11am: Pope gets the answer he wants, ignores the answer he needs

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Buck Hill

Just before noon, McDowell and Heintzelman returned from their investigation of the Confederate lines. “I know what you are going to say,” Pope boomed. The commanding general had again drastically changed personality, and the swaggering, self-assured John Pope was back. “The enemy is retreating!”

The two generals were pleasantly surprised, because that was exactly what they were planning to say. As McDowell explained later:

We found all the points held by the enemy the day before beyond Bull Run abandoned, and in going over to the Sudley Springs road and west of it we saw no evidence of the enemy in force, some skirmishers and advanced posts or rear guards, as the case might be, being all that we found.

In fact, they had reconnoitered a legitimate gap in Jackson’s line between its flank and Bull Run, but it was only a very narrow one. They had ridden right past Maxcy Gregg’s South Carolina brigade and not noticed it, while not riding far enough to encounter Fitzhugh Lee’s cavalry.

But Pope had made up his mind thanks to Fitz John Porter. The dissenting corps commander was an obsessive intelligence gatherer, and passed on every scrap he gathered with a blind faith that his highers-up would be able to synthesize it into something meaningful. Earlier in the morning some of his pickets had overrun a Confederate picket outpost and rescued a Union soldier taken captive during the night. The man claimed he had overheard officers talking about Jackson’s men falling back to Gainesville or beyond in order to unite with Longstreet.

Porter regarded the story as ludicrous. The soldier, he wrote to Pope, he regarded “either as a fool or designedly released to give the wrong impression, and no faith should be put in what he said.” But Porter still sent him on to headquarters, and after a short conversation Pope came to the opposite conclusion. The Confederates were retreating, and the time to attack was now.