The Left Behind

Wherein not every general is off to a new adventure

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On March 17, the Third Division of the Third Corps became the first part of the Army of the Potomac to load on transports and depart for a grand campaign to capture Richmond. The First Division, Third Corps was scheduled to follow it in just a few days, when the transports returned, and begin expanding the beachhead on the Virginia Peninsula so that Maj. General George McClellan could land his army of over 150,000 men--an army twice the size of the one Napoleon had commanded for his great victory at Austerlitz.

But it was more than just transports that delayed McClellan's relocation of his base of operations (the place from which an army in the field supplies and sustains itself). President Abraham Lincoln had dictated that McClellan could not make the move without guaranteeing the safety of the capital, and so McClellan had dispatched the corps commander he had the most confidence in to ensure the Confederates were really gone.

Alexander and Duffey's handiwork, March 1862. The former bridge over Bull Run on Warrenton Turnpike

The Confederate Army of the Potomac has abandoned their lines at Centreville with a rapidity that had surprised McClellan (as well as Jefferson Davis). On their way out they had systematically destroyed every bridge they could find to make them difficult to follow. Lt. Colonel Porter Alexander, though technically the ordnance chief for the army, used his engineering expertise to blow the stone bridge on the Warrenton Turnpike that Shanks Evans had done so much to defend in July 1861. Writing about it years later as Ambassador to Nicuragua, he recalled the work he and the similarly multi-talented George Duffey performed nostalgically:

I was directed to blow up the old Stone Bridge--an arch of about 20 feet--when all had crossed, & Maj. Duffey & I mined the abutments & loaded them, & then the major remained & fired the mines at the proper time. I have always wanted to revisit that spot, which was quite a pretty one in those days, but I never had the chance, though I went across Sudley Ford, only two or three miles off, in Sept. '62. I will probably never see it again, but if any of my kids, or kid's kids, ever travel that Warrenton Pike across Bull Run they may imagine Maj. Duffey & myself, on a raft underneath the bridge mining holes in the abutments, & loading them with 500 lbs. of gunpowder & fixing fuses on hanging planks to blow up both sides simultaneously.