SUMMARY
Lewis A. Armistead was a Confederate general in the Army of Northern Virginia during the American Civil War (1861–1865). Decorated for bravery during the Mexican War (1846–1848), the West Point dropout and widower earned a reputation as a tough, soft-spoken, and highly respected leader at such battles as Seven Pines (1862), Antietam (1862), and Malvern Hill (1862), and was known to his friends, ironically, as “Lo,” short for Lothario. At Gettysburg, on July 3, 1863, he helped to lead the frontal assault that came to be known as Pickett’s Charge. When Armistead, at the head of his brigade, reached the stone wall on Cemetery Ridge that protected the Army of the Potomac‘s Second Corps, he was shot and wounded more than once. The Union troops who fired the fatal shots happened to be commanded by one of Armistead’s closest friends, Winfield Scott Hancock. His death was immortalized in the 1993 film
SUMMARY
Richard S. Ewell was a Confederate lieutenant general during the American Civil War (1861–1865) who apprenticed under Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson during the Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1862, and later took charge of the Army of Northern Virginia‘s Second Corps after Jackson’s death. Nicknamed “Old Bald Head” and said to be “blisteringly profane,” Ewell courted controversy with his decision not to attack Cemetery Hill on the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg (1863). Some historians have claimed that Ewell’s inaction in this episode cost the Confederates the battle, although Robert E. Lee‘s orders on the matter were vague and it is unclear whether Ewell’s men could have carried the day in any case.
Yet, even as the county’s men joined the war, geography and circumstance insured that Culpeper itself would be a focal point for military action. Geographically, it sat midway between and slightly to the west of Richmond and Washington, D.C., and railroads linked it to both national capitals. The Orange and Alexandria ran northward from the county seat of Culpeper Court House to Alexandria; the Virginia Central connected the county to Richmond via Gordonsville. In addition, the Rappahannock River formed the county’s northern boundary, and Culpeper marked the first point on the river where an invading Union force could ford the Rappahannock during most of the year. Outside of the Shenandoah Valley, it was one of the best invasion routes in the state.
SUMMARY
John Pope was a Union general during the American Civil War (1861–1865) with a reputation for outspokenness and arrogance. After serving in the Mexican War (1846–1848) as an engineer, the West Point graduate fought well in the West during 1861 and 1862, prompting U.S. president Abraham Lincoln to transfer him east. There, he exacerbated his already bad relations with Union generals George B. McClellan and Fitz-John Porter by issuing a proclamation trumpeting his own generalship. When he declared that he would make his “headquarters in the saddle,” some quipped that he had mistaken his hindquarters for his headquarters, and when he announced a series of hard-war policies aimed at punishing Confederate civilians, Confederate general Robert E. Lee labeled him a “miscreant.” At the head of the new Army of Virginia, Pope got the opportunity to confront Lee at the Second Battle of Manassas in August 1862 but was soundly defeated. Pope was transferred to the Dakotas, wh
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.