Battle of Bull Run

First Manassas: The Battle of Bull Run

On March 4, 1861, with war clouds threatening the land, Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated the 16th president of the United States. Read more

Battle of Bull Run

Rose O’Neal Greenhow: The Spy Who Won Bull Run

“But for you, there would have been no Battle of Bull Run.” When Confederate President Jefferson Davis made that blanket statement in the summer of 1862, he was not addressing Pierre G.T. Read more

Battle of Bull Run

The Creation of the U.S. Sanitary Commission

In the spring of 1861, a group of influential northern men and women, led by Unitarian minister Henry Whitney Bellows and social reformer Dorothea Dix, met in New York City to discuss the formation of a sanitary commission, modeled after the British Sanitary Commission established during the Crimean War, to provide relief to sick and wounded soldiers in the Union Army. Read more

Battle of Bull Run

Healers or Horrors: Civil War Medicine

Safe behind its ocean barriers, the United States paid scant attention to the wars that raged abroad during the early 19th century, taking little notice of the lessons that might have been learned from the European experience with mass killing. Read more

Battle of Bull Run

Battle of Mechanicsville: McClellan’s Unexploited Victory

After an almost uninterrupted, four-month-long string of Union successes beginning in early 1862, followed by the advance of a 100,000-man enemy army to the eastern outskirts of its capital at Richmond, Virginia, the Confederacy suddenly found itself in a life-or-death struggle for its very survival. Read more

Battle of Bull Run

City Under Siege: The New York Draft Riots

For four breathlessly hot days in mid-July 1863, New York City became the northernmost battleground of the Civil War. Read more

Battle of Bull Run

The 5th U.S. Cavalry: “A Hard Duty” at Gaines Mill

The celebrated 2nd U.S. Cavalry, like its brother regiment the 1st U.S. Cavalry, was formally created by an act of Congress in March 1855. Read more

Battle of Bull Run

Colonel Patrick Kelly at the Battle of Gettysburg

Colonel Patrick Kelly, who led the Irish Brigade into the Wheatfield on the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg, was born in Castle Hackett, County Galway, in 1821. Read more

Battle of Bull Run

American Civil War Timeline: Piecemeal Operations

U.S. President Abraham Lincoln had no military experience and discarded most of Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott’s so-called Anaconda Plan, which critics deemed too conservative. Read more

Battle of Bull Run

Lincoln vs. Frémont and His “Hasty Emancipation”

As the early days of the American Civil War were unfolding and the destiny of the republic was being contested on the battlefield, President Abraham Lincoln was engaged in a no less perilous type of battle. Read more

Battle of Bull Run

Civil War Quarterly Preview: General Phillip Sheridan and the Battle of Winchester

For General Philiip Sheridan, war was a tonic.

“He was a wonderful man on the battle field,” one of his fellow Union officers recalled, “and never in as good humor as when under fire.” Read more

Battle of Bull Run

Union Army Defeat at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff

In the wake of the humiliating and unexpected defeat, and fourth in a line that stretched back to Fort Sumter, the Battle of Bull Run, and the Battle of Wilson’s Creek, the Union Congress created a seven-man Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War to oversee and review all battles and the events surrounding them. Read more

Battle of Bull Run

Battle of Chickamauga: Death in the Deep Woods

It was nearly 11 on the morning of September 20, 1863, and the woods around slow-moving Chickamauga Creek in northwest Georgia were ominously quiet. Read more

Battle of Bull Run

CSS Alabama vs USS Kearsarge: The Greatest High Seas Duel of the Civil War

On August 24, 1862, newly promoted Captain Raphael Semmes of the Confederate States Navy called his largely English crew to the quarterdeck of his new command, the 220-foot battle cruiser Alabama, lying off the coast of Terceira in the Azores. Read more

Battle of Bull Run

Battle of Antietam: Clash in the Cornfield

The White House was a somber place in the summer of 1862. The Civil War was in the midst of its second costly year, and the Union armies had yet to win a significant victory in the eastern theater. Read more

Battle of Bull Run

4th U.S. Regulars at Gettysburg

When the Civil War erupted in April 1861, the 10 companies of the 4th U.S. Read more

Battle of Bull Run

The Days of Shoddy: Worst Manufacturers of the Civil War

“For sugar the government often got sand; for coffee, rye; for leather, something no better than brown paper; for sound horses and mules, spavined beasts and dying donkeys; and for serviceable muskets and pistols, the experimental failures of sanguine inventors, or the refuse of shops and foreign armories.” Read more

Battle of Bull Run

Return to Manassas

Sent into north-central Virginia to threaten Richmond on a second front, McDowell had managed to get lost in the woods near Gainesville and lost touch with his command for 12 full hours. Read more

Battle of Bull Run

The Likable, Inept Ambrose Burnside

Nothing in Ambrose Burnside’s pre-Civil War career indicated that he would be anything but a successful and energetic general. Read more

Battle of Bull Run

The Irish Rifles At the Battle of Chancellorsville

The city of New York provided more regiments than did many states during the Civil War, and the deeds of several of its regiments, such as the 9th New York “Hawkins’s Zouaves,” 39th New York “Garibaldi Guard,” and 42nd New York “Tammany Regiment” are well known. Read more