This Day in American History: The First Battle of Bull Run
- ForAmerica
- 1 hour ago
- 2 min read
On this day in 1861, hundreds of Washington sightseers packed picnic baskets and rode out to watch the Civil War's first major battle like it was a Sunday spectacle. They got a brutal wake-up call instead.
On July 21, 1861, Union forces under Brig. Gen. Irvin McDowell clashed with Confederate troops under Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard near Manassas Junction, Virginia, along a small stream called Bull Run. Three months after Fort Sumter, Union leaders still believed the rebellion could be crushed quickly, and public pressure pushed McDowell into an offensive with 35,000 green, poorly trained troops -- the largest army yet assembled on the continent.
The fighting pushed Confederate lines back to Henry House Hill, where Beauregard had anchored a defensive line with a brigade of Virginia infantry under Brig. Gen. Thomas J. Jackson. Firing from a concealed slope, Jackson's men repulsed charge after charge, and a fellow general, rallying his own wavering troops, pointed to Jackson's brigade and shouted that it stood "like a stone wall." The nickname stuck for good. Confederate cavalry under J.E.B. Stuart then captured Union artillery, Beauregard ordered a counterattack, and the inexperienced Federal line broke and fled back toward Washington in a chaotic retreat -- tangled up with the very carriages of the sightseers who'd come to watch.
The defeat shattered any illusion that the war would be short or bloodless. Both sides realized, almost overnight, that they were in for a long and brutal fight -- one that would ultimately claim more American lives than any conflict before or since.
Also on this day:
1899 -- Author Ernest Hemingway is born in Oak Park, Illinois.
1925 -- John T. Scopes is found guilty of teaching evolution in Dayton, Tennessee, in the famous "Monkey Trial."
1944 -- American forces land on Guam during World War II.
1949 -- The U.S. Senate ratifies the North Atlantic Treaty, founding NATO.
1969 -- Neil Armstrong completes his historic moonwalk, about 6 hours and 40 minutes after landing.
A Sunday picnic turned into the opening chapter of America's bloodiest war -- and gave us a general's nickname that's outlasted everything else about that terrible day.
Source: HISTORY.com, Library of Congress
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