Download The Greatest Civil War Battles: The Second Battle of Bull Run (Second Manassas) AudioBook Free
"An outstanding military almost demoralized, millions of public property given up or destroyed, thousands of lives in our best men sacrificed for no purpose. I dare not trust myself to speak of this commander as I feel and imagine. Suffice to say...that more insolence, superciliousness, ignorance, and pretentiousness were never put together in a single man." (Union II Corps Commander Alpheus Williams) The Second Fight of Bull Run (August 28-30, 1862) was one of the very most decisive battles fought through the Civil Battle, and it was also one of the very most unlikely. Significantly less than three months prior to the battle, Joseph E. Johnston's Army of Northern Virginia had been pushed back almost all the way to Richmond by George B. McClellan's Army of the Potomac, so close that Union troops could see the cathedral steeples of the Confederate capital. And yet, at the end of Second Manassas, Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia found itself in the field unopposed about 20 miles away from the Union capital of Washington D.C. How could such a exceptional reversal of fortunes take place so quickly? After Lee been successful the wounded Johnston, he forced McClellan's Army of the Potomac away from Richmond and less difficult the Peninsula in later June, only to then swing his military north to handle a second Union military, John Pope's Army of Virginia.
