On July 20, General McDowell attacked the army under General Beauregard near Centreville, a Virginia village to the northward of a little stream which gave its name to the battle that ensued,—Bull Run. About 35,000 Northerners made up the army of invasion; Beauregard commanded less than 20,000, but Joseph E. Johnston brought his army of 15,000 from the Valley of Virginia in time to decide the fortunes of that hot summer day. After stout fighting on both sides during the earlier part of the onset, these fresh troops of the Valley were seen marching into action. To Union eyes the 15,000 easily appeared to be 30,000. Panic seized men and officers alike, and a stampede for Washington and safer ground followed. Arms, provisions, horses, even, and the carriages of stiff-backed Republican Congressmen, who had left their posts to see the fun, were left upon the field and along the wayside as memorials of the first battle. At the close of the day Jefferson Davis, Beauregard, Johnston, and “Stonewall” Jackson, who won his proud soubriquet on that famous field, held a conference and decided not to follow the Federals to Washington that evening. On the morrow a heavy rain fell and the roads of northern Virginia became impassable for a week. The defeated forces had time to regain their composure while the people of both sections began to see what war meant.
The Southerners rejoiced and celebrated, even relaxed their preparations, thinking their valor vastly superior to that of their enemies. President Davis was less confident, and pressed upon his Congress the better organization of the armies, whose numbers now mounted to 400,000 men; he sent James M. Mason and John Slidell as commissioners to Europe, and ordered troops under Robert E. Lee to West Virginia to save that recalcitrant region to Virginia and the Confederacy. In the absence of a revenue, and already shut off from the markets of both the North and Europe, the Confederates resorted to loans and the issue of paper money to meet the enormous expenses of war. The Confederate Government borrowed hundreds of millions from the planters, and the States likewise piled up debts in unprecedented fashion in maintenance of the same great cause. Of gold and silver there was little; the banks had long since suspended specie payments, but increased their issues of notes. The cotton crop, then being harvested by the negroes, and the grain and cattle of the hill country were the chief resources. The paper money of the Government was paid to soldiers, farmers, and planters for their services and supplies, and this was given back to the Government in exchange for interest-bearing bonds that were issued. With a European market for the planters' products the system might easily have been successful; but this one essential to victory failed, or waited upon military success.
The first general election came on in the late autumn. Under the stimulus of the victory at Manassas, or Bull Run, Davis and Stephens were elected President and Vice-President without opposition for terms of six years. New Senators and Representatives were chosen, generally from the ranks of conservative politicians, for the sessions of the regular Confederate Congress, which was to supersede the provisional congress and government on Washington's birthday, 1862. The judiciary of the Confederacy was regularly organized except as to the Supreme Court; the adjustments of national and state relations were all rapidly and easily made; while the selection and appointment of high officers in the army and civil administration went steadily on at Richmond, under the relief from military pressure which the success of Beauregard and Johnston in northern Virginia had secured. In the general security some of the ablest officers of the army, especially Joseph E. Johnston, felt free to attack the President in the newspapers because of the failure to give the highest commands according to rank of officers in the former United States Army,—a quarrel which was destined to have a fatal influence in the final overthrow of the new government. There was also an attempt to fix upon Davis the blame for not capturing Washington City the day after the Bull Run débâcle. However, these were as yet but ripples of discontent which only proved the general confidence of the people in their final triumph.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
F. E. Chadwick's The Causes of the Civil War (1906) and J. K. Hosmer's The Appeal to Arms (1906) are the best brief and recent accounts of the events of 1859 to 1862. But Rhodes, McMaster, and Schouler cover the period to 1876, each after his distinctive method. John C. Ropes's The Story of the Civil War (1894), continued by W. R. Livermore, treats the military history in the most critical and fair-minded way, though Wood and Edmonds's The Civil War in the United States (1905), and G. P. R. Henderson's Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War (1900), are equally good, if somewhat briefer.
Of original material there is no limit, and the student is compelled to find his way through the uncharted wilderness of evidence in the Rebellion Records, already cited, and the thousands of volumes of memoirs and special contemporary narratives of which U. S. Grant's Personal Memoirs (1886), Joseph B. Johnston's Narrative of Military Operations (1874), Nicolay and Hay's Abraham Lincoln: a History (1890), and Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (1887-89), are perhaps the most important. Almost all the officers of both the Union and Confederate armies, with the unique exception of General Lee, left published or unpublished narratives of their rôles in the great struggle which help to clear up most disputed episodes, though they complicate the task of the historian.
The estimates of the numbers of men engaged on both sides by Ropes, Rhodes, and especially T. L. Livermore in his Numbers and Losses, are most trustworthy, though this is a subject still hotly controverted in both North and South. Each of the great battles has its historian: H. V. Boynton, The Battle of Chickamauga, and Morris Schaff, The Battle of the Wilderness, being the best examples.