The First Land Battle in Virginia

On the morning of June tenth, eighteen sixty-one, less than two months after the fall of Fort Sumter, Union forces marched out of Hampton and Newport News toward a small Baptist church called Big Bethel. What happened there was the first significant land battle of the Civil War in Virginia, and it did not go well for the North.

Major General Benjamin Butler, commanding Union forces at Fort Monroe, devised a plan to strike Confederate outposts before they could dig in. He sent two columns marching through the night to converge at dawn on Confederate positions north of Hampton. The plan collapsed almost immediately. In the darkness and confusion the two Union columns fired on each other, alerting the Confederates and costing the attackers the element of surprise before the real fight began.

The Confederate position was commanded by Colonel John Magruder, who had around fourteen hundred men dug in behind earthworks along Brick Kiln Creek. When the disorganized Union force of roughly thirty-five hundred men finally attacked, they ran into a well-prepared defense. The Confederates held their line with ease. After several failed assaults, the Union troops withdrew.

The casualties tell the story in stark numbers. The Union lost seventy-six men killed or wounded. The Confederates suffered eight casualties, only one of them fatal.

The Confederate victory was celebrated across the South as proof that Rebel soldiers were superior fighters. Northern newspapers, equally convinced the war would be short, had to explain an embarrassing setback. In reality Big Bethel was too small to matter militarily, but it fed the dangerous confidence on both sides that the war would be decided quickly. It would not be decided for four more years.