- 37 maps that explain the American Civil War - Vox
Looking for:
Civil war battles in virginia mapWilliamsburg | May 5, | American Battlefield Trust
To view the purposes they believe they have legitimate interest for, or to object to this data processing use the vendor list link below. The consent submitted will only be used for data processing originating from this website. If you would like to change your settings or withdraw consent at any time, the link to do so is in our privacy policy accessible from our home page. Manage Settings Continue with Recommended Cookies. This flag was carried by an unknown Virginia regiment.
Major Ward was General Custer's brother-in-law. Sources: U. National Park Service U. Library of Congress. Vendor List Privacy Policy. Black Slave Owners. Grant Stonewall Jackson George B. Hood General Robert E. Second Confederate Flag On May 1st,, a second design was adopted, placing the Battle Flag also known as the "Southern Cross" as the canton on a white field.
This flag was easily mistaken for a white flag of surrender especially when the air was calm and the flag hung limply. More on Confederate Flags. Courtesy AnimationFactory. America's Christian Heritage From Plymouth Rock to Independence Hall and beyond, the pages of American history overflow with evidence of the profound role Christianity has played in the founding of our nation. Virginia Civil War Map of Battles History's Mysteries: Family Feud: The Hatfields And McCoys Millions of dollars worth of timber and coal rich land were at stake, the courts were involved and once the national press got wind of what was happening, the backwoods folk found that their fight was being followed nationwide.
The Civil War - A Film by Ken Burns Here is the saga of celebrated generals and ordinary soldiers, a heroic and transcendent president and a country that had to divide itself in two in order to become one. Wargame Construction Age of Rifles - Game lets you design and play turn-based strategic battles.
You can create scenarios betwen years and You have complete control over all the units, and can customize their firepower, movement points, strength, aggressiveness, etc. Supports 1 or 2 players. History Channel Civil War A Nation Divided Rally the troops and organize a counterattack -- Your strategic decision and talent as a commander will decide if the Union is preserved or if Dixie wins its independence.
Sid Meier's Civil War Collection Take command of either Confederate or Union troops and command them to attack from the trees, rally around the general, or do any number of other realistic military actions. The AI reacts to your commands as if it was a real Civil War general, and offers infinite replayability.
The random-scenario generator provides endless variations on the battles. While all of those are very good in their own right they simply do not compete with the level of detail presented here. Hundreds of scenarios and multiple OOBs are only the start, the best thing is the campaign game. The Virginia State seal depicts the Roman goddess Virtus representing the spirit of the Commonwealth. She is dressed as an Amazon, a sheathed sword in one hand, and a spear in the other, and one foot on the form of Tyranny, who is pictured with a broken chain in his left hand, a scourge in his right, and his fallen crown nearby, implying struggle that has ended in complete victory.
Buy this Virginia State Flag. In , the Virginia State Convention passed an ordinance establishing a design virtually identical to that in current use. This flag has a deep blue field with a circular white center. The obverse of the great seal of the Commonwealth has been identically painted or embroidered on each side of the flag.
If no button appears, you cannot download or save the media. Text on this page is printable and can be used according to our Terms of Service. Any interactives on this page can only be played while you are visiting our website. You cannot download interactives. Resource Library MAP. Resource Library. The Battles of the U. Civil War. Subjects Geography, Social Studies, U. We and our partners use data for Personalised ads and content, ad and content measurement, audience insights and product development.
An example of data being processed may be a unique identifier stored in a cookie. Some of our partners may process your data as a part of their legitimate business interest without asking for consent. To view the purposes they believe they have legitimate interest for, or to object to this data processing use the vendor list link below. The consent submitted will only be used for data processing originating from this website. If you would like to change your settings or withdraw consent at any time, the link to do so is in our privacy policy accessible from our home page.
Manage Settings Continue with Recommended Cookies. As a history buff, visiting Civil War Sites is a must. From Manassas to Fredericksburg and beyond, these historic sites are rich with history and offer a unique perspective. Our favorites? Stratford Hall to see the personal history of the Lee family, and Manassas battlefield park for stunning scenery. These battles were some of the first major engagements of the American Civil War.
