Thus the general situation in July was that the whole of northeastern Virginia was faced by a semicircle of superior forces which began at the Kanawha River, ran northeast to Grafton, then northeast to Cumberland, then along the Potomac to Chesapeake Bay and on to Fortress Monroe. From the Kanawha to Grafton there were only roads. From Grafton to Cumberland there was rail as well. From Cumberland to Washington there were road, rail, river, and canal. From Washington to Fortress Monroe there was water fit for any fleet. The Union armies along this semicircle were not only twice as numerous as the Confederates facing them but they were backed by a sea-power, both naval and mercantile, which the Confederates could not begin to challenge, much less overcome. Lee was the military adviser to the Confederate Government at Richmond as Scott then was to the Union Government at Washington.
Such was the central scene of action, where the first great battle of the war was fought. The Union forces were based on the Potomac from Washington to Harper's Ferry. The Confederates faced them from Bull Run to Winchester, which points were nearly sixty miles apart by road and rail. The Union forces were fifty thousand strong, the Confederate thirty-three thousand. The Union problem was how to keep "Joe" Johnston in the Winchester position by threatening or actually making an invasion of the Shenandoah Valley with Patterson's superior force, while McDowell's superior force attacked or turned Beauregard's position at Bull Run. The Confederate problem was how to give Patterson the slip and reach Bull Run in time to meet McDowell with an equal force. The Confederates had the advantage of interior lines both here and in the semicircle as a whole, though the Union forces enjoyed in general much better means of transportation. The Confederates enjoyed better control from government headquarters, where the Cabinet mostly had the sense to trust in Lee. Scott, on the other hand, was tied down by orders to defend Washington by purely defensive means as well as by the "on to Richmond" march. Patterson was therefore obliged to watch the Federal back door at Harper's Ferry as well as the Confederate side doors up the Shenandoah: an impossible task, on exterior lines, with the kind of force he had. The civilian chiefs at Washington did not see that the best of all defense was to destroy the enemy's means of destroying them, and that his greatest force of fighting men, not any particular place, should always be their main objective.
On the fourteenth of June Johnston had destroyed everything useful to the enemy at Harper's Ferry and retired to Winchester. On the twentieth Jackson's brigade marched on Martinsburg to destroy the workshops of the Baltimore and Ohio Railway and to support the three hundred troopers under J. E. B. Stuart, who was so soon to be the greatest of cavalry commanders on the Confederate side. Unknown at twenty-nine, killed at thirty-one, "Jeb" Stuart was a Virginian ex-officer of United States Dragoons, trained in frontier fighting, and the perfect type of what a cavalry commander should be: tall, handsome, splendidly supple and strong, hawk-eyed and lion-hearted, quick, bold, determined, and inspiring, yet always full of knowledge and precaution too; indefatigable at all times, and so persistent in carrying out a plan that the enemy could no more shake him off than they could escape their shadows.
On the second of July the first brush took place at Falling Waters, five miles south of the Potomac, where Jackson came into touch with Patterson's advanced guard. As Jackson withdrew his handful of Virginian infantry the Federal cavalry came clattering down the turnpike and were met by a single shot from a Confederate gun that smashed the head of their column and sent the others flying. Meanwhile Stuart, who had been reconnoitering, came upon a company of Federal infantry resting in a field. Galloping among them suddenly he shouted, "Throw down your arms or you are all dead men!" Whereupon they all threw down their arms; and his troopers led them off. Patterson, badly served by his very raw staff, reported Jackson's little vanguard as being precisely ten times stronger than it was. He pushed out cautiously to right and left; and when he tried to engage again he found that Jackson had withdrawn. Falling Waters was microscopically small as a fight. But it served to raise Confederate morale and depress the Federals correspondingly.
Patterson occupied Martinsburg, while Johnston, drawn up in line of battle, awaited his further advance four days before retiring. Then, with his fourteen thousand, Patterson advanced again, stood irresolute under distracting orders from the Government in Washington, and finally went to Charlestown on the seventeenth of July—almost back to Harper's Ferry. Johnston, with his eleven thousand, now stood fast at Winchester, fifteen miles southwest, while Stuart, like a living screen, moved to and fro between them.
