On this day 1861… Champagne at Bull Run

The first battle of the American Civil War took place on this day in 1861 and excited civilians gathered to watch the event with picnic hampers and Champagne to hand.

Although the battle started well for the Union, fresh Confederate reinforcements turned the tide late in the day

On 21 July 1861 the Union and Confederate armies clashed for the first time at a small railway junction some 25 miles south of Washington DC.

It was, by all accounts, a beautifully sunny day and many civilians in Washington decided to make their way down to Centreville where the Union army was concentrated as word began to filter back that a battle was imminent.

So they hitched up their buggies and traps, packed their picnic hampers and put Champagne on ice for the occasion.

The correspondent for the (London) Times, William Howard Russell, no stranger to war having covered the Crimean conflict in 1854, related in his account of the battle that in the morning: “I swallowed a cup of tea and a morsel of bread, put the remainder of the tea into a bottle, got a flask of light Bordeaux, a bottle of water, a paper of sandwiches, and having replenished my small flask with brandy, stowed them all away in the bottom of the gig.”

Strange, frivolous even callous as it may appear to us now, many people were keen to watch the coming battle as they thought it was likely to be the deciding engagement of the war – and one the Union would surely win.

In this respect the early days of the American Civil War bear many parallels with the beginning of the First World War some 50 years later. The outbreak of the conflict was greeted with celebration and much excitement and there was a rush to enlist as a great wave of patriotic fervour swept the country.

Like the British ‘Pals’ battalions of the Great War, men from the same street or fire department or factory joined up together and formed their own units. Similarly, many believed the war would be both glorious and short.

It was not to be. Despite a promising start for the Union at the battle, the steadiness of general Jackson’s Virginians (this was the battle that earn him the moniker ‘Stonewall’) and the arrival by train of fresh Confederate reinforcements turned the battle in the South’s favour. One Confederate general, Nathan Evans, rushed back and forth holding his wavering line together, accompanied by an aide carrying a small barrel of the general’s favourite whiskey.

By the time Russell arrived at the battlefield the turning of the tide hadn’t quite happened yet but on his way from Washington he had already witnessed some of the indiscipline of the untried Union army that would lead to its defeat; such as men of the 4^th Pennsylvania who’d quit the battle saying they’d done their bit and were going home.

Arriving with the other picnicking civilians on the hill of Centreville a little way from the actual battle, Russell would have found himself in the company of around 500 spectators including senators and congressmen. Although they had come to watch the progress of the battle very few could see what was going on as the fighting was happening behind a low hill in the middle distance from which dense smoke and canon fire were emanating. Russell noted he quickly grew annoyed by people asking to use his telescope in the hope of catching a glimpse of what was going on.

He was further peeved when he lost a good measure of his brandy to a “broken-down looking soldier” passing by who asked him for a drink and, Russell lamented, “took a startling pull, which left but little between the bottom and utter vacuity”.

A Punch cartoon depicting Russell

Finding no other food in the town, Russell, his friend Mr Warre and a little black boy ate the sandwiches he’d brought along and drank half of the Bordeaux.

At this point a Union officer rode up and declared that the rebels were “whipped on all fronts”. Russell took a horse and arranging to meet Warre a little later, rode down towards the battlefield itself. On arriving however he was swiftly caught up in the rapidly developing Union rout caused by JEB Stuart’s cavalry charge.

Despite trying to find the Union commander, general McDowell, in the end he concluded: “There was nothing left for it but to go with the current one could not stem.”

Back at Centreville, finding his friend and their buggy already gone he began the long ride back to Washington among the broken army, having an unpleasant run in with one clearly hysterical fugitive who, “mad or drunk”, tried to shoot him.

After an exhausting and eventful ride he arrived back at his hotel at 11 o’clock that night to find, “a most welcome supper ready on the table – an enormous piece of cheese, a sausage of unknown components, a knuckle-bone of ham, and a bottle of a very light wine of France.”

Trying to file a report immediately after his meal he admits that he fell fast asleep at his desk, “with my head on the blotted paper”.

And the war would go on, for much longer and far more destructively than anyone could have imagined.