The Battle of Rio Hill was a skirmish in the American Civil War in which Union cavalry raided a Confederate camp in Albemarle County, Virginia.
In the early afternoon of February 28, 1864, Union Brig. Gen. George A. Custer and 1,500 Union soldiers advanced towards Charlottesville. This raid was an attempt by the Union to divert attention toward Charlottesville while a separate attempt was made to free prisoners of war being held in Richmond.
Custer's orders were to destroy a railroad bridge across the Rivanna River. His only opposition came from Confederate Maj. Gen. J.E.B. Stuart's "Horse Company" stationed in a camp near the Rivanna River at Carrsbrook. Custer's men raided the camp under fire from Confederate forces commanded by Capt. R. Preston Chew and Captain Marcellus N. Moorman. The Federal troopers looted the camp and set fire to it, after capturing two Confederate soldiers. During the raid, one of the Confederate caissons exploded, and Custer became confused believing that the explosion was actually the reopening of enemy artillery fire. His men fired into each other and then fled from the camp. The Confederate troops regrouped and chased Custer out of Albemarle.
Custer and Philip Sheridan returned to Charlottesville in 1865 and occupied the town from March 3 to March 7, a month before the Army of Northern Virginia surrendered at Appomattox.
After the Mine Run Campaign, Robert E. Lee's Confederate Army of Northern Virginia set up winter quarters in Orange County. Four batteries of Major General J.E.B. Stuart's horse artillery battalion encamped in nearby Albemarle County. The artillerymen began constructing winter huts just west of the Earlysville Road about 4 miles (6.4 km) north of Charlottesville, just south of the South Fork of the Rivanna River and Rio Mills. After the harsh campaigning of 1863, the Confederate gunners rested easily in their camp through the early weeks of 1864.
Northern forces, however, were busily at work. In early 1864, Union commanders devised a multi-objective raid on the Confederate capital of Richmond. While Judson Kilpatrick led the raid on Richmond (which included the infamous Dahlgren Affair), Brigadier General George A. Custer was tasked with leading a diversionary raid into Albemarle County. Charlottesville had long been a Union target. Custer's mission was twofold: Destroy Confederate supplies stockpiled in Charlottesville and destroy the Virginia Central Railroad bridge just east of town over the Rivanna River (the Railroad had longed served as a pipeline of supplies from the Shenandoah Valley to Lee's army). Custer was detached several regiments from different divisions and set out with his hodgepodge force from Mount Pony at 2:00 PM on February 28.
The American Civil War (1861–1865) was the deadliest conflict in American history, killing an estimated 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers and an unknown number of civilians. The Confederate States of America, formed by eleven seceding Southern states, faced the Union in four years of warfare across 23 states and territories. Major engagements included First and Second Bull Run, Antietam (the bloodiest single day in American history, September 17, 1862), Chancellorsville, Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863), Vicksburg (surrendered July 4, 1863), and Sherman's March through Georgia and the Carolinas (1864–1865). President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, transforming the war's stated purpose to include the abolition of slavery and enabling the enlistment of approximately 180,000 Black men in the United States Colored Troops. Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. The war resolved the question of secession and ended American slavery, though Reconstruction would face sustained resistance in its attempt to secure civil rights for formerly enslaved people.
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