LETTER FROM ONE OF GENERAL McDOWELL’S AIDS
[From the Cincinnati Gazette, July 27]
From a letter of one of General McDowell’s aids, to his wife, we have been permitted to make some extracts, which are very creditable to the two Ohio regiments. The letter reveals something which we have not seen stated elsewhere. When the reserve advanced to support the advance, which at the time had driven the enemy some distance, it fired our own men and threw them into disorder. The writer says: –
The army was to move at two o’clock P. M., in two columns – one approaching the enemy direct and the other on his flanks. We all moved off in time, and the two columns reached their destined positions, as had been planned, and the engagement commenced in two places. The column in direct advance attacked them a long distance off, while the other column came around and commenced the attack on the side of the enemy. This flanking column drove the enemy from its place across the country for two miles, when our two columns made a junction. Then we made a general attack and drove the enemy off into the corner of open flats surrounded by woods. At this time our reserve came up, and opened their fire on our own men, which threw them into disorder; and just when we had completely whipped them from every position they had taken, our men were thrown into a panic by our troops firing on them, taking them for the enemy, for there was no way of telling friends from foes in the general engagement. And then came a sight – may I be spared from seeing such another! Two thousand men started, panic stricken, running through some five thousand who were on their way to assist them. The panic spread through the five thousand, and it was not in the power of human exertion to restrain them to form them into any kind of shape. Appeals of all kinds and threats were alike unheeded, and the only men unmoved were our regulars. They moved on in compact form, and fought the advancing enemy on one side, holding them in check, and on the other were our two Ohio regiments, supported by Captain Ayers’ battery, which kept the panic stricken men from being cut to pieces while trying to organize them into some shape on a plain opposite to where we had been so hotly engaged. I looked also on that plain and there was our small band of regulars, and the Ohio brigade, under Schenck, with Ayers’ battery, holding the enemy in check, and giving us time to draw off our disorganized mass of men, and then commenced a retreat. Our General is now subject to all the blame and disgrace a defeated General is made liable to. He is conscious of having done all that was in his power, and that, too, of the best officers in his army to assist him. In no one point did he allow any changes when he could by any means prevent. Two things he could not provide for: one was General Johnston’s army reinforcing Beauregard; and the other the undisciplined troops that were so easily demoralized and thrown into a panic. There is a vast difference between disciplined and undisciplined troops in a battle field. Our regulars and some of the volunteers, such as Burnsides’ brigade of Providence, Schenck’s Ohio brigade, the Connecticut brigade, and some of the Boston and New York Volunteer regiments did well, and all of these men were in the first of the engagement except the Ohio and Connecticut troops. The great mass of the troops were green men that had just come into the service, for the very morning we had our engagement some of the three months’ men marched from the field for home. This had a bad effect on our men.
We presume that this account will deepen the impression on every one’s mind that our men were required to do impossibilities. Their number was entirely inadequate for the undertaking. They beat the enemy wherever they met them, but they would have continued to fall back on successive lines of masked batteries and intrenchments, until our troops would have been overcome by fatigue and slaughter. The attack was brave and successful at the beginning, but it was an attack that never ought to have been made. Attacking formidable intrenchments with half the force may be heroic, but neither that nor waiting for their completion is strategy.
New York (NY) Herald, 7/30/1861
Contributed by John Hennessy
Harry Smeltzer
Bull Runnings 
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