Ball's Bluff 1861: Moonlit Trees, Three Skiffs and a Drowning Retreat

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In October 1861, three months after Bull Run, George B. McClellan ordered Brigadier General Charles Pomeroy Stone to make a slight demonstration along the Potomac against Nathan Shanks Evans's Confederates near Leesburg, Virginia. That night Captain Chase Philbrick led about 20 men across from Harrison's Island, climbed Ball's Bluff and reported an unguarded Confederate camp that was really a row of trees in the moonlight. Stone sent Colonel Charles Devens with 300 men at dawn on October 21, and when they found only trees he added 350 more. Command passed to Colonel Edward Dickinson Baker, a sitting senator from Oregon and close friend of Abraham Lincoln, who ordered every available unit across with only three small skiffs.

Troops trickled over all day, and Baker crossed around 2:30 p.m. to a cramped position atop a 100 foot cliff. He was killed at 4:30 p.m., the only sitting U.S. senator ever killed in battle. A fresh Confederate regiment drove the Union line over the bluff, swamped boats drowned hundreds, and bodies floated down to Washington and Mount Vernon. Union losses were 223 dead, 226 wounded and 553 captured. Congress created the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, which targeted Democratic generals, and Stone was arrested and imprisoned without formal charges for more than 100 days.

• For a time official records listed only 49 Union dead, the number buried on the bluff under a flag of truce.
• Lieutenant Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. of the 20th Massachusetts was shot through the chest and later became a Supreme Court justice.
• The drowning of 19 year old Lieutenant John William Grout inspired George Frederick Root's song The Vacant Chair, popular in North and South.
• Herman Melville wrote the poem Ball's Bluff, a Reverie, and the battle opens Geraldine Brooks's novel March.
• The national cemetery at the site holds 54 Union dead, only one identified by name.