MANASSAS
I CALL it Manassas.
That is the name we Southerners gave it. We won that battle more completely and more conspicuously than any other battle was won by either side during the Civil War.
It is the right of the victor always to name the action. We named it Manassas. In the North it is called Bull Run.
We reached Manassas after two days and nights of ceaseless marching, at ten o’clock on the evening of the 20th of July, 1861.
We knew that trouble was at hand; otherwise Stuart would not have swung us at such a breakneck speed across the mountains from the valley to this point. We were six hundred strong.
Six hundred young Virginians, cradled in the saddle, and who had shot wild turkeys as soon as we were able to digest them. There was another battalion of cavalry present, under Colonel Radford, numbering perhaps three hundred men. But the story had gone forth in the Northern army that we were thirty thousand of the finest horsemen ever known since the days of the Mamelukes.
That story had its part in creating the panic at Manassas.
I believe we were good horsemen. There were men among us who might have given the Mamelukes points, both in horsemanship and in the use of the sabre. But if our nine hundred men had been the thirty thousand reported, we should have thundered into Washington on the night of Sunday, July 21, 1861, and would have ended the war then and there, in spite of the presidential stupidity which feared that “aggression” might anger a people with whom we were at war.
We lay that night in an open field, each man having his horse tethered to his left arm, and each man booted, spurred, sabred, and pistolled for instant action.