 William Shakespeare King was the chief medical officer for the Union at the first Battle of Bull Run. The regimental surgeons working under him weren't very experienced. Medical schools at this time were not very rigorous. Many states had laws against human dissection, so most surgeons' first experience cutting open a human body would be on their patients. Medical schools required a semester of lectures. The schools that demanded that you take two semesters of lectures didn't change the lectures up between terms. So most doctors at this time really learned their trade through experience in conducting their practice. This might be enough for a doctor to get by in diagnosing and treating standard issues of the 1850s, scarlet fever, clubfoot, things like this, but even the doctors with years of experience under their belts would be unprepared for what they would encounter on the battlefield. The unexperienced doctors could be as young as 21 years old. But Dr. King wasn't very worried about it. Reflecting back on the battle, he said, quote, my impression at the commencement of the battle was that there would be a brief skirmish, and then the rebels would most probably fall back to take up a new position, end quote. He figured he could probably handle the small number of casualties by himself, and he decided he'd keep a list of all the injured soldiers that were brought to him. He stopped taking names after he reached 100. I mentioned previously some early signs of the Union overconfidence about the quick battle, and their medical preparations are a good example of this as well. They left many of their medical supplies behind when the battle started, making the Union actually less prepared to treat their wounded than the Confederates would be, despite the fact that the North actually had better resources of this kind than the South did overall. They did have ambulances, which were wheeled carts to transport the wounded, but the Army saved money by ordering a large number of two-wheeled ambulances rather than the preferable four-wheeled ones. This meant that the unfortunate soldier who was carried on a two-wheeled ambulance would be painfully tossed from side to side by the poorly balanced ambulance, and sometimes he'd be thrown off it altogether. The Army's designated various buildings or tents as hospitals, but as the casualties would mount, they quickly became overcrowded. Standard battlefield medicine was to have an assistant surgeon move through the battlefield, carrying a medical bag, sometimes carried by a steward, that had a few basic items in it for on-the-spot temporary treatment. This typically was something like a couple of tourniquets and splints, needles and ligatures to sew up open wounds, some items to clean wounds, and of course brandy to serve as an anesthetic. The closest medical facilities were the field stations, which were located ideally within a mile of the fighting, and they allowed the soldier to get more serious treatment before being transported to the general hospital. Most likely this was somebody's home, such as that of Wilmer MacLean. If the assistant surgeon felt like a soldier's wound was mortal, they would usually just give him a swig of brandy and move on to somebody else. This wasn't callus, it was just practical. If a wound was serious but treatable, the soldier would be taken to a field station, and this often meant amputation. If you've been listening to this podcast from the very beginning, I talked about drugs in the 19th century and the very first episodes, and I mentioned that opiates were seen as something of a goddessend for Civil War soldiers. Chloroform and morphine were pretty much the only thing a doctor had to serve as an anesthetic before and after an amputation, and you were certainly grateful for it, but at most, it would take the edge off the tremendous agony that amputation brought about. And at the outset of the war, opium was in short supply for both sides. The south would have less access to these items throughout the war in the north, though. When people visited these field stations, they were overwhelmed by the cries of pain and the stench of blood. But probably the most unnerving sight would be the literal piles of arms and legs that would accumulate. This isn't just histrionics. Soldiers' descriptions of the horrible piles of limbs are among the most common things found in written records from soldiers. Amputations became perfunctory. One Union general, Carl Scherz, described his viewing of a filled station after the Battle of Gettysburg. And this is a quote I've read before in the early episodes when talking about morphine, but it's useful when I'm going to read it again, quote. As a wounded man was lifted on the table, often shrieking with pain as the attendants handled him. The surgeon quickly examined a wound and resolved upon cutting off the injured limb. Some ether was administered, and the body put in position in a moment. The surgeon snatched his knife from between his teeth, where it had been while his hands were busy, wiped it rapidly once or twice across his blood-stained apron, and the cutting began. The operation accomplished. The surgeon would look around with a deep sigh and then, next. And so it went on, hour after hour, while the number of expectant patients seemed hardly to diminish, end quote. But amputations were safer than the alternative. Little was known at this time about microorganisms