Skip to content

Archive for

Apr 4

The Battle of Cedar Mountain

An excerpt from the current issue: Volume 32, #2

Table of Contents

 

The Battle of Cedar Mountain

by Michael E. Block
Vice President, Friends of Cedar Mountain Battlefield

 

The Battle of Cedar Mountain has never been considered part of a campaign. Many will place the fight as the opening action of the Second Manassas Campaign. However, the fight south of Culpeper, Va., on August 9, 1862 was, if anything, the concluding action of the Peninsula Campaign.

The Lincoln Administration needed to create a distraction for the Confederate armies on the Virginia Peninsula below Richmond—a distraction to relieve pressure on Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac so his troops could withdraw from their pocket along the James River.

Read more

Apr 3

Editors Letter: The Making of A Legend

The Making of A Legend

The story of Stonewall Jackson and his battle at Cedar Mountain with principal adversary Nathaniel Banks can not be fully understood without placing the fight in its proper context. Feature article author Michael Block offers the argument that the battle was not an opening action of the Second Manassas Campaign in the summer of 1862, as many accounts claim, but rather a concluding action to the Union’s failed campaign on the Virginia Peninsula.

Read more