The Riesling Retribution

The Battle Of Ball’s Bluff

Ball’s Bluff Battlefield Regional Park is located at the end of a street in a quiet subdivision near a sprawling outlet shopping mall a few miles from Leesburg, Virginia. But once inside the 223-acre park, the noise and bustle of the twenty-first century recede, and a visitor, out to exercise the dog or take a walk with friends or family, is soon enveloped in silence in the sun-dappled woods. Well-marked paths, Civil War monuments, and the third smallest military cemetery in the United States, where the remains of fifty-four Union soldiers lie in twenty-five graves, make it impossible to forget that a bloody battle occurred here—and some will swear that the park is haunted.

The Battle of Ball’s Bluff took place on October 21, 1861, three months after the Union army lost the First Battle of Bull Run, the first great land battle of the Civil War. Ball’s Bluff was, plain and simply, an accident that evolved as a result of a mistake by an inexperienced Union officer. In a few years’ time, it would be considered of relatively minor importance when compared to other battles such as Gettysburg, Antietam, or Chancellorsville, but its significance on the remainder of the Civil War is indisputable: Congress, eager for a scapegoat after the death of one of their own, Senator Edward Baker, a Union commander responsible for much of the bungling, decided to form the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. Shocked by Baker’s death and the sight of so many bodies in blue floating down the Potomac River past Washington, the committee oversaw the strategy and battle plans of Union commanders, who chafed under this authority for the remainder of the war.

James A. Morgan III, author of A Little Short of Boats: The Fights at Ball’s Bluff and Edwards Ferry (Ironclad Publishing, 2004), describes the bluffs as a six-hundred-yard-long stretch of heavily wooded shale and sandstone cliff on the Virginia side of the Potomac River. A floodplain lies between the water and the cliffs, which rise about 110 feet above the river. Harrison Island, a long, narrow island that bisects the Potomac at the bluffs, played a significant role in the battle as the place from which Union soldiers launched their boats. The geography of Ball’s Bluff then, as now, is unforgiving.

In the fall of 1861, under orders of Major General George McClellan, Union troops were keeping an eye on the area around Leesburg. Because all Potomac bridges between Harpers Ferry and above the Chain Bridge near Washington, D.C., had been burned, the ferry crossings above and below Leesburg were of strategic importance to both armies. Whoever controlled the area controlled invasion routes leading north and south.

For several weeks in October, Confederate commander Nathan “Shanks” Evans watched uneasily as a growing number of Union troops amassed in the area. Worried that he might be cut off without nearby reinforcements, Evans withdrew from Leesburg on October 16 without getting permission from his commanding officers.

Union troops monitoring Evans’s departure assumed Leesburg had been left unprotected. What they did not know was that Evans’s commander, General P.G.T. Beauregard, had ordered him to return to the town, which he did on October 19. The following day, Union soldiers, under orders of Brigadier General Charles P. Stone, staged a small show of force to see what, if anything, the Confederates would do. That night a small Union patrol crossed the Potomac River to investigate the impact their demonstration had had on the Confederates. Unfortunately, in the moonlight their inexperienced leader mistook a row of trees for an enemy camp and reported this to Stone, who ordered a raid the next day.

But early on the morning of October 21, the raiding party was discovered by a company of Confederate soldiers who engaged them in fighting—ironically just as General Stone was being told there was no camp. Stone handed off what he believed was an expanded reconnaissance mission to Baker who, without evaluating the situation, immediately began sending more troops across the river.

Ball’s Bluff was not so much a single battle as a series of smaller skirmishes that gradually escalated over the course of the day as both armies sent more troops. Though each side had almost the same number of men, Baker’s troops—relatively inexperienced compared to the Confederates, some of who had fought at Bull’s Run—were eventually trapped at the end of a long, punishing day of fighting at one end of the battlefield with their backs to the bluff. Overwhelmed and panicking after a seesaw battle that cost Baker his life, Union soldiers fled and were injured or killed attempting to escape down the steeply sloped cliffs of Ball’s Bluff. Those who made it to the floodplain found only three small boats to take them back to Harrison Island. Some tried to swim and either drowned or were shot. Many surrendered.

Though Balls Bluff would later be overshadowed by larger, bloodier battles, it was significant as a stunning early success for the South. According to Jim Morgan, neither side was expecting the Civil War to drag on as it did, nor to turn into a bloodbath. But the South would always remember their surprising victory, practically in the backyard of the Northern capital. For the North, however, the name Ball’s Bluff became a curse.