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On Friday, May 15, Lt. Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson’s last earthly journey came to an end. After lying in state in the governor’s mansion in Richmond, his coffin covered with the newly-approved “Stainless Banner,” Gen. Jackson’s remains were conveyed by rail and riverboat to Lexington.
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With the Union army in defeat in Virginia, focus in mid-May 1863 turned to Mississippi, where Maj. Gen. Ulysses Grant was making advances on the fortified Confederates at Vicksburg. Col. Benjamin Grierson’s cavalry raid from Tennessee through Mississippi had ended at Baton Rouge, La., on May 2.
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On two of the three major fronts, as May 1863, opened, Northern armies moved in new offensives. The Army of the Potomac was at poised at Chancellorsville, while other Union force marshaled at Fredericksburg. In a freak accident, the South loses one of its heroes as Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson is killed by friendly...
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The Congress of the Confederate States levied a comprehensive “tax in kind” of one-tenth of all produce of the land for the year 1863 on April 24. Skirmishing took place the next day at Hard Times Landing in Mississippi as Maj. Gen. Ulysses Grant’s troops continued to push south after bypassing Vicksburg.
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April 1863 The first clash between local Mississippi Confederates and the U.S. Cavalry commanded by Col. Benjamin Grierson on their raid south from LaGrange, Tenn., took place between Ripley and New Albany, in northern Mississippi on Saturday, April 18. In Arkansas, Confederate cavalry commanded by Brig. Gen. John S. Marmaduke launched a raid into...
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April 1863 The siege of almost a month of the Federal troops garrisoned in Suffolk, Va., by Confederates commanded by Lt. Gen. James Longstreet (on detached duty from the Army of Northern Virginia) began on Sunday, April 12, the second anniversary of the start of the war. Out west in the Utah Territory, Federal...
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April 1863 April, 1863, specifically April 10, was the midpoint of the war, 1861-65, though it was then unknown at the time in 1863. Military activity by both land and naval forces throughout the divided nations increased daily. On Saturday, April 4, President Lincoln left Washington for Fredericksburg, Va., to confer with Maj. Gen....
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March/April 1863 As the month of March 1863 began closing, much of the military focus was on the Union efforts to capture the Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River at Vicksburg. Things were not going well for the Federals. The Union gunboat USS Diana was captured by Confederates at Pattersonville, La. Maj. Gen. William...
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March 1863 Maj. Gen. Edwin V. Sumner, one of the oldest Federal officers in the service, who had performed well as a combat commander in the Peninsula Campaign and in Maryland in September 1862, died in Syracuse, N.Y., on Saturday, March 21. The same day, in Mississippi, gunboats on Steele’s Bayou were harassed by...
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March 1863 During the night of Saturday, March 14, Adm. David Farragut in his flagship USS Hartford led his Union naval squadron up the Mississippi River past the Confederate artillery batteries at Port Hudson, La. The Hartford and the USS Albatross succeeded in getting through but the Monongahela and Richmond were heavily damaged and...
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March 1863 Only two months after becoming a Partisan Ranger, Confederate Capt. John S. Mosby and several of his Rangers sneaked through Federal lines into Fairfax Courthouse, Va., on the chilly, rainy night of Sunday, Mar. 8, intending to capture Sir Percy Wyndham, a British “by-the-book” Union cavalry officer observing the war for Queen...
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March 1863 The first glimmerings of spring after a winter of bitter weather greeted North and South as the month of March, 1863, began. There were increased worries in the Confederacy, and hope mixed with discontent in the Union. Northern citizens were critical of their military leaders, even of Maj. Gen. Ulysses Grant; he...
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February 1863 During the last week of February 1863, several military, naval, national and political events took place, with skirmishes and engagements all around between Union and Confederate forces. On Sunday, Feb. 22, the anniversary of George Washington’s birth, ground was broken in Sacramento, Calif., for the Central Pacific Railroad that would eventually link...
