Civil War Battles

From the beginning of the Civil War, the Chesapeake Bay was one of the most important bodies of water in America. The capitals of both the Confederacy and the United States sat next to Bay tributaries: Richmond, Virginia, is on the James River, and Washington, D.C., is on the Potomac River. The short distance between these two cities kept huge armies prowling around Maryland and Virginia throughout the war. Access to the Bay meant the ability to receive shipped goods, quickly transport troops from one point to another and threaten the enemy with strikes deep into their territory.

The Potomac Flotilla

In May of 1861, federal authorities created “a flying flotilla” to calm and patrol the Bay and its tributaries. Dubbed the Potomac Flotilla, the fleet was directly responsible for the safety of travel and supplies to and from Washington and the upper Bay. The fleet was initially made up of just six reconditioned steamers, barges and side-wheeled ships outfitted with cannon.

For the length of the war, the Flotilla had its hands full keeping the raiders and smugglers of the Bay in check. And while Grant moved through Virginia during his Overland Campaign of 1864, the Flotilla removed Confederate mines from the Rappahannock River. This allowed the Union army to use Fredericksburg as a secure base of supply. The Flotilla began to extract gunpowder from the mines for the Union troops to use in the field.

The Flotilla provided invaluable security to the U.S. capital, and, by 1864, it had helped in driving the Confederate Navy almost completely out of the Bay.

Ironclads

In March of 1862, the Bay saw one of the most important naval battles in history, when the first ironclads CSS Virginia and USS Monitor fought to a bloody standstill in the waters off Hampton Roads, Virginia.

After four hours of brutal fighting, the battle ended in a draw. Monitor prevented Virginia from destroying the rest of the Union fleet stationed at Hampton Roads, and had won a moral victory. The squat, iron-encased ships, impervious to almost all attacks, had ushered in a new era in naval engineering. Winston Churchill wrote in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, “The combat of the Merrimac [Virginia] and Monitor made the greatest change in sea-fighting since cannon fired by gunpowder had been mounted on ships.”

The USS Monitor sunk in rough seas off the coast of Cape Hatteras on December 29th, 1862. The intact wreckage was located in 1973, and her gun turret is now on display at the Mariners' Museum in Newport News, Virginia.

The Peninsula Campaign

In March and April of 1862, the Union Army of the Potomac was transported down the Bay from Washington, D.C., to the York-James peninsula. The 112,000-man army—the largest army ever assembled in North America—was bound for an attempt on Richmond. Nearly 400 vessels of every size and stature were used. Along with the troops, thousands of horses, cattle, wagons, ambulances and artillery pieces were brought on the voyage down the Potomac and out to the Bay.

The Union Army landed at Newport News and Fort Monroe, Virginia, which were both Union outposts, and began their assault up the peninsula. The Union Army advanced to within six miles of Richmond by late June before Confederate forces pushed back the Union advance in a series of bloody clashes known as the Seven Days Battles. Lincoln ordered the Army of the Potomac removed back to Washington, D.C., via the Bay in August, and the campaign for Richmond came to a quiet close.

Point Lookout

The prison camp at Point Lookout is one of the darkest chapters in Bay history. In July of 1863, the federal government used Camp Hammond , as Point Lookout was officially known, to house many of the thousands of rebels captured in the Battle of Gettysburg.

Prisoners at the camp were kept in an area known as the “bull pen,” a 1,000-square-foot area surrounded by a 14-foot high fence with guard posts. The prisoners were given only thin tents for shelter, which offered little protection from the extreme weather on the unprotected peninsula. When high tide came, the low-lying bull pen would flood, often creating knee-deep mud and swamp-like conditions. This made clean drinking water almost impossible to find.

In March of 1864, after the Union ended the prisoner exchange system between the North and the South, the camp's prisoner population ballooned from 9,153 in December of 1863 to about 20,000 by June of 1865. This was more than double the number the camp was designed to hold.

Supplies at the camp were stretched so thin that there would often be 16 or more men to a single 15-square-foot tent; three or more men would share a single blanket. The cramped conditions made tempers shorter than ever, and there were several instances of violence between guards and prisoners. Swarms of mosquitoes carried malaria and typhoid fever into the camps, where chronic diarrhea, scurvy and other diseases ran rampant. The death toll began to rise during the summer of 1864. In May of 1865—a month after the fall of Richmond and the end of the war—324 men died in the camp.

There is no reliable count of the total number of men who died while imprisoned at Point Lookout. There are almost 4,000 men buried in the camp cemetery, which is about 8 percent of the more than 50,000 men who passed through. But the practice of burying many of the dead in mass graves, as well as the poor record keeping at the prison, has led some to claim that this figure should be much higher.