As I mentioned in my last week’s post, General Robert E. Lee withdrew the Army of Northern Virginia slowly toward the southwest. He established a new line of defense along the Rappahannock River north of where the Rapidan River joins the Rappahannock. Key to this line were Confederate held fortifications near the town of Remington, at a whistle-stop on the Orange & Alexandria Railroad called Rappahannock Station. Lee believed a strong show of force here would cause Maj. Gen. George Meade to divide his army in an attempt to gain the Confederates rear and force them to retreat.

If that is what happened. On November 7, 1863 Meade sent the Third Corps, under Maj. Gen. William French, marching toward Kelly’s Ford, about five miles south of Rappahannock Station, and just off the bottom of the map at right. (Click the map for a larger view.) Meade also set the Sixth Corps, under Maj. Gen. John Sedgwick, in motion directly toward Rappahannock Station. At this point, General Lee made a rare blunder. He believed the Sixth Corps movement to be a feint intended to keep him from sending troops south to Kelly’s Ford. By noon, the ford was in Union hands and the Third Corps was crossing to the south side of the river. Believing this to be the real threat, Lee left two veteran brigades (about 2,000 men) to man the defenses at Rappahannock Station, and sent the rest of his men toward Kelly’s Ford.

Sedgwick’s artillery shelled the Confederate redoubts throughout the afternoon. When it was nearly dark, a small force of two brigades, also about 2,000 men, rushed toward the Rebel works. For the first time during the war, Federal troops assaulted and took control of a fortified position held by an equal number of Confederates on the first attempt. The fighting was hot, much of it hand to hand, but the issue was settled quickly. 1,670 (about 80%) of the Confederate defenders were either killed, wounded, or captured. Union casualties were 419 (about 20%), most of which were suffered by two regiments, the 6th Maine and the 5th Wisconsin, who were the first to charge the two redoubts.

The Fourteenth Connecticut Volunteer Infantry took no part in this battle, but this short, sharp victory forced Gen. Lee to abandon the Rappahannock line and fall back into Orange County south of the Rapidan, exactly where he was before he set out on what came to be called the Bristoe Campaign, and where the two armies would square off face to face in just three weeks time.

Note:  The above map is from the Library of Congress Digital Maps Collection. It was drawn by Private Robert Knox Sneden. Sneden was just an average guy with a knack for drawing maps and sketching scenes from the war. He was assigned to the Third Corps staff as a mapmaker. Later in the war he was captured and sent to the Andersonville prison camp, and his descriptions of the horrors there are heart-rending. His book Eye of the Storm (Touchstone, Simon & Schuster) is a worthy addition to anyone’s Civil War library. His maps, artwork, and narratives gave me a deeper understanding of the war from an ordinary private’s perspective.

In our focus on the Fourteenth Connecticut Volunteer Infantry, it’s easy to forget about what else was going on in the war. Battles fought and movements of armies in the east effected events in the west and the reverse was true as well.

So what was happening in the western theater? Vicksburg and Port Hudson, the last Confederate bastions on the Mississippi River, had surrendered to Union forces in early July, 1863. By September, Union military control of Vicksburg had restored order. A loyal civilian government was in place and the bulk of Grant’s Army of the Mississippi began to move eastward late in the month.

Chattanooga, Tennessee became the next area of conflict in the western theater. Two days of bloody fighting in northern Georgia along Chickamauga Creek (September 19-20) ended in Confederate victory. The Confederate Army of Tennessee, under the command of Maj. Gen Braxton Bragg. had been newly reinforced by Maj. Gen. James Longstreet’s Corps sent from Virginia by Gen. Lee. The defeated Federals of Maj. Gen. William Rosecrans retreated northward to Chattanooga.

The war department in Washington needed to send more men to Chattanooga in a hurry. Grant was made commander of all the western armies. Two corps (15,000 men) would be detached form the Army of the Potomac under the command of Maj. Gen. Thomas Hooker, and most of Gen. Sherman’s Army of the Mississippi would march through northern Mississippi and Alabama to Chattanooga.

So why is this important to our friends in the Fourteenth Connecticut manning the picket line along the Rapidan River south of Culpeper, Virginia? Gen. Lee knew the Union response to their defeat at Chickamauga would be to send more men to the area. Undermanned as he was with Longstreet’s Corps gone, Gen. Lee determined to try to keep the enemy on his front so busy so that the entire Army of the Potomac had to remain where it was.

In early October, Lee started his troops on a march around the right flank of the Army of the Potomac. They marched west of Cedar Mountain, swung to the north of Culpeper, then northeast to Warrenton. It would be Lee’s last offensive campaign, and the newly refitted, remanned, and retrained Fourteenth Connecticut would play a vital role in the outcome.