Audiobook · read by volunteers
First Battle of Bull Run
Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard (1818–1893)
Read by Mark F. Smith · 3 chapters · 1 h 42
About the book
In July 1861, two armies met on the fields near a small stream in Virginia, and the first major land battle of the American Civil War began. In these pages, General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, one of the senior Confederate commanders, tells the story from his own side. He was the officer who had given the order to open fire on Fort Sumter some months before, and here he describes the march, the preparations, the confusion of two untrained armies and the course of the fighting itself. Written in the 1880s, the account is a firsthand military narrative, direct, sometimes combative, and not neutral. It gives the listener a vivid sense of how a commander saw and remembered a decisive day, and what he wished posterity to believe about it.
Introduction
Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard (1818-1893) was a Louisiana-born officer who graduated from West Point and became one of the senior generals of the Confederate army. He directed the bombardment of Fort Sumter in Charleston harbour in April 1861, which opened the hostilities of the Civil War, and he commanded Confederate forces at the first battle of Bull Run, known in the South as First Manassas, in July of that year.
This account appeared in 1887 in the series Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, a collection of articles in which former officers on both sides gave their accounts of the principal engagements. Such memoirs are valuable historical sources, but they must be read with care. They were composed decades after the events, by men with a natural interest in explaining their decisions, and they often reflect the debates and rivalries of the veterans themselves.
Even so, the narrative has real interest. It shows what the armies were like in the early months of the war, how plans were made, how orders went astray, and how quickly an engagement could turn on small matters of timing and communication. The recording is divided into three parts and lasts about one hour and forty minutes. It was read by a LibriVox volunteer, and it will appeal to students of the Civil War and to anyone who enjoys firsthand military history. Because the account is the work of a participant, it is best listened to alongside other sources, but it has the immediacy of a witness. For anyone curious about the early days of the war, or about how generals shaped their own legacies, it is a short and stimulating listen.
Public domain
Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard died in 1893: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive