President Lincoln addresses the State of the Union and grows impatient with General McClellan.
The month saw few battles, with no decisive advantage gained. A skirmish on Buffalo Mountain in western Virginia was typical. Union troops attacked a Confederate camp but withdrew after a morning’s fight—137 Union casualties, 146 Confederate.
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In this exclusive clip from the 1930s, Confederate veterans step up to the mic and let out their version of the fearsome rallying cry.
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As Union generals came and left, personalities clashed and Southern farmers set fire to their fields.
On November 1, George B. McClellan assumed the role of general in chief of the Union armies, a post voluntarily vacated by the ailing 75-year-old Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott, who had been a target of McClellan’s barbs in the press. The promotion inflated McClellan’s already significant ego, and he would spar with Lincoln throughout the war.
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While the generals on both sides deliberated, troops in blue and gray fidgeted.
A greater defeat awaited Union forces on the 21st. At Ball’s Bluff on the Potomac River, Union Col. Edward D. Baker, a friend of the president’s, led his soldiers in a charge up the cliff, only to be pushed back into the river, incurring 921 casualties, including himself, out of 1,700
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During September, the civil war expanded to Kentucky and West Virginia, and President Lincoln rejects an attempt at emancipation.
Five months into the Civil War—on September 9—Richmond, Virginia’s Daily Dispatch editorialized that the time for debate had passed. “Words are now of no avail: blood is more potent than rhetoric, more profound than logic.”
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The musicians of the Union and Confederate armies provided strong memories of the homes left behind for the battlefield.
