By: Michael Kirschner
Before William T. Sherman led a division at Shiloh, captured Atlanta, or marched through Georgia, he grudgingly commanded a brigade of volunteers at First Bull Run, Virginia. Had Sherman gotten his wish, he would have recruited and led a regiment of regular army infantry in and around St. Louis, as he strenuously objected to being associated with volunteer militia units. If that had happened, there is no telling how his career or the outcome of the war would have unfolded. But Sherman’s desires were foiled. He led volunteer soldiers at First Bull Run, and for that single battle, his career intersected with the history of one of the Union’s most storied units—the 2nd Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment. His leadership produced bloody results that ultimately prepared the Badger regiment to serve as the inspirational senior member of the soon-to-be-formed Iron Brigade.
In May 1861, while in St. Louis, Sherman received regular assurances from his political correspondents in Washington that he had been named colonel of the new regular army’s 13th Infantry Regiment.
Still, on June 6, Sherman jumped at an urgent summons to Washington upon rumors that he was to be made Quartermaster General of the United States Army, and he was not about to miss such an opportunity. Immediately upon arriving in Washington, Sherman and his brother went to Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase’s home to inquire about the position but were disappointed to hear that another had already been given the post.
Being in Washington, however, Sherman renewed his acquaintance with Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott and Scott’s military secretary, Schuyler Hamilton, a grandson of Alexander Hamilton whom Sherman described as “a particular friend of mine.” And here, Sherman began to undermine himself. First, Scott refused to let him return to St. Louis to organize his new 13th Infantry Regiment. Instead, Scott had Sherman appointed to inspect the arriving volunteer militia units and the forts that were being built to protect Washington from a feared Southern attack. Sherman disparaged volunteers. In a prior letter to his brother John, he stated that “volunteers and militia never were, and never will be fit for Invasion and whoever tries it will be defeated & dropt by Lincoln like a hot potato.” Sherman’s opinion did not approve after his rounds of inspection: “[I]t was manifest they were far from being soldiers.”
This picture of Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott was made at West Point, N.Y., June 10, 1862. The subscribers claim that, for correctness of portraiture, finish and detail, it is preeminently the best portrait of the Great American Military Chieftain.
Public Domain
The inspection work brought Sherman into contact with another object of scorn: Brig. Gen. Irvin McDowell, who Sherman deemed woefully inexperienced, was charged with creating an army in Virginia to drive the rebels away from Manassas Junction.
McDowell, given a difficult task, was not about to let a fellow West Pointer slip through his fingers, and so Scott ordered Sherman to cross the Potomac to Virginia on July 1 and report to McDowell, who, in turn, ordered Sherman to take command of a brigade of four volunteer infantry regiments, one of which was the 2nd Wisconsin.
Sherman was handicapped by having no battlefield experience of any kind, having been sent to California during the Mexican-American War. He revealed the depths of his combat ignorance in his Memoirs with a startling statement about his need to learn battlefield basics: “[After First Bull Run] I organized a system of drills, embracing the evolutions of the line, all of which was new to me, and I had to learn the tactics from books.” [Emphasis added.]
In essence, Sherman knew nothing of combat and knew that he knew nothing.
Sherman’s lack of experience leading men into battle, combined with his aggressiveness, led to heavy casualties among his four regiments at the battle of First Bull Run. Toward the end of the battle, he ordered unsupported and fruitless charges up Henry Hill, one regiment at a time, all in a doomed effort to recapture Union artillery that had been overrun by elements of the Confederate army.
Of the eight Union brigades heavily engaged at First Bull Run, Sherman’s casualties in killed and wounded—313—dwarfed those of any other. Sherman thereby contributed to the bloody toll that one of his regiments—the 2nd Wisconsin—would amass during the war, ultimately earning it the dubious distinction of suffering the highest proportion of battlefield casualties of any Union unit in the Civil War. Even here, however, Sherman contributed to overall Union success because the experience of the 2nd Wisconsin at First Bull Run was critical in the later formation of what became the best fighting unit that the Union knew during the entirety of the war—the Iron Brigade.
While the 2nd Wisconsin would remain in the Eastern Theater of the Civil War, Sherman would head to the West.
