Big Bethel

Fought on June 10, 1861, near Newport News on the Virginia Peninsula, the clash at Big Bethel ranks among the war's first engagements on land. It is also remembered under two other names, Bethel Church and Great Bethel.

Popular vote had confirmed Virginia's secession on May 23, prompting the Confederacy to dispatch Colonel John B. Magruder (who would later rise to major general) down the peninsula. His task was to discourage Union forces stationed at the heavily fortified Fort Monroe from pushing toward Richmond, the state's capital. Major General Benjamin Butler, once a lawyer and politician from Massachusetts, held command of that garrison and had set up fresh camps at Hampton and Newport News. For his part, Magruder positioned troops at two outposts, Big Bethel and Little Bethel, both within striking distance of Union lines, hoping to tempt his adversary into acting too soon.

The scheme worked. Butler, together with his aide Major Theodore Winthrop, drew up a plan calling for troops to march overnight and strike the Confederate camps at daybreak. He himself stayed behind rather than lead the expedition, a choice that drew criticism afterward. His men, however, lacked the training such a complicated nighttime maneuver required, and to make matters worse, his staff neglected to distribute passwords among the units. Advancing blindly, without any real sense of how the Confederate positions were arranged or how strong they were, the Union troops ended up firing on each other, which betrayed their presence to the enemy. Ebenezer Peirce, a general from the Massachusetts militia leading the operation on the ground, bore the brunt of the blame once it collapsed.

Casualties on the Union side reached 76, of whom 18 died, among them Major Winthrop and Lieutenant John T. Greble, the latter being the first regular army officer to fall in the conflict. Confederate losses were far lighter, just eight men hurt and a single fatality. Magruder eventually pulled back toward Yorktown and settled along a defensive position at the Warwick River, yet the outcome still counted as a symbolic win for his side, and Union troops in the area made no serious attempt to push forward again until the Peninsula Campaign got underway in 1862. Though modest in scale next to battles that followed, Big Bethel took on outsized significance at the time, fueled by widespread expectation that the conflict would not last much longer.

Historiography

A claim repeated by numerous writers holds that Private Henry L. Wyatt, serving with the 1st North Carolina Volunteers (renamed later the 11th North Carolina Infantry Regiment), stands as the first Confederate soldier to die in combat during the war. Wyatt was indeed the only Confederate fatality at Big Bethel. Yet the claim holds up only when one separates the category of officers from that of enlisted men. Captain John Quincy Marr had already fallen earlier, on June 1, 1861, at the Battle of Fairfax Court House, making him the first Confederate officer to die in action. Wyatt's distinction, then, seems limited to being the first enlisted man lost.

In terms of chronology, Big Bethel ranks among the earliest ground engagements fought both within what is now Virginia and across the wider conflict, coming after the shelling and fall of Fort Sumter. Some have debated whether the true first land battle of the war belongs to Philippi, fought June 3, 1861, in territory now part of West Virginia but then still Virginia, or to Big Bethel itself. Yet two days before Philippi and nine before Big Bethel, fighting had already broken out at Fairfax Court House, within Fairfax County, Virginia, on June 1, 1861. The historian David J. Eicher dismisses both Fairfax Court House and Philippi as nothing more than "mere skirmishes," crediting Big Bethel instead as the war's first genuine land battle. Curiously, after summarizing that fight, he goes on to lump these opening clashes together as "these first minor skirmishes," without drawing much distinction among them.

One might also point to the Baltimore riot of April 19, 1861, as a contender for an early Civil War clash, given that it left several dead and wounded on both sides. Still, the Confederate participants there were not soldiers but a civilian mob, confronting an organized body of troops, several companies from the 6th Massachusetts Militia. A similar pattern played out in St. Louis, where civilian crowds clashed twice with military units in the war's opening days following Sumter's surrender. When measured against the scale of the great battles that followed, however, every one of these early confrontations before First Bull Run (or First Manassas) deserves to be remembered simply as minor skirmishes.

Aftermath

The fighting at Big Bethel, together with the friendly fire episode that came before it, left the Federal side with 76 casualties in total: 18 dead, 53 injured, and 5 unaccounted for. According to Poland's 2006 account (p.