The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct, Volume 1 (of 2) / A Narrative and Critical History

by George Cary Eggleston

Thus, according to the official reports, the Confederates had in all 29,188 men and fifty-five guns with which, in a strong position of their own selection, to meet the advance of McDowell's force estimated by the best Northern authorities at about 34,000 men.

If Patterson had not been sent to the valley at all, but to Washington instead, the Federal force would have been swelled to 55,000 or 60,000 men, while Beauregard's strength could not have been increased by more than a few thousands at most. In that case the result of the first great battle of the war might or might not have been different from what it was—for with wholly untrained troops strength is not always to be accurately measured by numbers. But in any case the probability would have been greatly increased that the first battle of the war should be the last and that the country by quick and complete victory should be spared four years of desolating war that threw homes by scores of thousands into the shadow.

The battle was brought about not in answer to any consideration of military propriety but solely in response to ignorant but irresistible popular clamor. The people of this country knew nothing of modern war or of the conditions that govern success or failure in it. The latest national recollection of war was of the unequal conflict with Mexico nearly a decade and a half before. The American people had never seen assembled in their name and behalf an army half so great as that with which their patriotism had now responded to the country's call. In front of Washington and in the near-by valley of Virginia they had between fifty and sixty thousand men, while their adversaries could muster there only a little more than half as many.

Knowing little of the difference between uniformed men with arms in their hands and seasoned soldiers, the people at the North grew violently impatient of the delay. They had furnished their Government twice as many armed men as the enemy could count, and they could not understand why the double force thus created should not go on at once to make an end of what they regarded as the "nonsense down there in Virginia."

So confident had been the conviction at the North that this was a petty outbreak to be suppressed easily and quickly, that a large part of the enlistments were for no more than three months. That period seemed to them more than adequate to the task in hand, and it had been deemed needless to take young men away from their homes and their employments for a greater length of time.

It is plain enough that the administration at Washington at first shared this conception of the case. Otherwise it would neither have called for nor accepted three months volunteers.

But the three months were now nearly expired, and nothing had been done to make an end of the "nonsense." The terms of service of many regiments were soon to expire and there seemed to be no general disposition on the part of the men composing them to enter into new enlistments. It was obvious that unless the "army" at and near Washington should go forward at once, crush Beauregard's greatly inferior force, march on to Richmond and make an end of the difficulty, new levies must be called for and a new strain put upon the endurance and the patience of the people.

All this impatience found daily and often intemperate expression in the newspapers, whose rivalry in clamor fanned the flame of discontent among the people. Desk strategists who knew nothing of war's conditions had an easy task in figuring out with their blue pencils an absolutely certain victory for the Federal arms, if only the Federal generals could be persuaded or compelled by public opinion to avail themselves of their matchless opportunity. "Are not two more than one? And have not we the two to our enemy's one? What dullards and laggards our generals must be to delay for a day or an hour!" So ran the editorial argument, and that argument seemed to the people conclusive and convincing, for the reason that the people generally were as ignorant as the strategists of the editorial rooms themselves concerning the conditions that govern battle and the training necessary to convert civilian volunteers into soldiers fit to face a fire of musketry and cannon.

The military men knew better, of course. Except the superannuated commander-in-chief, General Scott, not one of them had ever commanded so much as a brigade in battle, but at least they had been taught in a military school and many of them had seen fighting. They knew the peril of hurling ill-organized regiments of utterly untrained and undisciplined civilians upon the chosen positions of an armed foe, even when that foe's forces were in a like condition of undisciplined inefficiency. The arithmetical argument in no degree deceived them. They knew that with such men as they had under their command strength could not be safely reckoned by a mere numerical count, that under certain easily imagined conditions, indeed, strength must often be in inverse ratio to numbers. They perfectly knew that for them to advance against the Confederates with an army in such condition as theirs was at that time was to take a fearful risk of defeat, disastrous and demoralizing to the army and dangerously discouraging to the country behind the army.

But the demand on the part of press, pulpit and people for an immediate advance was too insistent, too clamorous, and was rapidly becoming too angry to be longer resisted. It was reinforced by an almost equally insistent demand on the part of the civilian authorities at Washington, whose ignorance of military conditions was scarcely less pronounced than that of the excited editors and orators of the country.