people organized

and moving, that anything begins to happen. And so the personal leadership

of individual officers is going to be extremely critical this day.

At 1015, Burnside's lead regiments emerged from the trees and walked

straight into Evans' brigade.

The Confederates opened fire with devastating results.

Burnside's men recoiled and soon fell back to the tree line.

Minutes later, General Hunter and his staff engineer reached Burnside and

ordered him to attack Evans' right flank and push him down off Matthews Hill.

That way, Burnside's men could take the stone bridge and link up with Tyler's

force on the other side.

While Burnside organized the rest of the attack, he sent forward a single

regiment, the 2nd Rhode Island, to lay fire down on the Confederate line.

Evans' men responded with a series of deadly accurate volleys, followed by a

counterattack by a regiment of South Carolinians.

Hard pressed, the 2nd Rhode Island fell back.

Burnside had intended to launch his main attack with two regiments, the 71st New

York Militia and the 2nd New Hampshire Volunteers, but both were slow to get to

their jump-off positions to the west of the Sudley Road.

Seeing the 2nd Rhode Island in trouble, Burnside ordered his reserve regiment,

the 1st Rhode Island, forward to the attack.

With rifles leveled, the Rhode Islanders went to the rescue of their sister

regiment. As the battle was joined, accurate Confederate artillery and

musket fire began to shred the Union ranks.

Burnside's other two regiments joined the battle a short time later and for

almost an hour, hounded away at Evans' brigade.

Each Union advance was met by blistering counterfire, followed by a swift

counterattack, and twice Burnside's men were pushed back to the treeline.

Shortly before noon, the Union ranks were reinforced by a battalion of

regular infantry and part of another brigade from Hunter's Division.

Advancing swiftly, they hit Evans a third time and began driving him off

Matthews Hill.

If Evans didn't receive help soon, The whole Confederate flank would collapse,

and the day would belong to McDowell.

As the Union attack started to gain ground, Colonel Evans rode back to Henry

House Hill.

There, on this grassy knob, stood two fresh brigades sent forward by General

Beauregard.

While Evans was engaged, Colonel Bee and Bartow came up and began discussing the

situation with him.

And they wanted to stay on Henry House Hill and establish a position up there,

but Evans prevailed upon them to come up and assist him on Matthews Hill. And

that they did. They swung both of their commands over to Evans' right flank

and anchored it on Bull Run.

Bea and Bartow's men double-timed up Matthews Hill and formed up on Evans'

right.

But the Union ranks were swelling fast, and though the fresh Confederate troops

took some pressure off Evans, three brigades could not hope to stand for

long against two Yankee divisions with more help on the way.

Gradually, the Union advantage of numbers began to tell.

The Confederates fell back, harassed all the way by accurate long-range artillery

fire. The Union troops were now supported by at least 24 guns, which

wrought havoc on the exposed Confederates.

Bee, Bartow, and Evans knew that their defense was crumbling.

They had successfully held up the Union advance, but the object now was to

extract their units safely and hope that the Confederate high command had someone

else to stop the Aims.

As the Confederate lines struggled to reform, a fresh unit came into view on

the crest of Henry Hill.

It was the brigade of General Thomas J. Jackson.

General B. pointed to the spot and shouted, there stands Jackson like a

stone wall.

Rally behind the Virginians.

Jackson. with his troops arrives from Manassas Junction on a battlefield

around 11 a.m., and he moves his units into a reserve position below the crest

on Henry House Hill.

There is some controversy about what General Bee meant with his comment or

even his exact wording, whether he was trying to rally his command or, in fact,

go to the aid of Jackson's command.

Whichever way it was, it's really unimportant because the nickname

Stonewall sticks to Jackson from this point on. He's no longer Thomas Jackson.

He is Stonewall Jackson.

Soon, Jackson and his brigade would find themselves in the eye of the storm as

the fighting swept south to Henry House Hill.

I think the turning point in the Battle of First Bull Runner, First Manassas,

was when Stonewall Jackson formed up a line of cannon along the Henry Hill. But

he formed it up along with his infantry brigade, which was enough to stop the

Union and form an anchor upon which Beauregard and Johnston were able to

coordinate more Confederate troops rushing up to the area as

reinforcements, and it was those reinforcements that were able to deliver

the counter-strike that eventually turned the battle into a Confederate

victory.

