Manassas (Bull Run) National Battlefield Park [1953]

Cover: The Stone House. From a wartime photograph
DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR March 3, 1849 NATIONAL PARK SERVICE DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR
UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR DOUGLAS McKAY, Secretary National Park Service Conrad L. Wirth, Director
REPRINT 1953 U. S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE: 1953 O-F—237985
Here was fought the opening field battle of the Civil War and here a year later a Confederate victory led to Lee’s first invasion of the North.
Manassas National Battlefield Park commemorates two great battles of the War Between the States fought in the vicinity of Bull Run, a small stream in northern Virginia about 26 miles southwest of Washington, D. C. The military significance of the Manassas area lay in the junction of two railroads. The Orange and Alexandria Railway, which offered the only direct rail connection between Washington and Richmond, was joined there by the Manassas Gap Railroad, a direct route to the strategically important Shenandoah Valley.
The opening battle of the war found ill-trained citizen armies of the North and South engaged in a struggle for this strategic railroad junction. On an eminence, known as Henry House Hill, 6 miles north of Manassas, Confederate arms finally put to rout the Federal force. This victory, the English historian Fuller points out, was very important because it led “Southern politicians... to underestimate the fighting capacity of the enemy” and because it “so terrified Lincoln and his Government, that from now onwards until 1864, east of the Alleghanies, the defense of Washington became the pivot of Northern strategy.”
Approximately a year later, both armies, now composed of seasoned veterans, were locked in a bitter struggle on the same field. After heavy fighting, the Federal Army was forced back upon the defenses of Washington. Second Manassas stands with Chancellorsville as one of the two most significant Confederate victories of the war—in both cases the military result was invasion of the North. After Second Manassas came Antietam; after Chancellorsville came Gettysburg.