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18621776 Club

Lee sends wave after wave up Malvern Hill; 171 Union guns shatter each charge

McClellan holds the 130-foot rise with artillery and James River gunboats, winning the field decisively even as his army prepares to fall back to Harrison's Landing.

After nearly a week of grinding combat across the Virginia Peninsula, George McClellan had finally found ground worth holding. On July 1, 1862, Robert E. Lee sent wave after wave of Confederate infantry up Malvern Hill — a 130-foot rise in Henrico County held by 171 Union guns — in assaults his own senior subordinate James Longstreet had advised against. Union artillery, supported by gunboats on the James River, shattered each charge before it reached the Federal line. McClellan's army won the field decisively, then abandoned it anyway, retreating to Harrison's Landing and ending the Peninsula Campaign…

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More from July 1
1863

Hill's men march on Gettysburg for supplies; Buford's cavalry is waiting on the ridges

Trading ridge for ridge all morning, Union troopers hold long enough for infantry to arrive; Hancock picks Cemetery Hill as the ground to stand on.
1946

Blandy detonates the bomb over Bikini; the target fleet survives, and the Navy claims vindication

Test Able misses its aim point by 2,130 feet, scattering results that disappoint the Navy's critics but settle nothing about the weapon's power at sea.
1898

Roosevelt and the Buffalo Soldiers take Kettle Hill; San Juan Heights fall to the Fifth Corps

Outnumbered 16-to-1, Spanish defenders under Linares y Pombo inflict punishing losses before the heights are carried and the road to Santiago opens.
19631776 Club
The Zone Improvement Plan assigns a unique ZIP code to each address nationwide, with the first digit narrowing a region and each that follows pointing closer to a single post office.
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More from Civil War & Reconstruction
1868

Logan names May 30 a national day to decorate soldiers' graves; the order goes to every post in the Union

General Order No. 11 puts the commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic behind a practice Southern women began two years ago.
1862

Seward and Lyons sign a treaty giving both navies the right to search and seize slave ships

The Senate ratifies unanimously the same day, ending half a century of U.S. resistance to British calls for mutual search rights on African and Cuban waters.
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.
1863

Pleasonton crosses the Rappahannock at dawn; Stuart's cavalry fights all day to hold Fleetwood Hill

Eleven thousand Union horsemen hit the Confederate camps from two directions at once, and though the Federals withdraw by nightfall, the aura of easy Southern dominance on horseback does not survive the day.
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