The Battle of Hancock: Stonewall Jackson Refused

The small town of Hancock, Maryland sits on a sliver of land between the Potomac River and the mountain ridge behind it, at one point only about two miles wide, the narrowest reach of the entire state. In January of eighteen sixty-two, that geography put Hancock in the crosshairs of one of the most aggressive commanders in the Confederate Army.

General Thomas Jonathan Jackson, already earning the nickname Stonewall, marched north from Winchester, Virginia in bitter cold on New Year's Day. His objective was not conquest but disruption: tear up as much of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal as possible, both critical Union supply arteries running through this narrow Potomac corridor.

By January fifth, Jackson's forces had pushed the Union defenders back across the Potomac and positioned artillery on Orrick's Hill, on the Virginia side of the river, looking directly across at the Maryland town. Jackson sent a message to the Union garrison commander, Brigadier General Frederick Lander, demanding the surrender of Hancock. Lander refused.

Jackson opened fire. His artillery shelled the town for two days. The bombardment did relatively little physical damage, partly because Lander had ordered civilians to leave town before the bombardment.

Jackson spent two days searching for a safe crossing of the Potomac and found none. Without a ford, he could not take the town. On January seventh, he withdrew. His forces destroyed a B and O Railroad bridge and moved on toward Romney, West Virginia. Total casualties on both sides were estimated at about twenty-five.

It was a small engagement in a war of enormous battles, but it illustrated the strategic logic of this corridor: whoever held this narrow neck of Maryland controlled the Union's main east-west railroad lifeline.