Irvin McDowell, born in Ohio in 1818, studied at the College de Troyes in France and graduated from West Point in 1838 alongside P.G.T. Beauregard. After serving as an aide-de-camp and earning a brevet at Buena Vista in the Mexican War, he spent 1848 to 1861 as a staff and supply officer in the adjutant general’s department. Backed by Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, he was made a brigadier general in May 1861 and given the Army of Northeastern Virginia, though he protested that he was a staff officer and his volunteers were untrained. Under the cry On to Richmond, he was sent into battle anyway.

His complex flanking plan at First Bull Run in July 1861 broke down with green troops and ended in a rout. He went on to fail against Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley and to lose again at Second Bull Run under John Pope, then testified against Fitz John Porter and sat two years without an assignment. In the West he commanded the Department of the Pacific and enforced neutrality during the French intervention in Mexico. An 1879 review board cleared Porter and blamed McDowell. He retired in 1882 and became San Francisco’s park commissioner.

• Some contemporaries reportedly called him Squash McDowell.
• His soldiers at Second Bull Run came to believe he was secretly working with the Confederates.
• He and Pope despised each other, and their orders contradicted one another.
• The 1879 board cited his failure to pass along intelligence on James Longstreet’s position.
• He laid out drives with views of the Golden Gate in the Presidio before his death in 1885.