and their role in diseases and infections. Gangrene spread so quickly that one of the country's leading surgeons, Frank Hamilton, who witnessed thousands of cases, wrote a medical treatise and said, quote, no one doubts that hospital gangrene is contagious, end quote. Gangrene is not contagious, but the doctors had no way of knowing how it spread. When a soldier had a gunshot wound, the low-velocity bullets would rip holes in the flesh and then possibly ricochet off a bone or exit through a hole at some odd and unpredictable angle from the entry wound. So doctors weren't always sure if the soldiers still had the bullet lodged inside them. To figure out whether there was a bullet that needed removing, doctors had to probe the wound. And because the bullet didn't always maintain a straight trajectory when passing through the soldier's body, they needed a probe that was flexible. So they used their fingers. AIDS would have to hold the soldier down to keep them from lashing wildly from the pain while the doctor shoved his finger in the wound, twist and bend it around causing excruciating pain for the wounded soldier and unknowingly spreading bacteria from under their fingernails, often leading to gangrene or some other infection. The amputation simply seemed like the lesser evil in many cases. Battlefield medicine would evolve quite a bit throughout the war as people adapted to the unforeseen scale of battlefield casualties. And I'm not going to get into those changes here. I hope to devote an entire episode to battlefield medicine and its changes through the Civil War much later in the series. But I don't know exactly how everything is going to pan out, so we'll see. But for here, I just wanted to give you an idea of what the understaffed, undertrained, under-equipped, and wholly unprepared battlefield surgeons found themselves dealing with as Bull Run escalated into a large-scale battle. These are the elements of this war that are so often left out of lectures on this topic. I'm Chris Calton, and this is the Mises Institute podcast, Historical Controversies. In the previous two episodes, we looked at the first battle of Bull Run up through the afternoon fighting on Henry Hill. We ended the episode right as the battle started to reach its climax after Union General Irvin McDowell ordered an artillery charge against the Union forces organized by Stonewall Jackson only to find themselves devastated. After prematurely celebrating victory around noon, the Union forces found the tide turn against them around 2 PM. And by four o'clock, the battle had made a complete 180. Now, both sides would engage in the deadliest part of the battle, as each tried to take control of the Union artillery between Matthews Hill and Henry Hill. We will pick up where we left off last week. Let me remind everybody once again before we get into the meat of this episode that as we approach the one-year anniversary of Historical Controversies, we are taking questions from listeners that will be answered during our live Q&A at 2 PM Eastern Time on August 6th. If you have a question about any of the topics covered so far on the podcast, such as the war on drugs or the antebellum years or the current topic, or even if you have general history questions or questions about history in the view of Ludwig von Mises, please submit your questions to mesis.org.com. I've already gotten a few good questions, but we still have room for more, so get those questions to me. And if you can't watch live at 2 PM Eastern, the Q&A will also be posted on YouTube, so don't miss out. I ended the last episode with the Confederate charge on the two cannons on the Confederate left under the command of Charles Griffin. To the left of them were the six guns under the command of James Ricketts. And to the left of that were the other three guns in Griffin's battery. The two Griffin guns were the first to be left behind, but the other batteries were facing heavy pressure from the reinforced Confederate line on Henry Hill. After Griffin's cannon ears retreated, the Union Regiment of Infantry support pushed back and drove the Confederates off, reclaiming the guns. They tried to move them off the battlefield, but the horses were dead, so the men had to move the guns not just without the horses, but with the carcasses of the horses still strapped to the guns, only adding to the weight. They couldn't budge them. The reality is that the New York Infantry had done a better job at scattering the Confederate line than they realized because the smoke from the battlefield was so intense that they couldn't see the devastation they had wrought against the Southerners. They therefore did not know that they had an opportunity to push on the Confederate left flank, which was the original plan in moving the guns there, and they failed to seize this opportunity, so they charged the Confederate artillery instead in Stonewall Jackson had been preparing for this since he first set up the line on the Hill. He gave his men their instructions, quote, reserve your fire until they come within 50 yards, then fire and give them the bayonet, and when you charge, yell like furies, end quote. When the New Yorkers got close enough, both the artillery and the infantry unloaded on them, unleashing a destructive volley of canister shot with its 27 projectiles with a 16 foot spread, and a musket fire. New Yorkers went down, but the regiment reformed and