By 1 p.m., the Confederate line atop Henry House Hill held nine full

regiments and 13 cannon.

Beauregard was still outnumbered, but his position on the hill would even the

odds.

McDowell was determined to sweep through the rebel lines, and he had the forces

in hand to do just that. Three relatively fresh brigades, two from

Heinzelman's division and one from Tyler's, were ready to attack the hill.

The attack began around 2 p.m. and was met by stubborn resistance.

Two batteries of Union artillery were soon brought forward to pound Jackson's

left flank with deadly Enfilade fire.

Unopposed, they set up a gun line about 50 yards from the Henry House.

To give them support, the New York Fire Zouaves and the 1st Minnesota Volunteers

moved forward, ready to repel any attempt to storm the guns.

As these guns are deployed forward, there is a problem that develops.

In order for them to use their canister rounds, they've deployed them so close

to the Confederates that they're within easy range of these rifled muskets that

are being used by the Confederate infantry.

And so the horses are killed fairly quickly and the guns are stranded.

And although the gunners are being killed, the regular artillerymen

continue to fire, creating havoc with the Confederates and a situation that

has to be addressed by the Confederate command.

Jeb Stuart saw the carnage the guns were causing on Henry House Hill.

Seizing the moment, he led his cavalry troopers down across the Sudley Road in

a wild charge right into the middle of the New York Fire Zouaves.

With saber, carbine, and pistols, Stuart's men hacked and blasted their

way through the New York line and out the other side.

While the Zouaves were rattled, they didn't rout, as Stuart later claimed.

They had killed nine of the troopers along with 18 horses.

As Stuart's horsemen slammed into the Union troops protecting Griffin's

battery, Jackson's far-left regiment, the 33rd Virginia, spontaneously

attacked.

Clad in blue uniforms, the Southerners marched slowly forward.

The Civil War battlefield is a very confusing, smoke-haze-covered place.

And when you throw into that mix the fact that both sides in this battle were

wearing very similar uniforms, some southern units had blue uniforms, some

northern units had gray uniforms, both sides, some of them had red shirts, red

pants.

This issue is a problem, and it creates this confusion whereby

this unit is able to approach these guns.

In a tragic case of mistaken identity, the Union gunners held their fire,

believing these new troops to be friendly.

The issue was settled when the Virginians leveled their muskets and

fired, killing or wounding dozens of Federals. The Union troops fell back,

leaving the guns in the no man's land between the two forces.

The next two hours were spent in numerous charges and counter charges as

each side struggled to control the hilltop and its key artillery position.

As the Confederates swept forward, a strange, eerie scream accompanied their

advance. Soon to be known as the Rebel Yell, The sound struck fear into the

hearts of the enemy.

Discouraged and exhausted from hours of marching and fighting in the sweltering

Virginia heat, the northern soldiers began to fall back, slowly at first, but

with increasing panic as men became separated from their companies and

officers lost control of their commands.

The retreat soon became a rout as many Federals began a headlong scramble down

the Warrington Pike.

toward Bull Run.

Fortunately for the Yankees, several companies of Army regulars maintained

their discipline and formed a rear guard that managed to cover the Union retreat.

Up from the Stone Bridge, fleeing Union soldiers soon became entangled with

civilians from Washington, D.C., mostly politicians and their families who would

come out to picnic and watch the battle.

Back on the other side of Bull Run, the rebels were jubilant.

Jefferson Davis, who had arrived from Richmond, urged a vigorous pursuit, but

both Johnston and Beauregard believed such action impossible.

In Johnston's words, our army was more disorganized by victory than that of the

United States by defeat.

For the Union, this first great clash of the Civil War had come within a whisker

of victory, only to devolve into an embarrassing defeat.

But its repercussions were not strictly negative.

It made everyone in the North realize this is not going to be a short war,

that they needed as many people as they could get, and another rash of

volunteers happened after the defeat that benefited the North.

The South, by comparison, ended up getting lulled into the sense of, well,

we're invulnerable, we're the best, all we have to do is sit back and let the

North come to us because they have to negotiate.

