At the Battle of Cedar Mountain, Confederate forces under Thomas J. (Stonewall) Jackson managed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. The battle thus became an important step in turning back the Union offensives launched in the summer of 1862, a task that was completed 19 days later at the Second Battle oe Bull Run.
By July 1862 George B. McClellan’s Peninsular campaign had essentially failed, and he had ordered the withdrawal of Union troops from the area around Richmond. To the south, however, Union general John Pope was enjoying a fair amount of success. A portion of Pope’s Federal forces, led by Gen. Nathaniel Banks, captured the town of Culpeper and made plans to move further south.
To neutralize the threat, 14,000 troops under Stonewall Jackson were sent to halt the Union’s advance. Jackson was not himself aware that Union troops held the town of Culpeper, and so when the Confederates arrived there on the afternoon of August 9, they essentially stumbled into an ambush. Union artillery pounded the Southerners as Gen. Jubal A. Early attempted to organize a line of artillery and infantry with which to fight back. The artillery battle lasted for three hours and claimed the lives of many Confederates.
At 5:00 that afternoon, Banks ordered a pair of infantry attacks against the poorly organized Confederate line. The attacks broke through and trapped many of Jackson’s troops on the narrow, winding road leading to Culpeper. In the confusion, a substantial number of Southern soldiers were killed, while others threw down their guns and fled. Jackson arrived on the scene in the midst of this panicked retreat, and he responded swiftly. Jackson drew his sword, the only time this is known to have happened during the war, and he himself led the Confederate countercharge. At the same time, fresh troops under Gen. Ambrose P. Hill arrived. This gave the Confederates a two-to-one advantage, and the exhausted Union troops were forced to fall back. What would have been a decisive defeat for the Confederates instead became a hard-won victory. The Federal forces suffered 2,381 casualties, the Confederates 1,276. So many men were wounded so quickly that some soldiers called the battle “Slaughter Mountain” in their letters home.
On the next day, August 10, Union leadership decided not to continue the battle and requested permission under a flag of truce to gather their wounded and bury their dead. Jackson and his troops withdrew that evening. Less than a month later, the same armies would meet again at the Second Battle of Bull Run. Victory would be Jackson’s on that occasion as well. Pope was forced to join McClellan in withdrawing from Virginia, giving the initiative to Robert E. Lee and allowing him to launch an offensive into Maryland in September 1862. It would be two years before
Union forces would once again penetrate so deeply into Virginia.
Further reading: Robert K. Krick, Stonewall Jackson at Cedar Mountain (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).
—Arthur E. Amos
Chamberlain, Joshua L. (1828-1914) educator, politician, Union general
College professor, Union officer, and governor of Maine, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was born in Brewer, Maine, on September 28, 1828, to Joshua Chamberlain, Jr., and Sarah Dupee Brastow. Graduating from Bowdoin College in 1852 and Bangor Theological Seminary in 1855, he took a teaching position at Bowdoin and married Frances (Fannie) Caroline Adams.
In 1862, Chamberlain, age 33 and the father of two, took a leave of absence from Bowdoin and accepted a commission as lieutenant colonel of the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry. Promoted to colonel after the Battle of Fredericksburg, Chamberlain ordered a bayonet charge at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863, that probably saved the Federal position on Little Round Top from being turned by the Confederates. Following a bout with malaria in 1863, he rejoined his regiment at Spotsylvania in May 1864 and was soon given command of a brigade. Chamberlain was officially promoted to brigadier general after he was badly wounded during the Petersburg campaign. He returned to the army before the Battle of Five Forks, where he was brevetted major general for bravery. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant further honored Chamberlain by choosing him to receive the Confederate surrender at Appomattox Court House in 1865.
Chamberlain returned to Maine a hero. Uninterested in resuming his professorship, he secured the Republican nomination for governor of Maine and won election in 1866. After a tumultuous four years as governor, he became president of Bowdoin College and set about reforming the curriculum, with mixed results. An attempt to institute military training at the all-male college failed when the students refused to drill.
An increasingly conservative Chamberlain grew nostalgic about the war, expressed sympathy toward exConfederates, and applauded the end of Reconstruction. Having resigned the Bowdoin presidency in 1883, Chamberlain spent his retirement trying to recapture his wartime glory. He lectured on the 20th Maine’s heroism at Gettysburg and on the surrender of Lee. He wrote magazine articles, gave Memorial Day addresses, and made frequent trips to old battlefields, especially Gettysburg. In 1893 he was awarded the congressional Medal of Honor for his leadership at Little Round Top. In his 80s, Chamberlain wrote a history of the Appomattox campaign (published posthumously in 1915 as The Passing of the Armies), that revealed his romantic view of war as the ultimate test of character.
Chamberlain died in Brunswick, Maine, on February 24, 1914, of complications from the Petersburg wound he had received 50 years earlier.
See also Gettysburg, Battle of; Spotsylvania, battle of.
Further reading: Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, The Passing of the Armies: An Account of the Final Campaign of the Army of the Potomac, Based upon Personal Reminiscences of the Fifth Army Corps (1915; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998); Thomas A. Desjardin, Stand Firm Ye Boys from Maine: The 20th Maine and the Gettysburg Campaign (Gettysburg, Pa.: Thomas Publications, 1995); Alice R. Trulock, In the Hands of Providence: Joshua L. Chamberlain and the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).
—Amy J. Kinsel
World History
