John Taylor stood agape at the spectacle–dazed and confounded, he admitted. On either side of the road crowds of soldiers surged toward Centreville. So much had the men discarded that Taylor was certain he could almost have walked from the field to Centreville on bags of oats, bales of hay, and boxes of ammunition. But, Taylor wrote, the most startling aspect of the retreat was its hurry: Every one seemed after the honor of being the first man to enter Washington. Soldiers dashed at wagons to cut loose the horses, and with two on a horse, gallop off toward home. Lamented Taylor, Every sentiment of shame, and all sense of manhood was absent for the moment.

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Intense urgency yielded to outright panic when the Confederates managed to get some artillery in range of the bridge over Cub Run. Amidst the gauntlet of shells, a Union wagon swerved and overturned on the bridge, forcing all who wished to cross into the water on either side. Ambulances, horses, cannon, and men were piled in one confused mass, remembered a Rhode Island artilleryman. Shells burst overhead as the Yankees rushed on, and soon the Rhode Islander shuddered at the sight of the upper half of a soldier’s body flying up the hill. With this, he admitted, A cry of mortal terror arose among the flying soldiers.

The scene at the Cub Run bridge was the defining event of the First Battle of Bull Run. It was into this scene (commonly mislocated to the Stone Bridge) that newspapermen, moviemakers, historians, and novelists injected civilians as central characters–frightened souls tossing aside picnics and parasols to infect the retreating army with panic. Yet, dozens of contemporary accounts make it clear that the panic was a military, not a civilian, event. No civilians were killed or wounded (as the moviemakers love to portray), and so few of them were present east of Cub Run that their presence was rarely if ever mentioned by the soldiers who did participate in the panic. That handful of civilians who had reached the ridge overlooking the Stone Bridge managed to recross the Cub Run bridge before the span was blocked and the true panic began. As Taylor asserted after the war, There is no truth whatever in the claim that civilians contributed to the panic.

Once across Cub Run, the panicked mob transformed into a discouraged flood, protected by a strong line of infantry and artillery just west of Centreville. Captain Tidball had by now moved his battery to the Warrenton Turnpike and watched as the bedraggled crowd flowed by. Tidball recognized his inquisitors of the morning, Senators Lane, Wilson, and Wade. Lane came by first, now mounted on a flea-bitten gray horse with a rusty harness on and wielding, sure enough, the musket he had promised to find. Not far behind Lane trundled Senator Wilson, hot and red in the face from exertion…in his shirtsleeves, carrying his coat on his arm. When he reached Tidball, Wilson (who would later briefly command the 22d Massachusetts Infantry, Henry Wilson’s Regiment) swabbed the sweat from his brow and growled, Cowards! Why don’t they turn and beat back the scoundrels?

And finally up the hill toiled Wade, without the strength to do anything but drag his coat on the ground behind him. Wrote Tidball, As he approached me I thought I had never beheld so sorrowful a countenance. Wade’s normally long face seemed still more lengthened by the weight of his heavy under-jaws…so heavy it seemed to overtax his exhausted strength to keep his mouth shut.

Such was the condition of most of the Yankees who had found their way to Bull Run that day. But the vast majority of civilians had not gotten near Bull Run, had not caught even a glimpse of a Confederate soldier, and were not panicked by a stumbling mob of frightened Union soldiers. When word of the disaster filtered back to the large gaggle of spectators at Centreville, most of them simply mounted their buggies or horses and headed back toward Washington, albeit with some urgency. One brief spasm of panic infected part of the fleeing horde, but generally the civilian departure was orderly. (Russell noted this sliver of panic, and therefore it became famous.) Some arrived back in the capital during the night, hundreds more the next morning–all of them with tales of woe and fright. The spectacle of these woebegone civilians became an instant target for newspapermen and editorialists–most of whom had been hundreds of miles away during the battle.

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