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Battle blunders
at Ball's Bluff
It is the first autumn of the War Between the States, 1861. The soldiers and their commanders are, for the most part, as green as the summer grass they have just seen disappear into the frost of autumn. Just 35 miles upriver from Washington, DC., between Poolesville, Maryland, and Leesburg, Va., there are a number of important Potomac River crossings. Both sides mass their forces to guard these crossings in the thrust and counterthrust of war.
In Washington, Major General George McClellan is under intense pressure from the Radical Republicans in Congress for an advance against the main Confederate forces at Manassas Junction. McClellan is a defensive-minded commander-in-chief who, it turns out, will never develop a successful offensive against the enemy over the next 18 months of his command, despite the adulation of his men.
McClellan surveys his meticulous maps of enemy positions along a 35-mile defensive line from Northern Virginia to Winchester. He does not want his beloved and mostly inexperienced troops to attack into the enemy’s main strongholds, so
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