A heavy, soaking rain fell across northern Virginia on the night of August 30-31, 1862. Despite the storm's intensity, it could not wash away the bloodstains that reddened the fields and wood lots along Bull Run creek. On the two previous days, more than 100,000 Northerners and Southerners had killed and maimed each other.
If General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia had a single crucible that forged it into one of history's finest commands, it was perhaps this familiar killing ground at Manassas.
The road back to Manassas for a second bloodletting stretched across two months to the outskirts of Richmond. There, during the last weeks of June, Lee's troops shoved Union Maj. Gen. George McClellan's Army of the Potomac down the Virginia peninsula away from the Confederate capital. When the retreating Federals repulsed Rebel charges at Malvern Hill on July 1, the Seven Days' campaign ended. McClellan shifted his units to the vicinity of Harrison's Landing, where Union gunboats offered firepower.
The two antagonists stalked each other for the next six weeks. McClellan singed the telegraph wires to Washington, D.C., with demands for more men, arms and supplies, and blamed President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton for all the Union Army's setbacks. Lee, meanwhile, probed the Federals with occasional artillery bombardments and infantry skirmishers. As the inactivity lengthened, Lee turned his attention to a second Union threat lumbering across central Virginia.
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