Nineteenth-century Centreville, Virginia, was hardly a place to inspire awe. One man wrote of it in July 1861, ‘It looks for all the world as though it had done its business, whatever it was, fully eighty years ago, and since then had bolted its doors, put out its fires, and gone to sleep. Yet on the night of July 20, 1861, the eyes of the world fixed on this bedraggled place some two dozen miles west of Washington, D.C. The valleys, woods, and fields around Centreville teamed with the largest assemblage of military might ever seen in the Americas. More than 30,000 Union soldiers shuffled nervously, sleepily in their camps, on the eve of the first major battle of the Civil War.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Civil War Times magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

Among the military throng that night was John Taylor, an aspiring politician from New Jersey, who, like a few other civilians, had come out early from Washington to witness history. The future state senator watched the Union army assemble about 2:00 a.m. It was, he wrote, one of the most inspiring and impressive sights of my life time. From the fields on either side of Braddock Road and the Warrenton Turnpike, which ran east to west through Centreville, hundreds of soldiers tumbled from their camps and into column. Writing of the scene 32 years later, Taylor wistfully remembered that the cadence of the troops seemed to be measured by the unison of those hearts beating stoutly for their country’s salvation.

Taylor would soon have plenty of civilian company. As the Union army around Centreville stirred that July morning, Washington rumbled with an excitement rarely matched in the capital’s history. For months, the 19th-century equivalent of CNN had churned out news and speculation at a feverish pitch. Now, the day of the big battle had finally arrived. It was Sunday–the week’s only leisure day–and throughout the city, newspapermen, politicians, and common folk hunted up carriages for a trip to the front. Talk of the battle was everywhere, and many of the curious meant to see of it what they could. The sun rose over clots of civilian wagons heading westward out of the city, taking their passengers to witness what would surely be an unsparing, unequivocal Union victory.

Intending only to watch from the sidelines as history was made, these noncombatants were about to become part of the history and lore of the First Battle of Bull Run–part of an enduring legend that puts civilians at the center of some of the most chaotic moments in that first major battle of the war, regardless of what actually happened.

Only a handful of civilians were in Centreville early enough to watch the army march. Their numbers would swell by the hour to perhaps several hundred, and would include some of America’s luminaries: Congressman Elihu Washburne of Illinois, later Ulysses S. Grant’s sponsor; Senator Jim Lane of Kansas; future Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax of Indiana; Radical Republican Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts; Senator Benjamin F. Bluff Ben Wade, who would be the spiritual leader of the radical Committee on the Conduct of the War; and a handful more. Despite their lofty positions, few of them had any concept of the day’s battle plan as laid out by the Union army commander, Brigadier General Irvin McDowell. Once the army started to march, the civilian dignitaries, like the Confederates, would have to guess what would happen next.

There was, however, one civilian with special access to the army and its plans that day: Rhode Island’s 31-year old governor, William Sprague. Sprague was rich, cultured, ambitious, and eligible (he would later marry Washington’s foremost belle, Kate Chase, daughter of the treasury secretary). The governor took seriously his titular post as commander of the Rhode Island State Militia; he would attach himself this day to the brigade commanded by Colonel Ambrose E. Burnside.

The two Rhode Island regiments in Burnside’s brigade would lead the day’s featured Yankee movement: an arching march north and west to cross Bull Run creek above the Confederate left flank and the Stone Bridge, where the Warrenton Turnpike crossed the creek, almost five miles west of Centreville. Sprague had no intention of merely looking over his favorite general’s shoulder. Instead, he rode at the head of the column with Burnside, spurring forward occasionally to reconnoiter, and ultimately directing his constituents into tumultuous musketry fire on Matthew’s Hill, just north of the turnpike. Governor Sprague was foremost in the fight and inspired the men with coolness and courage, wrote one Rhode Islander. The governor had two horses shot from under him–probably the only sitting governor in American history to suffer that distinction.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to