Second Manassas 1862 : Robert E. Lee's Greatest Victory

There never was such a campaign, not even by Napoleon wrote Confederate General Pender of the Second Manassas campaign in which the gray-bearded Virginian, Robert E Lee, came as close as he ever would to exterminating his Northern enemies.

Second Manassas established Lee as the South's pre-eminent military commander and the Army of Northern Virginia as its most powerful weapon.

The fighting in northern Virginia left Union General John Pope's career in tatters and proved that the South was a power to be reckoned with. There never was such a campaign, not even by Napoleon.' So wrote William Dorsey Pender, a brigadier-general in the Army of Northern Virginia, in the wake of the Second Battle of Manassas.

His words were not hollow boasts - the campaign in north Virginia in the late summer of 1862 demonstrated Robert E.

Lee's truly great generalship. Although overshadowed by later clashes such as Antietam and Gettysburg, the Second Manassas campaign was a military masterpiece in which Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia came as close as they ever would to exterminating their Federal opponents and ending the war.

In so doing Lee confirmed himself as the South's pre-eminent military leader and helped forge his Army into the formidable force it would remain for the rest of the war. The crushing defeat of Federal General John Pope's Army of Virginia provided the springboard for Robert E.

Lee's first invasion of the North which would reach it's climax along the banks of Antietam Creek that September.