By the beginning of the summer of 1863, the American Civil War in the eastern theatre of Northern Virginia was on a knife edge. Defeat after defeat for the Union forces had driven President Abraham Lincoln to despair and to hire and fire his way through several commanders. The grand plans of Lincoln’s supposedly finest field commander of 1862, General George B McClellan, to take the vast army he had painstakingly rebuilt to occupy the enemy’s capital of Richmond and so bring to battle and smash Confederate forces, had failed. What followed was a series of even bloodier failures and lost opportunities. The failure of McClellan to catch Lee’s divided forces at Antietam was followed by his successor Ambrose Burnside’s tactics of massed assaults which led to the carnage at Fredericksburg.
Replacing Burnside with Joseph Hooker had now led to the calamity of an even bigger defeat and loss of life at Chancellorsville. The Battle of Chancellorsville in May had been another disaster for the north, as once again, thousands of Federal troops were badly led and needlessly killed or wounded as a smaller Confederate army ran circles around them in the dense woods of the Wilderness and inflicted a stunning defeat. Though ingenious in its conception, and dramatic in victory over the enemy, the Army of the Potomac was not destroyed. Robert E Lee’s forces were still too weak to inflict that kind of damage. And Lee’s victory had come at a cost – among the loss of valuable troops, the Army of Northern Virginia lost arguably its most talented and aggressive corps commander: Joseph ‘Stonewall’ Jackson. Lee would be proven correct when he surmised Jackson’s loss as akin to losing his own right
