Here in brief was the iron chess-game situation in the early autumn of 1862; an all-important crisis in the long-drawn contest:
Lee had wearied at last of acting solely on the defensive. Since the Civil War’s outset, the Confederates had thus far contented themselves with defending their own territory. On Virginia fell the brunt of the fighting. The Old Dominion had from the very first been the chief battleground of the two conflicting forces.
There the South had won victory after victory; with ludicrous ease defeating its more numerous and better-equipped Northern foes. McClellan in vain had hurled his forces against Richmond. In Northern Virginia, at Manassas, the North had also been beaten; there and nearly everywhere else throughout the length and breadth of the State.
Lee, master strategist, had confuted every Federal plan. Jackson, by a wizardry of generalship, had all but annihilated various Union armies in the mountain district.
It had all been easy conquest for the South, prepared and self-girded beforehand for the conflict.
And now, finding the defensive so simple, Lee had determined to take the aggressive; to cease merely to defend his own and to strike a blow at the very heart of the North to carry war directly and vehemently into the enemy’s own well-bulwarked territory itself.
His plan was clever.
Maryland, adjoining Virginia to the north, had ever been loud in protestations of sympathy to the South. The State had all but seceded. It was alive with ardent Confederate well-wishers.
The song “Maryland, My Maryland,” vied with “Dixie” itself. From a thousand Baltimoreans and other Southern sympathizers Lee had received word that the moment his armies should set foot in Maryland the whole State would rise as one man to his support.
Lee, believing all this, decided to invade the North by way of Maryland, where aid and reënforcements by the wholesale presumably awaited him. Thence he planned to march straight to Pennsylvania, and so through to New York, and even, perhaps, to Boston itself.