Henry Hill, Height of the Battle, and "Stonewall" Jackson is Born: Manassas 160 Live!

wow everybody i'm going to try to calm down not easy for me to do because here we are finally on henry hill on the monash national battlefield park i've got so much to tell you about we're going to try to do a lot of it in one video and in order to do so i'm going to try to slow down and lay out the story the best i can happily this is one of the few places on a civil war battlefield where you can pretty well grasp the entire battle from one spot or from one hill and we are standing on this hill right now we'll talk about the hen reason why it's called that soon enough but first let me connect you with what we were doing before first of all the stone bridge is about a mile and a half two miles off in that direction in other words i'm looking sort of north easterly and if i changed my trajectory a little bit 30 miles away is washington dc richmond is way behind the camera maybe 80 miles or something like that okay so we already went to the stone bridge and we followed how the union army took a circuitous flank march up towards suddenly you can see the manassas suddenly road at one of the busiest intersections in the whole country as far as i'm concerned and one of the worst and just to show andy poulton behind the camera just nodded because he knows um the union army emerged at suddenly a couple miles up that road and then there's going to be a sharp fight a delaying action by the confederates launching attacks against union soldiers on matthews hill matthews hill is uh above uh the stone house that you might be able to see the roof of off in the distance you can see some of the stone house and its roof and the hill above it is buckhill and the hill above that is matthews hill all i really want you to remember is on the morning of july 21st 1861 the union and confederate forces struggled as they really truly opened this battle out on matthews hill the confederates fall back to henry hill they also take a position at mr robinson's farm a free black man who lives off in the distance his house no longer stands um but but along there wade hampton has been brought up i mentioned them earlier with some of his south carolinians and they take position along robinson's fence also you have other confederate units trying to slow down the union but they don't really need to because mcdowell takes this sort of two hour break while he gets everything into position he makes a few questionable calls easy for us 160 years later to judge the people of the past happens in the news every day um you try to command one of the largest armies in the world in the largest battle ever fought in american history after that time see how you do having said that i'm not a big mcdowell fan and one of the things that really happens here is that the union has these long-range cannons you may be very even seen a rifled cannon over my shoulder already there are other rifled cannons around here rifled cannons can fire a mile and a half two miles effectively the confederates mostly have smoothbore cannons that are gonna fire half a mile three you know three quarters of a mile effectively right so the union could have put their cannons way out of the range of the confederate cannons and be basically safe instead they took the rifled cannons two particular batteries under ricketts and griffin and surrounded this house up here this is the henry house judith carter henry lived here and if i can take a side note for a second judith carter henry her whole life can be traced from this one point she was born about a mile and a half away at a place already mentioned called pennsylvania she's a carter she was judith carter she then uh moved over here when she married mr henry i forget his name and i think this house was called spring hill and it was much smaller at the time they gave lofty names to small houses at the time okay so then she came and lived here um for a while i'll tell the story soon enough but then she would die in that house and she'd be buried right there her whole her whole life geographically at least is this is visible right here henry hill is named for the henry family who occupied this it's a hill but it's also sort of this broad plateau once you're up here there's not all that many undulations many cases on both sides of the house two long-range union batteries griffins on this side of the house ricketts on that side of the house are going to take position here right up close to the confederates it totally completely favors the confederates in a short-range fight because their cannons are designed for short-range fighting in any case mrs henry is in the house here and um there's there's all this artillery fire going on all of a sudden the confederates occupy the house as sharpshooters henry's uh judith henry's sons try to move her and find it even more dangerous as they're trying to get her out down the lane in that direction um it's a disaster they bring her back into the house just in time for ricketts to realize he is being his cannoneers are being picked off by confederates in the house so he turns one or more of his candidates toward the house pepper it with uh shrapnel um and with canister actually specifically and she will be killed known as the first civilian killed um in the civil war she also you know has an enslaved woman living here she takes uh uh you know a position in the big chimney there and she will survive but because the chimney is being hit uh repeatedly she will be deafened for life at that point um sad story henry will die she'll be buried here some of her sons who died much later are actually buried here as well now let me lay out what's going on here a little bit and where we are we started at the stone bridge we went over to suddenly we then went back down to matthews hill then here we are at henry hill and if you try to make sense of this good luck because everything happened up here okay and i'm going to try to describe this while we walk around the hill a little bit but you can maybe see the henry house on there when we zoomed in and you can see some units going