First Bull Run 1861: Picnicking Spectators and the Great Skedaddle

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In July 1861, congressmen and Washington socialites rode out in carriages with picnic baskets to watch what they expected to be a quick Union victory at Bull Run, also called First Manassas. Lincoln's 90-day volunteers were nearing the end of their enlistments, and the press demanded a march on Richmond. Brigadier General Irvin McDowell protested that his roughly 35,000 men were too green, and Lincoln answered that the enemy was green also. The army left Washington on July 16 and crawled toward Manassas Junction as soldiers broke ranks to pick blackberries, while Rose O'Neal Greenhow's spy ring warned P. G. T. Beauregard and Joseph E. Johnston slipped his army away from Robert Patterson by rail.

On July 21, Captain Edward Porter Alexander spotted the Union flanking column from Signal Hill and sent the first combat wigwag message. Union forces drove the Confederates back to Henry House Hill, where Thomas J. Jackson placed 13 guns on the reverse slope and Barnard Bee's words gave him the name Stonewall. When the blue-uniformed 33rd Virginia approached Charles Griffin's guns, his superior ordered him not to fire, and a point-blank volley captured the battery. Around 4 p.m. a wagon overturned on the Cub Run bridge, and the retreat became the Great Skedaddle, with soldiers and spectators fleeing together toward Washington.

• Judith Carter Henry, an 85-year-old bedridden widow, was killed when Union artillery fired on her house.
• Historians still debate whether Bee's stone wall remark was praise or a complaint that Jackson was not coming to help, and Bee died the next day.
• Jefferson Davis urged a pursuit, but the exhausted, disorganized Confederates did not follow the Union army to Washington.
• Confusion between the Stars and Bars and the Stars and Stripes led to the Confederate battle flag with a blue cross on a red field.
• Days later, Thaddeus Lowe went up in the balloon Enterprise over Washington and reported the Confederates were not advancing.