Second Bull Run

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Second Battle of Bull Run, one of the most complete defeats of the war, and one of the most thorough jobs of outgeneralling anyone did on anyone else in the war. Though - and this says a great deal about the way the war went in the east - there are other contenders for those dishonors...

I've mentioned before, that Robert E. Lee was the luckiest general of the war - he fought against a series of incompetents, while in the west, his far less talented Confederate fellow officers fought the likes of Grant and Sherman and Thomas. The Union generals, especially in the west, had their share of luck sometimes - but Bragg and Johnston and the like were generally capable, in spite of their limitations, and some of their underlings - Forrest and Wheeler and Cleburne and the like - were quite outstanding. But Lee... Nowhere, probably, more so than at Second Manassas. John Pope was probably the worst general to be put in charge of a large body of men in the war - though I suppose he did have some competition for that... The Second Manassas campaign was a clown show from the start. He invaded Northern Virginia while McClellan was still down on the Peninsular, but Jackson and then Lee came after him and ran him ragged. Stonewall marched rings around him, captured his supply depot, captured his headquarters, and completely eluded him, sending Pope on a wild goose chase throughout the area.

When he finally did find him (with Jackson's help, since old Jack was looking for a fight), he still thought Stonewall was trying to get away. That wasn't it - Jackson was trying to lure him into a fight, to give Lee and Longstreet time to come up and crush Pope between them. So it was - 150 years ago today, toward evening, Jackson attacked the Union army at a place called Brawner's Farm. That fight turned out to be one of those straight up face to face thousands of men in a line blasting away at one another from a hundred yards or less for hours at a time fights that you still found in the Civil War, especially in 1862. The Union side happened to be the Black Hat brigade in its first fight - later known as the Iron Brigade, and one of the elite units of the war, who would end up with the highest casualty rate in the Union army - they got a good start on it there...

So - the next day Pope decided Jackson was trying to get away, and attacked - Jackson was ready and waiting in strong defensive positions, and proceeded to drive the Yankees back. And the next day, after Jackson had moves some of his troops around, Pope decided he was in full retreat and his part was to pursue - no, Jackson was not retreating - another massive battle resulted, and then Longstreet came in on the flank...

The whole affair was a catalogue of incompetence. Not only did Pope completely misconstrue Jackson and Lee's intentions - he wrote badly worded orders that confused his subordinates and left them out of the battle; he ordered men (Porter's corps, specifically) to attack, and refused to listen to Porter when he said that the rest of Lee's army was just out of sight to the left; finally got Porter into the fight on the 30th, just in time for Longstreet to come hammering in on the left - since Longstreet was right where Porter said he was. And just to add some spice, you have McClellan delaying bringing up troops in barely disguised hope that Pope would get thrashed and he would be restored to command...

And that's how it went. The Federals were whipped and retreated in despair; Pope aws relieved and McClellan put back in charge, to the glee of the soldiers; Lee invaded Maryland, McClellan found his orders and - in his timid and incompetent way - tried to cut him off, leading to the battle of Antietam, the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of Little Mac. But that's to come. In August 1862, things were in the balance - the South was on the rise, counterattacking east and west, winning, making things look bad... After things had looked disastrous for the Confederacy in the winter and spring. That was Second Bull Run - one of the series of big battles in the second year of the war that really defined the way it was going to go. The massive bloodletting, and some of the stalemate, as no one could ever quite turn these fights into more than victories and defeats. Lee hoped to crush Pope's army, destroy it - but he just beat it - sending it on a glum retreat, but still functioning. There was a lot of killing left to do after this, and these battles - 7 Days, Bull Run, Antietam, as well as Perryville out west, tended to reset ideas of how the war would be fought.