Battle of Bull Run

Washington civilians packed picnic baskets and rode out in carriages to watch what they expected to be a brief, decisive Union victory along a creek called Bull Run in northern Virginia on July 21, 1861. Three months into the war, the 90-day volunteers were almost at the end of their enlistments, and there was a sense in Washington that the rebellion needed to be crushed before it hardened. What unfolded instead was a chaotic, bloody rout that sent Union troops — and the picnicking spectators — fleeing back toward the capital in panic, and told both sides this war would be nothing like anyone had imagined.

The Union forces under General Irvin McDowell had the Confederates pushed back and nearly broken when fresh Confederate troops arrived by rail from the Shenandoah Valley — one of the first times in history railroads were used to shift forces during battle. Thomas Jackson's Virginia brigade held the line on Henry House Hill, earning the nickname "Stonewall" in the process. The Confederate counterattack collapsed the Union flank. By late afternoon, a retreat became a rout; soldiers and civilians tangled together on the road back to Washington.

The effect was clarifying on both sides. Lincoln signed legislation the next day calling for 500,000 three-year volunteers and appointed George McClellan to reorganize the Army of the Potomac. In the South, the victory fed a dangerous overconfidence about the war's likely brevity. Bull Run established Virginia as the war's primary eastern theater and made clear that the American continent was large enough to sustain a long, grinding conflict of attrition that neither side had prepared for.