Claim As First Land Battle of The American Civil War
Big Bethel was one of the first Civil War land battles both in present-day Virginia and in the war after the bombardment and surrender of Fort Sumter. Although arguments have been made that either the Battle of Philippi, on June 3, 1861, in present-day West Virginia (then part of Virginia) or the Battle of Big Bethel was the first land battle of the entire war, the Battle of Fairfax Court House (June 1861) took place in Fairfax County, Virginia on June 1, 1861, two days earlier than the Battle of Philippi and nine days before the Battle of Big Bethel. Historian David J. Eicher discounts both the Battle of Fairfax Court House and the Battle of Philippi as "mere skirmishes" (despite his characterization of the former engagement as "ostensibly the first land battle of the war") and says the first "real land battle of the conflict" was the Battle of Big Bethel, although after a brief summary of the Battle of Big Bethel he characterizes the early Civil War engagements without apparent distinction as "these first minor skirmishes." The Baltimore riot of April 19, 1861 might also be considered a small Civil War battle, with several killed and wounded on each side, but the Confederate side in the affair was a civilian mob, not an organized military force like the force the mob attacked, which was several companies of the 6th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry (3 Month Militia). Civilian mobs also were engaged with military forces in two similar riots in St. Louis in the early days of the war after the surrender of Fort Sumter. Compared to the large battles to come, all the engagements before the Battle of First Bull Run (Battle of First Manassas) are fairly characterized as mere skirmishes.
Read more about this topic: Battle Of Big Bethel
Famous quotes containing the words civil war, claim, land, battle, american, civil and/or war:
“During the Civil War the area became a refuge for service- dodging Texans, and gangs of bushwhackers, as they were called, hid in its fastnesses. Conscript details of the Confederate Army hunted the fugitives and occasional skirmishes resulted.”
—Administration in the State of Texa, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“It matters little comparatively whether the fields fill the farmer’s barn. The true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first but his last fruits also.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When you have come into the land that the LORD your God is giving you, and have taken possession of it and settled in it, and you say, “I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me,” you may indeed set over you a king whom the LORD your God will choose. One of your own community you may set as king over you; you are not permitted to put a foreigner over you, who is not of your own community.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Deuteronomy 17:14,15.
“That civilisation may not sink,
Its great battle lost,”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“An accurate charting of the American woman’s progress through history might look more like a corkscrew tilted slightly to one side, its loops inching closer to the line of freedom with the passage of time—but like a mathematical curve approaching infinity, never touching its goal. . . . Each time, the spiral turns her back just short of the finish line.”
—Susan Faludi (20th century)
“They have been waiting for us in a foetor
Of vegetable sweat since civil war days,
Since the gravel-crunching, interminable departure
Of the expropriated mycologist.”
—Derek Mahon (b. 1941)
“What war has always been is a puberty ceremony. It’s a very rough one, but you went away a boy and came back a man, maybe with an eye missing or whatever but godammit you were a man and people had to call you a man thereafter.”
—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (b. 1922)