Maryland Campaign - Initial Movements

Initial Movements

On September 3, just two days after the Battle of Chantilly, Lee wrote to President Davis that he had decided to cross into Maryland unless the president objected. On the same day, Lee began shifting his army north and west from Chantilly towards Leesburg, Virginia. On September 4, advance elements of the Army of Northern Virginia crossed into Maryland from Loudoun County. The main body of the army advanced into Frederick, Maryland, on September 7. The 55,000-man army had been reinforced by troops who had been defending Richmond—the divisions of Maj. Gens. D.H. Hill and Lafayette McLaws and two brigades under Brig. Gen. John G. Walker—but they merely made up for the 9,000 men lost at Bull Run and Chantilly.

Lee's invasion coincided with another strategic offensive by the Confederacy. Generals Braxton Bragg and Edmund Kirby Smith had simultaneously launched invasions of Kentucky. Jefferson Davis sent to all three generals a draft public proclamation, with blank spaces available for them to insert the name of whatever state their invading forces might reach. Davis wrote to explain to the public (and, indirectly, the European Powers) why the South seemed to be changing its strategy. Until this point, the Confederacy had claimed it was the victim of aggression and was merely defending itself against "foreign invasion." Davis explained that the Confederacy was still waging a war of self-defense. He wrote there was "no design of conquest," and that the invasions were only an aggressive effort to force the Lincoln government to let the South go in peace. "We are driven to protect our own country by transferring the seat of war to that of an enemy who pursues us with a relentless and apparently aimless hostility."

Davis's draft proclamation did not reach his generals until after they had issued proclamations of their own. They stressed that they had come as liberators, not conquerors, to these border states, but they did not address the larger issue of the Confederate strategy shift as Davis had desired. Lee's proclamation announced to the people of Maryland that his army had come "with the deepest sympathy the wrongs that have been inflicted upon the citizens of the commonwealth allied to the States of the South by the strongest social, political, and commercial ties ... to aid you in throwing off this foreign yoke, to enable you again to enjoy the inalienable rights of freemen."