Northern Virginia Campaign – Battle of Cedar Mountain

Fought between Union and Confederate forces 160 years ago on August 9, 1862, the Battle of Cedar Mountain (aka Slaughter’s Mountain) was a brief but bloody affair in Culpeper County, Virginia. The battle touched off the Northern Virginia Campaign, widely considered to be Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s most successful military campaign. 

The Northern Virginia Campaign culminated in the Second Battle of Bull Run, in which an entire Union army was nearly destroyed. This paved the way for Lee’s invasion of Maryland and the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest single day in American history. The campaign resulted in over 25,000 total casualties.

In June 1862, President Abraham Lincoln pulled Union Maj. Gen. John Pope from the Western Theater to consolidate scattered Union forces across northern Virginia, to buy time for Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan to bring his defeated army back to Washington, DC. Pope boasted “I have come to you from the West, where we have always seen the backs of our enemies.”