Orlean, Virginia: Witness to History by Jeff Hughes Civil War histories invariably point to Gettysburg , and the famous battle fought there, as the high tide of the Confederacy. The point at which the American South came closest to seizing its independence. Only, those accounts are wrong. By July 1863, notwithstanding the string of battlefield victories that Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia had put together, the prospects of the Confederacy were already quickly waning. The west was nearing collapse. Food and forage – never abundant – were in critically short supply... enough so that that spring had already seen bread riots in Richmond and Lee dispatching half his army (Longstreet’s corps) into North Carolina to find sustenance. And Stonewall Jackson, Lee’s battlefield soul mate, lay fresh in his grave. No one understood those quickly narrowing odds better than Lee. When he began crossing the Potomac in the summer of 1863, with destiny pulling him towards the sleepy, crossroads ...
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