During the first battle of Manassas, Confederate General Thomas Jonathan Jackson earned his nickname Stonewall after he successfully defended the flank of his army. The Union forces were eventually forced to retreat, and this victory helped to boost Southern morale. Before or after seeing the battlefield, stop by the Henry Hill Visitor Center to learn more about that first conflict. The facility includes exhibits and a minute movie that is very interesting and well made.
Civil War Battle Maps – Battle Archives.
South Carolina went first, on December 20, , stating explicitly that slavery was the reason for the crack-up in its declaration of secession. Four states from the outer South — including large and prosperous Virginia — held on, trying to gain leverage for some kind of negotiated settlement. South Carolina seceded months before Lincoln actually took office in March , creating a dilemma for federal officials in the state — especially the military personnel charged with manning the fortifications that had originally been designed to protect the Port of Charleston from foreign attack.
President James Buchanan refused to surrender Sumter to South Carolina, but also declined to take the kind of large-scale military action that would make it possible to resupply the fort. Soon after Lincoln took office, the fort began to run out of food, forcing his administration to act. Lincoln chose to send an unarmed resupply ship, hoping the South would fire the first shot of the war. Confederate officials took the bait, firing on the fort on April 12 and starting four years of war.
General Winfield Scott, a hero of the earlier war with Mexico, was a senior US military officer at the outbreak of the war and drew up the initial plan for Union victory. Lincoln rejected this idea in favor of a more aggressive push for a conquest of Richmond and a swift victory. But a naval blockade and economic warfare were a secondary element of Union strategy, and as the swift victory was not forthcoming they proved essential in the long run.
The difficulty was that in practice, sealing off such an enormously long coastline was challenging. Throughout the war, federal blockade patrols played a game of cat and mouse with blockade-running ships bound for Europe. At the same time, the threat of English or French intervention in the war to disrupt the blockade was ever-present and avoiding it was the key objective of American diplomacy at the time.
From the American Revolution to Algeria to Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, lightly armed insurgent movements often win wars against mighty powers.
But the South did not really adopt an insurgent strategy. Instead, they formed large formal armies and met federal troops in pitched battle. The Confederates hoped this would help them secure international recognition, believed that a few victories would sap northern will to fight, and perhaps also recognized that while guerrilla tactics can be effective at winning wars they are unlikely to be of much use in helping plantation owners retain their mansions and human chattel.
The much greater density of railroad networks in the Northern states is an impressive visual manifestation of their greater population density and level of industrialization. The rail network helped the Union in concrete terms during the war, because it facilitated the movement of troops and supplies across the very large frontier.
But it also signifies a larger set of Northern advantages. Those railroads were useful during wartime, but they existed long before it because the demand for them existed in the form of Northern factories and large Northern cities. The supply chain to create them existed, both in terms of metal and sophisticated financing. The same features of a modern industrial and financial capitalism that gave the North the capacity to construct such a vast rail network gave it formidable advantages in terms of shipbuilding, munitions supply, and other key sinews of war.
The key question throughout the duration of the conflict was whether the North would make the political decision to use its resources to crush the South, not whether it had the capacity to do so over the long haul. From a tactical standpoint, the location of the Union capital on the border between the slave state of Maryland and the secessionist state of Virginia was far from ideal.
The Confederacy stood no real chance of capturing any other significant Northern city, but Washington was extremely vulnerable to Confederate attack. Consequently, defending the city through a ring of surrounding fortifications shown as red dots on this map — click for a larger version was a key early priority. In the s, the city of Washington was much smaller than the District of Columbia, with the remaining territory still in a rural state.
As the city grew in subsequent decades, old forts — including Fort Totten, Fort Lincoln, Fort Davis, and Fort Dupont — would be pressed into service as the names of new neighborhoods. This map offers a very high-level overview of the major land campaigns of the Civil War. One point to note is that the Virginia theater of the war — the one in which Robert E. But the development of steam engines opened up new possibilities for warship design.
The Confederacy developed the Virginia , a warship that was low to the water and totally covered in heavy iron armor. On March 8, , the Virginia sank two wooden warships in the Union-held harbor called Hampton Roads. Luckily, the Union had just built an ironclad ship of its own, called the Monitor.
