 Probably the biggest change in perspective that was observed on both sides of the war after the union defeated Bull Run was the loss of romanticism about the war. Even though we don't have precise figures, more than half as many Americans died in that battle than the entire Mexican-American war. Young men who signed up for an adventure soon learned the grim realities of combat. This new reality permeated throughout the rest of the citizenry as well. When the retreating army of northeastern Virginia returned to Washington DC, the sight of them served as a cold awakening for many of the patriotic warhawks of the north. The journalist William Russell wrote about his first sight of the defeated soldiers in his diary, and I think his description gives an account that is accurate for much of the north. I awoke from a deep sleep this morning about six o'clock. The rain was falling in torrents and beat with a dull, thudding sound on the leads outside my window. But louder than all came a strange sound as if, of the tread of men, a confused tramp and splashing and a murmuring of voices. I got up and ran to the front room, the windows of which looked on the street and there to my intense surprise, I saw a steady stream of men covered with mud, soaked through with rain, who were pouring irregularly without any semblance of order up Pennsylvania Avenue towards the capital. A dense stream of vapor rose from the multitude, but looking closely at the men, I perceived they belonged to different regiments, New Yorkers, Michiganders, Rhode Islanders, Massachusettsers, Minnesotians, mingled pel-mel together. Many of them were without knapsacks, cross belts, and fire locks. Some had neither great coats nor shoes, others were covered with blankets. Hastily putting on my clothes, I ran downstairs and asked an officer who was passing by, a pale young man who looked exhausted to death and who had lost his sword for the empty sheath dangled at his side where the men were coming from. Where from? Well, sir, I guess we're all coming out of Virginia as fast as we can and pretty well whipped, too. What? The whole army, sir? That's more than I know. They may stay that like, I know I'm going home. I've had enough of fighting to last my lifetime. The news seemed incredible, but there before my eyes were the jaded, dispirited, broken remnants of regiments passing on wards where and for what I knew not, and it was evident enough that the mass of the Grand Army of the Potomac was placing that river between it and the enemy as rapidly as possible. Is there any pursuit? I asked of several men, some were too surly to reply. Others said, they're coming as fast as they can after us. Others? Since they've stopped it now, the rain is too much for them. A few said they did not know and looked as if they did not care. End quote. He gives another account later in the day, quote, the rain has abated a little and the pavements are densely packed with men in uniform, some with others without arms on whom the shopkeepers are looking with evident alarm. They seem to be in possession of all the spirit houses. Now and then shots are heard down the street or in the distance and cries and shouting as if a scuffle or a difficulty were occurring. Willard is turning into a barrack for officers and presents such a scene in the hall as could only be witnessed in a city occupied by a demoralized army. There is no provost guard, no patrol, no authority visible in the streets. General Scott is quite overwhelmed by the affair and is unable to stir. General McDowell is not yet arrived. The secretary of war knows not what to do. Mr. Lincoln is equally helpless and Mr. Seward, who retains some calmness, is not withstanding his military rank and military experience without resource or expedient. There are a good many troops hanging on about the camps and forts on the other side of the river, it is said. But they are thoroughly disorganized and will run away if the enemy comes in sight without a shot and then the capital must fall at once. Why Beauregard does not come, I know not, nor can I well guess. I have been expecting every hour since noon to hear his canon. Here is a golden opportunity. If the Confederates do not grasp that which will never come again on such terms, it stamps them with mediocrity." Both dismay and tear spread through the nation's capital at the side of the beaten soldiers. People were afraid the Confederates were on their way to take the city and they fled in droves. In his diary Russell gave his account of speaking with a young black boy who said that he had to leave before the Confederates came and took him as a slave. Everybody in the city believed that the arrival of Confederate conquerors was imminent. Lincoln spent the entire day of the 22nd lying on his sofa in the cabinet room of the White House, mentally, physically, and emotionally drained by the recent events. He was beginning to realize, just as so many other people were beginning to realize, that this war was going to be far more trying than anybody could have anticipated. I'm Chris Calton and this is the Mises Institute podcast, Historical Controversies. In the previous episodes we have covered the campaign leading up to the First Battle of Bull Run, or First Manassas, which resulted in a crushing Confederate victory. Visions of a quick war, decided by a single decisive battle, were over. The Confederates proved that they could match the Union on the battlefield despite all the apparent disadvantages they faced as the less populated and less industrialized region of the country. Although Bull Run would be eclipsed by several bloodier battles in the coming years, it was eye-opening for both the Union and the Confederacy and it served as the first hint of the coming bloodshed. The significance of all of this makes it worth devoting an episode to the aftermath of the battle, particularly in the Union political sphere. And before we get into the meat of today's episode, this is the last reminder that we will be doing a live Q&A this Monday, August 6th at 2 p.m. Eastern Time. If you have a question you would like me to answer, there's still some time to submit at Mises.org slash QA. Send me your questions and if you can't watch live, the video and audio will be available for later viewing as well. Contrary to fears in the capital, there was no Confederate push on D.C. Even if they had wanted to, and some apparently did, the armies of the Shenandoah and Potomac were hardly fit enough to invade the Union capital after their costly victory at Bull Run. Jefferson Davis arrived on the battlefield after the combat was over and spoke to his officers. Davis was no stranger to war, but the sight of the soldiers was unlike anything he'd ever seen. According to Hunter McGuire, the Army surgeon for Stonewall-Jackson's brigade, he said that the Confederate president, quote, looked around at his great crowd of soldiers. His face was deadly pale and his eyes flashing, end quote. When Jackson saw the president, while he was getting his wounded finger treated, he stood up, took off his cap, gave his commander-in-chief a salute and said, quote, We have whipped them. They ran like dogs. Give me 10,000 men and I will take Washington City tomorrow, end quote. Many historians dismiss this as a meaningless offer that Jackson was in no position to carry out. And at least one historian, David Detser, questions the veracity of the account on the grounds that it was out of character for Stonewall-Jackson, but most historians do believe that regardless of whether or not he believed he could do it, Jackson did actually make this offer. The Confederate victory brought them important gains, not the least of which was maintaining control of the all-important Manassas Junction. The significance of railroads during the war was made quite clear by Johnston's ability to reinforce Beauregard at crucial moments throughout the battle. Control of the railroads was one of the primary ways that the Confederates were able to compensate for their smaller army in the early part of the war as they could quickly transport troops to wherever they were needed. The Confederates also seized 16 pieces of artillery, including the giant 30-pound cannon that was hardly even fit for battlefield use because of its enormous size. By controlling the battlefield, they were also able to recover a large supply of weapons from the dead or from Union soldiers who dropped them during the retreat. Given the Union's economic superiority, the Confederate arms gains here were a tremendous windfall. The men were understandably ecstatic at their victory. They knew that the Union did not consider them capable of matching northern strength, but Southerners proudly believed that a single Confederate was worth several Union soldiers and the recent battle seemed to confirm this in the minds of many Southerners. But as jubilant as they were in their victory, they still faced the harsh reality of their many fallen comrades. The Confederate leaders counted nearly 900 battlefield dead, Union and Confederate combined, and hundreds more would follow them as infected wounds would take the lives of many of the more than 2,600 injured soldiers. As the uninjured men looked for fallen comrades, it would be increasingly difficult to find anything to celebrate. A group of Georgians, when searching for their regiment commander, Colonel Francis Bartow, came across all manner of carnage. Writing about one dead body, they found a soldier said that quote, The lower part of his face had been carried away, end quote. Elsewhere, they found a trail of blood left by some injured soldier dragging himself away from the battle. Where a Union cannon had been, they found quote, Five horses and a heap, end quote. Accounts of this kind of carnage show up in thousands of letters and diaries left behind. Each telling a different gruesome story. Instead of celebrating, the soldiers spent their time trying to bury the dead. For the injured, surgeons continued doing what they could, which often resulted in rising piles of amputated arms and legs forming around the makeshift hospitals that were quickly constructed all along the railroads, so the troops could be more easily moved to them. One six-year-old girl witnessed the battle and remembered it well enough to tell her grandchildren about it decades later. She also remembered the story told to her by her uncle William Wilkins, the night the battle ended. He'd been walking through the woods when he heard cries of pain coming from a young soldier