Maryland Campaign - Background

Background

The year 1862 started out well for Union forces in the Eastern Theater. George B. McClellan's Army of the Potomac had invaded the Virginia Peninsula during the Peninsula Campaign and by June stood only a few miles outside the Confederate capital at Richmond. But, when Robert E. Lee assumed command of the Army of Northern Virginia on June 1, 1862, fortunes reversed. Lee fought McClellan aggressively in the Seven Days Battles; McClellan lost his nerve, and his army retreated down the Peninsula. Lee then conducted the Northern Virginia Campaign in which he outmaneuvered and defeated Maj. Gen. John Pope and his Army of Virginia, most significantly at the Second Battle of Bull Run (Second Manassas). Lee's Maryland Campaign can be considered the concluding part of a logically connected, three-campaign, summer offensive against Federal forces in the Eastern Theater.

The Confederates had suffered significant manpower losses in the wake of the summer campaigns. Nevertheless, Lee decided his army was ready for a great challenge: an invasion of the North. His goal was to reach the major Northern states of Maryland and Pennsylvania, and cut off the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad line that supplied Washington, D.C. His movements would threaten Washington and Baltimore, so as to "annoy and harass the enemy."

Several motives led to Lee's decision to launch an invasion. First, he needed to supply his army and knew the farms of the North had been untouched by war, unlike those in Virginia. Moving the war northward would relieve pressure on Virginia. Second was the issue of Northern morale. Lee knew the Confederacy did not have to win the war by defeating the North militarily; it merely needed to make the Northern populace and government unwilling to continue the fight. With the Congressional elections of 1862 approaching in November, Lee believed that an invading army playing havoc inside the North could tip the balance of Congress to the Democratic Party, which might force Abraham Lincoln to negotiate an end to the war. He told Confederate President Jefferson Davis in a letter of September 3 that the enemy was "much weakened and demoralized."

There were secondary reasons as well. The Confederate invasion might be able to incite an uprising in Maryland, especially given that it was a slave-holding state and many of its citizens held a sympathetic stance toward the South. Some Confederate politicians, including Jefferson Davis, believed the prospect of foreign recognition for the Confederacy would be made stronger by a military victory on Northern soil, but there is no evidence that Lee thought the South should base its military plans on this possibility. Nevertheless, the news of the victory at Second Bull Run and the start of Lee's invasion caused considerable diplomatic activity between the Confederate States and France and England.

After the defeat of Pope at Second Bull Run, President Lincoln reluctantly returned to the man who had mended a broken army before—George B. McClellan after the Union defeat at the First Battle of Bull Run (First Manassas). He knew that McClellan was a strong organizer and a skilled trainer of troops, able to recombine the units of Pope's army with the Army of the Potomac faster than anyone. On September 2, 1862, Lincoln named McClellan to command "the fortifications of Washington, and all the troops for the defense of the capital." The appointment was controversial in the Cabinet, a majority of whom signed a petition declaring to the president "our deliberate opinion that, at this time, it is not safe to entrust to Major General McClellan the command of any Army of the United States." The president admitted that it was like "curing the bite with the hair of the dog." But Lincoln told his secretary, John Hay, "We must use what tools we have. There is no man in the Army who can man these fortifications and lick these troops of ours into shape half as well as he. If he can't fight himself, he excels in making others ready to fight."