The Confederacy on the Brink: The History and Legacy of the Battles that Saved the Confederate Cause in 1862

In addition to having a direct impact on the rest of the fighting in 1862, the Peninsula Campaign would remain in the minds of Union soldiers and leaders over the next few years. Lincoln’s frustrations with different generals in the Army of the Potomac led to his promotion of Ulysses S. Grant as chief of all armies ahead of the Overland Campaign of 1864. When the Army of the Potomac was thwarted at the Battle of the Wilderness in early May 1864, it found itself in a similar position as Hooker at Chancellorsville, McClellan on the Peninsula, and Burnside after Fredericksburg. Union soldiers got the familiar dreadful feeling that they would retreat back toward Washington, as they had too many times before. This time, however, Grant made the fateful decision to keep moving south, inspiring his men by telling them that he was prepared to “fight it out on this line if it takes all Summer.”

Even after Lee pushed McClellan’s Army of the Potomac away from Richmond and back up the Peninsula in late June of 1862, he then had to swing his army north to face a second Union army: John Pope’s Army of Virginia. Correctly assuming that he needed to strike out before the Army of the Potomac successfully sailed back to Washington and linked up with Pope’s army, Lee daringly split his army to threaten Pope’s supply lines, forcing Pope to fall back to Manassas to protect his flank and maintain his lines of communication. At the same time, it left half of Lee’s army (under Stonewall Jackson) potentially exposed against the larger Union army until the other wing (under James Longstreet) linked back up. Thus, in late August 1862, the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of Virginia found themselves fighting over nearly the exact same land the North and South fought over in the First Battle of Bull Run 13 months earlier.

When Pope’s army fell back to Manassas to confront Jackson, his wing of Lee’s army dug in along a railroad trench and took a defensive stance. The battle began with the Union army throwing itself at Jackson the first two days, but the concentration on Stonewall’s men opened up the Union army’s left flank for Longstreet’s wing, which marched 30 miles in 24 hours to reach the battlefield by the late afternoon of August 29. Lee used Longstreet’s wing on August 30 to deliver a devastating flank attack before enough reinforcements from the retreating Army of the Potomac reached the field, sweeping Pope’s Army from Manassas and forcing the Union soldiers into yet another disorderly retreat from Manassas to Washington D.C., a scene eerily reminiscent of the First Battle of Bull Run.

From there, Lee would make one of the most consequential decisions of the war by invading Maryland and taking the fight to a Union state. The Maryland Campaign would culminate with the Battle of Antietam on September 17, which remains the bloodiest day in American history. Though that battle was tactically a draw, it resulted in forcing Lee’s army out of Maryland and back into Virginia, making it a strategic victory for the North and an opportune time for President Abraham Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all slaves in the rebellious states. Antietam is still considered one of the turning points of the Civil War, but in that sense it also serves as a stark reminder of just how far the Army of Northern Virginia had turned the tide in the span of just a few months.