At the North very different standards prevailed. The poets and the newspaper writers might lavish opprobrious epithets upon these young men in a collective capacity without mentioning their individual names, but their neighbors, their sweethearts, their daily associates were not apt to take so quixotic a view of their duty or so severely to judge their conduct. It must always be borne in mind that men's standards of duty and obligation are apt to conform in a general way at least to those of their neighbors. In passing upon human conduct we must be attentive to this fact if we would justly judge.
As for the men who went into the fight on the Union side we must remember that at the end of it the companies and regiments and brigades of which they had formed a part in the morning had been dissipated into the thinnest of thin air at three o'clock in the afternoon by the lightning-like stroke of panic. There were no longer any companies left or any regiments or any brigades or any organizations of any other sort. There was no longer any such thing as cohesion among them. There was nobody authorized to give orders—nobody capable of enforcing obedience. The multitude of men who in the morning had seemed to constitute an army had been resolved before nightfall into a wild-eyed and uncontrollable mob of irresponsible fugitives, intent only upon seeking safety, without any regard whatever to any obligation or impulse, of honor or duty or shame—any impulse except the instinct of self-preservation.
There were many such panic-stricken fugitives on the Confederate side also—so many that when Jefferson Davis met a mob of them on his approach to the battlefield, he was convinced that the Southern army had been defeated and broken. But these were individuals merely, and while their aggregate was large, it embraced no command, no entire body of troops, whether company, regiment or brigade. The Confederate commands remained intact. They preserved their organizations perfectly and remained absolutely obedient to orders. At the end of the battle theirs was not only still an army; it was an army flushed with victory, illimitably confident both in itself and in its leaders, eager for further action, clamorous for advance and ready to do and dare anything and everything that might promise further glory.
That army eagerly wanted to march at once upon Washington, and there was absolutely no military reason why it should not have done so. There was no fighting force to resist it on the march. There was no force at Washington which could have seriously disputed its entry into the city. It could easily have trampled to earth the feeble resistance it must have encountered at the gateways of the capital. Stuart, almost with tears on his cheeks, besought permission to lead such an advance with his handful of cavalry men, pledging his honor and reputation as a soldier and all that he hoped for of a future career, in bail of his promise to clear away every obstacle and open an unobstructed road to the columns of Beauregard and Johnston in their victorious march across the Long Bridge and into the streets of the Federal capital.
Stuart was accustomed to boast that he never used profane language. But his impatient cavaliers heard and heartily echoed some strong words from his lips when finally the paralyzing prohibition of an immediate advance came to him in the shape of an order to encamp his men in a muddy cornfield on that rainy night, when in his judgment they should have been gaily galloping on march for Washington as the advance guard of a victory-inspired army, intent upon making the most of its success and crowning its achievements with historic consequences.
Stuart at least anticipated no difficulty in galloping into Washington and Stuart's stalwart cavaliers were ready for any enterprise to which that born leader of men might invite them.
Those Virginia horsemen had been for ten consecutive days and nights forbidden to remove a saddle. For ten consecutive days and nights they had stood at the heads of their horses at feeding time and held the temporarily removed bridle bit in one hand and the ear of corn from which the horse was feeding in the other. For ten consecutive days and nights those men had been ceaselessly in the saddle, their only sleep being snatched in brief fragments, while their horses were tethered to their wrists. Yet so eager were they to follow up this victory that every man of them "swore like a trooper" on that Sunday evening when the pursuit was senselessly called off, and every man of them ejaculated a hearty "amen" to their leader's vituperation of that superior authority which forbade him and his devoted cavalry men to ride into Washington close upon the heels of the broken, panic-stricken and utterly demoralized Federal fugitives from the battlefield.
There is now not the slightest doubt that he could have done this. There is not the smallest question that if he had been permitted to do it, with a supporting column of infantry and artillery following as closely as it could upon his horses' heels, Washington would have become a Confederate possession on that Sunday night, and—who knows what else might have happened? Perhaps four years of the bloodiest of modern wars might have been spared to the American people.
However that may be, the historian of the Confederate War is bound to regard the failure of the Confederates to follow up their victory and pursue their broken, fleeing and utterly disintegrated enemy into Washington during that night and the next morning as one of the most stupendous blunders recorded anywhere in history.
It was perfectly well known to the two Confederate commanders, that Washington was not defended on the South by any fortifications which a determined assailing column could not easily have run over. There was only one earthwork, and that an incomplete one, in the way, and it was so little in the way that a column moving upon the Federal capital could easily have passed on toward the city by thoroughfares that lay quite out of the effective range of its guns.