Military History|Bolivar Heights — Twelve Thousand Rifles Stacked in One Morning

Bolivar Heights is a plateau rather than a summit. It faces west across School House Ridge, and it is overlooked from behind — Maryland Heights stands across the Potomac, Loudoun Heights across the Shenandoah. Hold those two hills and you hold the town below, and by the morning of 15 September 1862 the Confederate columns held both.

Thomas J. Jackson's three commands had closed on Harpers Ferry from 12 September. Lafayette McLaws's division drove the Union detachment off Maryland Heights on the 13th; John G. Walker's guns were firing from Loudoun Heights by mid-morning on the 14th; Jackson sealed the western approach. Colonel Dixon S. Miles held this ground with roughly 14,000 men, short of long-range ammunition and under fire from three directions.

His officers agreed to capitulate at about nine o'clock. Miles was hit by a shell fragment as the flag went up and died of the wound; Brigadier General Julius White completed the surrender.

The tally differs by source. The National Park Service records more than 12,500 prisoners and 47 guns; the American Battlefield Trust gives 12,419 captured and 73 guns. Both put the small arms near 13,000. The Park Service calls it the largest single capture of Federal troops in the war.

The prisoners were paroled north, where recruits training at Camp Douglas christened them the Harper's Ferry Cowards, a name the New York State Military Museum records sticking to them for months. A. P. Hill's division stayed behind to process the surrender, then marched to Sharpsburg and reached the field on the afternoon of the 17th.

Harpers Ferry was in Virginia when the garrison surrendered here, and has been in West Virginia since 1863. The plateau is now part of Harpers Ferry National Historical Park: a mown loop trail, a line of guns, a surviving earthwork, and about a dozen wayside panels.

📸 Cover: Bolivar Heights today, Harpers Ferry National Historical Park — photo by Acroterion, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.