Battles

The Second Battle of Bull Run was a blunder for Union forces against Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Lee would take his army into Maryland, where they would fight Union forces at Antietam. It would end in a strategic victory for the Union. It was also the single bloodiest day in American history.

In December 1862, yet another Union commanding general, Ambrose Burnside, devised his own plans to take on Lee, and his plans met with disaster in the Battle of Fredericksburg. Union casualties would be double that of the Confederates.

Despite official stances of neutrality, Canadians were affected by the Civil War- and some started to join it.

This map of eastern North America includes the Canadian colonies, the Union north, the neutral border states who remained within the Union, and the Confederacy. Spots where major battles and sieges of the Civil War took place are seen throughout both the Union and the Confederacy.

At this point, the exhibit starts looking again at individuals. Arthur Rankin was a politician and militia officer who accepted a commission to raise recruits for the Union army- violating neutrality, getting him arrested, and costing him both commissions.

Abram Shadd was one of the sons of the Shadd family of Buxton, Ontario. He enlisted in the 55th Massachusetts in 1863, rose to the rank of sergeant-major, and recruited other black men into the Union army.

Kahgegagahbowh (George Copway) recruited Ojibwe warriors for the Union army, but with the deaths of some of them, became ostracized.

Smoke on Civil War battlefields carried far, and made it hard to actually see what was going on at times.

After the victory at Antietam, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. It deemed those black people in bondage in those states in open rebellion to be free. It said nothing about the border states not in rebellion, where slavery existed- though the leadership of those states understood what was coming. It was a military and diplomatic maneuver that in making the war about the abolition of slavery ensured that the British and French would stay out of it. And it gave the Union a higher cause to fight for than simply restoring the Union.

Another Union general, Joseph Hooker, took command of the Army of the Potomac, with another plan. It fell apart at a crossroads called Chancellorsville, deep in Virginia, a place with dense woods and undergrowth. Robert E. Lee- already undermanned with a portion of the Army of Northern Virginia on another assignment with General James Longstreet- went with his other commanding general Thomas Jackson to meet the Union army. Jackson would take a part of the army and launch a surprise attack into the Union flank, which had not been dug in for defense. The surprise would collapse the Army of the Potomac into retreat, but Jackson would later die of wounds sustained while between the lines at night.

The greatest battle ever fought on North American soil took place over three days at a small town in Pennsylvania. Lee  and his army had invaded the north, and the Union army followed. They met at the town of Gettysburg on July 1st 1863, where the high ground south of town was occupied by Union infantry on that first day, and over the next two days, Confederate forces were decisively beaten, with the battle culminating in what would be called Pickett's Charge. The Confederates began a retreat back to Virginia, with the Union army following. Both sides had taken a mauling during the battle.

During this same period out west, Grant's siege of the town of Vicksburg on the Mississippi resulted in the surrender of the town. The tide of the war had turned.

In the fall, Grant's forces fought and won a campaign around Chattanooga, Tennessee, which would lead to Grant taking overall command the following year of all Union armies.