By Pedro Garcia
Our cause is on the advance—our star in the ascendant. The tide is swelling in our favor: shall we take it at its flood…? The army and the people say, advance—seize the golden opportunity…. An opportunity lost, seldom ever returns. The tide, if not taken at the flood, sweeps past us forever.
—Richmond [Va.] Whig, August 7, 1862
On September 7, 1862, Colonel Walter Taylor of General Robert E. Lee’s staff wrote in a letter to his sister, “The Yankee papers of the 6th exhibit a gloomy picture for our enemy. Just now it does appear as if God was truly with us. All along our lines the movement is onward. Ohio, Maryland they expect to see invaded. We are here & I trust Kirby Smith will ere long shell Cincinnati.”
The Confederacy’s Apogee
The colonel was correct in believing that the Confederacy was reaching its apogee in September 1862. In view of the South’s strength mobilized and concentrated in the field, the morale of its soldiers and citizens, and a Confederate offensive push set in motion that saw six Confederate columns on a front stretching from western Virginia to northern Mississippi on a drive to the Ohio River, and a seventh under Kirby Smith that had already entered eastern Kentucky, Taylor’s was a reasonable assumption.
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