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February 1863 River and ocean warfare highlighted the events of the third week in February 1863. In Washington, President Lincoln was concerned about a naval attack being planned for Charleston, S.C. There was fighting at Yazoo Pass, Miss., when Confederates there opposed Maj. Gen. Ulysses Grant’s plans to move gunboats down the Yazoo River...
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February 1863 Three blockade runners successfully broke through the Federal blockade off Charleston, S.C. on Saturday, Feb. 7. The same day, the Federal Department of Washington was recreated and Maj. Gen. Samuel Heintzelman was placed in command. Near Williamsburg, Va., Confederate soldiers ambushed a Union cavalry patrol, resulting in the deaths and wounding of...
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January/February 1863 As January closed, raids on settlers by the Shoshone Indians led by Chief Bear Hunter in the Utah Territory provoked retaliation by Federal troops. Col. Patrick Connor led his troops out in the deep snow from Fort Douglas and marched 120 miles to Bear Hunter’s camp near present-day Preston, Utah. After an...
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January 1863 On Saturday, Jan. 24, President Lincoln in Washington conferred with Army Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Henry Halleck on the military situation, and awaited the arrival of his commander of the Army of the Potomac, Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside, from Fredericksburg. The next day, Gen. Burnside conferred with President Lincoln early and...
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January 1863 The weather during the five weeks since the Battle of Fredericksburg had been, for the most part, fine. The Army of the Potomac under Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside remained in their camps across the river from Fredericksburg, while Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army still occupied the high ground west of the...
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January 1863 Federal troops under Maj. Gen. John McClernand arrived on the night of Jan. 9 at Fort Hindman, or Arkansas Post, Ark., on the Arkansas River about 50 miles upstream from its junction with the Mississippi River. Confederates under Brig. Gen. Thomas Churchill had been disrupting river traffic from Fort Hindman; Gen. McClernand’s...
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January 1863 In the beginning of January, savage fighting continued in Tennessee in the Battle of Murfreesboro (or Stone’s River) after Maj. Gen. William Rosecrans’ Federal army advanced from Nashville on Gen. Braxton Bragg’s Confederates encamped at Murfreesboro. By attacking first, the Confederates surprised the Federals and drove the Union troops back. After three...
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December 1862/January 1863 In the last days of 1862, Federal forces closed in on Vicksburg, Miss. and Gen. Braxton Bragg’s Confederate army centered around Murfreesboro, Tenn. In Washington, President Lincoln wrote the last revisions to the Emancipation Proclamation; in the South, President Davis was in Alabama, still on his tour of the Confederate States....
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December 1862 In Washington on Saturday, Dec. 20, the Cabinet crisis moved into its second day. Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase tendered his resignation, to follow those of Secretary of State William Seward and his son Frederick, the assistant secretary of state, and Postmaster General Montgomery Blair’s offers to resign. The disputes ended when President...
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December 1862 Fredericksburg: On Saturday, Dec. 13, a day after Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside got his entire Federal Army of the Potomac across the Rappahannock River using five pontoon bridges, he launched a series of futile frontal attacks against Gen. Robert E. Lee’s entrenched Army of Northern Virginia on the high ground at Prospect...
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December 1862 President Lincoln, on Saturday, Dec. 6, ordered the the Dec. 19 execution of 39 Sioux warriors for their part in the Indian uprising in Minnesota (the Dakota War of 1862), which lasted a month at the end of summer. More than 300 of the captured Sioux had been convicted by a military...
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December 1862 As December 1862 began, it was a far different military picture than it had been a few months before. Confederate troops had been victorious on the peninsula at Richmond and in northern Virginia, and for a brief time in Kentucky, but now toward year’s end, the long term outlook for the Confederacy...
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November 1862 Federal Maj. Gen. Edwin Sumner, one of Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s subordinate commanders in the Army of the Potomac, agreed on Saturday, Nov. 22, not to bombard the city of Fredericksburg, despite Gen. Burnside’s ultimatum to the mayor the day before, “so long as no hostile demonstration is made from the town.”...
