The columns of Confederate infantry and artillery stretched for miles, ranks of foot soldiers and strings of cannon filled the roadbeds. It was after midday on Wednesday, May 4, 1864, in central Virginia south of the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers, and the Army of Northern Virginia was on the march. Reports from signalmen indicated that its old nemesis, the Union Army of the Potomac, was also on the move north of the rivers, heading south and east toward a pair of Rapidan fords.
The resumption of active campaigning had been the subject of rumors and campfire talk by the Confederates for weeks. Although veteran officers and men understood that the renewal of fighting meant further bloodshed in a war steeped in carnage, many of them had welcomed its return. In this, the conflict’s fourth spring, the struggle’s outcome appeared as distant as it had a year before, but the Rebels believed that these roads, the first of many, led possibly to final victory and independence for their nascent country. The roads’ length, however, would not be measured in miles.
It had been 10 months to the day since General Robert E. Lee’s “glorious army,” in the estimation of a southern civilian, had begun its retreat from Gettysburg, Pa. The three-day engagement had exacted a terrible cost in killed, wounded, and captured or missing of more than 28,000; a casualty rate of 39 percent. Nine generals had fallen or been captured, and 150 field officers—colonels, lieutenant colonels, and majors—had been casualties. “Gettysburg was more than a defeat,” contended Jennings Cropper Wise, historian of Lee’s artillery units. “It was a disaster from which no army in fact, no belligerent state, could
