Edward Alfred Pollard, The lost cause; a new Southern history of the War of the Confederates ... Drawn from official sources and approved by the most distinguished Confederate leaders.

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[151] rush of troops upon the decks of the river boats nearly sunk them. At Washington the railroad depot had to be put under strong guard to keep off the fugitives, who struggled to get on the Northern trains. They were yet anxious to put a greater distance between themselves and the terrible army, whose vanguard, flushed with victory and intent upon planting its flag on the Northern capitol, they already imagined on the banks of the Potomac, within sight of their prize, and within reach of their revenge.

But the Confederates did not advance. The victorious army did not move out of the defensive lines of Bull Run. It is true, that within the limits of the battle-field, they had accomplished a great success and accumulated the visible fruits of a brilliant victory. They had not only defeated the Grand Army of the North, but they had dispersed and demoralized it to such an extent, as to put it, as it were, out of existence. With an entire loss in killed and wounded of 1,852 men, they had inflicted a loss upon the enemy which Gen. Beauregard estimated at 4,500, in killed, wounded, and prisoners; they had taken twenty-eight pieces of artillery and five thousand small arms; and they had captured nearly all of the enemy's colours. But the Confederates showed no capacity to understand the extent of their fortunes, or to use the unparalleled opportunities they had so bravely won. At any time within two weeks after the battle, Washington might have fallen into their hands, and been taken almost as an unresisting prey. Patterson had only ten thousand men before the battle. His army, like the greater part of McDowell's, was composed of three months men, who refused to re-enlist, and left for their homes in thousands. The formidable hosts that had been assembled at Washington were fast melting away, some slain, many wounded, more by desertion, and yet more by the ending of their terms of enlistment and their persistent refusal to re-enter the service. On the Maryland side, Washington was then very inadequately defended by fortifications. The Potomac was fordable above Washington, and a way open to Georgetown heights, along which an army might have advanced without a prospect of successful resistance. It needed but a march of little more than twenty miles to crown the victory of Manassas with the glorious prize of the enemy's capital.

But the South was to have its first and severest lesson of lost opportunity. For months its victorious and largest army was to remain inactive, pluming itself on past success, and giving to the North not only time to repair its loss, but to put nearly half a million of new men in the field, to fit out four extensive armadas, to open new theatres of the war, to perfect its “Anaconda plan,” and to surround the Confederacy with armies and navies whose operations extended from the Atlantic border to the western tributaries of the Mississippi.