By Swords and Bayonets

 

The Four Battles:

Big Bethel, June 10, 1861: Shortly after the onset of hostilities at Fort Sumter, the Union sought to quickly subdue the rebellion. Maj. General Benjamin Butler was dispatched to Fort Monroe, at the tip of the Virginia Peninsula with a force of mostly untested volunteers and an eye towards taking Yorktown. Standing in his way was an equally motley but highly motivated force under “Prince” John B. Magruder. Butler devised an overly ornate, complicated plan to fall upon a hastily constructed strongpoint built upon the banks of swollen Wythe Creek (which he did not even bother to lead into the field himself). After a pre-dawn friendly fire incident sapped the strength of their most veteran infantry unit, the two-brigade Union force pressed on and dashed itself against the dug-in Confederate force at Big Bethel. They were repulsed and driven back south to their camps at Hampton Roads and Newport News.

Mill Springs, January 19, 1862: A battle that helped seal the fate of both Kentucky and Eastern Tennessee. Local scions Maj. General George B. Crittenden and Felix Zollicoffer sought to exert control of the strategic Cumberland Gap through the war’s first winter and to buttress a line of forces spanning both strategic states that were still tenuously held by the Union. Crittenden ignored the advice of Confederate leadership and made a winter camp with his back to the Cumberland River. Sensing a chance to defeat in detail a large Union force under the command of Brig. Gen. George H. Thomas before he could be reinforced by the forces of Brig. Gen. Albin Schoepf, Crittenden and Zollicoffer force-marched their small division north from Mill Springs, hoping to fall upon Thomas in the cold, wet mists of a raw January morning. The battle was hotly contested, but in the end, Zollicoffer met an untimely end, and the Union counterattacked, driving Crittenden’s opportunistic force back down to the Cumberland and beyond.

New Bern, NC, March 14, 1862: In a strategic bid to keep the pressure up in the south Atlantic rebel states and to keep reinforcements from Richmond (then the subject of a major operation on the Virginia Peninsula), Major General Ambrose Burnside is sent on an amphibious expedition of his own. Ultimately, Burnside’s Expedition would prove more successful than the ill-fated Peninsula Campaign to follow that spring and summer. Burnside’s large division disgorged from the North Atlantic Blockading squadron and advanced north along the Atlantic and North Carolina railroad, where a vastly outnumbered, green force awaited under the command of Lawrence O’Brien Branch. His patchwork force manned a series of earthworks and breastworks spanning a mile into the interior of the lowlands west of the Neuse River, anchored by Fort Thompson at the coast. On a foggy, damp morning, the Union juggernaut attacks the entrenched line and finds a key weak point in the defensive salient, forcing a frenzied Rebel withdrawal towards the interior of North Carolina.

Rappahannock Station, November 7, 1863: In the aftermath of the pivotal battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, Robert E. Lee conducts a masterful retreat into Virginia, evading the pursuing forces of Union Major General George Meade. Determined to hold the Rappahannock River Line for the winter encampment, Lee’s forces built a defensive position on a hillock north of the river near Rappahannock Station, hoping to hold it and successfully defend the crossing at Kelly’s Ford, 6 miles to the southeast. The Union mounted a multi-corps level attack on the line, and the task of taking the hilltop bastion fell to General Russell of Sedgwick’s VI Corps. After a methodical advance to the river’s edge, Russell launched a dusk attack that not only captured the dug-in position but also cut off almost an entire brigade of Confederate Maj. General Jubal Early’s division, preventing them from retreating across a pontoon bridge that was the only crossing point over the Rappahannock.