that Wilkins estimated to be about seventeen years old. When he asked the boy what he wanted, the poor wounded soldier cried, I want my mother. Unable to do anything else, Wilkins took the boy's empty canteen, filled it in a spring nearby, and brought it back to the young man to drink. He promised that he would come back for him in the morning, and the boy responded, quote, no, I will be gone before tomorrow, end quote. The young man was correct. When Wilkins returned the next day, the boy was dead. The devastation of the battle prevented any real celebration of victory in Confederate cities. Virginia citizens volunteered to house injured soldiers, as there were too many wounded men for the Confederate hospitals to keep them all. In Richmond, the returning soldiers offered a similarly grim sight to that described in D.C. by Russell, as I recounted in the opening to this episode. Between the sight of the bandaged men and the widespread effect of lost loved ones, there was little reason to rejoice. The victory brought relief, but not celebration. The death of Miss Henry, the only civilian casualty of the battle, served as fodder for Confederate propaganda. She was the victim of union barbarity, according to southern propagandists. Another popular story intended to drum up hatred for the north was the infamous Lincoln handcuffs. Supposedly, among the captured supplies of the defeated Union soldiers were 30,000 pairs of handcuffs. This story spread widely as evidence of the Yankee plan to shackle thousands of Confederate prisoners and march them in front of the advancing Union army on the way to take Richmond. The story was almost entirely fabricated, but it was rooted in a very small kernel of truth in that one regiment officer from Maine did bring with him about 60 pairs of handcuffs that Confederates recovered. However, these handcuffs were not intended for Confederate prisoners, but rather were intended for potential mutinous Union soldiers. But the fabricated explanation for the handcuffs spread throughout the south with no regard for reality. By contrast, the Union reaction I described in the intro was at least for a short time contained within D.C. The newspapers in the city gave no reports of the Union defeat, most of them reporting on an apparent victory, if anything, based on the premature pronouncements by soldiers during the early part of the battle. Union censors made sure to prevent any newspapers from printing any reports of Union defeat throughout the rest of the country. But the presence of the Union soldiers grew and words spread quickly enough. Soldiers reacted differently to the defeat, but none of the reactions were good. Some men abandoned their camps looking for alcohol and begging for food. One Alexandria civilian wrote, quote, our city is overrun with drunken vagabonds who, being without discipline, are a tear to our people, end quote. Anywhere that sold alcohol was crowded with drunken soldiers who were, quote, drunk, vomiting, and rolling in their filth, end quote, according to one soldier's testimony. But it's hard not to have sympathy for these men who were reduced to begging for food. One Massachusetts private wrote a letter home in which she told his family, quote, I begged for a piece of bread and was given some hoe cake and butter. I sat down on the fence of the White House while eating it, end quote. In some regiments, small mutinies broke out and had to be harshly suppressed. As the days moved slowly on in and around the capital, the chaos grew. On July 26th, one drunken private from New Hampshire named William Murray murdered a woman named Mary Butler on the streets of Alexandria. In order to make an example of him, he was quickly tried by a military tribunal and sentenced to execution. He was publicly hanged, and all the nearby regiments were ordered to stand at attention while they watched. Within weeks, nearly 200 union officers resigned. This was probably a very positive thing for the Union Army as the rapid mobilization of the army meant the promotion of many people who were not fit to be officers, and the embarrassing defeat helped weed out the less capable. This would have been especially true for local officers as officers that did not hold national commissions were often popularly elected by the men in their regiment. Most of these resignations came from very minor state level officers. The northern enthusiasm for the war shifted tremendously, as can be expected. Volunteers for the army slowed a great deal now that the realities of war were starting to sink in. The Confederates now looked like a formidable enemy. One Wisconsin private wrote quote, we have learned that they are not a miserable rabble, half clothed and half armed, but a well armed, powerful army, end quote. Horace Greeley, who had been one of the chief advocates for a quick push toward Richmond, wrote a letter to a president revealing how awful he felt about the news of union defeat. He said to Lincoln quote, this is my seventh sleepless night. You are not considered a great man, and I am a hopelessly broken one. If it is best for the country and mankind, that we make peace with the rebels at once and on their own terms, do not shrink even from that, end quote. Lincoln was more optimistic about remaining