SUMMARY The Stonewall Brigade was a collection of five Virginia infantry regiments and an artillery battery in the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia during the American Civil War (1861–1865). Trained and first led by Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, it was perhaps the most accomplished and certainly one of the most famous units of its kind in American military history. The brigade saw action in many of the bloodiest battles of the war, from First Manassas (1861) to Antietam (1862) to Gettysburg (1863) to Spotsylvania Court House (1864), losing only a single engagement under Jackson’s command but also losing more than 96 percent of its men by 1865.
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Nathaniel Prentiss Banks was a Massachusetts state legislator (1849–1853), a ten-term United States Congressman (1853–1857, 1865–1873, 1875–1879, 1889–1891), Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives (1856–1857), governor of Massachusetts (1858–1861), and a Union general during the American Civil War (1861–1865). One of the most prominent political generals of the conflict, Banks lacked military talent and experience but rose to high command on the strength of his public stature and his staunch support of the administration of U.S. president Abraham Lincoln, despite having been one of Lincoln’s political rivals in 1860. Banks’s tendency to subordinate military affairs to political ambition, his penchant for grandiose planning without devoting sufficient attention to tactical details, and his inability to admit or correct mistakes ensured that a once-promising career in arms would fall short of expectations. As commander of the Department of the Shenand