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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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.
A member of the Richmond elite, one woman defied convention and the Confederacy and fed secrets to the Union during the Civil War.
One of the most effective was Union spy Elizabeth Van Lew—a prominent member of Richmond, Virginia, society. The 43-year-old lived with her widowed mother in a three-story mansion in the Confederate capital, but she fervently opposed slavery and secession, writing her thoughts in a secret diary she kept buried in her backyard and whose existence she would reveal only on her deathbed.
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The first Union officer killed in the Civil War was a friend of President Lincoln’s.
Ellsworth was a man with large military ambitions, but his meteoric fame came in a way he could not have hoped for: posthumously. At the age of 24, as commander of the 11th New York Volunteers, also known as the First Fire Zouaves, Ellsworth became the first Union officer killed in the war.
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The band of the Union Army’s 114th Pennsylvania Infantry, the “Zouaves d’Afrique” regiment.
