McDowell fumed as the blue column straggled and stretched out along the way. Union commanders cursed as raw recruits fell out of formation to pick blackberries and search for water. When he finally reached Bull Run, McDowell had to delay another precious day to get his army together.
Those few days provided time enough for word to reach Richmond that Beauregard was badly outnumbered. And for Confederate general Joe Johnston, who was guarding an important gap with ten thousand men, to reach and reinforce Beauregard. The gap became unimportant now that the Confederacy knew where the main attack was to be launched.
But the reinforcements were of little use in the face of McDowell’s successful maneuver. When a forest fire rages out of control, it does not matter how many trees are to burn. And the Union attack was raging out of Confederate control.
Canon swung Scratch around and rode after the professor. Hammer was Canon’s traveling horse, the black Arabian his war horse. Robert E. Lee had attached the Black Horse to the professor’s Virginia brigade that morning, following the skirmish. With the professor directing artillery fire from the hill, and Canon assigned to a scouting role, it appeared that any real action would bypass them. When he reached the woodsline, Canon found the professor calling together the Virginians and the dismounted Black Horse. The professor’s pale blue eyes were strikingly vivid. His jaw was set as he paced through the Virginia troops, rallying men who had yet to see a shot fired in anger.
At the crest of the hill, Confederate soldiers were falling back as their comrades wilted before the growing Union momentum. Scarcely three hours had passed since the Union flank attack began, but an increasing stream of gray clad men flowed up the hill.
General Bernard Bee of South Carolina, who had been placed in charge of Alabama troops, had seen his men fight bravely for a while and then join the retreat. It was turning into a rout.
So convinced was Irwin McDowell that he had won a great victory, if not the war, he had already telegraphed Lincoln that the day was his.
General Bee, too, saw defeat looming. Riding up to the professor, Bee said, “I am afraid they are beating us back.”
“Then, sir,” replied the aroused professor, “we will give them the bayonet.”
Turning to the Virginians, the professor cried in a shrill voice, “Men of Virginia, the South is losing the war right here, right now. It is up to us, and only us, to act. If you love your home and your land, you must decide right here, right now that you will die for them. But not until you kill the enemy. If you are willing, we will hold this hill for the South until we lie dead on it, or have whipped the enemy.”
With a shout, the Virginians rose and fixed bayonets. Just over the rise, Rebel soldiers were running toward them. Some stopped to fire, but many had thrown down their guns and were fleeing fast as they could fly. Then the blue wave topped the hill, sweeping all before it. General Bee rode back and forth among the retreating Rebels, trying to regroup them.
Canon saw the professor draw his sword. “For Virginia and the South,” yelled the professor, and he pointed his sword for the charge.
Canon, now on foot, called for the dismounted Black Horse and they grouped to him. Canon knew there was no time to waste on preliminaries. With a wild scream he scarce identified as his own, Canon took his men into battle.
The charging blue line smashed into the Virginians. Each side reeled from the shock, then closed once more. Fighting was hand-to-hand. Inexorably, the victorious Union troops pressed harder. But they had fought uphill for more than a mile. Many were exhausted. Some were discouraged at running into more fresh troops.
The Northern charge slowed, stopped as men in blue and gray were engulfed in wild melee. Horses and men screamed in anger, fear and pain. Smoke and the crackle of musket fire filled the air.
Confederate units to each side of the Virginians continued to fall back past them, but more slowly. Bee, still trying to stop the retreat, saw the Virginians hold their ground. He saw the professor, atop Little Sorrel, hold the horse steady as the battle surged around him.
Pointing at him, Bee shouted, “See! There is Jackson, standing like a stone wall. Rally, men! Rally to the Virginians.”
Bee, having bestowed one of the great noms de guerre in military history, took a mortal wound moments later. But the backbone had been removed from the Union attack. Having stalled, it wavered and wavering, broke.
Two Union batteries had gained the hill and began pouring a deadly fire into the Confederate position. But after firing only a couple of rounds, the guns fell suddenly quiet. Then they reopened fire, but this time the heavy shot slashed into Union troops, already beginning to fall back. When the grape shot ripped into them, the blue troops turned to run.
A mounted Union lieutenant who had taken part in the charge up the hill rode furiously to the gun emplacement. “You fools,” he yelled as he dismounted and grabbed the extraordinarily tall gunner, “this is a Union cannon and those are Union troops you’re firing into.”
“Actually,” replied Canon with a grim smile, “I’m a Confederate Canon.” He pulled back the blue coat he had taken from a captured Yankee to reveal his own gray uniform underneath. Then Canon produced quite the largest pistol the lieutenant was sure he had ever seen. When the lieutenant was directed to sit, he complied.
“These boys,” Canon pointed to a half-dozen similarly blue coated members of the Black Horse, “tried to tell me that anything that has a mouth big as the one on this gun had to be Yankee.”
Then he pointed to a stack of cannonballs. “But I convinced them that anything with balls this big needed to be Confederate.”
Canon had been fighting near Jackson when he saw the two Union batteries rolling into place. As the Union attack crumpled against the Virginians, the lead Northern units surrendered. Canon stripped a few Yankees of their coats and, gathering several of his men, took them through the woods as they donned the blue coats.
Emerging from the woods no more than fifty yards from the big guns, they looked like reinforcing infantry to the Yankee gunners. The Yankee gun crew was happy to see them until a volley from the disguised Rebels drove them away.
The crumpling Union charge collapsed in the face of point blank artillery fire from Canon’s men. Blue troops getting ready to charge the hill looked up in surprise to see their comrades suddenly run back toward them.
At the worst possible moment for the Union and the best possible for the Confederacy, some of Joe Johnston’s fresh Rebel troops arrived on top of the hill after a march through the woods. With a yell, they joined in the assault on the reeling Yankees.
McDowell saw the fortunes of war undergo a sudden change. He felt dismay but was far from disheartened. He had still won a great victory. All he had to do was reorganize his disordered troops, halt the retreat, reform his lines. He would fight again tomorrow.
This plan would have worked had not so many Washington civilians believed the opinion of the Northern press that the battle would be a quick and decisive rout of the Southern troops by the Union. Much of the pro-Northern gentry in Washington turned out for the battle as if it were an attraction staged for their benefit. It was a soft July Sunday. And soft July Sundays were days for picnics and rides through the country in fancy carriages.
They turned out to witness the battle. They were dressed in finery, in fine carriages, with picnic baskets and bottles of champagne.
Canon had seen through his field glasses the festive way with which the onlookers viewed the battle. He realized these feckless fools had little idea of the horrors they witnessed with aplomb from afar. They saw men jump and fall as bullets struck, and lie where they had fallen, but the watchers could not smell the gore or the foul odors from dying men. They could not hear the groans. The watchers thought it clean and amusing. Canon thought them ghouls, as they enjoyed delicacies and sweetmeats while good men on each side lay screaming out their dying breaths on the horrible field.
As the tide of battle turned, Canon sent word to Jackson—replacement crews were needed for the captured Yankee artillery. The Black Horse