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Northwest of Manassas Junction
At about 3:30 in the morning, Maj. General Fitz John Porter,
commanding the Fifth Corps of the Army of the Potomac, was roused from sleep at
his headquarters at Bethlehem Church on the Manassas-Gainesville Road
[Wellington Road]. A messenger had arrived from Maj. General John Pope, the
commanding general, with his unequivocal order for Porter to march to the
battlefield immediately to arrive before dawn. It would be light enough to see
in just an hour and a half, so Porter sent orders to rouse the men and then got
dressed.
Groveton
Not long before Porter’s Union men started marching, Maj.
General Richard Anderson’s Confederate men stopped marching at last. Anderson
commanded the final division of the Confederate army, which had been detached
for special work on the march from Richmond. They had marched 17 miles, and for
the last few hours in the pitch-black, and the men were exhausted.
Anderson was marching without guides. He had expected to
meet an officer from Longstreet’s staff in Gainesville and been disappointed,
so he continued marching east on the Turnpike hoping one would arrive. They
didn’t. At last he ordered a halt where the bodies lay thick enough that it
appeared he was on the battle line. His men stacked arms and flopped onto the
ground to catch some sleep.
About to take a quick nap before dawn in his position in the
Brawner Woods, Brig. General John Bell Hood was interrupted by a subordinate
who had watch Anderson’s men lay down on the hill overlooking Groveton
[Stonewall Memory Gardens].
Knowing that some thirty or forty pieces of artillery bore directly on his troops, I mounted my horse, rode off in search of his quarters, and urged him to hasten withdrawal, as the Federal artillery would assuredly, at daylight, open upon his men… Upon my warning, he promptly aroused his men and, just after daybreak, marched to the rear of my line of battle.
Dogan’s Ridge
Maj. General Franz Sigel’s First Corps, Army of Virginia had
opened the fight the day before and had a rough time against Jackson. But Sigel
had had most of the afternoon to regroup them in the hollows behind Dogan’s
Ridge where it crossed the Warrenton Turnpike. Schenck’s division, which had
spent the previous morning engaged on the Turnpike, was resting unmoved since
mid-afternoon, with only the 75th Ohio out on picket duty. Schurz’s
division was largely re-formed on the right of the army, but as soon as
daylight came Sigel had permission to bring it to Dogan’s Ridge too. His two
one-brigade divisions—one of these was Milroy’s—were on the east side of
Dogan’s Ridge and would be his reserves for the day.
Sigel was not alone in using the late afternoon and the
night to regroup his corps. Maj. General Jesse Reno, commanding a two division
detachment of the massive Ninth Corps, had been at work consolidating it on the
ridge too. The division of Maj. General Isaac Stevens, the hero of Lewinsville,
was now resting altogether on the Sudley Road, and Reno’s own division,
including Nagle’s still shaken but battle-ready brigade, extended to their left
up the ridge.
Between Sigel’s and Reno’s corps, though, Maj. General Joe
Hooker was making little effort to reorganize his division. Sam Heintzelman’s
Third Corps, Army of the Potomac was split, with Phil Kearny on the other side
of Stevens. Hooker’s men had made attacks around the same time as Reno’s Ninth
Corps, but he had not made a concerted effort to bring the division back
together, letting the regimental officers keep their men wherever they could
gather them. The New Jersey and Excelsior brigades were more or less on Dogan’s
Ridge, while Grover’s was still scattered to the east of Sudley Road. Kearny’s
division, meanwhile, had slept on their weapons after their late afternoon
breakthrough, expecting the Confederates to come at any time. Getting them to
the rear to rest and regroup was Kearny’s top priority.
With Porter’s Fifth Corps, Army of the Potomac on its way,
that left only Maj. General McDowell’s Third Corps, Army of Virginia. The corps
was as close to being united as it had been in any time for the previous two
days, but it wasn’t there yet. King’s division, being led by its senior
brigadier, John P. Hatch, was still split from the action of the night. Hatch’s
own brigade and that of Abner Doubleday were still in disarray from their
nighttime adventures near Groveton. The brigades of John Gibbon and Marsena
Patrick were both up on Dogan’s Ridge, surrounded by First Corps men.
