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18621776 Club

Ewell routs Frémont at Cross Keys; Stahel's brigade broken, Union pursuit collapses

McClellan's expected Shenandoah reinforcements stall as Jackson's Valley army holds both Union columns at bay.

By June 1862, the Union's grand strategy for ending the war rested on two columns converging on Richmond — George McClellan's Army of the Potomac pressing up the Virginia Peninsula, and reinforcements he expected from the Shenandoah Valley. Stonewall Jackson had other ideas. On June 8, 1862, Jackson's division commander Richard Ewell held off John Frémont's Union army at Cross Keys, Virginia, routing Julius Stahel's brigade so completely that Frémont never mounted a coordinated follow-up. The next day at Port Republic, Jackson broke James Shields's command as well. Both Union columns retreated, and Jackson's 17,000 men were free to ride east and join Lee before Richmond — the reinforcements McClellan had counted on never came…

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More from June 8
1789

Madison rises in the House with a list of amendments; rivals are still calling for a second convention

Drawing on more than two hundred proposals from state ratifying conventions, he moves to revise the Constitution before its opponents can dismantle it.
1906

Roosevelt signs the Antiquities Act; no proclamation needed from Congress to seal off federal land

For decades, pot hunters have stripped pottery and bones from Chaco Canyon and across the Southwest. The president can now designate national monuments alone, by proclamation.
1861

Tennessee votes to leave the Union; the eleventh state is also the last

Middle Tennessee swings from 51 percent against secession in February to 88 percent in favor today, providing the decisive margin, though East Tennessee refuses to accept the result.
17761776 Club
A local farmer leads the 2,000-man column off the road as British reinforcements land behind them, cutting off any retreat north.
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More from Civil War & Reconstruction
1866

Congress creates a new rank so Grant outranks every soldier alive

The four-star General of the Army exists for one man, and one man only holds it.
1868

Johnson signs the Wyoming Organic Act as territory takes shape along the rail line

The boundaries drawn this week already look like the Wyoming on today's map.
1861

Five days after Bull Run, Lincoln hands his broken army to McClellan

The thirty-four-year-old general inherits a demoralized force and calls the deference of Lincoln, the Cabinet, and Scott a 'strange operation of magic'.
1868

Seward certifies it: citizenship and equal protection enter the Constitution

The amendment overturns Dred Scott and rewrites who counts as a citizen.
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