Until the battle began here on July 21, 1861, Americans on both sides of the Civil War thought of it almost as an adventure. A volley or two would make the enemy flee. The war would be over quickly and practically bloodlessly.
And then came the reality of Manassas.
Two young armies faced each other en masse – some 35,000 Union soldiers and 33,000 Confederates – and nearly 1,000 died by the end of that afternoon. The number of casualties reached 5,000 captured, injured or killed.
It was the largest battle North America had ever seen, and it was devastating.
“Manassas is the place that really got the Civil War going. It changed the perceptions of both sides, North and South, of what the war was going to be,” said Ed Clark, superintendent of Manassas National Battlefield Park, where the 150th anniversary of the battle will be commemorated Thursday morning. Four days of events at several sites in and around Manassas will mark the onset of the nation’s deadliest war.
If Manassas had turned out to be the one and only battle of the Civil War, as both sides expected, the war could have ended without addressing a major issue at its core.
“At this point, the role of slavery in the war is ambiguous,” said Edward L. Ayers, noted historian, president of the University of Richmond and keynote speaker for the commemoration. “The Confederacy frankly acknowledges that it is a nation that will protect slavery. (In the north,) there’s no declaration at all that it is trying to destroy slavery.”
The battle is the beginning of what America will become, Clark said.
“Look at what this begets – 625,000 Americans killed, fighting through 1865, the evolution of the idea of freedom,” Clark said. “What starts with squabbling over Constitutional issues becomes a huge civil war which begets emancipation, which begets civil rights, how we live, how we view our leaders, how we view our president. All that starts to change at Manassas.”
Before Manassas, America had an innocence about what war would bring.
“At the bombardment of Fort Sumter, nobody died. It was completely bloodless,” Clark said. “There were many skirmishes (before Manassas), but only a few score of dead in all these battles. Both sides were very sure of their cause and very sure it was going to be a relatively quick and relatively bloodless war. Both sides (expected that the other side) would fold up and go home.”
Manassas proved them wrong.
“When those two armies clashed on that battlefield, that was the largest number of troops engaged in battle and the largest number of casualties ever on American soil,” Clark said. “This is when the telegraph is coming online and real-time news is occurring. The ferocity of the fighting and the human tragedy spread like wildfire throughout the north and south.”
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