back in an intense fight uh it's just there's so much happening here that it's hard to really even see a whole lot of it okay but know this that and i'm being particular to talk about griffin and ricketts because the fight for manassas the fight for bull run the fight for henry hill really comes down to controlling this position this ridge here where you see ricketts cannons over there and you can see at least one of griffin's cannons over there during the fight once they realize where the confederates are and we'll walk over there and start to spoil the end you can see some of the confederate cannons right over there if you can see the woods you might be able to see some dots in front of those woods those are the short range confederate cannons napoleons and howitzers okay the union knows they're not in a good position here so what griffin does and he used to command the west point battery this guy knows artillery okay and he's going to detach two of his cannons leaving i think lieutenant charles hazlitt who is of gettysburg fame uh here he's going to take his two mountain howitzers good guns meant for short range and try to get around the confederate line over there we're going to talk about that a little bit later so griffin's got two guns there rickett's got his five or six here then griffin has a few more over in this direction and the fight will come to devolve around this area okay the park service has done a good job of restoring uh the henry house not to its wartime appearance but to its uh uh post-war um appearance i don't know if we want to take a look at the henry gray's when we get out of here um we'll check that out i have a couple pictures to show you as well because when people came back after the battle of bull run or manassas this is what the henry house looked like all that was left was the chimney in which the slave woman had hidden okay now it didn't look exactly like that after the battle um it didn't look that bad um this was after the winter of the confederates really uh you know needing firewood and doing all that they could in order to survive and burning it down one of the early pictures we actually have shows how small the henry house spring hill if i'm correct actually looked we have three drawings and no pictures of it before it was dismantled largely for firewood in any case um you know this photo here actually looks sorry andy let me do this again here if you look toward the henry house ruins here you can actually look up in the distance and see judith carter henry's house uh the pennsylvania house the carter mansion and the foundation of which still sits in the woods way off in that direction so pretty cool stuff let's take a look inside the house you're with the american battlefield trust i'm gary adelman it's andy poulton behind the camera and we are walking around henry hill for manassas 160. the park held their largest events um over the weekend where they had a band they had all sorts of people out and everything like that but they sometimes do interpretation in here um i'm gonna see if we can no we can't looks like the original chimney is still there but it's not visible at this very moment henry's son hugh fought leroy henry actually uh used to give tours around henry hill and we are to be thankful for him because he helped to mark the battlefield itself a lot of the yellow signs around here were originally wooden signs that he put up while talking to officers and soldiers who had fought here um in the battle so the fact that we have some of this battlefield preserved and that we can understand it um is really a lot due to hugh fauntleroy henry and i think for a quarter or 50 cents he'd talk to you and take you around the hill pretty cool stuff um and we have pictures of him sitting on that porch which is cool now here is one of the more famous things of the battle of manassas or the battle of bull run this is of course the monument to the patriots note it does not say this is not football here it doesn't say which side it is really to but on june 11 1865 a bunch of people gathered out here to see this monument that was constructed in one day one day they grabbed stone from the unfinished railroad bed there they dedicated the monument and they would uh you know here's here's a close-up of it here they would pose proudly uh on the monument there's the monuments architect there and sometimes you see famous people there's samuel uh heinzelman uh and we there's henry benham over there and i i think montgomery migs is somewhere in there as well so um there's william gamble uh the cavalry commander who actually had the place built and stuff but check this out here it is that day hot day they did a similar monument uh on on the second manassas battlefield as well except it has cannonballs stacked instead of this on here the park service didn't take over until the 40s and they realized this place this monument was starting to fall apart so they did work on it and only then after you know nearly a century did they realize that those 200-pound parrot shells on there were live that whole time uh i mean and those are the kinds of shells that if they explode near they don't need to hit you with the shrapnel you are disintegrated so they're this very public danger was sitting there forever of course nothing bad happened and now those shells are safely disarmed and not original as far as i know at this point here come on so it wasn't just cannons coming up here right the cannons came up but i haven't said anything about the infantry yet first of all i think you know the story although confederate soldiers fell back from matthews hill um they were greeted by reinforcements right i already mentioned that thomas jonathan jackson shows up and he's basically generically speaking occupying that whole wood line right there okay the guns are in front of there the infantry is in support pretty good position to be in back there right the union gave them time to get ready and steady themselves and everything like that and more confederates are on the way and this is the story of the battle of manassas as the day goes on the union starts