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The Stage Is Set For Battle
"The end of the week coming will show the world whether Richmond is to stand or fall, or whether there will or will not be a Southern Confederacy."
-- W.H. Quigley, 1st Pennsylvania Reserves
The final battles of the Seven Days Campaign captured the attention of the North and South. Citizens in New York City opened their newspapers and studied maps of Glendale. Anxious Southerners hoped that a decisive victory would save Richmond and shift the momentum in their favor. They hoped that foreign nations would lend their support to the Confederate cause, as they had done 80 years earlier for the colonies in their struggle for independence from the British.
A flurry of operations elsewhere added to the tension. Federal forces had been winning significant victories outside of Virginia all year. In June they began to menace the important Confederate strongholds at Vicksburg, Mississippi, and Charleston, South Carolina. Meanwhile, Southern leaders started assembling a Confederate army to invade Kentucky.
In the midst of it all, nearly one-fifth of a million men marched toward Glendale. What they did here on June 30, and at Malvern Hill on July 1, would help shape the course of events for the rest of 1862. |