Bull Run Read Online Free

Patterson, who was too old and too timid for this or any task. Despite my not having a single reliable map of Virginia, which I was to invade. And despite the most worrisome problem of all, one I dared not complain of in public: I, who’d just a few weeks before been made a brigadier general in command of an army of thirty thousand, had seldom led more than a hundred men.
    In spite of all this, I drew up a plan of attack. It was approved by the President. We’d begin our march south in the second week of July. I dreaded the coming of that day.

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FLORA WHEELWORTH
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    My daughters departed soon after their husbands. The house held but me and the servants once more. After all the bustling, I found idleness irksome and organized a Soldiers’ Friend League. We sewed shirts by the score. We cut and rolled bandages. We searched our ragbags for scraps of linen and scraped them with knives to procure lint for wounds. While working we exchanged the latest news. General Beauregard, the hero of Fort Sumter, had come to Virginia and made his headquarters a few miles off in Manassas Junction. We felt as if the Lord had sent one of His angels to protect us from the Yankees. Mrs. Granger had actually spoken to him and reported him most charming. He was from French Louisiana and at once showed himself a gentleman by kindly advising all the civilians in Washington to leave, as he would shortly occupy the city. We prayed that he would do so quickly, for the newspapers said that the Union was sending thousands of armed Negroes and Indians to pillage the South and free the slaves. Weeks passed. Our troops made no advance. We fretted and furiously debated but could not understand the delay. Then Miss Pruitt read from a Richmond paper a report stating that Lincoln so feared an attack that he slept with a guard of fifty men and had lately been drunk for days at a spell. Upon hearing this, we concluded that General Beauregard had been halted by his honor, which would not permit him to strike an opponent who was already all but prostrate.

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GIDEON ADAMS
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    To be a Negro living in the midst of whites, unknown to them, is to be a ghost spying on the living. Oftentimes I felt I must have joined the Southern army by mistake. The soldiers mercilessly abused a stuttering black cook in our company and tormented the collie dog he’d brought with him. Most of them said they were fighting against secession, not against slavery. Some declared they’d rather shoot Negroes than the Rebels. My ears burned at such words.
    In May we traveled to Washington. A march on Richmond was constantly talked of, but instead we merely crossed the Potomac and drilled on the south bank instead of the north. Unlike many of the men, I could write, and was often asked to take down their letters. I recorded their complainings about the heat, the drilling, the food, the lice. Many vowed to rush back to Ohio the moment our ninety-day term had expired, no matter if the Rebels were marching on Washington. I nearly strangled my pen at such times. Then one day I found myself putting in ink a loutish private’s opinion that the blood of black people was thinner and inferior to that of whites, which explained the Negroes’ lack of intelligence. How I hungered to yank off my cap and show him which of us knew the alphabet and which was the inferior, ignorant fool! I almost did so, and halted my pen. Then I mastered myself and finished the letter, but closed it with “Your wood-headed jackass” instead of the farewell he dictated. He grinned, uncomprehending, at the words, then below them scrawled, with some effort, his “X.”

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COLONEL OLIVER BRATTLE
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    In June I joined General Beauregard’s staff to advise him on strategy. I found that he felt in no need of advice. Though his celebrated assault on Fort Sumter had been nothing more than target practice, he’d been hailed a hero so loudly that he’d come to think he