to feed in all their forces and they start to get weaker because they're launching most of the attacks piece a meal a regiment at a time two regiments at a time while the confederates amply managed by joseph e johnston are constantly getting more reinforcements coming in from portici that is where closer to the rail head where joseph e johnston is going to position himself and he can keep feeding troops in wherever the yankees show up the confederates have some solid reinforcements here the union is going to launch some attacks toward the confederates the southerners aren't having any of it but eventually some michigan and new york soldiers get in those woods behind the visitor center by the way it's a great visitor center there they have a small museum a great bookstore there um and a movie and you can see the qr code for the american battlefield trust battle app there that you can scan and it'll take you right to the place where you can download our free battle app to see a younger but equally hyper historian looks a lot like me about 11 years ago on a bunch of videos as well now beyond there in those woods is where you're going to have union soldiers enter those woods and compromise the confederate cannons back there some of those cannons actually pull out at that point the confederates are going to start to push back on them the two guns of griffin that are on the other side of the visitor center they are going to swivel toward the woods because they see some confederates coming toward them at that point right but griffin he sees the enemy but his boss a guy named major barry says nope that's not the enemy they are your supports griffin said no sure is anything those are the enemies like no those are your battery supports i know what supports are okay griffin holds fire the confederates open fire from the woods stonewall brigade and some others um and they are going to decimate that portion of griffin's battery um the confederates are ultimately going to capture those cannons over there and um you're going to have later afterward i kind of like this kind of a clap back deal where after the battle griffin goes to barry well do you think those were my battery supports now and barry was like no i must have been mistaken about that or something like that so i liked his people back then did that sort of stuff now um so that fight continues the confederates are starting to get you know more of their jazz together they're getting more infantry kirby smith's brigade comes online the sixth north carolina shows up here and the union is running out of options so they're going to try to launch attacks across this field but by now the confederates are also coming in this way here they come out of the woods there they've already captured and they're going to try to hold griffin's cannons over there now they're making a bid for ricketts cannons so let me stop there for a second there at this point you have more union soldiers coming up you've got erasmus kaiser keys brigade over in that direction but wade hampton is holding the robinson farm there you've got william tecumseh sherman now coming up whose brigade will be bloodied more than any other union brigade that fought here and the confederates are bringing up more troops so let's stop for a second and walk a little bit further if you haven't seen this i'm looking forward to showing you it's one of the cooler things you'll see on this or even any other battlefield as well in the meantime this is just great if you come to manassas there are more than 50 miles of walking trail and i'm sorry more than 40 miles of walking trail you can walk all around but just the one mile loop trail around henry hill going out to the robinson farm and then around to some of the places we're going it's a great little walk and you can really understand the battle well especially if you have the trust battle app now robinson already mentioned his free black man he later files a petition because you know if your home was destroyed by union soldiers or your property or your crops you could file a claim long after few people got the payouts that they deserved ultimately he would get a payout long after the civil war but allowing him to actually expand his house his house was still standing until sometime in the 20th century i can't remember exactly when in the meantime i think some of his kids are seen around and are actually going to work and help around a tavern and a coffee operation owned by gideon and jane starbuck they couldn't make it go in the stone house over there and i like to call it the united states first failed starbucks location sorry i couldn't resist um so here we are walking up to closer to the confederate position here um on henry hill to you know it's easy for me to confuse you here and confuse myself so let me try to lay it out imagine confederates in the wood line all that you see there by this time in the battle the cannons are becoming a non-issue this is going to be an infantry fight even the union guns of rickets and griffin have gone silent or they've been pulled off so the union still has at least eight guns up here the confederates are threatening them where the union soldiers can't really work them the confederates are trying to turn the guns around they lose the guns the yankees take them back and then they fall back and it's a back and forth fight but the union seems to be only able to attack with one or two regiments at a time let's not uh you know really get on them too much about this because nobody had trained in brigade drill at the point i mean this was a huge group of soldiers three four thousand soldiers at a time you're going to launch a brigade with two brigades or an attack with two brigades at the time oh man so people didn't really think that way sherman later on would probably very much regret the bloodying his troops did you're talking about some of his wisconsin soldiers there was also pennsylvania new york and michigan soldiers blooding themselves and trying to capture ricketts guns back this went on for an hour hour and a half okay as part of this fighting of course you have two