High-Water Mark: The 1862 Maryland Campaign in Strategic Perspective (Book Review)

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Reviewed Ted Alexander
By Timothy J. Reese
Baltimore, Butternut and Blue Press, 2004 By Mark Dunkelman

By fall 1862, Confederate morale was the highest it had been since the start of the war and Confederate armies were on the move on a front more than 1,000 miles wide. In the Western theater, Confederate incursions into Kentucky and northern Mississippi sought to checkmate the gains made by Union forces earlier that year.

Two Confederate armies under Generals Braxton Bragg and E. Kirby Smith marched into Kentucky in late August, and by September 4, 1862, Smith’s column captured and occupied the state capital at Frankfort. Smith hoped to reach the banks of the Ohio River opposite Cincinnati by September 15. The commanders intended to draw Federal troops out of middle Tennessee, gain recruits and win a decisive victory on Kentucky soil that would secure the Bluegrass State for the Confederacy.

Meanwhile in north Mississippi, Generals Sterling Price and Earl Van Dorn moved to drive Union forces out of that part of the state and perhaps capture the rail center of Corinth. And in the Trans-Mississippi theater, a Confederate force prepared to invade Missouri.

Back east, General William Loring led a small Confederate army into the Kanawha Valley of western Virginia. His goal was to give the people of that region an opportunity to rise up and overthrow Unionist rule, gain recruits, disrupt the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and secure the salt mines of the region for the Confederacy. On September 13, 1862, Loring triumphantly entered Charleston, proclaiming his army as liberators.

The largest and most decisive of the Confederate invasions during this period was General Robert E. Lee’s invasion of Maryland. On September 4, 1862, Lee’s army of some 40,000 men crossed the Potomac River and marched north toward Frederick.

All of these sometimes loosely coordinated Confederate incursions had one thing in common: They were all repulsed in some of the bloodiest combat of the war in their respective theaters. For more than a century, the blood, glory and ink expended during and after the Battle of Gettysburg has lured historians into dubbing that great encounter in southern Pennsylvania as the turning point of the Civil War. Many modern historians of the conflict now view fall 1862 as the true High Tide of the Confederacy. Never again would the South have the military might to launch invasions on the wide front that it did in 1862. Not only did the Confederates lose on the battlefield during this period, but they lost any chance for foreign recognition or of bringing the Border States into the fold.

One of the first scholars to examine the causes of Confederate defeat was Bell I. Wiley. His small but seminal 1954 study The Road to Appomattox pinpointed the fall of 1862 as the zenith of Confederate military success and of high morale on the home front. James McPherson’s 2002 book Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam, The Battle That Changed the Course of the Civil War expanded on Wiley’s premise.

In his new book High-Water Mark: The 1862 Maryland Campaign in Strategic Perspective (Baltimore, Butternut and Blue Press, 2004, $15), author Timothy J. Reese continues the discussion of that bloody autumn by introducing a number of new angles to the debate. One of Reese’s most tantalizing arguments is that British belligerence was a viable threat. By August 1862, just a few weeks before the Battle of Antietam, more than 18,000 British troops, including some of the crown’s most elite fighting units, "were arrayed for war in Lower Canada," writes Reese. Did the U.S. government feel threatened by them? Perhaps.

A message from Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to General Henry W. Halleck dated September 16, 1862, relayed the military necessity of protecting the du Pont powder mills in Delaware and at least hinted at the possible threat from Britain. With thousands of Redcoats to the north and more within easy sailing distance in the Caribbean, the author raises the specter of another British raid up the Chesapeake Bay similar to what occurred in 1814. Admittedly, Reese concedes, the possibility of such an event occurring is conjectural, avoiding the pitfalls of venturing deep into the murky waters of counterfactual history. Thus he concludes his chapter on the threat of British intervention: "Never again would the United States and Great Britain venture so close to the brink of war….The blue and the gray had narrowly sidestepped the blue and the red."

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