2-356-071 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Major Theodore Winthrop at Big Bethel, Virginia, 1861 (c1880). Winthrop (1828-1861) was killed at Great Bethel on 10th June 1861. At the Battle of Big Bethel he volunteered for General Ebenezer Pierce's staff and drew up a crude plan of battle. After a Federal attack to the enemy right flank was foiled, Major Winthrop led an ill-fated assault on the Confederate left held by four companies of the 1st Regiment North Carolina Infantry. Winthrop leaped onto the trunk of a fallen tree and yelled, One more charge boys, and the day is ours. Soon thereafter he was killed by a musket ball to the heart and became the first officer to be killed on the northern side in what history regards as the first pitched land battle of the American Civil War. A print from Cassell's History of the United States, by Edmund Ollier, Volume III, Cassell Petter and Galpin, London, c1880.