Tag Archives: Chickahominy River

Gaines Mill: Part II — The 2nd Maine defends Boatswain’s Creek

  As the sun rose east of Richmond, Virginia on Friday, June 27, 1862, Charles W. Roberts knew that his 2nd Maine Infantry boys were “in” for it. The previous day, Colonel Roberts and the 2nd Maine had listened for hours as Confederate troops attacked Union soldiers entrenched along Beaver Dam Creek. A Pennsylvanian division […]

Gaines Mill: Part I — “The nearest run thing you ever saw”

  Looking from Maine in 2016 to Virginia in 1862, we cannot appreciate how, in the words of Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, in speaking about Waterloo, the Battle of Gaines Mill was “the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life, by God!” George Brinton McClellan had split his Army of the Potomac […]

Civil War lore confirmed as a historical fact

The Civil War created many legends, from the eccentric Virginia Military Institute professor transformed into “Stonewall” Jackson to the borderline alcoholic and military strategist — Ulysses Simpson Grant — who whipped Southern troops wherever he encountered them. And the war generated a historical lore that, to this day, requires historians to sift fact from legend. […]