From November 23 to 25, the Federals made a series of attacks on Lookout Mountain, Orchard Knob, and Missionary Ridge. In the end, and for the first time, Southern soldiers ran in mass panic from a field. Half-starved Confederate soldiers continued their retreat all the way to Dalton, Ga. Bragg was finished as a field commander.
1863 IN THE EAST
On the night of March 8, dapper John S. Mosby and his Confederate partisan rangers attacked Fairfax Court House, Va., only a few miles from Washington. The most important item bagged at Fairfax by the Confederates was the garrison commander, Gen. Edwin Stoughton, who was captured while asleep in bed.
John S. Mosby (the hatless figure fourth from left), pictured with some of his partisan rangers. The “Gray Ghost” weighed only 125 pounds.
From April 29 until May 8, Federal cavalry under Gen. George Stoneman cut a swath of destruction through Virginia almost to Richmond itself. Yet Stoneman’s absence from the Army of the Potomac helped Lee win perhaps his greatest victory. Late in April, Gen. Joseph Hooker started southward toward Richmond with an army of 133,000 soldiers. His line of march was through a mass of thick woods and dense undergrowth known as the Wilderness. There “Stonewall” Jackson delivered a surprise flank attack at a road junction called Chancellorsville.
Intense fighting lasted three days and extended from Chancellorsville ten miles eastward to Fredericksburg. Hooker suffered 17,000 losses. Soon the defeated Federal army was limping up familiar roads toward Washington.
Over 12,800 Confederate soldiers were killed or wounded at Chancellorsville. Yet the hardest blow of all was the death of Jackson. Accidentally shot by his own men, Jackson died of complications on May 10.
Lee’s army soon started on a second invasion of the North. Four reasons prompted this thrust: (1) Southern hopes that Lee might capture an important city such as Harrisburg, Baltimore or Washington, relieve the pressure on Vicksburg in the West, and possibly effect a victorious peace; (2) the hope too that a great victory on Northern soil might cause England to offer mediation in the war; (3) the desire to transfer the war from ravaged Virginia; and (4) the need to acquire supplies for Confederate soldiers.
With his army at a peak strength of 75,000 men, Lee crossed the Potomac in mid-June. Lincoln soon replaced Hooker with a Pennsylvanian, Gen. George G. Meade. By the end of June the 90,000-man Federal army was moving northward from Maryland into Pennsylvania in search of the Confederates, who had turned southward in search of supplies. Advancing from opposite directions, these two mighty forces collided at Gettysburg, Pa.