July 19, 1863 – August 1, 1863
By Phil Kohn
Phil Kohn can be reached at USCW160@yahoo.com
Confederate Brig. General John Hunt Morgan
Brig. Gen. John Hunt Morgan and his remaining 1,300 Confederates (the others being killed or wounded in skirmishes or lost to desertion) ride into significant opposition — Federal troops, militia and gunboats — at Buffington Island, Ohio, on July 19, 1863. Morgan and about 400 men escape and head towards Pennsylvania, but some 125 others are killed and over 700 are captured. In North Carolina, Union cavalry embarks on a circular, five-day raid, targeting Confederate positions at Greenville, Wilson and Tarboro.
On July 21, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia is still heading south in the Shenandoah Valley, while the Federal Army of the Potomac is following on the east side of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Gen. Lee worries about the Northerners getting between him and Richmond.
Federal gunboats on July 22 attack Confederates at Brashear City, Louisiana, forcing them to retreat northward up Bayou Teche.
Brig. Gen. John Hunt Morgan and his remaining Confederate raiders on July 24 are harassed by pursuing Union troops at Athens, Ohio, about 75 miles southeast of Columbus, the state capital.
On July 26, Brig. Gen. John Hunt Morgan and 364 of his exhausted Confederate troopers (they have spent as much as 21 hours per day in their saddles trying to elude their pursuers) are captured at Salineville, Ohio, near the Pennsylvania border about 45 miles from Pittsburgh. It is the farthest north that uniformed Confederate troops will reach during the war. Although the raid spreads panic in the North, it accomplishes nothing strategically and is looked upon later as a misguided waste of soldiers — an ever-scarcer resource in the Confederacy. Morgan and his officers are sent to the Ohio State Penitentiary at Columbus, from which Morgan and six of his officers will escape in November 1863.
On July 28, Confederate Col. John Singleton Mosby and his men begin a series of harassing raids on the Army of the Potomac in and around Warrenton, Virginia. Mosby and his partisans make quick hits, then disappear into the countryside.
President Lincoln, on July 30, issues his Order of Retaliation, which says: “It is therefore ordered that for every soldier of the United States killed in violation of the laws of war, a rebel soldier shall be executed; and for every one enslaved by the enemy or sold into slavery[,] a rebel soldier shall be placed at hard labor on the public works, and continued at such labor until the other shall be released and receive the treatment due to a prisoner of war.”
By July 31, Gen. Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia, with 50,000 infantry and 9,000 cavalry, are situated at Culpeper, Virginia. Maj. Gen. George G. Meade, with 105,000 troops of the Federal Army of the Potomac, is at Warrenton, Virginia, about 20 miles northeast.
On August 1, a cavalry skirmish at Brandy Station, Virginia, scene of the large cavalry battle in June 1863, closes out the Gettysburg Campaign. Federal horsemen engage with Southern cavalry to try to determine the next move of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia on its retreat from Pennsylvania. President Jefferson Davis, faced with a growing incidence of desertion in the army and a desperate need for military manpower, offers an amnesty to those soldiers absent without leave if they return to their units within 20 days. Federal authorities around Charleston, South Carolina, begin organizing forces for an attempt to retake Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.