pretty well-known combat commanders here bernard b you know him he's gonna name stonewall jackson um before the day is up and uh francis bartow savannah georgia and bartow is up here commanding a brigade but he's got uh you know he's kind of a georgia man he's got the eighth georgia and he's getting ready to lead one of the many just try to sort him out and to do so you can read john hennessy's book the end to innocence it's an older book but it stands up very well um you know to kind of understand it i like jack davis book the battle of bull run except it's uh a little bit less on the tactic so you might not understand the fighting as well he is leading his soldiers into battle bartow is when he is uh you know shot and he said they've killed me boys but don't give up the fight now within two or three months of the battle two engravings are actually made okay showing this sort of scene i already pointed this out this is judith carter henry's house you can see the battlefield in the distance and here it is an early monument saying they have killed me boys don't give up the fight okay you can see it's sort of a round monument right well let me show you one of my favorite things on here because because by the summer of 1862 that monument was gone we don't know what happened to it there's all sorts of suggestions about what might have happened when the union soldiers came and took possession here but what i do know is that the base of that monument is still here do you see the circular impression here right on it this is the base of the temporary francis bartow monument that was here in 1861 it might have been here until you know the spring of 1862 we don't know so this is let me say with great reverence the base of the first civil war monument and i hate using superlatives but i don't know of another memorial a stone memorial put up to soldiers before september of 1861. this is pretty early stuff here now bernard b for everything he's doing he is active remember he thought he was going to miss the fight he was angry he was being sent to this part of the battlefield oh somebody said are we going to see some fighting today he's like no we're going to hear it we're going to hear the music of battle but we're being sent off to nowhere of course b will be in the thick of it and really help the confederate cause here after the troops fell back from matthews hill they gather back that way and a couple hours later hours not right then but a couple hours later he was heard to say by three different soldiers two in the fourth alabama and one from one of the other units that was there something to the effect of there stands jackson like a stone wall let's go to his assistance all three accounts talked about let's go to his assistants okay not there stands jackson like the like a stonewall rally around the virginians john hennessey has done all this work and it's really well done there was nothing to rally to okay the unit had already fallen confederates had already fallen back hours earlier they were already rallied all the accounts say that they're going to help jackson they're not rallying around jackson jackson's standing there he wants to move forward let's help him and so they did and it was attacks like that that helped actually um the confederates to capture griffin's guns and then the rest of rick and then uh ricketts guns as well okay people then go further and say their stance jackson like a stonewall was meant to be derogatory like b was making fun of jackson he's not moving let's move with him it doesn't seem to be that either i call it the myth of stonewall jackson not that the sobriquet does not fit you know he stonewalled jackson fits he's a hard fighter he is hard to move by all means but let's get it right okay there stands jackson like a stone wall let's go to his assistants by every account all three of them um that's what bernard b said he will be mortally wounded in the stomach not long after that and there's a monument to him um standing not far from here as well with the tall grass sometimes it's harder to see now we're going to continue walking up the hill here but i think i've already tipped the hat of a little bit about what's happening here the union keeps attacking one or two regimes at a time the confederates are counter-attacking with two three four regiments at a time and the confederates have more reinforcements coming up i already mentioned arnold elsie maybe is coming up uh came under the command initially if kirby smith smith is shot as soon as he gets here so now you got elsie you got jeb stewart hanging out on the flanks and here comes jubal early new brigade's coming up the union has one fresh brigade coming up after sherman and that is uh oliver otis howard i mentioned them earlier these are the guys who marched through the hottest part of the day um in order to get here now here of course does stan jackson like a stone wall here um you know we call it jackson on steroids sometimes it is sort of an art deco looking thing he's a very muscular jackson it was put up around 1940 done by a guy named joseph paulia excuse me if i'm not getting the pronunciation right but this has to be the most famous thing along with the stone bridge on the manassas national battlefield park okay this is jackson's moment and jackson is going to be memorialized here and so he is before we fully walk on this might be the best view that we get not only the confederate cannons over there but you may or may not be able to see a small break in the woods well that is the actual road to the house called portisi it looks like port i don't know it's p-o-r-t-i-c-i but it's portici and that's where joseph e johnston is you can take a park uh trail back to there and actually see there's a cemetery back there you can see where port tc1 stood but you can follow in the footsteps and even you know along that very road uh stonewall i'm sorry jefferson davis uh was coming up and he ran into other soldiers on the way out it might have actually been stonewall jackson i can't remember um here we are coming up back toward the visitor center and i want to take the battle