Obviously, we've proven that we're superior on the battlefield.

The Battle of Manassas was but a prelude to the largest storm ahead.

While it had been a Union defeat, the battle hung in the balance until the

very last hour and only swung in favor of the South when fresh troops arrived

from the valley.

Had General Patterson, who was removed from command after the battle, pinned

Johnston's army down around Winchester, Bull Run probably would have been a

Union victory.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of the First Battle of Manassas was the

effect it had on both Union and Confederate officers.

Manassas, or Bull Run as it was called in the North, made or destroyed dozens

of careers.

After the battle, both sides took a hard look at the performance of their leaders

and did not hesitate to make major changes.

While McDowell's performance at Bull Run was really not that bad, he fell victim

to the Northern Short War Syndrome and was subsequently relieved of command,

and General McClellan took his place as Commander of the Army.

Besides McDowell, many other commanders at Bull Run had their careers either

made or broken as a result of their performance on the battlefield that day.

One commander emerged from the fighting at Manassas who would profoundly affect

the course of the Civil War, Thomas J. Jackson.

His performance during the battle and that of his brigade became the stuff of

legend.

That day on Henry House Hill, Jackson's brigade played the crucial role in the

battle, and they paid the price for it, too. They lost about 488 men out of the

unit. out of 1,982 Confederates who were lost during the entire battle.

So they really paid the price, but at the same time, no Southern unit played a

more crucial role.

Jackson later gained command of a corps and served under Robert E. Lee

throughout 1862 and 1863, becoming one of the greatest leaders of the Civil War

in the process.

Besides being a proving ground for officers, Bull Run demonstrated to both

sides that much had changed in the years since the Mexican War.

The development of the mini-bull, which allowed the rapid loading and firing of

a weapon in combination with the rifled musket, greatly improved the

effectiveness of shoulder weapons.

During the Mexican War, troops got within 100 yards of each other and fired

weapons that were effective out to about 75 to 100 yards.

until they could blow a hole into the line on the other side with combined

artillery, and then they'd charge through.

An offensive line would usually break on a defensive line.

The weapon was accurate 75 to 100 meters.

The mini-ball made the rifled musket accurate out to 500 yards easy, and you

could hurt somebody out to 1,000 yards.

This now meant that the time that it took to cross the deadly ground...

jumped from a one-minute timeframe to five or six minutes.

The defense had a whole lot more time to wipe out an offense.

The range of artillery, in contrast to the musket, had changed little between

the Mexican and Civil Wars. Solid rounds could reach out perhaps 1,000 yards and

explosive shells around 800.

Canister loads were essentially a large shotgun shell.

out to about 400 yards, which was well outside the range of a smoothbore

musket. It was the use of artillery at close range that blew tremendous holes

in the enemy lines during the Mexican War, but similar attempts during the

Civil War proved disastrous.

When they fight the first battle of Manassas at Bull Run, they run the guns

up within 400 yards of the enemy, get ready to blow a hole in the enemy line

and charge forward just like they did.

In the meantime, that enemy line stood up with rifled muskets that are now

accurate out to 500, 600 yards, and they cut down the entire gun crew.

And almost more important are the horses.

And now that gun crew has absolutely no way of retrieving its guns.

We keep thinking firearms progress, but they don't always progress at an equal

pace.

A change in tactics was clearly needed, but the lack of training and skill among

both officers and enlisted men meant it would be years before new methods of

attack began to evolve.

Although technology is a constant, tactics will evolve very slowly through

the Civil War, and part of that problem is the terrible attrition of officers

and experienced men as the casualties are suffered by both sides.

In the West, where perhaps more of the experienced veterans survive long enough

to make some changes, they'll experiment with some rudimentary rushing tactics

where part of the unit will fire and the rest of the unit will move forward in

short rushes, kind of a rudimentary fire and movement system.

While in the East, where perhaps there's a lower percentage of experienced

veterans left in the Army, they'll drop back to an earlier era and try some

experiments with...

narrow, compact column attack formations.

Although innovations in attack formations showed great promise in

controlling smaller units, applying these same tactics to the enormous

armies engaged in many battles proved difficult.

