CAPTAIN CHARLES GRIFFIN, AFTERWARD MAJOR-GENERAL.
)line, wonderful daring, and matchless skill, were the ; till they were lost.”— Geheral James B. Fry.
R. E. Lee as military adviser, exercised in person general military control of the Southern forces. The enemy to he engaged by McDowell occupied what was called the “Alexandria line,” with headquarters at Manassas, the junction of the Orange and Alexandria with the Manassas Gap railroad. The stream known as Bull Run, some three miles in front of Manassas, was the line of defense. On Beauregard’s right, 30 miles away, at the mouth of Aquia Creek, there was a Confederate brigade of 3000 men and 6 guns under General Holmes. The approach to Richmond from the Lower Chesapeake, threatened by General B. P. Butler, was guarded by Confederates under Generals Huger and Magruder. On Beauregard’s left, sixty miles distant, in the lower Shenandoah Valley and separated from him by the Blue Ridge Mountains, was the Confederate army of the Shenandoah under command of General Johnston. Beauregard’s authority did not extend over the forces of Johnston, Huger, Magruder, or Holmes, but Holmes was with him before the battle of Bull Run, and so was Johnston, who, as will appear more fully hereafter, joined at a decisive moment.
Early in June Patterson was pushing his column against Harper’s Perry, and on the 3d of that month McDowell was called upon by General Scott to. submit “ an estimate of the number and composition of a column to be pushed toward Manassas J unction and perhaps the Gap, say in 4 or 5 days, to favor Patterson’s attack upon Harper’s Perry.” McDowell had then been in command at Arlington less than a week, his raw regiments south of the Potomac were not yet brigaded, and this was the first intimation he had of offensive operations. He reported June 4th that 12,000 infantry, 2 batteries, 6 or 8 companies of cavalry, and a reserve of 5000 ready to move from Alexandria would be required. Johnston, however, gave up Harper’s Perry to Patterson, and the diversion by McDowell
BRIGADIER-GENERAL IRVIN MCDOWELL.
In command of tlie Union forces at Bull Run. (From a pliotograpli.)
THE BATTLE OF BULL RUN.
THE STORY OF THE BATTLE FROM THE UNION SIDE.
BY JAMES B. FRY, BREVET MAJOR-GENERAL, U. S. A.
At Bull Run, Captain and Assistant Adjutant-General on McDowell’s staff.
CAPTAIN JAMES B. RICKETTS, AFTERWARD MAJOR-GENERAL.
“The batteries of Ricketts and Griffin, by their flue disci prime features in the fight. The battle was not los
Prance, was continued at the United States Military Academy, from which he was graduated in 1838. Always a close student, he was well informed outside as well as inside his profession. Distinguished in the Mexican war, intensely Union in his sentiments, full of energy and patriotism, outspoken in Ms opinions, highly esteemed by General Scott, on whose staff he had served, he at once secured the confidence of the President and the ׳ Secretary of War, under whose observation he was serving in Washington. Without political antecedents or aequaintanees, he was chosen for advancement on account of his record, his ability, and his vigor.
Northern forces had hastened to Washington upon the call of President Lincoln, but prior to May 24th they had been held rigidly on the north side of the Potomac. On the night of May 23d-24th, the Confederate pickets being then in sight of the Capitol, three columns were thrown across the river by General J. K. P. Mansfield, then commanding the Department of Washington, and a line from Alexandria below to chain-bridge above Washington was intrenched under guidance of able engineers. On the 27th Brigadier-General Irvin McDowell was placed in command south of the Potomac.
By the 1st of June the Southern Government had been transferred from Montgomery to Richmond, and the capitals of the Union and of the Confederacy stood defiantly confronting each other. General Scott was in chief command of the Union forces, with McDowell south of the Potomac, confronted by his old classmate, Beauregard, hot from the capture of Port Sumter.
General Patterson, of Pennsylvania, a veteran of the war of 1812 and the war with Mexico, was in command near Harper’s Perry, opposed by General Joseph E. Johnston. The Confederate President, Davis, then in Richmond, with General
to the Union. Missouri was rescued from secession through the energy of General P. P. Blair and her other Union men, and by the indomitable will of Captain Lyon of the regular army, whose great work was accomplished under many disadvantages. In illustration of the difficulty with which the new condition of affairs penetrated the ease-hardened bureauism of long peace, it may be mentioned that the venerable adjutant-general of the army, when a crisis was at hand in Missouri, came from a consultation with the President and Secretary Cameron, and with a sorry expression of countenance and an ominous shake of the head exclaimed, “ It’s bad, very bad; we’re giving that young man Lyon a great deal too much power in Missouri.”
Early in the contest another young Union officer came to the front. Major Irvin McDowell was appointed brigadier-general May 14th. He was forty-three years of age, of unexceptionable habits and great physical powers. His education, begun in
. . . After the firing of the first gun upon Sumter, the two sides were equally active in marshaling their forces on a line along the border States from the Atlantic coast of Virginia in the east to Kansas in the west. Many of the earlier collisions along this line were due rather to special causes or local feeling than to general military considerations. The prompt advance of the Union forces under McClellan to West Virginia was to protect that new-born free State. Patterson’s movement to Hagerstown and thence to Harper’s Ferry was to prevent Maryland from joining or aiding the rebellion, to re-open the Baltimore and Ohio railroad, and prevent invasion from the Shenandoah Valley. The Southerners, having left the Union and set up the Confederacy upon the principle of State rights, in violation of that principle invaded the State of Kentucky in opposition to her apparent purpose of armed neutrality. That made Kentucky a field of early hostilities, and helped to anchor her