support for the war in the north, but he was dismayed at Greeley's willingness to surrender after so vocally supporting the war before the battle. Instead of seeking peace, Lincoln decided to double down. A week following the battle, he sent a memo ordering four major union armies to press on. This referred to the army at Cairo, Illinois, which was not yet under the command of Ulysses S Grant, but would be soon. The army of Cincinnati, that would eventually be led by William Tecumseh Sherman. The army of Pennsylvania, which was no longer led by Robert Patterson, who was relieved of command for his failure to keep Johnston from reaching Manassas Junction. And the army of Alexandria and Arlington, that was to now be commanded by George McClellan. Lincoln certainly wasn't the only person in the north who was ready to double down after the defeat at Bull Run, and this isn't an unpredictable reaction. Some people obviously were less eager for war once the true cost of it started to become apparent, but others became more eager to fight out of a growing sense of resentment against the Confederates, who they believed were to blame for all of this suffering. The mood in the north changed, but it's better to see it as pushing people to the outer edges of the pro-war, anti-war divide. One other political shift was support for emancipation. With the exception of the radicals like Horace Greeley, most people in the north did not support emancipation of the slaves, and they supported the war out of nationalism and unionism. But with resentment for the South growing, support for emancipation grew as well, but not because people started to care more about the plight of slaves, but rather because they saw it as a way to punish the South. But even if the support grew for the wrong reasons, it still demonstrates a significant shift. One Northern Democrat four days after the battle vocalized his support for freeing the slaves, writing, quote, We are fighting on a false issue. The Negro is at the bottom of the trouble. The South is fighting for the Negro and nothing else, end quote. At this point, I think it's incorrect to say that the South was only fighting for their slaves. Confederate soldiers legitimately did believe in political independence and Southern nationality, as revealed in their personal letters and diaries. But as I always stress, the perspective among people in the north is vital in understanding their actions, even if the perspective is inaccurate. By the time emancipation would actually go through, it was still largely supported as retribution against the South, and very few people supported any provisions that would compensate slaves. Though the proposals for compensating slaves out of the property of slave owners were ideas that Murray Rothbard thought to have been great ideas that would have offered a just form of restitution. And I will talk about that stuff later on, I think, but we are still a very long way off from that. So for now, it's enough to note the seeds of support for emancipation starting to sprout as a retributive measure against the South, and this idea will play an increasing role throughout the war. I mentioned earlier the Confederate propaganda that was designed to make the Union look like barbarians, and the Union was no different in their treatment of the South. Nor their newspapers made up accounts of Confederate atrocities against Union soldiers. Confederate soldiers, they said, mercilessly bayoneted wounded Union men as they lay helplessly on the ground. They fired their guns inside hospitals. When the Joint Committee on Conduct of the War was formed, one of their topics of investigations was, quote, unquote, rebel barbarity. This kind of propaganda is common in wars, of course. In World War I, Britain spread propaganda about German soldiers tossing Belgian babies from bayonet to bayonet, and a drum-up support against Iraq in the 1990s, our own media circulated the story of Iraqi soldiers murdering babies in hospitals. And as bad as the German and Iraqi militaries undoubtedly were, these were fabricated stories, just as the alleged rebel barbarities were fabricated. But in 1861, the propaganda actually had a minimal effect in the North, as Union soldiers actually quite commonly sent letters home, explicitly denying the stories of Confederate atrocities. As is always the case with such failures, people in the North were eager to find people to blame. Because the battle took place on a Sunday, some preachers blamed McDowell for waging the battle on the Sabbath. The chaplain for the House of Representatives said, quote, had the Sabbath been observed, had citizens been at church, and had the soldiers been permitted to rest and eat, and assembled to sing and pray, and hear the words of life from the chaplains, no doubt the results might have been different, end quote. Other people blamed the civilian spectators, who would be the cause of scorn in both the North and the South. One newspaper said that the fleeing civilians, quote, spread confusion as they advanced, and filled with consternation many a man who would have remained firm as granite, but for that society, end quote. This is undoubtedly a ridiculous explanation, but it illustrates both the need to point fingers, as well