Ball's Bluff: Charles Stone and Herman Melville

On this date in 1862, a Union brigadier general, Charles P. Stone, was arrested and put in prison, where he would remain for more than six months without any charges being filed. This injustice did much to make people of good will suspicious of  the politicians who brought it about following Stone's defeat at Ball's Bluff the preceding October. A small part of The Army of the Potomac fought there on the banks of the river after which the army was named.
The battle was the result of what was essentially a Union raid, and likely made McClellan an even more cautious general than he was already inclined to be. It has some similarities to another raid-battle conducted a couple of weeks later (Nov. 7, 1861) on an even more famous Civil War river, the Mississippi, where Grant generalled his first real fight at Belmont, Missouri. Unlike Ball's Bluff, Belmont was not a defeat, but it was not a victory, either. (However Grant, unlike Stone, was with his troops in battle.)
While Stone's treatment by scapegoat-seeking politicians was outrageous, that does not absolve either him or his superior, Major General George McClellan, of responsibility for the outcome of Ball's Bluff. They blamed a scapegoat of their own, Col. Edward Baker -- a politically inexpedient choice, since Baker was a) killed in the battle, b) a sitting US senator, and c) a close friend of Abraham Lincoln. McClellan also hung Stone out to dry, in part based on intelligence from Allen Pinkerton, a notoriously incompetent spy whose main claim to fame was inflating estimates of Confederate troop numbers (which increased McClellan's caution to an almost paralytic state).
Perhaps the focus belongs not on the squabbling leaders but the unheralded soldiers who lost their lives, which is where Herman Melville put it in his poem, Ball's Bluff: A Reverie:

One noonday, at my window in the town,
    I saw a sight — saddest that eyes can see —
    Young soldiers marching lustily
      Unto the wars,
With fifes, and flags in mottoed pageantry;
    While all the porches, walks, and doors
    Were rich with ladies cheering royally.
 
They moved like Juny morning on the wave,
    Their hearts were fresh as clover in its prime
    (It was the breezy summer time),
      Life throbbed so strong,
How should they dream that Death in rosy clime
  Would come to thin their shining throng?
Youth feels immortal, like the gods sublime.
Weeks passed; and at my window, leaving bed,
    By nights I mused, of easeful sleep bereft,
    On those brave boys (Ah War! thy theft);
      Some marching feet
Found pause at last by cliffs Potomac cleft;
    Wakeful I mused, while in the street
Far footfalls died away till none were left.