Second Battle of Rappahannock Station: Lee's Worst Night

On the evening of November seventh, eighteen sixty-three, two Confederate brigades waited behind formidable earthworks at Rappahannock Station , modern-day Remington, Virginia , holding the north bank of the Rappahannock River while Robert E. Lee's main army rested on the south bank. The entrenchments were strong, the position commanding, and the generals in charge believed it would hold. They were catastrophically wrong.

Union Major General John Sedgwick's Sixth Corps struck at dusk, which was itself unusual , Civil War commanders rarely launched attacks in failing light. But the timing was deliberate. Two Union brigades moved under cover of the confusion and charged the Confederate works in a fast double-quick rush. They went over the earthworks and into the Confederate position before the defenders could organize a coherent response.

The result was a rout of stunning proportions. More than sixteen hundred Confederate soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured in the brief action , more than eighty percent of the men engaged on that side. The two brigades were counted among the Army of Northern Virginia's finest. Union casualties totaled fewer than five hundred.

For Lee, it was a humiliation without equal in the autumn of sixty-three. Two elite brigades, sheltered behind prepared defenses and supported by artillery, had been swept away by an enemy force of roughly equal size. The defeat forced Lee's army to retreat south of the Rappahannock and eventually of the Rapidan River, surrendering territory he had hoped to hold for the winter.

The action at Rappahannock Station closed the Bristoe Campaign and demonstrated something important about the Union Army of the Potomac in its third year of war: it had grown confident, aggressive, and capable of the kind of decisive nighttime operation that had once been the exclusive province of Stonewall Jackson's corps. This field, quiet today, was where that lesson was delivered.