The View from the Top of the Knoll: Capt. John C. Tidball's Memoir of the First Battle at Bull Run

The View from the Top of the Knoll: Capt. John C. Tidball's Memoir of the First Battle at Bull Run Eugene C. Tidball John C. Tidball, an artilleryman for every day of his forty-one years in the Army, saw action in many of the great battles of the Civil War, first as a horse battery captain, and later as a brigade and corps commander of artillery. His attachment for the Ught artillery service began early in his West Point days, when he experienced the excitement of a cannonier at artillery drills, and grew as he became more experienced as an officer. He never abandoned his love of the big guns; when he retired he was commander of the artillery school at Fort Monroe and the army's premier artillerist. But the Civil War had hardly begun when he posted his battery on the high ground at Bull Run, dress rehearsal for the many bloody conflicts that lay ahead. His observations during that memorable week were recorded years later, when he wrote his memoirs.1 No one has improved onWilliamTecumseh Sherman's one-sentence description of the Union army's performance at that battle: "It is now generally admitted ," he wrote more than twenty years after the event, "that it was one of the best-planned battles of the war, but one of the worst-fought." In July 1861 neither the Union nor the Confederacy had a coherent strategy for waging war, and neither side was mihtarily ready. But Union poUticians were convinced that ifthe North made a bold appearance, the Rebels would run.While a strategic case could be made for attacking the Confederate army at Bull Run, it was a battle fought not for strategic reasons, but for political reasons. The northern press pushed an ill-prepared Union army into action, and the Confederate Army pushed it off the plains of Manassas back to Washington. The battle ended with the Army of the North, as Sherman put it, "in a state of disgraceful and causeless flight."2 1 His attachment to the artillery, as he wrote years later, "caused me to adhere to it during the late war, even when it would have been greatly to my advantage to have left it for advancement in other branches." "Getting Through West Point," manuscript, 106, John C. Tidball Papers, United States Military Academy, West Point, New York. 2 William Tecumseh Sherman, Memoirs ofGeneral W. T. Sherman (New York: The Library of America, 1990), 199. Civil War History, Vol. xliv No. 3 © 1998 by The Kent State University Press 176civil war history Events of the spring of 1861 pulled the North and South relentlessly toward that first major battle of the War. On March 5, only one short day after his inauguration, Lincoln was greeted with the news that dwindling food supplies would force an evacuation of Fort Sumter within four to six weeks. Sumter was one of only two Southern forts of any significance still in federal possession at the end of the Buchanan presidency; the other was Fort Pickens in Pensacola Harbor. Lincoln, in one of the first major decisions of his new presidency, ordered a secret expedition to reinforce Fort Pickens, but on Fort Sumter decided to wait out Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Cautiously, a few weeks later, he notified the Confederacy that he intended to send provisions only—no men or arms—to Sumter. Incessant demands from South Carolina for action to redeem Southern honor provoked Davis into a decision that would forever cast him as the aggressor who started the Civil War; he ordered Gen. P. G. T Beauregard, the Confederate Commander at Charleston, to attack. Two days later, on April 14, Fort Sumter surrendered.3 By this time Lt. John C. Tidball was already on his way to Fort Pickens. In the absence of its captain, William Barry, Tidball was in charge of BatteryA, 2d U.S. Artillery, and onApril 17, he disembarked in the heavy surf off Santa Rosa Island in Pensacola Harbor. Bvt. Maj. Henry Hunt's Company M, 2d U.S. Artillery was also there, along with an assortment ofregular army infantry and engineering personnel who were rushed to the scene...