Irvin McDowell

General Irvin McDowell

Irvin McDowell (October 15, 1818 – May 10, 1885) was an American military officer, famous for his loss of the first large-scale battle of the American Civil War, the First Battle of Bull Run.

McDowell was born in Columbus, Ohio. He initially attended the College de Troyes in France before graduating from the U.S. Military Academy in 1838. One of his classmates at West Point was P.G.T. Beauregard, his future adversary at First Bull Run. He was commissioned a second lieutenant and posted to the 1st U.S. Artillery. McDowell served as a tactics instructor at West Point, before becoming aide-de-camp to General John E. Wool during the Mexican-American War. He was brevetted captain at Buena Vista and served in the Adjutant General's department after the war. In 1856, he was promoted to major in the Adjutant General's department.

McDowell was promoted to brigadier general in the regular army on May 14, 1861, and given command of the Army of Northeastern Virginia, despite never having commanded troops in combat. The promotion was partly because of the influence of his mentor, Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase. Although McDowell knew that his troops were inexperienced and unready, pressure from the Washington politicians forced him to launch a premature offensive against Confederate forces in northern Virginia. His strategy during the First Battle of Bull Run was imaginative but ambitiously complex, and his troops were not experienced enough to carry it out effectively, resulting in an embarrassing rout.

After the defeat at Bull Run, Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan was placed in command of the new Union Army defending Washington, the Army of the Potomac. McDowell commanded a division in the new army, but McClellan soon reorganized his command and McDowell was given I Corps the following spring. His corps stayed behind to defend Washington, and was eventually supposed to march to McClellan's support while the latter fought in the Peninsula Campaign; however, the nervous politicians who feared that General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson's Valley Campaign would eventually attack Washington kept McDowell's 40,000 soldiers behind.

Eventually, the three independent commands of Generals McDowell, John C. Frémont, and Nathaniel P. Banks were combined into Maj. Gen. John Pope's Army of Virginia and McDowell led the III Corps of that army. Because of his actions at Cedar Mountain, McDowell was eventually brevetted major general in the regular army in 1865; however, he was blamed for the subsequent disaster at Second Bull Run. He escaped culpability by testifying against Maj. Gen. Fitz John Porter, whom Pope court-martialed for alleged insubordination in that battle. (In 1879, when Porter's conviction was overturned, McDowell's reputation was soiled by accusations of perjury in his self-serving testimony.) Despite his formal escape, McDowell spent the following two years in effective exile from the leadership of the Army.

In July 1864, McDowell was given command of the Department of the Pacific. He later commanded the Department of California, the Fourth Military District (the military government for Arkansas and Louisiana during Reconstruction), and the Department of the West. He was promoted to permanent major general in the regular army in 1872, and retired from the U.S. Army in 1882. He served as Park Commissioner of San Francisco, California, before dying in 1885. He is buried in San Francisco National Cemetery in the Presidio of San Francisco.

References

• Eicher, John H., and Eicher, David J., Civil War High Commands, Stanford University Press, 2001, ISBN 0-8047-3641-3.
• Warner, Ezra J., Generals in Blue, Louisiana State University Press, 1964, ISBN 0-8071-0822-7.

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