Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Telly Halkias, an award-winning freelance journalist. It originally appeared in the Bennington Banner. (Also hear VPR’s podcast on Vermonters’ role in the First Battle of Bull Run.)
A few weeks back I heard a Vermont Public Radio commentary by my friend Peter Gilbert of the Vermont Humanities Council. In it, he reminded us July 21 was the 150th anniversary of the First Battle of Bull Run, a seminal moment in our nation’s history — with globally historical consequences.
As the Civil War’s first major land battle, Bull Run was both crude and surreal.
From the military side, on July 21, 1861, Union and Confederate armies engaged near Manassas, Va., and the battle is still known by that name today in southern states. Fighting ensued when about 35,000 Union troops marched from Washington to push back a Confederate force of 20,000 along a stream called Bull Run.
The rebels were blocking the road to Richmond, the Confederate capital, and President Lincoln saw them as a strategic target of opportunity.
After having forces pushed back for most of the day, the Confederates rallied and penetrated the Union lines, sending the regulars into a mass retreat toward Washington. Because of their own disorganization, however, the Southern troops were unable to pursue and capitalize on the victory, or directly threaten the federal capital.
Peter also recalled an interesting tidbit about Bull Run that reflected the naïveté of the American public at the war’s start: “It was a Sunday morning, and people rode out from Washington in carriages with wine and picnic lunches to watch the battle.”
What a difference four years made, and how shattered our innocence became by the time the Civil War ended.
But the die was cast. Bull Run gave the South courage and caught many in the North napping. After that, Lincoln realized the war wouldn’t be won that quickly, or easily.
As Peter noted in his commentary, the North was in a real fight and 90-day volunteers weren’t going to get the job done. The Union needed longer terms of enlistment into state-based regiments that filled out the Regular Army. This ultimately led to Union victory, as well as the bloodiest war ever fought by Americans.
But Bull Run was a catalyst reaching far past our shores, and its own era. The South’s defeat was sealed the day after Bull Run. Lincoln’s subsequent decision to mobilize began a brutal war of attrition.
Such a strategy, so effectively carried out by the likes of Generals Grant, Sherman, Sheridan and others, was the Confederacy’s death knell. Its hope was for a settled truce after some quick battlefield victories — before it could be exposed as a logistical dwarf. For all of its élan, the Confederacy lacked the resources to sustain prolonged and dispersed operations indefinitely.
More significantly, however, was one of the little noticed (in the U.S.) by products of the Civil War: It was the first, and last, truly hybrid war, where new and old technologies and tactics clashed on both sides to create a bloodbath.
Across the Atlantic, the Prussians paid attention. Later that century, in the first real modern conflict, the Franco-Prussian War, they took the lessons learned (and paid for in blood) from us and steamrolled over France — using firepower, mobility and decentralized, initiative-oriented small unit command they saw we had not yet grasped.
This was a pattern Kaiser Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler would continue to develop, and then repeat twice in the next three generations. So it’s not a stretch to think that what started as a wine and cheese party for Washington’s weekend entertainment eventually evolved into the carnage of the two World Wars.