So when the Virginia returned the next day looking for more wooden ships to sink, it instead found itself in a fight with the Monitor. This map shows how the inconclusive battle was waged. Neither managed to sink the other after two hours of pounding, but news of the battle caused navies around the world to stop building wooden ships and begin work on ironclad ones instead.
In , Union Gen. George McClellan set out with more than , men on a campaign to capture the Confederate capital of Richmond. The plan was to sail down the Chesapeake Bay, land on the peninsula between the York and James rivers, and then march 80 miles upriver to capture Richmond. McClellan was charismatic, detail-oriented, and well-liked by his troops. But he had a pathological aversion to risk-taking. The first Confederate troops McClellan encountered, commanded by John Magruder, were well-entrenched, but there were only 13, of them.
McClellan should have been able to rout them fairly easily. But Magruder put on a show for McClellan, parading the troops past the same point multiple times to exaggerate their numbers and convincing McClellan that the force was much bigger than it really was. So McClellan wasted weeks preparing for the battle. These and other delays gave Confederate forces plenty of time gather reinforcements and prepare their defenses, leading to a series of inconclusive battles in the outskirts of Richmond.
Commanding a small Confederate army of about 17, in the Shenandoah Valley miles west of Richmond and Washington, Jackson executed a series of daring raids on Union positions. In the end, neither side achieved a decisive victory in the Shenandoah Valley campaign.
Still Jackson did a huge service to the Confederate cause by keeping more than 50, Union troops occupied with a much smaller force. The majority of those troops would otherwise have been dispatched to Richmond, where they might have allowed McClellan to seize the Confederate capital.
After a Confederate victory near Chancellorsville, Virginia, in May , some Confederate leaders wanted to send troops to reinforce Confederate forces elsewhere in the South.
But General Robert E. So Lee marched 75, troops north, taking them deep into Union territory. This map illustrates the resulting chase; red arrows show the path of Confederate troops while blue ones show the pursuing Union forces.
The armies finally met on July 1, , near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The Union victory there forced Lee to retreat to Confederate territory; Southern troops would never again pose a serious threat to Northern territory. In addition to running an increasingly successful blockade of the Confederate coast, Union forces also gradually took control of key Confederate ports. By , Mobile Bay was one of the few Southern harbors still in Confederate hands.
After one of his ships struck a mine also known as a torpedo in the s that had been laid by confederate ships, the other ships hesitated.
Full speed ahead. This map produced for the campaign season features the Republican Party touting one of the signature achievements of its ascendancy — the protective tariff. Both the Federalist Party and the Whig Party had generally argued for high taxes on imported goods in order to encourage the growth of American industry, but both were typically defeated at the polls by the Democrats.
When the new Republican Party came to the fore, anti-slavery ideology was at the core of its appeal, but it retained the old Whig tariff policy. After the South seceded, the GOP suddenly found itself in possession of large majorities. Even before Lincoln took office, Congress passed Vermont Rep.
The tariff question was in part an ideological one about the merits of statist versus laissez faire approaches to economic development, but it also spoke to the regional divide in American politics. The South, with its slave plantations and soil suitable for the cultivation of export-oriented cash crops, benefited from the ability to import low-priced manufactured goods from abroad. Northern agriculture was less commercially promising, and while Northern industry far outpaced Southern industry it lagged behind competition from Britain in many respects.
While Republicans offered a pro-manufacturing trade policy to Northern city dwellers, they offered a vision of free land for small farmers to Northern agriculturalists. Under the Homestead Act, western lands were surveyed according to the Public Land Survey System depicted in this diagram, and families were offered a quarter section of land at minimal cost provided that they occupied it for a set number of years and demonstrably invested in improving the land with structures and cultivation.
Southern planting interests would have preferred to see large tracts of land sold off to cash-rich investors who could have worked it with slave labor. But once they seceded from the Union they no longer had a say in the matter in Congress, and the Republican vision prevailed.
Homestead Act implementation was deeply troubled in practice. It limited farmers to acre plots that while suitable for eastern agriculture were often too small to be viable in the relatively arid climate of the west. In , the same Rep.
