WILLIAMSBURG
PENINSULA CAMPAIGN
Proudly Supplying Metal Beverage Cans to the Virginia Area for over 35 Years
Did you know that the annual canned foods production increased 6x Âą from 5 million to 30 million Âą by the end of the Civil War?
George Custer
I
Metal Beverage Packaging Division, $PHULFDV ‡ :LOOLDPVEXUJ 9$ www.ball.com
t was during the Peninsula Campaign that George Custer, later known for his tragic mistakes fighting Indians at Little Big Horn, got early war experience. Less than a year out of West Point (he graduated at the bottom of his class), Custer was a second lieutenant in the Union Army when he arrived on the Peninsula. Custer quickly gained a reputation for brashness and braggadocio. On May 5, as the Union pursued the Confederate Army from Yorktown to Williamsburg, Custer volunteered to lead a detachment over exposed ground to explore a formidable Confederate redoubt. It was empty. At the close of the Battle of Williamsburg, Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock noted Conferderate dead were strewn for 600 yards in front of his line. Custer’s take in a letter to his sister was that he had “captured a Captain and five men without any assistance.� — Rusty Carter
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