With all the sorrow that came to the South in these first months of depression, it is pleasant to see that she had not lost the saving humor and satiric sense that was so to strengthen her in the evil days which followed. On April sixteenth, for example, the Confederate Congress, alarmed by the condition of the Southern army, passed a measure for conscription. This was commented upon in the Southern Literary Messenger for the month, with a delightful epigram:
Let us hail in this crisis the prosperous omen
That our senate shows virtue higher than Roman;
It has spurned all titles of honor, for rather
Than claim that each member be called “Conscript Father,”
All self-aggrandizement they lay on the shelves,
And declare all men conscripts, excepting themselves!
During May and June of ’62 Jackson and Lee endeavored to arrest McClellan’s progress by their counter campaign in the Shenandoah. For the South it was a most successful move. Not only were the Southern arms carried to victory, but, through the unfortunate wounding of Joseph E. Johnston at Seven Pines, Lee, whose fame had grown in the Shenandoah, was placed in supreme command of the army of Northern Virginia. The turning point of the Southern fortunes had arrived. The battle of the Chickahominy, Malvern Hill, and the Seven Day’s fighting before Richmond, resulted in the defeat of McClellan’s campaign, and Richmond, for the next two years, was saved.
The army of the Confederacy, through the hardships and reverses of the first year of fighting, had become a seasoned and experienced (though, thanks to the blockade, a sadly ill-equipped) machine. Its three great leaders were Lee and Jackson and Beauregard. The Southerners at home were beginning to be accustomed to the privations of war. They were all as confident as ever of the righteousness of their war. Thus with a united Confederacy behind him and after another victory at “Second Manassas,” in ’62, Lee began his ill-starred Maryland campaign, as a counter-stroke against the Army of the Potomac. Lee’s part of the Confederate line, the Army of Northern Virginia, was the only part of the original battle wall still intact. Butler and his forces were in possession of New Orleans, the fall of Vicksburg, already in siege, was but a matter of time, and in the West, uncertainty still prevailed. John R. Thompson’s spirited “A Word to the West,” was written when Joseph E. Johnston was dispatched to relieve Vicksburg. It was at the same time an answer to A. J. Requier’s impassioned plea, “Clouds in the West.”
Those were anxious days, indeed. September saw the desperate conflict at Sharpsburg, the bloodiest single day’s battle of the war, which, although it was not a conclusive defeat, left the Confederate forces wretchedly crippled, and brought deepest anguish to the South. The gloom, however, was relieved in December by Lee’s victory at Fredericksburg. So the second year of war closed on a people and a nation, whose hearts were sick of the conflict. A second Christmas came to the Confederacy to find only the grim realities of life instead of the plumes and pomp of circumstance with which the war had begun. Mrs. Preston drew the picture for her countrywomen, in Beechenbrook: