The Battle of Ball’s Bluff

(NYTimes) The first months of the Civil War had been a series of humiliating lessons for the citizens and soldiers of the Union, highlighted by dramatic defeats at Bull Run and Wilson’s Creek. The war, it was becoming clear, would be neither easy nor quick. But it was also clear that, especially among the Union Army officer corps, those lessons had not yet fully sunk in — a fact made all too clear by the Oct. 21 disaster at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff. Continued

Photo: Discovering the bodies of the slain in the Potomac river, Battle of Balls Bluff (Va.) fought 21 October, 1861 by Alfred Waud (Library of Congress).