title: Donnybrook: The Battle of Bull Run, 1861
author:  David Detzer 
description: The Civil Wars first major battle was not especially bloody or decisive, but this fascinating study makes it an apt microcosm of the conflict. Historian Detzer (Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston and the Beginning of the Civil War) provides a lucid narrative of the battles course, judiciously assesses the causes and authors of the Union defeat, draws vivid thumbnail sketches of participants from generals to privates, and debunks the "stone wall" legend and other enduring myths of the battle. But the books greatest strength is its account of the social, psychological and organizational aspects of warfare in the Civil War epoch. Fought by hastily mobilized amateurs, the battle highlighted the Herculean difficulties the two sides faced in clothing, supplying and feeding large armies and trying to turn fractious civilians into competent soldiers. And Bull Run gave volunteers imbued with romantic jingoism their first taste of the horror, chaos and physical agony of combat. Drawing on a mountain of first-hand accounts, Detzer paints a detailed panorama of every aspect of army life, from the mechanics of working a musket, to the grisliness of battlefield medicine, the scrounging for meals and the suffering through long, waterless marches on a sweltering July day. The result is a splendid portrait of the Civil War as the soldiers knew it. B&w photos not seen by PW.<BR>Copyright &copy; Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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  # THE BULL-RUN ROUT
  
  
  ### SCENES ATTENDING
  
  
  THE
  
  
  ## FIRST CLASH OF VOLUNTEERS  
  
  
  IN THE CIVIL WAR
  
  
  BY  
  
  
  EDWARD HENRY CLEMENT
  
  
  CAMBRIDGE  
  
  
  JOHN WILSON AND SON  
  
  
  University Press  
  
  
  1909
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  From the  
  
  
  Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society  
  
  
  for March, 1909.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  ## THE BULL-RUN ROUT
  
  
  A little paper written years ago by a lately deceased brother of
  mine[[1]](www.gutenberg.org@dirs@3@2@9@5@32951@32951-h@32951-h-0.htm#Footnote_1_1)
  describing the rout of the battle of Bull Run as he saw it with the eyes of a
  boy and a boy's love of the marvellous seems to me to possess some value
  historically for the intimate, unconscious picturing, along with it, of the
  state of the public mind on the eve of the so-called "great uprising." It
  seems to illustrate well the truth that the great Civil War, as a war, was
  really a surprise,—to the people of the North at least; that the idea
  persisting up to the day of the battle of Bull Run at the back