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secure this border state, he reasoned, the others might follow. Halleck had sidelined Grant after Shiloh and put his faith in General Buell, whose timely arrival on April 6 had saved the Federal army from defeat. But Buell was fretting uselessly, sending his troops hither and thither without actually trying to intercept Bragg. Robert Neve of the 5th Kentucky Volunteers had vivid memories of the relentless marching: of the thirst, the hunger, and the ever-present dust. He recalled with sadness a man they “found dead on the road who had died through excessive fatigue. As the army passed along there, he laid like a dog as if no one cared who he was. It was,” he wrote, “a bad sight to see a poor soldier die in such a way.”75 While Neve and thousands like him labored to keep moving under the broiling sun, Confederate raiders preyed on Buell’s weaker outposts.

On the far eastern side of Kentucky, the small Federal force that had wrested the Cumberland Gap from the Confederates was itself surrounded. Colonel De Courcy’s commander sent a desperate telegram to the War Department on August 10 warning that their supplies would last three weeks at best. That was his last communication with the outside world. A few hours later, Confederate guerrillas organized by John Hunt Morgan and his English staff officer, Colonel George St. Leger Grenfell, cut their telegraph line. The beleaguered Federals had no way of knowing whether help would come; still, when the Confederates ordered their surrender, they replied defiantly: “If you want this fortress, come and take it.”76 Morgan and his raiders ignored the challenge, confident that starvation would do the work for them.

Lincoln’s cabinet was grim when it learned that a Confederate army was marching unopposed toward Kentucky. As Lincoln’s frustration with Buell increased, he turned to General Pope to stop the run of bad news. Pope, at least, claimed to be thirsting for battle. The self-promoting victor of Island No. 10 had recently boasted to the press that his soldiers only ever saw the backs of the enemy. Pope liked to make “hard war.” Unlike McClellan, he was less concerned about keeping casualty figures to a minimum, nor did he believe in protecting civilians from the ravages of war. He wanted Southerners to suffer, because he thought it would make them more willing to surrender. But in one important sense, Pope was just the same as McClellan: he underestimated his opponent.

The Seven Days’ Battles had brought out the fighter in Lee. The once cautious officer had undergone a metamorphosis into a resolute and audacious general. He had private reasons, too, for wanting to throw the Federals out of Virginia. At the start of the war he had lost the family home of Arlington, across the river from Washington. Shortly after the Seven Days’ Battles, his other home, the White House plantation in central Virginia, was burned to the ground by Federal soldiers, forcing his wheelchair-bound wife, Mary, to seek refuge in Richmond.77

Lee divided his army of fifty thousand into two “wings” so that he could attack Pope from several directions, a risky tactic given his inferior numbers. Stonewall Jackson was given command of one, and General James “Old Pete” Longstreet, who had performed well during the Seven Days’ Battles, the other. Jackson’s division struck first, tearing into Pope on August 9. He launched another surprise attack against Pope two weeks later, and followed it up on the twenty-seventh with a raid on Pope’s supply depot at Manassas Junction. “Huzza,” crowed John Jones, the usually cynical clerk at the Confederate War Department. “The braggart is near his end.”78

Jackson’s raid gave away his position; Pope ordered his commanders to prepare the men for battle. The name Manassas conjured up dreadful memories for the North. “Everything is ripe for a terrible panic,” Charles Francis Adams, Jr., wrote to his father from Washington. “I have not since the war began felt such a tug on my nerves.”79 Pope had superior numbers to Jackson but not by an overwhelming margin. McClellan had played into