The first Union artillery shells detonated at 1 p.m. Picnickers from Washington, society women in long dresses and their escorts in string ties and long black coats, watched from their hillside vantage point, eating fried chicken as they waited for the Federal troops to crush the Confederates. At the outset, this battle near the railhead called Manassas Junction went according to Northern expectations.
Union forces swept over one hill, then another, as the Rebs staggered and dropped. The Federal's horse-drawn artillery batteries, seasoned regular Army units, were ordered to hold their fire, when a regiment of Brigadier General Thomas ("Stonewall") Jackson's Southerners, dressed in blue at this stage of the war, were mistaken for friendly forces. Cannons boomed, muskets cracked, horses reared in the dust. Confused and frightened soldiers stumbled through the swirl of smoke. Then, along the Sudley Springs Road, near Henry House, came Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston's fresh troops, who had just arrived from Manassas. The Northern advance faltered. A Union private yelled, "I can't see!" as he stumbled and fell into the weeds. Another Northerner lost his nerve and began to run. His colonel drew a pistol and yelled, "You have two seconds to get back into that line or you will be dead." The coward slunk back.
The Union artillerymen were cut to bits, and by 3:15 p.m., the disaster that the North was to call the First Battle of Bull Run was all but over. "Chase them Yankees back to Washington," shouted a woman in the spectators' area. Overhead, a supersonic Concorde ghosted upward from Dulles Airport, far too high for its passengers to see history being remade.
This restaging of the First Battle of Manassas (as the South, which won and thus should have the choice, calls the conflict) came 125 years less one day after the original. The site was five miles from the actual battlefield, on 500 acres turned over for the occasion by a land developer. It was one of the largest re-enactments so far in the national craze for battle re-creations, which gathered momentum as a result of the Bicentennial celebrations ten years ago, and shows no sign of a cease-fire.
Numbers are slippery, partly because hobbyists who specialize, say, in the Revolutionary War have no reason to keep in close touch with Civil warriors. But some 50,000 people, many of them women and children, may be involved in relighting the old campfires and refighting the old battles. Some spend thousands of dollars on their costumes and weapons, and a rueful joke among re-enactors is that their 18th or 19th century wardrobes are far more elaborate than their present-day clothes.