a little bit further as we get to uh some of the end here so the confederates keep getting stronger sherman has pounded himself against the confederate position the confederates now solidify their hold upon you can see it's a ridge if you'll pivot over there andy you know their hold on that ridge now they are strongly posted along that ridge they've got griffin's guns uh a couple of griffin's guns and all of ricketts guns heartily in their possession and now what's next okay the union is still occupying suddenly road that is beyond it it's a nice road cut and the confederates are going to try to outflank them so i already mentioned the six north carolina shows up around here and uh up comes elsie and and i already mentioned this in early so they're starting to get around the union sees this in fact between sherman and howard mcdowell is thinking i'm going to win here i got 5 000 more soldiers well first of all the confederates have more fresh soldiers largely due to joseph e johnston but also um the confederates are in a better position here they're going to roll over the suddenly road and start to push toward chin ridge so let's get the camera off in this direction here trust me chin ridge which you've been able to see from some parts of henry hill back then is right beyond the visitor center it's probably a half mile past the visitor center and into chin ridge up to shin ridge shows oliverotus howard and we're going to pick that story up when we get a little bit closer to it but just know this that they're the last ones to arrive on the battlefield the confederates already have their guns trained upon it and they're already surrounding howard i don't know who you'd rather be the big confederate line looping around or some new englanders very hot in their first battle i think you'd probably pick the confederates at this point so um let's pause for a sec uh to take it down a notch and this is not an upper and i'm sorry for that um in march of 1862 the union photographers came here recorded some pictures i've already shown you a lot of them and on top here is a panoramic picture incredible um taken from near the robinson farm or house and in it you can see the henry chimney there and you can see several other things and you'll just have to trust me but this is what henry hill looked like in march of 1862 just months after the battle of manassas okay or the battle of bull run now they also got pictures three of them um taken of a water hole with graves around it okay and in one of the pictures you can actually blow it up and blow up on that grave and see that it's the grave of jtm lexington virginia only one person fits it's uh john t mccorkle he's a 23 year old schoolteacher 24 i mean from lexington rock bridge gray stonewall brigade and maybe that's the best we can do for him see where his temporary grave was a wisconsin soldier noted where these graves actually were on a map and i think i'll show you that next in a second so that we know roughly where the waterhole was here small waterhole surrounded by rebel graves okay and by the way here's the other two versions of the pictures and where i talk about mccorkle in this book here so um another thing i noticed was that in the background of some of these pictures you could see a distinctive tree uh sticking up let me see so there's like a blow up there and you can see it over here do you see this tall angle tree sticking up well so that's in the panorama from henry hill but i can see that same tree in a blow up from this one long story short this waterhole was located right here okay and to this day this thing fills up with water just like it does during rainy weather you can even see how behind in the distance how that land goes up a little bit just as it does right where griffin's cannons are over there okay so to me this is in part what it's about right we have to take the good with the bad we have to come to understand you know the just the horror of the civil war this is a war you have people dying here people in their first battle a battle they think would spell the end of the united states or the end of the confederacy um depending on which side you were on so i think it's important you know to talk about the more difficult parts of battles too and i'm gonna read a pretty rough account of a south carolinian who fought here um let me just do it here okay this is uh you know right over there not far from griffin's guns probably a little bit closer to the suddenly road but in this general and he lived but a moment i did not observe him when he fell on account of his being undercover of some woods immediately afterward i went to obtain his body when i found it all covered with blood his face disfigured his eyes rolled in the gaze of death i momentarily shuddered i was almost paralyzed i looked upon him for a few moments then dismounting i put him on little sawana his horse which was standing near his body when i found it but finding i could not carry the body that way i took it upon my shoulders and bored several hundred yards to a place of safety good heavens lizzy my back was actually saturated with his blood never had i such feelings before my own person stained with the blood of my dear little comrade i covered his body with a few bushes and entered battle not dreaming that i too might possibly meet in a few moments with the same sad fate that's private albert alfred dobie of the second south carolina infantry and you know i think that just summarizes it we can talk about a fight with 58 000 soldiers in it but it is composed of people and each of those people have a story and to the degree possible when studying our past we need to understand those stories um and i'll just thank you for watching and for supporting battlefield preservation [Music] you

Channel: American Battlefield Trust

Views: 25,053

Rating: 4.9672728 out of 5

Keywords: American Battlefield Trust, Civil War Trust, manassas battlefield tour, bull run battlefield tour, 160th anniversary of manassas, Henry Hill tour manassas

Id: tUJgPXS4R90

Length: 28min 20sec (1700 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 21 2021