VA History Office
Refugees crossing behind U.S. Army lines, circa 1862. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.
The American Civil War began in April 1861 as a response to preserve the United States. Within a month, enslaved African Americans seeking shelter behind Union lines shifted the war’s objectives. Many U.S. Army leaders, such as Major General Benjamin Butler, were unwilling to return these individuals to their disloyal enslavers. Hoping to deny the Confederacy of its labor force, U.S. officials recognized these self-emancipated people and harbored them as “contraband of war.” By running away from slavery, these Black Americans helped make emancipation a strategical component of preserving the Union.
From the Battle of Mine Creek by Samuel Reader.
The Battle of Gettysburg may have been the turning point of the Civil War, but no one told the Confederates that, especially in the West.
In August 1864, Confederate Maj. Gen. Sterling Price received an order to take the fight to the North, capture St. Louis and make Abraham Lincoln a one-term president.
The resulting offensive was one of the largest mounted cavalry attacks of the war, and it cost the Confederacy dearly. One Union soldier, a 20-year-old private from Iowa, earned the Medal of Honor for compounding the South s failure.
A cutting from the 1897 book The Story of American Heroism depicts a wounded Dunlavy taking Gen. Marmaduke s weapon, apparently just by virtue of proximity.