as the anger that people felt at the spectators, particularly after William Russell wrote an unflattering editorial about them for the London Times. But the political and military blame was more pointed and deliberate. McDowell, as well as many other people, blamed the untrained troops. This is true enough, but of course McDowell was the one who devised the plan to attack Richmond, rather than holding off any major land battles until the troops could be trained, as Winfield Scott had originally wanted to do. General Scott reminded the president of this, as well as a few senators and representatives who were present when he said, quote, I have fought this battle, sir, against my judgment, end quote. Lincoln countered that General Scott made it sound like the president had forced him to fight the battle, and Scott back down saying, quote, I have never served a president who has been kinder to me than you have been, end quote. Scott was probably being too generous to Lincoln, but the elderly general was among the only people who was not originally eager to meet the Confederates in battle, and he certainly had some grounds for defending himself from blame that he chose not to pursue further. The relationship between Lincoln and Scott would never be repaired, especially after one of the Democrat senators who was witness to the exchange later exploited Scott's statement on the floor of the Senate by charging the Republican president with pursuing a premature offensive. The senator probably wasn't wrong on that count, but many people were playing Monday morning quarterback with this argument, despite the fact that the vast majority of the people who supported the war at all also advocated a quick attack. The real reasons for defeat are of course far more complicated, and historians continued to debate the matter. Before I even detail some of this stuff, let me say that I always get uneasy with this Monday morning quarterback analysis that military historians are prone to. So on the one hand, it's easy to identify turning points in a battle and say that some move or another was a mistake, and that's all fair. It's a very different thing to say that to the military leader who made a particular mistake was making a bad decision at the moment he made it with the information he had. So that's the modest mindset that people should keep in mind when looking back on these battles. It's only with the benefit of hindsight that we can identify what went wrong, but when we filter out all the knowledge that we have and look only at the far more limited information that the generals had, it's easier to see how any capable leader could have made the same or a similar mistake in many of these instances. So battlefield analysis should always have this modesty check. Nonetheless, the bulk of the blame fell on Robert Patterson for not engaging Johnston. And as far as things go in contributing to the Confederate victory, there probably wasn't anything even close to as significant as Johnston's ability to reinforce Beauregardian asses. I mentioned in the first episode on the Bull Run campaign that Patterson was under the false impression that Johnston had a much larger armory than he actually had. And he chose not to attack because General Scott warned him against attacking a much larger force. And we might be generous to Patterson in recognizing that his poor intelligence was likely the product of the inexperienced scouts he was forced to deal with. And experienced men plagued both sides. However, even if we're generous to Patterson, he definitely doesn't help his own case when he boasts about insignificant gains that were handed to him, such as the minor victory at Hoax Run and some of his testimonies in his own defense were outright fabrications. So in terms of military analysis, Patterson probably does deserve the blame he got. And even if he was the genuine victim of bad information in General Scott's orders, it's undeniable that his failure to hold up Johnston had a tremendous impact on the outcome of the battle. But Johnston's reinforcement certainly did not guarantee victory at Bull Run. At best, the additional troops simply leveled the playing field against a much larger Union force at Manassas. The clear possibility of Union victory should be especially apparent when we observe the early Union victory on Matthews Hill. After taking the Hill, McDowell delayed giving further orders to pursue the Confederates for two hours. And this allowed the Confederates to reorganize on Henry Hill. Again, we should try to imagine McDowell's actions in the moment, given his limited knowledge of the situation. And it seems like he was taking the time to gain more information and move his artillery, which isn't unreasonable. But the time he afforded himself works even more to the advantage of the Confederacy. So his two-hour delay is still an undeniable turning point in the battle. It's also easier to criticize McDowell's delay given the premature celebrations of victory that quite clearly made the Union troops overconfident. Historians have also been highly critical of McDowell's complicated plan to push a small force across the bridge at Cub Run to look like the primary attack while sending two flanking forces around the Union right. The