Manassas First Bull Run: When Washington Panicked

They packed picnic lunches. On the morning of July twenty-first, eighteen sixty-one, Washington civilians, congressmen among them, climbed into carriages and drove thirty miles west to Manassas Junction in Prince William County to watch the war end. The Union Army was finally advancing in force. Everyone understood that one serious engagement would scatter the rebellion and bring the boys home before autumn.

What they found at Bull Run Creek was not what they expected.

The Confederate forces under General P.G.T. Beauregard had taken a strong defensive position. Through the morning the Union advance pressed them back, and the watching civilians began to feel their confidence was justified. Then, in the early afternoon, reinforcements arrived on the Confederate right. General Joseph Johnston had moved eleven thousand soldiers from the Shenandoah Valley by railroad, the first use of rail transport to shift troops to a battlefield in American military history. Their arrival broke the Union momentum. The line held. Then it pushed back.

What began as a Union retreat became a rout. Soldiers ran. The roads back toward Washington were choked with fleeing men mixing with the carriages of the civilians who had come to watch the war end. Congressman Elihu Washburne of Illinois reportedly helped carry a wounded soldier. Other civilian spectators simply fled.

By nightfall the army was back in Washington, shaken and disorganized. The picnickers were home. The easy war they had expected to watch end lasted four more years and cost six hundred twenty thousand lives.

The field at Manassas looks much as it did in eighteen sixty-one. The National Park Service maintains it as grassland. Standing here in the quiet, it is difficult to recover what the people in those carriages believed they were driving out to see.