charged again, and then a third time, finally getting within a few yards of Jackson's cannons. But they now had the bodies of their comrades littering the ground around them, and they were within range of Jackson's bayonet charge. After driving back the New York regiment, Jackson ordered a bayonet charge from the troops in front of Ricketts artillery in the center. This was done by the fourth and 27th Virginia. When Ricketts saw the charging Confederates, he was lying on the ground, unable to walk from a wound to his thigh. His artillery horses were dead, and the guns were immobile. When he tried to call for union men to face the charging Southerners, his call went ignored. The artillerists held fast though, loading their cannons with canister now that the enemy was in range, and they tore holes in the Confederate line, but it wasn't enough to stop the charge. Now the canineers fled, and the Confederates claimed Ricketts guns. Now Confederates were swarming onto the battlefield, mostly from the Confederate left flank, which was the most open. As they charged, Francis Bartow, leading the survivors from his seventh Georgia regiment that had fought on Matthews Hill that morning, was shot in the chest. In one famous account, one of the soldiers who helped carry him wrote, with both hands clasped over his breast, he raised his head and with a god-like effort, his eye glittering in its last gleam with a blazing light, he said, with a last heroic flash of his lofty spirit. They have killed me, but boys never give up the field," end quote. When Colonel Charles Fisher led the charge of his sixth North Carolina regiment down the left side of Henry Hill, his men took fire from some unseen scattering of Union soldiers, firing from behind trees. His men broke their line and started to scatter themselves, and Fisher himself took a bullet through the skull, dying on the spot. The scene was chaos, and the men had trouble telling whether the soldiers around them were friends or enemies. This was the most heated part of the entire battle of Bull Run, as the largest number of men faced off in close quarters. One man was hit by the severed arm of one of his nearby comrades who lost it to a cannonball. Another soldier took a bullet to the neck, which exited through his open mouth, and somehow the soldier kept fighting. The close combat led to many stories of this nature. One man was knocked unconscious by the flying gun of the soldier next to him when he was killed. Another was killed by a bullet, and when he fell, his bayonet plunged through the foot of the soldier in front of him. At this point, roughly 3.30 p.m., the Confederates had captured eight cannons, all six of Ricketts' guns, and the two Howitzers that Griffin had moved to the Confederate left. The other three of Griffin's cannons on the opposite side of Henry Hill had retreated. McDowell observed the battlefield, and the idea of defeat must have been sinking in. The scene around Henry Hill was now bedlam as each regiment from either side fought for control over the cannons. Two groups of New Yorkers, the 14th Brooklyn and the Fire's Waves, attempted a charge against the Confederates that one Virginian who faced them called, quote, self-imposed butchery, end quote. The New Yorkers were decimated. One soldier from Massachusetts later described the scene in a letter to his mother, quote, there was men laying dead and wounded, and the artillery men had been killed, and the horses were all dead, piled together by the cannon. The bullets were flying thick. The enemy wasn't more than a stone's throw from us, end quote. The charge from the 5th and 11th Massachusetts was more successful, but not without cost. Dozens of men fell as they charged the Confederates guarding Ricketts' battery, and the line of the 5th Massachusetts broke. The 11th Massachusetts ran in from the Confederate right and drove the Southerners back. Like a pendulum, control of the cannons swung back to the Union. But more fresh Confederates kept arriving. The most recent brigade to arrive from Manassas Junction was the one led by Edmund Kirby Smith, and he was accompanied by the regiments that had been guarding the southeast part of Bull Run, led by Jubal Early and Millage Bonham. Several regiments from the brigade commanded by Philip St. George Koch also poured in. The 5th Virginia regiment charged down toward the Massachusetts troops who'd recently reclaimed Ricketts' battery. The pendulum swung back to the Confederates. At this point, it was an infantry battle, as the artillery guns from the Confederates had to withdraw. With the Union soldiers decimated, scattered, and beaten, McDowell was down to only two battle-ready brigades, totaling about 5,000 men. One of them, led by Colonel Oliver Howard, was ordered to move to Chin Ridge. Historians aren't exactly sure why McDowell did this. He only ordered Howard to support a battery, but historians aren't clear on what was meant by this. The common suggestion is that he was to provide the final charge on Henry Hill, which could be the case, but McDowell's orders give no indication of this, so we are left to speculation. Regardless, Howard's brigade took up on Chin Ridge, about 500 yards to the west of the Henry farm. The other brigade was led by William Sherman. This was the larger of the two brigades, totaling about 3,000 men. This brigade consisted of four regiments, and Sherman lined them up, one behind the