June 30, 1862, Henrico County, Virginia. Confederate Major General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson reaches the swamp at noon, finds the bridge burned, and stops there for the rest of the day. Two of his own officers find him ways across the water — a ford, a hastily built footbridge — and he uses neither. Three miles south, the real fight rages at Glendale; Jackson can hear it, and at some point that afternoon, he sits down under a tree and falls asleep. The armies trade artillery fire for eight hours, and only a single cavalry regiment ever crosses the water.

Next: Murfreesborough, July 13.

June 29, 1862, Henrico County, Virginia. Union forces are pulling back toward the James River, and a chaplain named James Marks stays behind anyway, with more than twenty-five hundred wounded men who cannot walk or ride. Command fails on both sides in the fight that follows: a Confederate bridge is left half-built while a ford sits open nearby, a Union corps slips away without telling the units beside it, and an armored railroad gun makes its first appearance in the war. By dark, the wounded are still where Marks left them, and the army that was supposed to come back for them is already gone.

Next: White Oak Swamp, June 30.

June 21, 1862, Charleston County, South Carolina. Five weeks after stealing a Confederate ship out of Charleston harbor and sailing it to freedom, Robert Smalls is back in the same waters — piloting a Union gunboat for a raid on the coast that once owned him. The raid burns a Confederate camp without a single casualty on either side. Then the Union troops go home, and the railroad they came to cut is never touched.

Next: Savage's Station, June 29.

June 17, 1862, Arkansas County, Arkansas. A Union flotilla, fighting its way past a Confederate obstruction on the White River, loses more than half a gunboat's crew to a single shell that finds its steam drum — one of the deadliest single shots of the entire war. The Union wins the fight. It doesn't matter: two separate resupply attempts, weeks apart, both stall out on the same shallow stretch of river, and the army they were trying to reach finally marches out without ever getting its supplies.

Next: Simmon's Bluff, June 21.

June 6, 1862, Shelby County, Tennessee. Thousands of people gather on the bluffs above Memphis to watch their navy win — a fleet of civilian-crewed "cottonclads" against the Union's ironclads. It takes less than an hour to lose instead. Seven of eight Confederate boats end up sunk, grounded, or captured. The only man killed on either side is the Union ram fleet's designer, hit by a sharpshooter during the fighting. Memphis surrenders that same day, and the Mississippi lies open to Vicksburg.

Next: Saint Charles, June 17.

May 27, 1862, Hanover County, Virginia. General Fitz John Porter marches twelve thousand men out to deal with a Confederate force a civilian told him numbered seventeen thousand — the real number is four thousand. He wins the fight cleanly. It doesn't matter: the reinforcements he was clearing the path for get recalled to Fredericksburg that same day, once word arrives of the Union defeat at Winchester two episodes back. Porter wins the battle and loses the reason he was fighting it, within twenty-four hours.

Next: Memphis, June 6.

May 23, 1862, Warren County, Virginia. Stonewall Jackson has a choice between a large, well-defended Union army and a small, weak outpost a dozen miles away — he picks the weak one. He cuts the telegraph line first, in a separate fight most accounts skip past entirely, then hits the outpost while its commander has no way left to call for help. By evening the whole garrison is captured or scattered, and Jackson is sitting behind the Union's main army with nobody left to warn it.

Next: Hanover Courthouse, May 27— a milepost, not a full episode, where the Union pays for not knowing sooner.

May 15–17, 1862, Mercer County, Virginia (now West Virginia). Confederate Brigadier General Humphrey Marshall lost badly the last time this show met him, at Middle Creek in January. Here he gets a different result — reinforcing a fight already underway, driving Union forces out of Princeton, and setting an ambush at a ridge called Pigeon Roost that ends the Union's month-long attempt to reach a rail line at Dublin. Two future presidents serve as junior officers in the losing column: Rutherford Hayes and a young sergeant named William McKinley.

Next: Front Royal, May 23.