Showing results for "George B. McClellan"
Middle Child and Second Fiddle: The Sad Fate of Second Manassas
Try as I might, I can’t persuade my daughter to explore anything to do with Second Manassas. It’s July 29, 2000. Steph is six but already the veteran of several battlefielding campaigns, and she’s particularly a fan of First Manassas because that’s where her hero, Stonewall Jackson, got his nickname. She’s been eagerly urging us […]
Read more...Unholy Sabbath
Unholy Sabbath: The Battle of South Mountain in History and Memory, September 14, 1862 by Brian Matthew Jordan Savas Beatie, 2012. Pp. XI, 388. ISBN 978-1-61121-088-0. Hardcover $32.95. On September 14, 1862, the Union Army of the Potomac defeated the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia in the mountain passes of South Mountain. The importance of this […]
Read more...Fort Pocahontas
When I stopped at Jamestown, Virginia over the weekend, I expected to find Pocahontas—but to my surprise, I found Fort Pocahontas, too. Just outside the Jamestown colony’s original triangle fort, to the west of the rebuilt palisade, a line of Confederate earthworks runs in a semicircle. It’s all that’s left of Fort Pocahontas, one of […]
Read more...The Bullets Rattled Like Hail: Forgotten Skirmish at Catlett’s Station
Today, Catlett’s Station and the surrounding area are nearly indistinguishable, except to the local population. Situated just several miles south of Manassas the open and rolling farm fields have avoided the engrossing urban sprawl that is so nearby. But in March 1862, this lonely station on the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, sat directly in the […]
Read more...The “Many Causes” of the Civil War: Slavery
“How many of you think the war was about slavery?” I asked. Not a hand went up. There were twenty-ish high school juniors in the class, a college-level survey course on American history offered by a local community college. They’d just wrapped up their unit on the Civil War, and their teacher had asked me […]
Read more...Thinking of Burnside on the Eve of His Disaster
By this point, I imagine the heavy stone sitting in the pit of Ambrose Burnside’s stomach has gone away, replaced by something else that maybe resembles scampering mice. One hundred a forth nine years ago today, his army sat on the west side of the Rappahannock River facing Confederates ensconced along the heights just outside […]
Read more...Ball’s Bluff and the Fall of Charles Stone
Second in a series When Union forces tumbled into the Potomac River on the evening of October 21, 1861, following their rout at Ball’s Bluff, the disaster was just beginning. The ripples from that plunge would be felt all the way in Washington, dozens of miles downriver. One could argue, in fact, that those ripples would […]
Read more...One of the Smallest–and Most Significant–Battles of the War
Once bodies started floating down the Potomac past Washington, it was tough for officials in the capital to overlook the battle at Ball’s Bluff. It was bad enough that the Union forces there had been soundly trounced. Of the 1,700 or so Federals engaged, more than a thousand ended up as casualties: 223 killed, 226 […]
Read more...The 5th Cavalry’s Charge at Gaines Mill – Help Save the Site
Many of our readers get the preservation mailings from the American Battlefield Trust, asking to save land at various sites. The most recent one covers several sites around Richmond, at Cold Harbor, Gaines Mill, Seven Pines, and related. You are welcome to read the appeal here. The Gaines Mill one in particular caught my attention, […]
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