150-Year Anniversary · May 1862
May 1862 found McClellan's army grinding up the Virginia Peninsula toward Richmond, fighting at Williamsburg on May 5 and closing on the Confederate capital by month's end at the Battle of Seven Pines.
In the Shenandoah Valley, Stonewall Jackson launched the lightning campaign that would make his reputation, striking at McDowell, Front Royal, and Winchester and throwing the Union high command into confusion.
With New Orleans fallen and Union armies pressing in the West, May 1862 seemed to many a month of approaching Union triumph—an expectation that Lee's coming counteroffensive would soon overturn.
May 1862 ran from the Valley to the Peninsula. Those operations sit inside the wider war described on the Civil War resource page.