other, to charge Henry Hill. This would prove to be a rookie mistake, and Sherman, here, was a rookie in this battle. He'd earned his reputation later in the war. As his fresh troops marched toward the hill, they were discouraged by the sight of the dead and wounded they passed. Sherman sent his 13th New York regiment up the left side of Henry Hill. When they came upon the Henry house, they opened fire, only to hear a cry of, you're firing on friends. A couple of the soldiers in the regiment spotted what they believed to be a US flag. They stopped shooting. An officer they didn't recognize came up to them, and one of the New York regiments' officers asked if the stranger was a Union man. The stranger had thought that the New Yorkers were a regiment of Baltimore secessionists, and realizing his mistake, he calmly handed over his revolver and sword and allowed himself to be taken prisoner. He was from the Hampton Legion, and when the confusion was cleared up, the two regiments exchanged fire. One by one, Sherman ordered his regiments up the hill, allowing the Confederates to take them out as they came, rather than dealing with them as a whole unit. The Union soldiers also came under actual friendly fire as they charged, forcing the soldiers to deal with both their own side and the Confederate volleys. Constantly, as the men fired, they heard cries that they were firing on friends, and in the chaos, they had to determine whether it was true or not. At some point, they started to suspect that such cries were deliberate deceptions. This would be the reason why the now more recognizable Confederate battle flag was designed. The 79th New York was one of Sherman's regiments sent up the hill, and it was led by Colonel James Cameron, the brother of Lincoln's secretary of war. Like the regiments before them, they faced devastating fire from the Southerners. They held as best they could, reorganizing and charging again, only to face more fire. Among their casualties was Cameron, who was mortally wounded. As Sherman sent his last regiment, the 69th New York toward Henry House, he received some backup from Lieutenant J. Albert Monroe, who brought two new cannons to the fight, and Colonel J. Hobart Ward's 38th New York regiment. Together, both regiments charged up the hill, facing a hail storm of bullets, and they fought for maybe 20 minutes before driving the Confederates out of the Henry House. The pendulum swung back to the Union, who once again took control of Rickett's battery. Bull Run was Sherman's first experience in combat, and the day left a strong impression on him. He described the scene, quote, then, for the first time, I saw the carnage of battle, men lying in every conceivable shape and mangled in a horrible way. But this did not make a particle of impression on me. But horses running around riderless with blood streaming from their nostrils, lying on the ground hitched to guns, gnawing their sides in death. I sat on my horse on the ground where Rickett's battery had been shattered to fragments and saw the havoc done. End quote. With the battery back in Union hands, the men tried to drag the guns off the field, no longer facing artillery fire from the Confederate line, and with the Confederate infantry weakened by the battle, they were able to drag the guns about 200 yards. But again, the Confederates had fresh troops on hand, the ones I mentioned earlier, some of whom were just now arriving. The new Confederate troops rushed over the top of Henry Hill and came down upon the New Yorkers trying to remove Rickett's battery. They cut the Union troops to pieces and drove them back. The pendulum swung back to the Confederacy. They would not lose control of the cannons again. The last hope that McDowell had was Howard's brigade still holding out on Chin Ridge. As Howard's brigade held their position on Chin Ridge, they were able to see the swarm of Confederate soldiers moving over the hill and driving off Sherman's troops. As they fled, they passed warning to Howard's men. It was a discouraging sight. The fleeing Union soldiers were being chased by Confederates led by Joseph Kershaw. We shot them down like beasts of prey, one of Kershaw's men later wrote. The Yankees gave one last fierce stand around Rickett's guns, but their situation was hopeless. Following behind Kershaw was Brigadier General Edmund Kirby Smith and his brigade. Smith took a bullet to the neck, not killing him, but ending his role in the battle. And Colonel Arnold Elsie took over his command. Behind Elsie was Jubal Earleys brigade, which included a fresh battery of cannons. They all pushed forward toward Chin Ridge. When the Confederates came upon the line of Union troops, fighting erupted once more. But even as the two sides exchanged fire, Elsie and Earleys moved to the Confederate left to flank the Union soldiers. They fired numerous volleys at the men on the ridge above them as they charged. But the most damage came from the Confederate cannons. The Union soldiers had the high ground on the ridge, but the artillery effectively forced them out of their position. At relatively close range, several Union men went down under cannon fire, but the explosions were enough to make the men scatter even if they weren't hit. The two regiments in the lower line of Howard's brigade moved up the hill to where the rear lines were. After holding the position for a little while, Howard finally called for his men