• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“The sun rises, but shines not,” Whitman wrote of the dismal day after the defeat. Rain continued to fall as the defeated troops flooded into Washington. From his window at Willard’s, Russell observed these bedraggled soldiers. “Some had neither great-coats nor shoes, others were covered with blankets.” Nettie Chase recalled being “awakened in the gray dawn by the heavy, unwonted, rumbling of laden wagons passing along the street below.” Thinking at first they were bound for market, she was sickened to realize they were filled with wounded soldiers heading for the hospital nearby. To relieve the crowded hospital wards, Chase opened his spacious home to nearly a dozen wounded men. Bishop McIlvaine, a friend visiting from Ohio who happened to be staying with Chase at the time, tended to the sick and dying. Nettie recalled the bishop’s uneasiness when one of the wounded men cursed loudly with each pain. “Just let me swear a bit,” the young man entreated the stunned bishop, “it helps me stand the hurting.”

“The dreadful disaster of Sunday can scarcely be mentioned,” Stanton wrote to former president Buchanan five days after Bull Run. “The imbecility of this Administration culminated in that catastrophe,” he pronounced with a sycophantic nod to his former boss, calling the fiasco “the result of Lincoln’s ‘running the machine’ for five months…. The capture of Washington seems now to be inevitable—during the whole of Monday and Tuesday it might have been taken without any resistance…. Even now I doubt whether any serious opposition to the entrance of the Confederate forces could be offered.”

Historians have long pondered the reluctance of the Confederates to capitalize on their victory by attacking Washington. Jefferson Davis later cited “an overweening confidence” after the initial victory that led to lax decisions. General Johnston observed that hundreds of volunteers, believing the war already won, simply left their regiments and returned home to “exhibit the trophies picked up on the field.” Other soldiers melted into the countryside, accompanying wounded comrades to faraway hospitals. Perhaps the most straightforward explanation of both the dismal Union retreat and the Confederate failure to march into Washington is manifest in the plain assessment Nancy Bates posted to her young niece Hester: “Well we fought all day Sunday. Our men were so tired that they had to come away from Manassa I expect that the others were very tired too or they would have followed our men.”

While Lincoln brooded in private, confiding in Browning that he was “very melancholy,” he maintained a stoic public image. He refrained from answering Horace Greeley’s acerbic letter, written in “black despair” after the Tribune editor had endured a week without sleep. “You are not considered a great man,” Greeley charged, adding that if the Confederacy could not be defeated, Lincoln should “not fear to sacrifice [himself] to [his] country.” Despite a blizzard of such indictments, Lincoln listened patiently to reports from the field of what went wrong. He told humorous stories to provide relief. And in the days that followed, with Seward by his side, he visited a number of regiments, raising spirits at every stop along the way.

At Fort Corcoran, on the Virginia side of the Potomac, he asked Colonel William T. Sherman if he could address the troops. Sherman was delighted, though he asked Lincoln to “discourage all cheering.” After the boasts that preceded Bull Run, he explained, “what we needed were cool, thoughtful, hard-fighting soldiers—no more hurrahing, no more humbug.” Lincoln agreed, proceeding to deliver what Sherman considered “one of the neatest, best, and most feeling addresses” he had ever heard. Lincoln commented on the lost battle but emphasized “the high duties that still devolved on us, and the brighter days yet to come.” At various points, “the soldiers began to cheer, but [Lincoln] promptly checked them, saying: ‘Don’t cheer, boys. I confess I rather like it myself, but Colonel Sherman here says it is not military;