On July 21, 1861, the Army of the Potomac met the Confederates in an open field just north of Manassas Junction and along the small creek of Bull Run. Emblematic of the prevailing optimistic assumptions dozens of Northern civilians traveled after the army with opera glasses and picnic lunches of oysters and champagne, hoping to watch the first and last great battle of the Civil War. Johnston to move his Confederate infantry (by rail) toward the main battle consequently, when the two forces came together their strength was roughly even. (Some men stopped to pick blackberries.) Patterson was fooled by a cavalry screen in the valley, allowing General Joseph E. Instead, the timing was off-a second general characteristic of Union attacks-as troops got lost in the unfamiliar and heavily forested terrain, and their march was slower than expected. The Union plan required timing and coordination veteran soldiers might have pulled it off, but not the Northern army at this point. To keep the Confederates divided, the Union plan called for General Robert Patterson to make a feint with his smaller force in the Shenandoah Valley, holding the Southern troops there. Photograph of Centennial Re-enactment of the Battle of Bull Run. Army career, was named superintendent of West Point in 1861. A skilled engineer and artilleryman, Beauregard came from an aristocratic French Creole family, had graduated from West Point, served in Mexico, and before secession ended his U.S. Beauregard commanded the main Southern force at Manassas. Confederate forces were divided between Manassas (twenty thousand) and the Shenandoah Valley (twelve thousand), a rich farming area about sixty miles west. McDowell intended to take his main force, about thirty-five thousand men ( a huge army, at that time the largest in American history), and attack the Confederated encamped at Manassas Junction, an important rail center just southwest of Washington. This initial Northern invasion and the resulting First Battle of Bull Run typified much about the Union’s efforts in the East during the first two years of the war. You are all green alike.” McDowell himself was untried in battle. When General Irvin McDowell protested that his men needed more training, Lincoln responded, “ou are green, it is true, but they are green also. By July, though, Lincoln had heard enough from the press and insisted that his army advance toward Richmond.

In Washington, the commander of the Army of the Potomac-the Union force in northern Virginia-hesitated to send his raw recruits into battle.

Northerners were particularly restless, and newspaper editors urged Lincoln to order the troops south to “whip the Rebs” and end the folly of secession. The army’s state of preparedness was not, however, the only factor determining when the Union attacked. Confederate leaders believed that the onus was on the Union to invade and subdue the South, and they were content to let the war come to them. In Spring 1861, both sides worked feverishly to train and equip the new armies, but the start of major hostilities would fall to the North.

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