How the period ended
An uncertain future
Two years of war in the Eastern Theater had
not produced a decisive resolution on the
battlefield. The armies had waged six major
campaigns, testing each other's mettle twice
on the plains of Manassas, in the fetid
lowlands outside Richmond, amid the rolling
Maryland countryside near Sharpsburg, on
the banks of the Rappahannock river at
Fredericksburg, and at Chancellorsville in the
dreary thickets of the Wilderness. More than
150,000 men had fallen on these fields,
mocking the widespread belief in 1861 that
the conflict would be settled on a single
battlefield. Dramatic fluctuations of military
fortunes had taught perceptive observers not
to expect Cannae-type victories.
Most people North and South, weary of
the war's butchery and general disruption of
normal patterns of life, hoped for peace but
saw no end in sight. Voicing a sentiment
prevalent in both armies, one of Lee's
soldiers wrote after Chancellorsville: 'I have
never felt as tired of the army since I have
been in it as I am now. ... I'm hoping for a
time when the filth, lice, scurvy, and slavery
of war shall be a thing of the past - and then- I close my eyes and am off to the dim and
dusky future peopling it with dreams which I
know are too bright ever to be realized.'
Only the South had succeeded in the
search for competent military leadership.
With Lee's emergence during the Seven Days,
Confederates had found the general whose
talent and achievements would place him at
the center of their quest for nationhood.
Stonewall Jackson had been Lee's peerless
lieutenant, the pair forming a seemingly
unbeatable team. Jackson's death plunged
the Confederacy into mourning. 'He was the
nation's idol,' wrote one woman, 'not a
breath even from a foe has ever been
breathed against his fame. His very enemies
reverenced him. God has taken him from us
that we may lean more upon Him, feel that
He can raise up to himself instruments to
work His Divine Will.' An officer in the
Army of Northern Virginia commented that
'No man in the Confederacy would have
been more missed and more deeply
lamented, except Lee perhaps.' Many who
lamented Jackson's loss tried to put on a
brave face, as when Richmond's diarist
J. B. Jones wrote that 'there are other
Jacksons in the army, who will win victories- no one doubts it.'
Although most Confederates looked with
confidence to Lee and his army, they
harbored few illusions about how quickly the
war would end. A Richmond paper observed
in mid-May 1863 that the 'Yankees have now
made up their minds that this is to be a long
war, and they are determined to fight it out
to the end. Of course, we shall beat them in
every battle, but they can afford to lose five
men for the sake of destroying one of us.' The
paper grimly concluded that the
Confederates fought 'at fearful disadvantage
with terrible loss, in spite of our superiority
in pluck and in generalship, and the state of
things may well continue twenty years
longer, for these mean Yankees cannot afford
to acknowledge our independence.'
The Army of the Potomac's high
command had endured enormous turmoil
during two years of fighting, and few in the
North believed in Joseph Hooker. A staff
officer in the VI Corps captured the
frustration of several failed campaigns in a
single sentence: 'I hope we shall not have to
cross this river again,' he wrote from camp
near the Rappahannock on 12 May 1863,
'for it is not the way to Richmond but I am
afraid we shall have to try it over again and
that very soon.' Elizabeth Blair Lee, whose
husband Samuel Phillips Lee served as a
Union admiral, took heart from rumors that