As time passed and pens spun ever more colorful explanations for Union defeat, inevitably some pundits began fingering the civilians as not just witnesses to the debacle, but as the disaster’s cause. One Syracuse paper asserted, editors, reporters, congressmen, and others…were the first to fly…. [They] filled with consternation many a man who would have remained firm as granite but for that society.

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The Syracuse editorialist was wrong. But such an explanation–now accepted as rote history–proved useful for the army and the government. It deflected responsibility from the officers and soldiers, who were the overwhelmingly dominant actors in the drama, and it appealed to cynical descendants–us–who revel in the follies of our ancestors. Today, few images in American history are so indelibly linked as the First Battle of Bull Run and civilian spectators. We have contorted the image into a carnival: civilians sprawled about on blankets on the edge of the battlefield, nibbling on picnic lunches while watching death and carnage, cheering as though at a football game. Shocking, sudden Union defeat engulfed these misbegotten ones–so the lore goes–and they fled hell-bent with their military protectors, dodging shells, scrambling through streams, often falling to exhaustion or shrapnel.

Modern Americans giggle and gawk at such manufactured images. But the license to giggle and gawk requires us to overlook how we gathered around our televisions by the millions on January 17, 1991, to watch the war with Iraq unfold. It requires us to forget that we swarm by the thousands on hot summer afternoons–hotter by far than July 21, 1861–to watch men pretend to kill each other in reenactments (and we cheer!). It demands that we discount the certainty that if today’s civilians could be assured of getting within a few miles of a battlefield without getting hurt, we would not only flock by the thousands, but some of us would be hawking T-shirts, too: I survived the Battle of Bull Run.

To sustain our cliched vision of civilian spectators at the First Battle of Bull Run, we must overlook that the historical image conjured by movie-makers and historians is grossly overstated. The civilians in fact affected (or were affected by) events that day very little indeed. Rather, the spectators at Bull Run thoroughly symbolized a nation’s naive view of the coming war–and commenced a tradition of war-watching that has since been elevated to a virtual (and dominantly American) industry.

This article was written by John J. Hennessy originally published in the August 2001 issue of Civil War Times Magazine.

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