Meanwhile McDowell's thirty-six thousand had marched past the President with bands playing and colors flying amid a scene of great enthusiasm. The press campaign was at its height; so was the speechifying; and ninety-nine people out of every hundred thought Beauregard's twenty-two thousand at Bull Run would be defeated in a way that would be sure to make the South give in. McDowell had between two and three thousand regulars: viz., seven troops of cavalry, nine batteries of artillery, eight companies of infantry, and a little battalion of marines. Then there was the immense paper army voted on the Glorious Fourth. And here, for the general public to admire, was a collection of armed and uniformed men that members of Congress and writers in the press united in calling one of the best armies the world had ever seen. Moreover, the publicity campaign was kept up unflaggingly till the very clash of arms began. Reporters marched along and sent off reams of copy. Congressmen, and even ladies, graced the occasion in every way they could. "The various regiments were brilliantly uniformed according to the æsthetic taste of peace," wrote General Fry, then an officer on McDowell's staff, and "during the nineteenth and twentieth the bivouacs at Centreville, almost within cannon range of the enemy, were thronged with visitors, official and unofficial, who came in carriages from Washington, were under no military restraint, and passed to and fro among the troops as they pleased, giving the scene the appearance of a monster military picnic."
Had McDowell been able to attack on either of these two days he must have won. But previous Governments had never given the army the means of making proper surveys; so here, within a day's march of the Federal capital, the maps were worthless for military use. Information had to be gleaned by reconnaissance; and reconnaissance takes time, especially without trustworthy guides, sufficient cavalry, and a proper staff. Moreover, the army was all parts and no whole, through no fault of McDowell's or of his military chiefs. The three-month volunteers, whose term of service was nearly over, had not learned their drill as individuals before being herded into companies, battalions, and brigades, of course becoming more and more inefficient as the units grew more and more complex. Of the still more essential discipline they naturally knew still less. There was no lack of courage; for these were the same breed of men as those with whom Washington had won immortal fame, the same as those with whom both Grant and Lee were yet to win it. But, as Napoleon used to say, mere men are not the same as soldiers. Nor are armed mobs the same as armies.
The short march to the front was both confused and demoralizing. No American officer had ever had the chance even of seeing, much less handling, thirty-six thousand men under arms. This force was followed by an immense and unwieldy train of supplies, manned by wholly undisciplined civilian drivers; while other, and quite superfluous, civilians clogged every movement and made confusion worse confounded. "The march," says Sherman, who commanded a brigade, "demonstrated little save the general laxity of discipline; for, with all my personal efforts, I could not prevent the men from straggling for water, blackberries, or anything on the way they fancied." In the whole of the first long summer's day, the sixteenth of July, the army only marched six miles; and it took the better part of the seventeenth to herd its stragglers back again. "I wished them," says McDowell, "to go to Centreville the second day [only another six miles out] but the men were foot-weary, not so much by the distance marched as by the time they had been on foot." That observant private, Warren Lee Goss, has told us how hard it is to soldier suddenly. "My canteen banged against my bayonet; both tin cup and bayonet badly interfered with the butt of my musket, while my cartridge-box and haversack were constantly flopping up and down—the whole jangling like loose harness and chains on a runaway horse." The weather was hot. The roads were dusty. And many a man threw away parts of his kit for which he suffered later on. There was food in superabundance. But, with that unwieldy and grossly undisciplined supply-and-transport service, the men and their food never came together at the proper time.
Early on the eighteenth McDowell, whose own work was excellent all through, pushed forward a brigade against Blackburn's Ford, toward the Confederate right, in order to distract attention from the real objective, which was to be the turning of the left. The Confederate outposts fell back beyond the ford. The Federal brigade followed on; when suddenly sharp volleys took it in front and flank. The opposing brigade, under Longstreet (of whom we shall often hear again), had lain concealed and sprung its trap quite neatly. Most of the Federals behaved extremely well under these untoward circumstances. But one whole battery and another whole battalion, whose term of service expired that afternoon, were officially reported as having "moved to the rear to the sound of the enemy's cannon." Thereafter, as military units, they simply ceased to exist.
At one o'clock in the morning of this same day Johnston received a telegram at Winchester, from Richmond, warning him that McDowell was advancing on Bull Run, with the evident intention of seizing Manassas Junction, which would cut the Confederate rail communication with the Shenandoah Valley and so prevent all chance of immediate concentration at Bull Run. Johnston saw that the hour had come. It could not have come before, as Lee and the rest had foreseen; because an earlier concentration at Bull Run would have drawn the two superior Federal forces together on the selfsame spot. There was still some risk about giving Patterson the slip. True, his three-month special-constable array was semi-mutinous already; and its term of service had only a few more days to run. True, also, that the men had cause for grievance. They were all without pay, and some of them were reported as being still "without pants." But, despite such drawbacks, a resolute attack by Patterson's fourteen thousand could have at least held fast Johnston's eleven thousand, who were mostly little better off in military ways. Patterson, however, suffered from distracting orders, and that was his undoing. Johnston, admirably screened by Stuart, drew quietly away, leaving his sick at Winchester and raising the spirits of his whole command by telling them that Beauregard was in danger and that they were to "make a forced march to save the country."