to fall back and reorganize. This looked like a retreat and the Confederates cheered. They charged to pursue the fleeing enemy, but when they came over the ridge, they found the Union men holding a new line. It didn't matter. The Confederates had the advantage and the Union line broke quickly. One Confederate later bragged that they, quote, fled like sheep, end quote. The Union men had had enough, wrote one of the main soldiers, quote, confusion, disorder, seized us at once. It was everyone for himself and having a due regard for individuality, each gave special attention to the momentum of his legs, end quote. Panics spread and Union soldiers started fleeing en masse. A Rhode Island soldier gave his own description, quote, the scene was terrible. Cavalry, infantry, and artillery in one confused mass hurried away as fast as possible, end quote. Included in the rush were injured soldiers being willed away on the ambulance as I mentioned earlier. At one point, a Confederate shell landed right on top of an ambulance in the words of the Union soldiers who witnessed it, quote, blowing at once to Adams, one of our dearest companions, end quote. The officers tried to rally the men and maintain some semblance of order, but it was no good. On the Confederate side, Beauregard rode through his troops, waving his cap and yelling cries of victory. McDowell told his men to fall back to Centroville and regroup. The few men from each army near there had not seen much action. This is where Beauregard had expected the action to take place before Richard Ewell failed to receive orders to initiate the attack. So while everyone else battled, they held their position in front of Israel Richardson and Thomas Davies. Davies had spent the past few hours scouting his position and when he found a path he thought was vulnerable, he started erecting some barricades. A local girl, 17 years old, saw him constructing this barricade and riding her horse, she innocently approached the Union soldiers and asked what they were building. Since she didn't seem to be a threat, the soldiers answered her and she casually rode away. Then she went to Richard Ewell's Confederate camp to relay the information about the fortifications, but Ewell could see Union canineers loading their guns in the distance and as the girl was explaining her story, Ewell became exasperated and interrupted her quote. Look there, look there miss. Don't you see those men with blue clothing on? In the edge of the woods? Look at those men loading those big guns. They're going to fire and fire quick and fire right here. You'll get killed. You'll be a dead damsel in less than a minute. Get away from here. Get away. End quote. But the woman was unconcerned and she finished giving her report. After she finally left, Ewell turned to one of his subordinates and said quote, women, I tell you sir, women would make a grand brigade if it was not for snakes and spiders, end quote. But the girls in tell wouldn't matter. With the Union on the run, Ewell received orders to return to Stonebridge and cut off the retreating Union forces. The Union spectators were about to face a giant surprise as the Union forces were running back across Bull Run and heading their way. But they were too far from the scene of the fighting to see the beginnings of the retreat. One reporter for the New York Herald, having grown restless on the hill, moved towards Stonebridge and asked one of the Union officers still there where McDowell was. The officer responded quote, you won't find him. All his chaos in front, the battle is lost. Our troops are giving way and falling back without orders. Get back to Centerville, end quote. Beauregard wanted to pursue the retreating soldiers and this is where cavalry were most useful. But the Confederates at this point were not much more organized than the Union. Jeb Stuart had split his force earlier to cover both of Jackson's flanks on Henry Hill and they still had not reformed. But the half of his force he had with him started to rush after the Yankees. To Stuart's surprise, a group of the Union soldiers they swarmed down on, turned around and formed a defensive square against the cavalry, another Napoleonic tactic. It was effective and Stuart led his men back and they gave chase more cautiously after this. The Confederates pursued the Union soldiers cross bull run and eventually ran into the civilian spectators. Some Confederate cavalrymen were the first to charge up the hill where they came across Daniel McCook, the spectator whose son Charles McCook was in the battle and had even taken a break to have lunch with him earlier in the day. With his father as a witness, a Confederate horseman came upon Charles and demanded his surrender. Charles refused and the horseman circled around behind him and shot him in the back before riding off, according to Daniel McCook's account. McCook then gathered up his son and put him on a carriage to ride back to Washington DC but Charles would die within a few hours. The Confederate cavalry was terrifying to the Union soldiers. Anytime they saw horsemen, they would cry warnings about the quote unquote black horse cavalry. There was one such cavalry that went by that name but the vast majority of the cavalry, the Union soldiers saw were not it. Nonetheless, the legend of the black horse cavalry became something that Union men would tell horror stories about and every time the cavalrymen was