The Largest Union Surrender of the Civil War
Near Harpers Ferry, West Virginia
On September fifteenth, eighteen sixty-two, Harpers Ferry was the site of the largest single surrender of United States military personnel during the entire Civil War. Confederate General Stonewall Jackson had spent three days maneuvering his forces to surround the Union garrison stationed here. His columns occupied the three ridges that ring the town, Maryland Heights across the Potomac to the north, Loudoun Heights across the Shenandoah to the south, and Bolivar Heights just to the west, and trained artillery down from all directions until the Union commander had no choice.
More than twelve thousand soldiers surrendered after Colonel Dixon Miles was mortally wounded and General Julius White agreed to terms. The Confederates also captured seventy-three artillery pieces and approximately thirteen thousand rifles, a haul that helped resupply Jackson's army before the bloodiest single day of the entire war. Two days after the Harpers Ferry surrender, those captured weapons were in Confederate hands as Jackson's force rejoined Lee's army at the Battle of Antietam in Maryland.
During the Civil War, Harpers Ferry changed hands between Union and Confederate forces eight times. Its location controlling the mountain gap and the river crossings made it strategically impossible to leave alone. The town, which had well over a thousand residents before the war, was badly depleted by eighteen sixty-two, its armory destroyed, its population scattered, its industrial life ended.
It never fully recovered its antebellum population.
