Battle At Bull Run By William Davis
Battle At Bull Run By William Davis
Whether it is called Bull Run or Manassas, this battle was a great victory for the members of the Confederate States of America and an incredible learning experience for the United States of America. William C. Davis takes his readers on a journey through this battle in an enlightening yet challenging manner. For the newcomer to military writing this book would prove to be very challenging. To follow Davis, the reader would probably need to read through this at least three times because he constantly, seemingly in mid-thought, switches from commander to commander, region to region, and Confederate to Union. While his style is somewhat difficult to follow, he often adds drops of humor to provide comic relief for the strained reader.
Davis describes the events leading up to the battle and the battle itself somewhat chronologically. He writes two or three paragraphs about the actions of the Confederacy during a time period and in the next paragraph will begin describing what the Union did during the exact same time period. After finishing the discussion about the North he jumps over to the South and begins telling their story right where he left off several paragraphs before. During the first one hundred and sixty pages, Davis sets up the actual battle by describing the political situation in 1861 and by telling how these two armies began to organize themselves from militia/civilians to soldiers. Instead of taking the reader directly to the battlefield he allows them to understand the events leading up to it in order to better understand the battle and the motivation behind it. Along with political discussions and the organization of these armies, he also describes in great detail the strategic movements leading to Bull Run and detailed characterizations of the battle’s key players. This rising action is peachy, but Davis’ best writing begins as the battle approaches and he writes, “There was never again such a night north or south of Bull Run. It was the twilight of America’s innocence” (p. 158).
The author’s thesis is, “America, it seemed had gone mad and gone to war with itself. Four decades of compromise between the sections of the country had come to naught, largely because the lawmakers of Washington repeatedly chose to treat the symptom rather...