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THE TWELVE DECISIVE BATTLES OF THE

WAR.

I.

BULL RUN.

I.

PRELUDE TO BULL RUN.

THE night of the 20th of July, 1861, two officers sat in earnest conference in a farm-house within the hamlet of Manassas, Virginia. Their discussion, as well might be, was grave and anxious; for into their hands, as its two most famous soldiers, the insurgent South had committed the fortunes of its untried army and the fate of its new-born Confederacy. Of these men one was General Beauregard, lately called from Fort Sumter to lead the army now lying encamped along the neighboring stream of Bull Run. The other was General J. E. Johnston, who, responding to his associate's appeal, had hastened to unite his Army of the Shenandoah with the one at Manassas, in order to meet the massive array which, long menacing, had at length launched forward from the Potomac, and which that night announced, in a thousand bivouac fires, its presence along the heights of Centreville. The single subject of council was the procedure of the morrow, before whose close it was manifest must be decided the great initial struggle between the armies of South and North. A map of the country lay before the generals; and by its aid they planned how best they might or parry or

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strike. Impulse and conviction alike prompted the latter course it was resolved to assume the offensive, and, with this intent, what remained of night was spent in determining the method of attack. But, while this project was taking shape, the army at Centreville was already in motion. Throughout the hazy midsummer's night, the Union columns wended their way through the moonlit forests towards the stream of Bull Run, inspired by a like purpose of offence. Thus in action and in council the night hours wore away. And when, with the first light of dawn, Johnston hastily signed the orders of attack, the boom of a single gun, startling the stillness of the Sabbath air, proclaimed that the Union force already confronted the Confederate army at Bull Run.

It was the signal-gun of Manassas.

If we may imagine to ourselves a dispassionate observer, who, regarding the two "points of mighty opposites" here arrayed against each other, should have attempted to forecast the issue of the contest about to be joined, it is easy to see how futile must have been his sagest speculations. The animosities engendered by political quarrels, checked but to gather fresh fury by repression, had at length burst into a war that rent in twain the American Republic. Instantly from sea to sea the continent had swarmed with armed men ; and, with that fierce intensity of hate which comes only of changed love, the strife between brothers began. As northward and southward thronged the combatants to the brink of the chasm which had cleft the Union, peaceful America seemed peopled in a day with a race of soldiers.

What was chiefly manifest at the outset was the energy with which the war promised to be waged. It took rise in those passions which stir the profounder depths of human nature, provoking men to the verge of possibility in action and in self-sacrifice. Searching for historic precedent to

guide his judgment upon the giant quarrel between the North and South, the reflective observer would find no parallel thereto in the world's record. It came of no royal spleen, or restless ennui, or lust of money or power; not of the theft of a necklace, or of a monarch's spouse; its source was not in the spretæ injuria forma of a despised court beauty, nor in a favorite's malice nor a minister's jealousy. It was even no affair of grand diplomatic intrigue or of overleaping national ambition, with its specious popular hallow of right. Of such wars an end can be awaited when the burden and the blood shall have wearied rulers and ruled, and made alike loathsome the end and the means of strife.

But this struggle between North and South stretched its roots too deep down into ultimate human motives, and laid hold too tenaciously of principle, for such termination. It lacked not, indeed, the stimulus of glory, of national conquest, and of that powerful emotion symbolized in the banner of the country. And verily the material considerations put at issue were on so grand a scale as to ennoble the cause only less than an ethical impulse. In lieu of going "to gain a little patch of ground that had in it no profit but the name," the moiety of a continent lay the territorial prize between the combatants. If the struggle was in part political as well as moral, at least it meant life or death for a Republic of thirty millions of people, the rehabilitation or the ruin of the broadest scheme in modern state-craft, and the governmental destinies of the America of the future, teeming with its hundreds of millions. While, underlying all these vast considerations, that honor was at stake which causes men "greatly to find quarrel in a straw; "—and underlying both national pride and national aggrandizement, were influences more universal and more potent. For, granted that base motives impelled many leaders and many followers, as, of blind hate, of cunning, blood-thirstiness, greed of money or of rank-from no such selfish ends did the embattled nation resort to the sword.

On the one hand was a mighty tempest of indignation again: what was conceived and held to be heaven-defying injustice, violation of faith pledged three generations gone, despotic oppression which hot passion, in its return fitful, subside. to the steady aspiration for independence and for a new Union untrammelled by the traditions of the old. Towering up against this cause stood the strong cause of the Northmarvellously compact of the sterner and the milder motives, of duty with high emotion, a blending of flame and fire: the integrity and sovereignty of the majestic Union, the defence of the government received from the fathers, the supremacy of the Constitution of the Republic, the honor and dignity of the Nation, to which motives were superadded the cry of humanity, and a glow caught from a vision yonder, along the yet untrodden path, of liberty guarded by law.

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Whoever should cast a parallel between such a war and the methodical conflict waged betwixt the swollen body-guards of two European princes, set upon each other at the wave of a single hand, and heedless of the cause of their mutual slaughtering, would preposterously err. There were, indeed, no standing armies worth consideration, it being that deadliest of struggles, a national war, millions against millions, and every soldier comprehending its cause and its aim a war, therefore, in which fresh levies spring joyfully forward as the earlier are exhausted, and which terminates only when one of the combatants, never yielding nor ever compromising, lies spent and helpless at the other's feet.

With such fell intensity of purpose it was that North and South rose up and grappled in the spring of 1861. And, as if incentive enough were not present, in touching all the better of the fundamental springs of their humanity, fraternal affection curdled to maddening hatred in their veins. For it is a law of human nature, that the more tightly the bonds of concord have united men in society, the deeper is the hate when once they are parted.

Accordingly, from the hour when the Union flag ran down from Sumter, one incessant drum-roll seemed to echo through the streets of every city, along every hillside and valley, sounding the alarum. No act or thought thereafter seemed worthy but thought and act of war. Trade stopped in its channels, and the myriad callings of peace were thinned of their followers; for to wage war or prepare for it was the only duty of the hour. Men too old or fecble to give life could at least give property to the cause, and children too young to march might at least wear the colors and chant the battlesongs; while, more memorable than aught else, wives, mothers, daughters, impelled by a sublime sentiment, weepingly gave all that they held dearest to the common cause. Amid such emotion the people rendezvoused unbidden to the rival banners in multitudes so great, that, no equipments being ready for them, by the thousand they were turned away. Despite all horrors lying in wait, grim and ghastly in the gloom ahead, perhaps from the consciousness of such horthe spectacle of America in the spring of 1861 contained something more inspiring than anything in her past history. With a proud step, as if rejoicing to be accounted worthy of such sacrifice, the nation, stimulated by the noblest motives and with faith in God, marched on to the baptism of blood.

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But the very intensity of the emotions under which the nation rushed to arms prevented a cool estimate of the military probabilities of its issue, much more of the chances of the first fruit of battle. On each side was perfect faith in its troops, in its leaders, and, above all, in the heaven-born justice of its cause. That one side or the other must be fatally deceived was a truth, which, as usual, did not, from either, exact an instant's pause for reflection. This confidence in success was stimulated somewhat by the noisy vaporing and boasting common to humanity, but more especially by the popular ignorance existing North and South of

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