plan required precise timing of three separate arms of McDowell's army, which had to be executed with inexperienced troops and poor battlefield surveying that caused him to incorrectly estimate the distance the flank would travel. In this regard, I do think military historians are falling too much into the role of the Monday morning quarterback in criticizing McDowell's plan. He was dealing with a pressure to attack quickly, so proper training and surveying was impractical, and any plan aside from simply attempting a direct assault across the river would have likely run into the same problems of inexperienced troops and unknown terrain. Even with the complications in his plan, the flanking maneuver seemed to actually work relatively well given that the Union did successfully take Matthews Hill, despite the fact that not all the Union soldiers showed up at the time they were supposed to. Take any of my tactical analysis with a grain of salt, I'm not really a military historian, I'm more of a political historian, but I have trouble seeing what alternative plan McDowell could have done that would have been substantially better given his situation. The artillery charge McDowell ordered against the Confederates on Henry Hill is quite clearly one of the biggest mistakes of the battle. As I detailed in that episode, the rifled weapons meant that artillery charges, a favorite tactic of Napoleon, were no longer effective as infantry could fire on the artillery from greater distances than would have been the case in the days of smoothbore muskets. Again, if we are being generous to McDowell, we should acknowledge that in military histories, nobody ever really anticipates the consequences of new weaponry until they face it in battle. So McDowell's failure to anticipate the problems of a rifle toting infantry is a mistake that anybody else would have likely made as well. Still, it is also worth remembering that the artillery commanders who were ordered to conduct the attack did not think it was a good idea and they voiced their objections before complying with McDowell's orders. The artillery charge was a costly mistake. The assault on Henry Hill also saw various subordinate officer mistakes. Without detailing every minor mistake as these all added up to significant losses rather than singularly turning the battles, one example of interest is William Sherman's mistake. He's famous today as one of the greatest union generals who helped to win the war for the North, but Bull Run was his first actual combat experience and he showed his inexperience when he sent his regiments up Henry Hill one by one rather than having them attack in unison. This was a rookie mistake, but Sherman was a rookie at that point and it would be anachronistic to analyze him according to the experience he would have years later. Inexperienced officers were particularly common in the Union Army as the South did have a greater number of West Point graduates and Mexican war veterans on their side. It's likely that any one of these mistakes by itself would not have been enough to cost the Union their victory, but in combination, they allowed the Confederates to win the day. We can also point to things that some of the Confederate officers did right, such as Jackson's capable leadership in organizing the troops on Henry Hill, but the Confederates suffered their own mishaps, such as the failure for the orders to be delivered initiating the Confederate attack at the Southeast portion of the battlefield. In hindsight, this hiccup may have actually turned out to be a positive thing. Since it freed up troops to reinforce Henry Hill, but we really can only speculate on how the battle would have turned out had Beauregard's plan been executed successfully. Beauregard was also slow to movement to Henry Hill, still expecting the combat to take place in the Southeast, but Johnston was quicker to react to McDowell's flanking forces. All we can really say is that the Union mistakes outweighed the Confederate mistakes. And although I am again, not a military expert, my impression is that Johnston and Jackson showed themselves to be more capable battlefield leaders than Beauregard during Bull Run, as they reacted much more quickly and decisively to the events of the battle. Lesser-known figures today also showed themselves to be capable battlefield commanders, such as Nathan Evans, Wade Hampton III, Barnard B, Francis Bartow, and Arnold Elsie. Battlefield analysis on Bull Run focused heavily on Union mistakes, but the capable command of the Confederate brigade commanders certainly demonstrates a pivotal element for the outcome of the battle, and historians do generally acknowledge the superiority of Confederate military leadership overall. But the Northern politicians did not share the sober perspective. It was in their political interests to place blame on anyone but themselves. And after some other Union defeats, the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War was formed in December of 1861. They investigated a number of issues, but among them was the matter of Bull Run, and they sought testimonies from all the officers involved. The effect was essentially to get officers to throw each other under the bus and justify increased congressional oversight