Special Offer: Receive a complimentary registration to this online program on Zoom by registering for the October 26 Battle of Second Manassas in-person tour by October 21. Further information will be shared with qualifying registrants via email in mid- to late-October.
Two weeks after the Seven Days Battles in June and July 1862, the lead elements of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army of Northern Virginia departed Richmond, heading toward Culpeper, Virginia, and Maj. Gen. John Pope’s Federal Army of Virginia. While the threat posed by Pope’s 51,000-man force was of great concern to Lee, he could not afford the luxury of sending the remainder of his army along; not while Maj. Gen. George McClellan’s 100,000-man Army of the Potomac remained near the Confederate capital.
Civil War tour guide and career military intelligence officer Marc Thompson looks at the precursor campaign to Lee’s first invasion of the North in September 1862. Along with analyzing Lee’s movement from Richmond toward Manassas, Thompson explains how the evolving nature of the Civil War can be seen through the fielding of two kinds of Federal armies in response to the threat posed by Lee’s Confederates.
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