The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, Volume 1

by Jefferson Davis

"Further assurance given to me this day that you shall be promptly and adequately reënforced, so as to enable you to maintain your position, and resume first policy when the roads will permit."

No immediate decision could therefore be made, and I returned to Richmond, to wait the further development of the enemy's plans, and to prepare as best we might to counteract them.

The feeling heretofore noticed as arousing in Virginia a determination to resist the abandonment of her northern frontier, and which caused the assurance of reënforcements, bore fruit in the addition of about thirty thousand men, by a draft made by the Governor of the State. These, it is true, were not the disciplined, seasoned troops which were asked for by the generals in the conference at Fairfax Court-House, but they were of such men as often during the war won battles for the Confederacy. The development of the enemy's plans, for which we had to wait, proved that, instead of advancing in force against our position at Centreville, he had, before the retreat of our army commenced, decided to move down the Potomac for a campaign against Richmond, from the Peninsula as a base. The conflagration at Centreville gave notice of its evacuation, and an advance was made as far as Manassas, but, as appears by General McClellan's report, with no more important design than to attack our rear guard, if it should be encountered. In the report on the conduct of the war by a committee of the United States Congress, evidence is found of much vacillation before the conclusion was finally reached of abandoning the idea of a direct advance upon Richmond for that of concentrating their army at the mouth of the Chesapeake. Whatever doubt or apprehension continued to exist about uncovering the city of Washington by removing their main army from before it, was of course dispelled by the retreat of our army, and the burning of bridges behind it. In this last-mentioned fact, General McClellan says he found the strongest reason to believe that there was no immediate danger of our army returning.

There was an apparent advantage to the enemy in the new base for his operations which was sufficiently illustrated by the events of the last year of the war. Had we possessed an army as large as the enemy supposed, it would have been possible for us at the same time to check his advance from the East and to march against his capital, with fair prospect of capturing it, before the army he had sent against Yorktown could have been brought back for the defense of Washington. On this as on other occasions he greatly magnified the force we possessed, and on this as on other occasions it required the concentration of our troops successfully to resist a detachment of his. Accepting as a necessity the withdrawal of the main portion of our army from northern Virginia to meet the invasion from the seaboard, it was regretted that earlier and more effective means were not employed for the mobilization of the army, a desirable measure in either contingency of advance or retreat, or at the least that the withdrawal was not so deliberate as to secure the removal of our ordnance, subsistence, and quartermasters' stores, which had been collected on the line occupied in 1861 and the early part of 1862.

A distinguished officer of our army, who has since the war made valuable contributions to the history of its operations—especially valuable as well for their accuracy as for their freedom from personal or partisan bias—writes thus of the retreat from Centreville:

"A very large amount of stores and provisions had been abandoned for want of transportation, and among the stores was a very large quantity of clothing, blankets etc., which had been provided by the States south of Virginia for their own troops. The pile of trunks along the railroad was appalling to behold. All these stores, clothing, trunks, etc., were consigned to the flames by a portion of our cavalry left to carry out the work of their destruction. The loss of stores at this point and at White Plains on the Manassas Gap Railroad, where a large amount of meat had been salted and stored, was a very serious one to us, and embarrassed us for the remainder of the war, as it put us at once on a running stock."

The same officer—and the value of his opinion will be recognized by all who know him, wherefore I give his name, General J. A. Early—in a communication subsequent to that from which I have just quoted, writes, in regard to the loss of supplies:

"I believe that all might have been carried off from Manassas if the railroads had been energetically operated. The rolling-stock of the Orange and Alexandria, Manassas Gap, and Virginia Central Railroads ought to have been sufficient for the purpose of removing everything in the two weeks allowed, if properly used."

The enemy's plans, the development of which, as has been already stated, was necessary for the determination of our own movements, were soon thereafter found to be the invasion of Virginia from the seaboard, and the principal portion of our army was consequently ordered to the Peninsula, between the York River and the James. Thus the northern frontier of Virginia, which, in the first year of the war, had been the main field of skirmishes, combats, and battles, of advance and retreat, and the occupation and evacuation of fortified positions, ceased for a time to tremble beneath the tread of contending armies.

To the foregoing narration of events immediately connected with the efforts of the Confederate Government to maintain its existence at home, may here be properly added an incident bearing on its foreign relations in the first year of the war.