For forty crucial days they fought a bloody struggle. When it was over, the Civil War's tide had turned. In the spring of 1864, Virginia remained unbroken, its armies having repelled Northern armies for more than two years. Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia had defeated the campaigns of four Union generals, and Lee's veterans were confident they could crush the Union offensive this spring, too. But their adversary in 1864 was a different...

Northern Virginia is a treasure house of history, perhaps more so tan any other part of the country. One unique way of experiencing that history is by visiting one of the region's many historic cemeteries. Cemeteries have been called open-air museums, and every gravestone has a story to tell. There are some 1,000 cemeteries in Northern Virginia, ranging from small family plots to huge national cemeteries covering hundreds of acres. Many of these...

The battle at Virginia's Big Bethel Church, known as the Civil War's first land battle, was a baptism of fire for a nation newly torn apart by civil war. Northern and Southern soldiers alike could not imagine how fiery passions and technological advances would collide into America's bloodiest war, all beginning that hot, cloudless day at Bethel, as the shells burst among the smartly clad Zouaves. Here, the war saw its first friendly fire incident,...

One of the most dramatic battles of the Civil War, Chancellorsville was Robert E. Lee's masterpiece. Outnumbered two to one, Lee violated a cardinal rule of military strategy by dividing his small army, sending Stonewall Jackson on his famous twelve-mile march around the Union flank. Charging out of the Wilderness with Rebel yells, Jackson's troops destroyed one entire corps of the Union army, and Lee drove the rest across the Rappahannock River. Lee's...

On 4 April 1862, Major General George McClellan marched his 121,500-strong Army of the Potomac from Fort Monroe toward Richmond. Blocking his path were Major General John B. Magruder's Warwick-Yorktown Line fortifications and the Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia. Despite outnumbering Magruder almost four to one, McClellan was tricked by Magruder's bluff of strength and halted his advance. Yorktown, the scene of Washington's 1781 victory over Cornwallis,...

The termination of the war and the fate of the Union hung in the balance in May of 1864 as Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and Ulysses S. Grant's Army of the Potomac clashed in the Virginia countryside--first in the battle of the Wilderness, where the Federal army sustained greater losses than at Chancellorsville, and then further south in the vicinity of Spotsylvania Courthouse, where Grant sought to cut Lee's troops off from the Confederate...

An examination of an important campaign between these two generals that set the scene for the pending war.

Few events in Civil War history have generated such deliberate mythmaking as the retreat that ended at Appomattox. William Marvel offers the first history of the Appomattox campaign written primarily from contemporary source material, with a skeptical eye toward memoirs published well after the events they purport to describe. Marvel shows that during the final week of the war in Virginia, Lee's troops were more numerous yet far less faithful to their...