Union Army Archives

Union Army

One Gallant Rush: Black Soldiers at Fort Wagner

By Eric Niderost

The sun had already set, but the western sky was still bright from its fiery departure not long before. Read more

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War So Terrible: The Battle of Fredericksburg

By Arnold Blumberg

Word spread like wildfire through the camps of the Army of the Potomac during the second week of November 1862: “Little Mac” was out, “Old Burn” was in. Read more

Union Army

Edwin Stanton: From Secretary to First in Command

By Paul A. Thomsen

In the late hours of April 14, 1865, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton sat at a small table in the Petersen House across the street from Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. Read more

Union Army

The Crime At Pickett’s Mill

By Roy Morris, Jr.

Peering through the thick underbrush west of Little Pumpkin Vine Creek, 30 miles northwest of Atlanta, on the afternoon of May 27, 1864, Ambrose Bierce had a bad feeling. Read more

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The Death of a Legend: The Battle of Yellow Tavern

By Arnold Blumberg

“We have been badly used up,” a sergeant in the 5th New York Volunteer Cavalry Regiment complained in a letter to his wife on May 8, 1864, four days before J.E.B. Read more

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Desperate Stand at Beecher Island

By David A. Norris

“Indians! Indians!” The staple warning from countless cliché-ridden dime novels was all too real at dawn of a Colorado morning in 1868. Read more

Confederate Brigadier General Wade Hampton, momentarily alone, desperately fends off enemy saber blows in a swirling melee in the farmland south of the York Turnpike at Gettysburg in Don Troiani’s painting, Hampton’s Duel.

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“Keep to your Sabers, Men”: J.E.B. Stuart’s Charge at Gettysburg

By Cowan Brew

An angry gloom hung like dust over the 6,000 Confederate cavalrymen trooping up the York Turnpike in the early dawn of July 3, 1863. Read more

Union Army

Sealing Vicksburg’s Fate

By Lawrence Weber

During the Civil War, the strategic importance of Vicksburg, Mississippi, was readily apparent to both the Union and the Confederacy. Read more

A Union doctor in a straw hat, foreground, examines a soldier’s leg wound while other casualties sprawl on the ground at a field hospital following the Battle of Savage’s Station, Virginia, on June 29, 1862.

Union Army

Healers or Horrors: Civil War Medicine

By Richard A. Gabriel

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

Flourishing his famous red-and-white headquarters flag, Union General Phil Sheridan rides along the front ranks after his dramatic return to the battlefield at Cedar Creek. Painting by Thure de Thulstrup.

Union Army

Glory Enough for One Day: Phil Sheridan’s Victory at Cedar Creek

By Roy Morris Jr.

Phil Sheridan had a bad feeling. The bantam-sized Union general always trusted his instincts, and now, in mid-October 1864, those instincts were telling him that trouble was brewing back at the front, where his Army of the Shenandoah was encamped near Cedar Creek, Virginia, resting and relaxing after a busy few weeks burning civilian farms and slaughtering thousands of head of livestock from Staunton north to Woodstock. Read more

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Wilson’s Creek: Bull Run of the West

By Joshua van Dereck

At the beginning of 1861, Missouri was in turmoil. A slave state since its inception in 1820, Missouri had grown increasingly tied to urban industry. Read more

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City Under Siege: The New York Draft Riots

By Rick Beard

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

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The Crater: Explosion of Death

By John Walker

It was just after 3 am on Saturday, July 30, 1864. A month of relative quiet along a two-mile stretch of Union and Confederate trench lines immediately east of Petersburg, Virginia, was about to come to an explosive end. Read more

Union Army

Alfred Duffie: A ‘Napoleon’ in the Civil War

By Arnold Blumberg

Napoleon Alexandre Duffie was born on May 1, 1833, in Paris, France. His father, Jean August Duffie, was a prosperous sugar refiner and mayor of the village of La Ferte-sous-Jouarre. Read more

Union intelligence chief Colonel George Henry Sharpe is pictured with his staff at Brandy Station in June 1863. Left to right are Sharpe, John C. Babcock, an unidentified man, and John McEntee.

Union Army

Civil War Intelligence

By Arnold Blumberg

The Union officer saw it quite clearly across the Rappahannock River: a hand-painted sign held up by a Rebel soldier that read, “Burnside and his pontoons stuck in the mud. Read more

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Mowed Down by the Fifties

By William E. Welsh

As Confederate General Robert E. Lee and his I Corps commander, Maj. Gen. James Longstreet, rode together on horseback along the dust-choked Quaker Road from Glendale to Malvern Hill on the morning of July 1, 1862, they stopped to confer with Maj. Read more

A 19th-century print offers a fanciful depiction of the desperate fighting along the Orange Plank on the second day of the Battle of the Wilderness. Although the battle ended in a draw with both sides suffering heavy casualties, the Army of the Potomac under the watchful eye of Commander-in-Chief Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant chose not to retreat, but continue south.

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James Longstreet’s Daring Advance

By Arnold Blumberg

The column of Confederates marched east as quietly as possible along the bed of an unfinished railroad that knifed through the Wilderness south of the Rapidan River shortly before midday on May 6, 1864. Read more