spotted, the soldier was certain that they were part of the dreaded black horse cavalry. The pursuing cavalry in this case were not despite Union fears, the black horse cavalry. They were troopers under the command of RCW Radford but they were scary enough and they claimed dozens of prisoners as well as another Union battery that soldiers had abandoned so that they could escape more quickly. When the eighth South Carolina regiment crossed the Stone Bridge, they spotted a man hiding behind a tree. The Confederates asked to he was Alfred Eli, he answered. They asked what state he was from and the man said New York. Seeing that the man was not a soldier, they asked next, are you connected with the government to which Eli answered that he was a representative in Congress. Hearing this, the men took away Eli's pistol and brought him as a prisoner to their officer, EBC Cash. When Cash learned of the man's identity, he flew into a rage. God damn your white-livered soul, he yelled pointing his pistol at Eli's head. I'll blow your brains out on the spot. He's a member of Congress, God damn him. Came out here to see the fun, came to see us whipped and killed. God damn him if it was not for such as he, there would be no war. God damn him, I'll show him. Before Cash could execute Eli, Porter Alexander intervened. You must not shoot a prisoner, Porter said. Never shoot an unarmed man. Reluctantly, Cash acquiesced and Eli was taken prisoner and kept for six months before finally being released, leading him to eventually write a book about his experience in the Confederate prison. Another prize taken by the Confederacy was the 30-pound cannon that opened the battle. Peter Haynes was struggling to get his beloved gun off the field, but it was gigantic and even with tent horses, it was almost impossible to get over the Virginia Hills. Haynes described the hill that defeated him, quote, the men lashed to the sweating, panting animals again and again, but the great gun refused to move up the incline, end, quote. He had to abandon it, giving the Confederacy their greatest trophy from the battle. The London Times correspondent wrote about the Union retreat that he witnessed, quote, the scene on the road had now assumed an aspect which is not a parallel in any description I have ever read. Infantry soldiers on mules and draught horses, Negro servants on their masters wagons, ambulance is crowded with unwounded soldiers, wagons swarming with men who threw out the contents in the road to make room, grinding through a shouting, screaming massive men on foot, who were literally yelling with rage, end, quote. As the Union soldiers ran into a traffic jam at Stone Bridge, too many trying to cross it once, they made easy pickings for the Confederates. Even among many Confederates firing on these men seemed unseemly and cruel. One Confederate soldier gave his account, quote, I leaped over the fence when I heard a loud crash and looking back, I beheld the upper half of a soldier's body flying up the hill. He had almost been cut in twains by a solid ball at this almost barbarous cruelty, that is, firing upon an almost unarmed and entirely unopposing force, a cry of mortal terror arose from the flying soldiers, end, quote. The Confederates also captured some of the Union hospitals. When the enemy started to come upon them, surgeons had to make the choice to stay and treat their patients, or to leave the wounded behind that avoid being captured themselves. In most cases, the doctors fled. In at least one case, the doctor abandoning his patient right as he was about to make the first cut of an amputation. You can hardly blame the doctors who ran, but nine doctors deserve particular admiration. In the Sudley Hospital, nine doctors chose to stay and tend to their patients, even as some of their colleagues ran. They allowed themselves to be captured and imprisoned because they refused to abandon the injured soldiers in their care. As the soldiers ran past the spectators, the politicians on the hill were incensed. Eight members of Congress formed a line across the road, yelling at the soldiers that they were not allowed to pass, calling them cowards and yelling profanities at them. According to the account left by Albert Riddle, one of the politicians forming this line, Senator Benjamin Wade even had, quote, his rifle in his hand and said he would shoot the first man who attempted to run any further, end quote. Another senator, Zachariah Chandler, pulled out his revolver and threatened the fleeing soldiers, calling them, quote, fools and cowards. When Henry Wilson, the senator from Massachusetts, learned of the retreat of the volunteers from his state, he reacted similarly, quote, cowards, why don't they turn and beat back the scoundrels, end quote. It's difficult to even imagine a group of politicians waving guns and yelling insults at the young men, some only teenagers, for not wanting to stay and continue fighting after facing 12 hours of seeing their friends get cut to pieces around them. I don't think anything else in this battle quite makes my blood boil as much as this scene of the arrogance of these congressmen. I will end this episode here with the battle decisively won by the Confederacy. Before moving on from Bull Run though, I do want to discuss the aftermath and significance of this battle. And that will be the topic of the next episode. 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