Protecting Three Acres of the Second Manassas Battlefield

In Northern Virginia, Union and Confederate armies fought over the same ground again and again. Manassas Junction, an important supply center, and the farmland around it drew two of the war's most important battles. The First Battle of Manassas, in July 1861, shattered any hope that the war would be over in a few months. The second came in August 1862, after President Lincoln formed the Union Army of Virginia and sent it south to aid the Union siege of Richmond.

The Battle of Second Manassas, August 1862, in a hand-painted lithograph by Currier & Ives, around 1862 (Library of Congress).

The battle

• August 27–28, 1862: Confederate troops camped beside the sloping embankment of an unfinished railroad near the First Manassas battlefield to block the Union advance.
• August 28: a vicious night battle broke out between the two sides.
• The next two days: Union troops launched massive frontal assaults along the railbed. The Confederates, at times fighting without ammunition, held until a sweeping counterattack to the south forced the Union army to withdraw.

Disorganized and with heavy casualties, the Union Army of Virginia could not stop the Confederate invasion of Maryland that followed — leading, just two weeks later, to Antietam, the bloodiest single day of the Civil War.

The land

In 2023 the National Park Service's American Battlefield Protection Program awarded a Battlefield Land Acquisition Grant of $268,259 to the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation to buy 3.11 acres — land where Confederate forces camped on the nights of August 27–28 and from which they launched counterattacks against Union troops attacking the unfinished railroad over the next two days. Buying it protects a core part of the battlefield from suburban development permanently.

The grant program

Battlefield Land Acquisition Grants help preservation partners across the country buy and protect threatened Revolutionary War, War of 1812 and Civil War battlefields. The program also offers:

• Preservation Planning Grants, open to all sites of armed conflict on American soil;
• the newly authorized Battlefield Restoration and Battlefield Interpretation grants.

Together they support community-led stewardship of historic places at the state, tribal and local levels.

Sources

• National Park Service, American Battlefield Protection Program: "Lightning Struck Twice: Preserving a key portion of the Second Manassas Battlefield."