On Henry Hill, McDowell had spent the night with the four
brigade division of Brig. General James Ricketts, in the spot where Ricketts
had lost his battery and been captured by Stonewall Jackson’s men just a year
earlier. Rickett’s men were weary from marching, but other than two regiments
that had skirmished at Thoroughfare Gap, hadn’t taken part in any fighting.
Brig. General John Reynolds’ Pennsylvania Reserves were right across Sudley
Road from them on Bald Hill.
Stuart Hill
As dawn broke on Lee’s Headquarters, Maj. General Thomas
“Stonewall” Jackson was already enjoying breakfast with the commanding general,
Robert E. Lee. After weeks on the march, Jackson had accepted an invitation to
spend the night in the comparable comfort of Lee’s tent. As they breakfasted,
they discussed their situation and the strategy for the day.
Lee’s army was split between two wings, one stretching from
Brawner’s Farm to Sudley Church at the base of Stony Ridge, with an unfinished
railroad cut providing a superb defensive position. Jackson commanded this
wing, and it had spent the previous day being pounded within an inch of its
life by John Pope’s army. A.P. Hill’s battered Light Division held the left,
with Ewell’s Division under Alexander Lawton in the center, and Taliaferro’s
Division under William Starke on the right. Substitute commanders now
outnumbered appointed commanders in the units in Jackson’s wing, some were even
on their third commander since the battle began.
The other was Longstreet’s wing, now complete with
Anderson’s arrival. It stretched from where Jackson’s ended at the Brawner
house due south to the Manassas-Gainesville Road [Wellington Road]. Cadmus
Wilcox held the pivot in the line at Brawner’s, with Hood opposite the Turnpike
from him (and now reporting to Shanks Evans). Stretching beyond them, but not
in continuous line, were the divisions of James Kemper and Neighbor Jones,
while rapidly marching west past them to a reserve position was Anderson’s
division.
Lee had wanted to launch a counter-attack with this wing,
first in the afternoon and then at dawn, but both time Longstreet and his
generals had convinced him that he couldn’t do so without exposing the army’s
flank and leaving himself open for defeat. Both times Lee had agreed, and now
he had little to do but rearm the men and pray that Pope attacked again.
Buck Hill
At Pope’s headquarters, the braggart general finally looked
crushed. It was not Lee that had brought him down, but rather Maj. General
George McClellan, the erstwhile General-in-chief. When his replacement, Maj.
General Henry Halleck, had ordered McClellan to bring the Army of the Potomac
back from the Peninsula, it had been with the intention of joining it with
Pope’s army to create what we would now call an “army group” of two armies
working in support of each other. Halleck had led one with great success in
Tennessee, though Pope, who had commanded one of the armies, had a different
opinion on how Halleck had done.
But because McClellan was McClellan, he had dragged his
feet, only arriving in Alexandria himself a few days before. Halleck had sent
the Third and Fifth Corps to Pope since they had arrived before McClellan
(also, half the Ninth Corps, a semi-independent unit under Ambrose Burnside),
but backed down from his bold words about sending the Second and Sixth Corps as
soon as McClellan voiced his objections in person.
The man who had left the capital bereft of defenders a year
before, spawning the crisis that led to the creation of Pope’s separate army,
suddenly became obsessed with having sufficient defenders for the capital.
McClellan may have had some very good arguments for keeping his two corps in
the capital, but his opinion was no longer trustworthy with the Lincoln
Administration, and it was not hard to see how he benefitted from Pope’s
troubles.
So when Pope had asked for the Sixth Corps to join him
immediately and to send supplies for his weary army that had exhausted its own
in the chase of Jackson all over northern Virginia, McClellan had instructed
its commander to decline to help. Instead, he offered to send only supplies by
train, and only if Pope would send a cavalry escort. Since the horses were
starving, and the few that weren’t were needed to scout for the army, Pope
understood that there was no relief coming.
To paraphrase McClellan’s suggestion to Halleck, it was up
to him to get out of this scrape alone.
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