Tempest At Ox Hill: The Battle Of Chantilly
By (Author) David Welker
Hachette Books
Da Capo Press Inc
4th January 2002
United States
Hardback
296
Width 155mm, Height 235mm
The first-ever popular account of a tide-turning Civil War battle that saved the Union capital-but at a horrific price. Every Civil War buff has heard of the Battle of Chantilly, the bloody 1862 engagement fought in a driving rainstorm only twenty miles from Washington that claimed the lives of two of the Union's most promising generals. Yet few have known the full story of courage and human drama because no one has ever produced a lively and historically accurate account of the battle-until now. Tempest at Ox Hill compellingly evokes this pivotal battle of the war, in which the Union army faced annihilation after Robert E. Lee's overwhelming victory at Second Bull Run. At Chantilly, Virginia, on September 1, 1862, a small Union rearguard faced down some of Lee's best generals. The retreating main Union army, and Washington, were saved, but at a frightening human cost, including the deaths of two Union generalsthe promising Isaac Stevens and the dashing Philip Kearny, a Mexican War veteran who had also served with Napoleon III's imperial guard. And around these two Union generals lay nearly twelve hundred American soldiers, both blue and gray, dead fighting for their chosen cause. Tempest at Ox Hill captures the moment, the courage, and the carnage unforgettably.
David A. Welker is the author of A Keystone Rebel and many Civil War-related newspaper and magazine articles. He works as a military analyst for the U.S. government and lives in Virginia.