For this reason, both northern and southern officers continued to adhere to

Napoleonic-era formations.

The tactics we started the American Civil War with were the same ones that

we used in the Mexican War. Everybody lined up shoulder to shoulder,

presenting a fantastic target to the newly accurate weapon.

The answer, of course, would be change tactics.

Well, nobody had gotten that far to figuring out how to change tactics.

All they knew to do was speed up the rate of march, get across that ground

faster. So instead of going so many feet per minute, we marched faster and moved

it up into 100 plus steps per minute.

That didn't do the soldiers in the line much good. They could run and they were

still going to get shot at and hit accurately.

An answer might have been to spread out the line, to not present such a huge

target.

The problem that comes with that is that technology had only increased in one

area, not in several.

A commander did not have the capability to control his line spread out over

three times the distance or four times the distance.

One of the reasons he marched in close columns was so he could yell, just a

standard voice over the noise of gunfire and on the battlefield to be heard by

his unit.

There are no radios.

Telegraph doesn't do much good on the battlefield.

It doesn't do badly getting information to the battlefield operationally, but it

doesn't do much good on the battlefield.

How can a commander control his forces if he's spread out?

The issue of how to control the immense armies that were thrown into combat

during the Civil War was one that largely remained unresolved, even by

war's end.

We're caught in a dichotomy here. How do we change tactics when we lose command

and control just to alleviate a problem that technology has brought into us

because of accuracy?

The answer was build more spirit into the troops.

They'll charge into anything, put the officers out front and let them lead it,

and we'll manage to muddle through.

We had about 10,000 casualties or so during the Mexican War. We ended up with

600,000 dead in the Civil War.

That's the difference.

Even if tactics had evolved more rapid, the belief that the war could be ended

quickly, widely held in both the North and the South, failed to take into

account the sheer size of the opposing forces.

In the American Civil War, there is no decisive battle.

Decisive in the terminology of an annihilation. When you take the army,

you defeat it, and that's it in this sector, in this theater.

Part of the reason is...

is because the armies are so large that no matter how well you

do at surrounding it, you can't surround the whole thing.

You can't take its entire supply because supply is coming by railroad.

Thanks to the railroads, the American Civil War witnessed a logistical

revolution that would have far-reaching consequences.

From the home front to the railhead, you have industrial-age logistics.

that really you couldn't improve on very much today.

From the railhead to the army, you had the same logistical system as Alexander

the Great used, muscle power.

And I think that's one of the reasons why Civil War operations, particularly

in the Eastern Theater, were so indecisive, that armies were very

powerful when they were near their railheads.

But as they attempted to leave their railheads, they became reliant upon this

huge and very expensive animal supply train and ran out of combat power,

especially if they were attacking an enemy who was sitting comfortably on his

railhead.

So I think in that sense, rail in a negative way really influenced the

manner in which the Civil War was fought.

Following Bull Run, the Union Army lapsed into a state of inertia that

frustrated and bedeviled Lincoln.

It would happen time and time again following nearly every major battle from

1861 through the end of 1863.

At only one point in the fall of 1861 did the Union Army in the east launch

another offensive.

Dubbed Ball's Bluff, it was a small unit affair that probably would have earned

only a line or two in history books had it not changed how the federal

government prosecuted the war effort.

Oregon Senator Baker took a military commission and became an officer in the

Union Army and took his small command in the fall of 1861 across the Potomac

River, where it was summarily wiped out by a Confederate counterattack that

pinned them up against the bank of the Potomac River.

Well, the result of this massacre and this disaster was immediate and swift

and had resounding repercussions throughout the entire war.

Congress was unhappy that one of its peers had died in such a grisly fashion,

and they became directly involved in how the war was going to be prosecuted. And

throughout the rest of the conflict, Congress's intrusions into military

policy would color how Lincoln was able to actually carry out his schemes and

campaigns.

After Ball's bluff, McClellan and his new Army of the Potomac spent the

remainder of the year training.

Lincoln waited eagerly for his young general to push south and march on to

Richmond, but that would have to wait for the spring of 1862.

And then Lincoln's hopes of victory would be ruined by the very man in whom

he had placed so much faith.