First and Second Manassas: The War the North Thought Would Last Three Months

On July twenty-first, eighteen sixty-one, Washington DC residents packed picnic baskets and drove south in carriages to watch. They expected a day's entertainment. The Union army was marching to Bull Run, a creek in Prince William County about thirty miles from the Capitol, where Confederate forces had taken a defensive position. The papers had been predicting a Union walkover. Some in Congress wanted to watch from horseback.

What they watched instead was a rout. Confederate reinforcements arrived by rail, one of the first times in the Civil War that troops were rushed to a battlefield by railroad, and the Union lines broke. The civilians who had come to watch fled back to Washington in a panic, tangled in the road with retreating soldiers and overturned supply wagons. The Confederacy had a clear path to Washington if it had chosen to use it.

A Virginia instructor at the Virginia Military Institute named Thomas Jackson stood his brigade on a hill during the worst of the Union assault until the line held. A Confederate general, watching from a distance, pointed him out to rally his own men: there is Jackson, standing like a stone wall. The name stayed.

The two armies fought over the same ground again in August of eighteen sixty-two. The Second Battle of Manassas, or Second Bull Run, was a Confederate victory again, more decisive than the first and more costly. Combined Union casualties across both Manassas battles exceeded seventeen thousand men. The arithmetic of what this war was going to require was now visible to anyone who could count.

Thirty miles from the Capitol building. Four years after those carriages turned back to Washington, the war ended at Appomattox. The distance between the two places is a measure of how wrong the picnickers were.