Fairfax Court House: The War's First Blood in Northern Virginia

On June first, eighteen sixty-one, a small squadron of Union cavalry clattered into the town of Fairfax Court House in the pre-dawn darkness and ran directly into Confederate pickets. The skirmish lasted only minutes. But it produced the first Union officer killed in action in the Civil War, the first Confederate officer killed in action, and the first prisoner taken on either side, all before sunrise on the same morning.

The war was barely six weeks old. Lincoln had called for troops in April. Virginia had seceded in May. The Confederate army was gathering near Manassas, and northern Virginia was a tense borderland where both sides were just beginning to probe each other's positions.

The Union raiding party, roughly sixty troopers under Lieutenant Charles Tompkins, had ridden out from Arlington on a reconnaissance. At Fairfax they found a Confederate cavalry detachment under Captain John Marr. Shots were exchanged in the streets. Marr was killed, the first Confederate commissioned officer to die in the war. A Union trooper, Private Saintclair, became the first Union enlisted man killed in Virginia. The Confederates were pushed back, but the Federals, outnumbered, withdrew before dawn.

Tompkins was later awarded the Medal of Honor for the raid, though the action he was being honored for remained technically a rout.

What makes this otherwise minor skirmish matter is what it announced. It happened on the same ground where armies would soon number in the tens of thousands, where two massive battles at Bull Run would be fought within cannon range, where the entire strategic contest for Washington would play out. Fairfax Court House in June of eighteen sixty-one was the first knock at a door that would be blown off its hinges within months.