in the war, while conveniently neglecting the fact that Republican congressmen were overwhelmingly supportive of the overconfident plan to quickly advance on Richmond. I mentioned in a previous episode to the politicians who pulled their revolvers on retreating soldiers, calling them cowards and threatening to shoot them if they didn't stand and fight a battle that was already lost. I feel like most Civil War history is written as being the North versus the South, but if you notice that I can be critical as well as generous to both sides, it's probably because my biases are such that I see it as the government versus the people, and this Joint Committee is certainly an example of the government versus the people, in my view. The North-South divide certainly increased as the war progressed, as each side blamed the other for the destruction, but the political division was always greater than the civilian division. One sad but touching example of this comes from two Confederate civilians and a Union soldier. Amos and Margaret Benson lived near the battlefield of Bull Run. In two days after the battle, they came across a body and a blue uniform lying on the ground near their fence. When they walked up to him, they found him still alive, but severely wounded by a bullet that had pierced his lung. Although they didn't know it just yet, the man's name was Private John Rice, who had served in the Second New Hampshire Regiment. The couple called a doctor who informed them that the man was mortally wounded and there was nothing that could be done for him. The Bensons, a religious couple, believed that as Christians, it didn't matter if the man was friend or foe, and it was their duty to make his final days as comfortable as possible. Unable to move him due to the severity of his injury, they put up a tent around him to protect him from the weather, cleaned his wound, and brought him food and water every day. For 10 days, Private Rice lingered on with the Bensons caring for him. The doctor turned out to be wrong, and thanks in part to the Bensons' caregiving, Private Rice survived. He was later held as a prisoner of war in Richmond, and when he was released, he re-enlisted in the Union Army and rose to the rank of colonel. He survived the war, but even after four years of conflict, he said he could not consider the Bensons his enemy. Years later, in 1886, he visited the battlefield where he'd nearly died, and as luck would have it, he ran into the Bensons. They spoke as friends, and out of gratitude for saving his life, the former Union soldier asked to the former Confederate civilians if there was anything he could do for them. The Bensons responded that they were merely doing the quote, dictates of humanity. But when pressed, the Bensons admitted that the war had ravished their community in suddenly Virginia, and their church was struggling to stay open. The Bensons said if he wanted to donate a dollar or two, they'd be grateful. Instead, Private Rice went home to Massachusetts, where he'd since moved, and wrote his story for the local newspaper, asking for donations to rebuild the Bensons' church. Within days, he'd received enough contributions to rebuild the church entirely. When you read the history of wars, it has stories like this that serve as a tremendous contrast between civilians and governments. There's the story of enemy troops playing soccer on Christmas day during World War I. And I've read similar stories of Vietnam soldiers sharing marijuana with enemy Viet Cong. Not unlike the story I recounted a few episodes ago of the Union and Confederate soldiers sharing whiskey with each other as they served a centuries. These are the stories that should be put side by side with the warmongering accounts of politicians and newspaper editors calling to burn Richmond from their armchairs or the stories of the politicians pulling their revolvers on their own soldiers and calling them cowards. To be sure, there was civilian hatred for the enemy on each side, as there always is in war. But the hatred filters down from the top more often than not. At least that's my view of it. With the battle over and the war just beginning, Irving McDowell was replaced by General George McClellan who would command the Army of Northeastern Virginia throughout the failed move to Richmond that would occupy much of 1862. But we still have a lot of other events to cover before we get to there. And we will be moving next to the state of Missouri where Lincoln was doing everything he could to make sure that Missouri did not fall to the Confederacy and posing similar policies to those we saw in Maryland. But Missouri saw a greater degree of resistance to the Union occupation leading up to the Battle of Wilson's Creek or the Battle of Oak Hills to Confederates. We will begin looking at the Union occupation of Missouri in the next episode. Historical Controversies is a production of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. If you would like to support the show, please subscribe on iTunes, Google Play or Stitcher and leave a positive review. You can also support the show financially by donating at Mises.org slash Support HC. If you would like to explore the rest of our content, please visit Mises.org. That's M-I-S-E-S dot O-R-G.