Green troops collide at Bull Run; the Union army breaks and runs for Washington
Three months after Fort Sumter, Washington still expected a short war. Crowds in the capital pressed Lincoln to march on Richmond, and on July 21, 1861, roughly 35,000 Union troops under Irvin McDowell met a combined Confederate force of about 34,000 under P.G.T. Beauregard and Joseph E. Johnston, though only about 18,000 troops on each side were actually engaged in the fighting along a creek called Bull Run near Manassas Junction, Virginia. Confederate reinforcements arrived by rail under Joseph E. Johnston and broke the Union line. McDowell's army disintegrated into a disorderly retreat toward Washington, a stampede that the Southern press nicknamed the "Great Skedaddle."
Bull Run ended the North's ninety-day fantasy of a quick war. Lincoln replaced McDowell with George McClellan and began building the large, trained army the conflict actually required. The battle also gave Jackson the nickname "Stonewall," one that has stuck in American memory ever since.
QWhy did congressmen bring picnic baskets to a battle?
Washington society treated the march on Manassas as a day trip. Confident of a quick Union victory that would let the army push on to Richmond, senators, congressmen, and their families rode out from the capital in carriages with baskets of food to watch the fighting from a safe distance, the way one might watch a horse race. When the Union line broke, those same carriages became part of the traffic jam clogging the road back to Washington, tangled among retreating soldiers who had thrown away their rifles to run faster.
QWhat happened to the woman killed in her own bedroom?
Judith Carter Henry was 85 years old and bedridden, unable to leave her house near Henry House Hill when the armies converged on her property. During the artillery duel that preceded the infantry assault, a Union shell crashed through the wall of her bedroom and killed her. Her death made her one of the notable civilian casualties of the battle, which was fought so close to a private home that she could not leave it in time.
QHow did Jackson actually earn the nickname Stonewall?
The name came from another general in the middle of the fighting, not from later legend. As Confederate general Barnard Bee's own troops began to waver under Union pressure, he saw Jackson's brigade holding firm on Henry House Hill and shouted to his men, "There is Jackson standing like a stone wall," to rally them back into the fight. Bee was killed shortly afterward and never lived to explain whether he meant it as praise or as a jab at Jackson's refusal to advance and help him, but the name outlived the argument.