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November 1862 The Federal Army of the Potomac, concentrated in Fauquier County around Warrenton, and now commanded by Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside (for whom sideburns was named, because of the general’s luxurious sideburns) began moving on Saturday, Nov. 15, towards Fredericksburg. His intent was to sweep his troops around the Confederate army encamped in...
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November 1862 The Federal Army of the Potomac, concentrated in Fauquier County around Warrenton, on Saturday, Nov. 8, was rocked by the news of Gen. George McClellan’s dismissal as their commander. “Little Mac” was loved by all of his troops. This feeling made the job difficult for the new army commander, Maj. Gen. Ambrose...
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November 1862 November 1862 opened with Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler, the Union commander in New Orleans, issuing orders tightening pass requirements and authorizing the discharge from confinement of “all slaves not known to be slaves of loyal owners.” In Richmond, Confederate President Jefferson Davis was concerned about the relationship of the Confederate states to...
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October 1862 The Federal Army of the Potomac, almost completely idle since the battle at Sharpsburg on Sept. 17, began crossing the Potomac River into Virginia on Sunday, Oct. 26. In Kentucky, Gen. Braxton Bragg completed the Confederate evacuation of Kentucky, retiring into Tennessee and heading towards Knoxville and Nashville. Around the Union’s national...
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October 1862 Out on the high seas, on Saturday, Oct. 18, the worst of a mid-October hurricane was over, the sea was running fearfully high and the crew of the CSS Alabama went about repairing storm damage. Capt. Raphael Semmes had saved the Confederate raider the day prior when his keen eyes saw the...
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October 1862 On the upper Missouri River, below Fort Berthold, Dakota Territory, a party of Sioux Indians fought with a boatload of miners on Oct. 11, while Indiana home guards drove a group of Confederate guerrilla fighters out of Hawesville, Ind. Maj. Gen. J.E.B. Stuart and his Confederate cavalry completed their second ride around Maj....
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October 1862 As October 1862 opened, Gen. Braxton Bragg’s Confederate campaign in Kentucky was reaching a climax. The Ohio River cities in north Kentucky had been successfully defended by Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell’s Federal troops but there was fighting near Mt. Washington and on the road between Louisville and Frankfort. In Corinth, Miss.,...
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September/October 1862 On Saturday, Sept. 27, the Second Conscription Act of the Confederate Congress authorized President Jefferson Davis to call out men between the ages of 35 and 45 for military service. In Washington, President Lincoln interrogated Maj. John Key and ordered his dismissal from military service for allegedly saying that the object of...
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September 1862 After the Battle of Sharpsburg (Northerners called it Antietam, after the creek on the battlefield), Gen. Robert E. Lee withdrew his battered Army of Northern Virginia back across the Potomac River into Virginia, and began moving south. The U.S. Army of the Potomac, under Maj. Gen. George McClellan, remained in their positions...
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September 1862 In accordance with Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Special Orders No. 191, issued in Frederick, Md., on Sept. 9, his Army of Northern Virginia had been divided. Maj. Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson’s troops marched on the Union garrison at Harpers Ferry while Maj. Gen. James Longstreet’s command marched through Boonsborough to secure the...
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September 1862 In both the eastern and the western theatres of war, Confederate armies were marching north. In the west, Gen. E. Kirby Smith’s army had crossed from Tennessee into Kentucky, with the goal of advancing on the Ohio River. In Tennessee, the Confederates under Gen. Braxton Bragg were marching north out of Chattanooga...
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August/September 1862 In a letter from Gen. Robert E. Lee to Maj. Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson on July 27, the commanding general, in his ire against Maj. Gen. John Pope for Pope’s harsh treatment of Southern citizens in the area of his command, called the Federal commander of the Army of Virginia a “miscreant who...
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August 1862 Toward the end of August, as more of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s army marched north to reinforce Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson’s troops, daily clashes occurred between the Confederates and the Federals in Maj. Gen. John Pope’s Army of Virginia. Maj. Gen. James E.B. Stuart’s Confederate cavalry, in concert with Maj. John Mosby’s...
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Maj. Gen. James E. B. Stuart was assigned command of all the cavalry of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia on Sunday, Aug. 17.
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