[CHAPTER XIV]
Manassas
At midsummer, 1861, there occurred near Manassas Junction in Virginia a battle which must always be regarded as one of the most remarkable of conflicts whether we consider its unusual event or its extraordinary sequences.
The battle was utterly untimely in its happening. It was a contest of the unready with the unready. It was brought about by influences peculiarly unmilitary and in defiance of the judgment of all the military men who had aught to do with it. We shall see hereafter in how strange a way it produced effects precisely the opposite of those that were legitimately to be expected of it; how to the victors in it it brought a paralysis of enterprise far greater than disaster itself could have wrought.
The Confederates lay at Manassas Junction thirty miles or so southwest of Washington, with a force numbering by official report 21,833 men and twenty-nine guns. The Federals had in front of Washington a total available force of 34,000 men. On both sides the men were volunteers, unused to the ways of war and unfit to enter upon a great battle. In this respect, as has been already said, the Confederates had somewhat the advantage in the fact that their volunteers were accustomed to outdoor life and to the use of firearms, while those on the Federal side were largely drawn from the counter, the bookkeeper's desk, the factory, the farm, and the village. But on both sides they were untrained, undisciplined, unlearned in the arts of war, and so loosely organized that their organization could scarcely at all be considered as an element of strength.
To offset this small Confederate advantage the Federals had behind them supply departments almost perfect, while the Confederates were very nearly starved to death by official incompetency in those departments even at that early period of the war.
At Manassas they were perilously short not only of provisions and forage, but even of water, all by reason of an extraordinary incapacity on the part of supply departments that began their careers by strangling themselves and their armies with red tape.
The facts of this matter have been set forth in detail in General Beauregard's official reports, and in other authoritative publications. Only a synopsis of them is necessary in this history. The Confederate army lay at Manassas in the midst of a country abounding in supplies, but its quartermasters and commissaries were not permitted to draw upon that source of supply even in the smallest way. For months, before and after the battle of Manassas, an entirely unused railroad—the Manassas Gap line—lay idle. It penetrated a country to the west of the army whose granaries were full, whose smoke-houses were rich in food, and whose fields were laden with ripening corn. A country similarly rich in food lay to the north, between the Federal and Confederate lines. Its supplies were sure to fall into Federal hands presently if not seized upon by the Confederates while they had opportunity. But the Confederate supply departments at Richmond absolutely forbade their own lieutenants at Manassas to feed and forage the army from such easily available sources. They forbade any food or forage purchases to be made in that region except by purchasing agents of their own, and they required that all food and forage so purchased in the immediate neighborhood of the army should be shipped to Richmond over the already overburdened, single track Virginia Central railroad, and shipped back again in such meager doles as the broken-down railroad could carry.
This peculiar imbecility of management continued till very nearly the end of the war to keep the Confederate armies half starved or wholly starved even when their camps lay in the midst of available plenty. The difference between the admirable management of the supply departments at the North and the phenomenally stupid management of the like departments at the South was, from beginning to end, the full equivalent of an army corps' difference in the number of fighting men.
Besides Beauregard's army there was a small force at Fredericksburg from which Beauregard was able to draw 1,355 men and six guns in time for the battle. In the last preceding chapter it has been shown how Johnston succeeded in transferring a large part of his army—6,000 men and twenty guns—to Manassas in time for the battle, while none of Patterson's regiments or batteries succeeded even in placing themselves within supporting distance of the Federal army there engaged.