The fighting 181Meade commanded the Army of the
Potomac for the rest of the war as by far its
most successful leader. In a very real sense,
he saved the Union - yet he has never
received much recognition for his
achievement. That is probably because
General U. S. Grant subsequently came east
at a convenient moment, when numbers and
materiel made it possible to end the war by
simply shooting down many tens of
thousands of men on both sides until
arithmetic held sway.
The fall and winter of 1863-64
The perspective of years seems to suggest that
Gettysburg turned the war onto a new axis,
especially when taken with Federal conquest
of the Mississippi river through the fall of
Vicksburg on 4 July. History is, of course, lived
forward but written backward. Americans
struggling to further their opposite causes in
1863 saw little of what is now said to have
been obvious. Confederates who fought at
Gettysburg, and their families writing from
home, rued the reverse they had suffered, but
almost never displayed any notion of
impending doom. When the Yankees came
back across the Potomac, they believed, the
invaders would be as susceptible to defeat as
they always had been - and the veteran
Confederate army set about to prove it.
Back on Virginian soil, Lee resumed his
adroit maneuvering to counter each Unionist
initiative, and proved to be almost uniformly
successful in foiling his enemy. The armies
edged southward and eastward, out of the
Shenandoah valley and into piedmont
country, finally fetching up about 40 miles
(64km) of latitude south of the Potomac.
Through the late summer and fall of 1863,
operations centered on a corridor between
Warrenton and Culpeper and Orange. None
of the sallies and probes evolved into a
major engagement. Lee dispatched
Longstreet in early September with one-third
of the army's infantry to the Western
Theater, where the reinforcements would
arrive just in time to play a crucial role in
General Ambrose Powell Hill had been one
of Lee's most capable division leaders, but at Bristoe
Station and elsewhere he failed to perform up to his
commander's expectations. (Public domain)the Battle of Chickamauga. Two Federal
corps followed Longstreet west, where they
spent the rest of the war. Longstreet returned
to Virginia in the following spring.
Lee's reduced strength threw him squarely
on the defensive. Meade promptly pushed
his foe south of the Rapidan river in
mid-September, but on 9 October Lee
grasped the initiative again, as he so much
preferred to do. The Confederates advanced
columns around both of Meade's flanks,
forcing the Federal army to fall back north
beyond Warrenton toward Manassas. A. P.
Hill's troops took the lead. Hill had been
almost invisible at Gettysburg during his first
battle at the helm of the Third Corps. Now