You may have noticed that clashes between North and South featured on this website aren’t all referred to as “battles”. There’s the Action at Philippi, Engagement at Gloucester Point, and Battle of Blackburn’s Ford to name a few. Others are called skirmishes.
What do these terms mean?
Though somewhat arbitrary, these terms do have a specific meaning and are applied purposefully to describe a military event as accurately as possible.
The popularly-named “Battle of Philippi,” for example, consisted of Union troops running into town while the Confederates rushed out. Only a handful of shots were fired and it resulted in a small number of casualties. According to author Fritz Haselberger, when veterans reflected on it years later:
All agreed on one thing, it would have been impossible to have fought a battle that day even if the Confederates had defended the town. The Southerners had some rusty muskets and flintlocks but very little ammunition. Kelley’s men lacked guns, many were armed only with clubs and sticks. Dumont’s Indianans were equipped with rifles but lacked cartridge boxes, being forced to carry their paper cartridges in their pockets where they had become wet and useless.
Yanks from the South! Pg. 80
So what military term accurately describes what happened there? We call this an “action” because some military activity took place, however brief. Shots were exchanged between two opposing groups. This could also be described as an “armed encounter”. But you can’t even categorize this as a skirmish because there was no sustained fighting.
As the size and severity of the conflict increases, we use different terms to describe it. Here is my working definition of the terms and how they are applied:
| Action | A brief armed encounter between units as small a team (2-4 men) |
| Skirmish | A prolonged armed encounter between units as small as a company (60-100 men) |
| Engagement | A sustained armed encounter between units a small as a regiment (600-1,000 men) |
| Battle | A sustained armed encounter between multiple regiments or brigades (2,000+ men) |
Only a few of the “battles” fought in May and June of 1861 actually meet the definition of the term. But even smaller actions involving a handful of troops deserve to be given their due. They were no less harrowing and dramatic for the men who fought.
Spirit of '61 