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BULL RUN, SUMMER 1861
The officers didn’t know what they were doing. A bookkeeper, a hatter, a few machinists, some store clerks, a carpenter—what did they know about war?
Yet here they were in the nation’s capital, with the Confederate army just a few miles away. Thousands of men were looking to them for direction. The generals, who were used to experienced soldiers from the regular army, had all kinds of demands. Desperately, the new captains and lieutenants pored over their tactics manuals.
It was hard enough putting the men through squad drill, dress parade, and regimental inspection, never mind memorizing what their manuals called “By the rear of column, left or right, into line, wheel” or “To form square by double column, marching.”
A private in the 3rd Connecticut wrote sarcastically:
The most remarkable thing we did is drill; and we did do some drilling during those five or six weeks that we stayed at Washington. For instance, we would take an hour’s drill before breakfast; that was to give us an appetite. After breakfast we would take an hour and a half drill; that was to settle our breakfast. After the breakfast settler came guard mounting. After guard mounting came the regular forenoon drill, which ended about dinner time.
An hour or so allowed for dinner, then we went out and drilled some. Then the regular afternoon drill lasting until late in the afternoon. Then we were dismissed for fifteen or twenty minutes to get ready for dress parade … it began to grow a little monotonous; we wanted a change of some kind … If the rebels could only have quietly surrounded us some night and have taken us all prisoners, we should doubtless have hailed the circumstance with delight, for it would probably take our officers two or three days to get us paroled and exchanged so that we might go to drilling again.1
A Connecticut soldier described their new routines in Washington: “for every drill we are called out & back by tap of drum.” (Letter of Wolcott P. Marsh to his wife, May 19, 1861, in Letters to a Civil War Bride: The Civil War Letters of Captain Wolcott Pascal Marsh, compiled by Sandra Marsh Mercer and Jerry Mercer [Westminster, MD: Heritage Books, 2006], p. 11.)
Between drills, a photographer captured an image of a company of the 3rd Connecticut Infantry in Camp Douglass in June of 1861. At left knelt the drummer who rousted the men to duty, while the captain and two lieutenants—with sashes and swords—struck confident poses in front. Behind stood the enlisted men, muskets at the ready.
For several weeks the men camped here in a grove of trees just north of the city. In the brief periods they were off duty, some soldiers walked into Washington to see the sights. Grand government buildings like the White House and the unfinished Capitol awed many of the boys who had never been outside of Connecticut.
Joe Hawley, the newspaper editor now captain in the 1st Connecticut, was not so cavalier. “You can have no idea of the intense application, the perfect absorption of my mind and body in the duties before me,” he wrote to a friend. “The great cause, the honor of the state—of our regiment, our company, the lives and health of my boys—you can see what considerations press upon me every instant and demand that I, five weeks ago a greenhorn in military matters, should exert myself to the utmost.”2
Turning volunteers into soldiers was a long, difficult process. Drilling was just a fraction of that process. The men had to learn unquestioning obedience to officers who just weeks earlier had been merely neighbors or cousins. They had to march long distances, and accept being deprived of sleep and food. They had to learn to mend their uniforms and make coffee over a fire.
The Union’s general-in-chief was Winfield Scott, nearly seventy-five years old and so obese he could no longer ride a horse. Commanding the troops in the field was Gen. Irvin McDowell. A career army officer, McDowell could see that weeks of drilling had not prepared his volunteer troops for battle. But he felt constant pressure from Washington, and it was obvious that if the Union army were to annihilate the Confederacy, he would have to act before his troops’ ninety-day enlistments elapsed and they all went home.
A month after arriving in Washington, the Connecticut soldiers found themselves crossing the Potomac River and marching into Virginia. This was enemy territory, and each man realized that here a Confederate attack could come at any second.
PICKET DUTY
“I don’t think I shall ever forget my first night on picket,” an anxious Connecticut soldier confessed later. He stood picket in the woods overnight, at some distance from camp.
Hour after hour rolled on. ‘Twas midnight … Thought it very reasonable to suppose that if the rebels intended to make an attack they would avoid the regular road and go through the woods … somewhere near where I was posted … I heard, or fancied I heard a slight disturbance in a clump of bushes near by … Had the rebels appeared? …
Army regulations require a sentinel to challenge an approaching party … I proceeded to address myself to the mysterious clump of bushes. Opened my mouth and went through all the motions of saying something … A sound issued from my mouth; but such a sound!
Just then a dark form seemed to be moving out from the bushes. It looked like a man crawling along on his hands and knees … Then the dark object spoke! It spoke in a language that had been familiar to my ear since my boyhood days. It was the grunt of a hog! … Was delighted to see that hog … Felt like twining my arms around its neck and shedding a few tears of joy …3
Elnathan B. Tyler of the 3rd Connecticut met the enemy—or was it a friend?—in an illustration from his 1872 book, “Wooden Nutmegs” at Bull Run, A Humorous Account of Some of the Exploits and Experiences of the Three Months Connecticut Brigade and the Part They Played in the National Stampede.
Hogs or no hogs, the boys soon got undeniable proof that the enemy was real and nearby. On the 17th of June, the 1st and 2nd Connecticut regiments rushed to the aid of Ohio troops that had been ambushed by the enemy at Vienna, Virginia. “We found the Ohio boys near the track,” wrote a shaken private. “By the aid of campfires and a lantern they were burying their dead, amputating the limbs of the wounded and caring for others who were badly wounded … It looked hard to see the long row of wounded dying and the dead.”4
Besides fear and inexperience, the new soldiers had to contend with bureaucratic incompetence. John C. Comstock, a Hartford printer who served as captain in Connecticut’s 1st Regiment, complained “We are yet suffering for lack of shoes and pantaloons … Many of the men are absolutely shoeless, and have not trowsers enough to cover their legs.”5
Gus Dana, a private in the same regiment, groused about “insufficient and very poor” rations. One lot of hardtack was impossible to eat; Dana and his buddies bored holes through them and hung them around their necks in protest. When their colonel cursed them, “we revenged [ourselves] by skyving our tin plates at his tent while we stood in line waiting for supper.”6
Still, in spite of the difficulties, most soldiers felt confident that the Union would put down the rebellion quickly and easily. Eli Walter Osborn, a captain in the 2nd Connecticut, confided to his family, “between you and me, I do not think we shall be required to fight much. The other side is too much frightened.”7
By mid-July, many regiments had only days left on their