Morrill who would pass the Tariff of introduced a bill to use federal land to finance institutions of higher education. His idea was that the federal government should make a gift to each state of a big bundle of land, and then instruct the states to use the proceeds of its sale to construct public universities. This was essentially the 19th-century version of a debt-financed infrastructure project, with Morrill calculating that the benefit to future generations of education would be greater than the cost to future generations of foregone land revenue.
His bill passed in , but was vetoed by Democratic President James Buchanan. With Lincoln in office, a new version of the same law passed in Many states have additional public colleges — the University of Texas, Arizona State, etc.
The idea of a railroad to the Pacific Ocean was at least as old as the influx of American settlers to California. Things really picked up steam when the War Department, under the leadership of then—Secretary and later CSA President Jefferson Davis published an exhaustive multi-volume report detailing five possible routes. But congressional gridlock made it impossible to choose which route to take. With the departure of Southern legislators during the Civil War, the gridlock was broken, and the Pacific Railroad Act provided free land and subsidized loans for the construction of the railroad.
In the summer of , Confederate General Joseph Johnston was fighting a war of attrition in the South that in many ways previewed the trench warfare of World War I. Meanwhile, Sherman was forced to deploy soldiers and suffer serious casualties in the rear defending rail lines from Confederate raids. By the time he captured Atlanta in September, Sherman was tired of this. So he marched 60, troops away from the Confederate troops and toward Savannah, Georgia.
The Union army cut a wide path of destruction through the Georgia countryside that was 25 to 60 miles wide. They destroyed railroads, burned down buildings, and freed slaves. Instead of shipping food in from the North, they ate food taken from Southern farms and warehouses. The Union strategy depended crucially on some slaveholding border states remaining loyal to the Union cause. So rather than sell the Proclamation as a principled antislavery measure, Lincoln promoted it as a way of depriving the Confederacy of much-needed manpower.
This pragmatic rationale is clearly evident in this map, showing the areas where the Proclamation freed the slaves red and those where it did not blue. Areas that were exempted included not only non-seceding states like Kentucky and Maryland, but also portions of Louisiana and Virginia that were then under Union control.
Lincoln also exempted Tennessee, which was partially occupied by Union troops and — Lincoln hoped — could soon be re-incorporated into the Union. All slaves in the United States were finally freed with the passage of the 13th Amendment in Abraham Lincoln was reelected decisively in the election the states he won are in pink here. But his reelection was hardly a foregone conclusion.
In August , Lincoln himself believed he would likely lose to George McClellan, the Democratic candidate and Union general Lincoln had fired for excessive timidity. Many thought that if McClellan won, he would bring the war to a quick conclusion by recognizing Confederate independence. The election also brought to office Vice President Andrew Johnson — a pro-war Democrat Lincoln put on his ticket as a gesture of national unity — and an even-more-Republican Congress.
When Lincoln was shot in April , Johnson became president. The moderate Johnson clashed frequently with Republicans in Congress who favored vigorous efforts to protect the civil rights of newly freed slaves. From mid until early , the Union and Confederate governments would periodically exchange prisoners. But this process broke down in due to a dispute over the status of black soldiers. The North welcomed African Americans to fight for the Union cause, but when these soldiers were captured, the racist Confederate troops would often execute them on the spot or — if they were freed slaves — send them back to their masters.
The North retaliated by suspending prisoner exchanges, leading to a prolonged standoff. As a result, the prisoner populations on both sides of the conflict swelled. Conditions tended to be worse in Southern prison camps than Northern ones. The camp was overcrowded, and prisoners were desperately malnourished by the time they were freed in If a media asset is downloadable, a download button appears in the corner of the media viewer.
If no button appears, you cannot download or save the media. Text on this page is printable and can be used according to our Terms of Service. Any interactives on this page can only be played while you are visiting our website.
You cannot download interactives. Resource Library MAP. Resource Library. The Battles of the U. Civil War. Subjects Geography, Social Studies, U. Background Info Vocabulary Questions. Article U. Civil War battlefields see new conflicts. Media Credits The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit.
Writer Benjamin Kessler. User Permissions. Media If a media asset is downloadable, a download button appears in the corner of the media viewer. Text Text on this page is printable and can be used according to our Terms of Service.
Comments
Post a Comment