Second Battle of Kernstown

In the summer of eighteen sixty-four the Shenandoah Valley became a strategic chessboard where the pieces kept reversing positions. In July, Confederate General Jubal Early had marched his army all the way to the outskirts of Washington and returned to the Valley spoiling for a fight. Grant sent two Union corps to chase him, then pulled them back to Petersburg when the immediate threat to the capital faded. That decision left only three Union divisions in the Valley under Brigadier General George Crook.

Early saw his opportunity. He could not afford to let a diminished Union force sit astride his supply lines while Grant pressed Lee at Petersburg. On the afternoon of July twenty-fourth, eighteen sixty-four, at the same ground where Stonewall Jackson had fought two years earlier, Early turned the tables on Crook at Kernstown.

Crook opened the engagement with an assault on Opequon Church, pushing Confederate pickets back. But Early's veterans counterattacked with ferocity, enveloping first the Union left flank, then the right. The Union brigade commander, Colonel James Mulligan, was mortally wounded. His last reported words, urging his men not to stop to carry him from the field, became one of the Valley Campaign's most quoted moments. With both flanks collapsing, Crook's army dissolved into a retreat that passed through Winchester and didn't stop until it reached the Potomac River in Maryland.

Early's losses were far lighter, about six hundred men. Crook suffered twelve hundred, most of them captured in the chaotic retreat northward.

The victory at Second Kernstown restored Confederate control of the Valley for another two months and bought Early time, until September nineteenth, when Philip Sheridan arrived with forty-five thousand men and ended the argument for good.