Few would have seen the opportunity, or, with a great army thundering at the gates of Richmond, have dared to seize it; but it was not McClellan and McDowell whom Lee was fighting, not the enormous hosts which they commanded, nor the vast resources of the North.  The power which gave life and motion to the mighty mechanism of the attack lay not within the camps that could be seen from the housetops of Richmond and from the hills round Fredericksburg.  Far away to the north, beyond the Potomac, beneath the shadow of the Capitol at Washington, was the mainspring of the invader’s strength.  The multitudes of armed men that overran Virginia were no more the inanimate pieces of the chess-board.  The power which controlled them was the Northern President.  It was at Lincoln that Lee was about to strike, at Lincoln and the Northern people, and an effective blow at the point which people and President deemed vital might arrest the progress of their armies as surely as if the Confederates had been reinforced by a hundred thousand men.

May 16.

On May 16 Lee wrote to Jackson:  “Whatever movement you make against Banks, do it speedily, and if successful drive him back towards the Potomac, and create the impression, as far as possible, that you design threatening that line.”  For this purpose, in addition to Ewell and Johnson’s forces, the Army of the Valley was to be reinforced by two brigades, Branch’s and Mahone’s, of which the former had already reached Gordonsville.

In this letter the idea of playing on the fears of Lincoln for the safety of his capital first sees the light, and it is undoubtedly to be attributed to the brain of Lee.  That the same idea had been uppermost in Jackson’s mind during the whole course of the campaign is proved not only by the evidence of his chief of the staff, but by his correspondence with headquarters.  “If Banks is defeated,” he had written on April 5, “it may directly retard McClellan’s movements.”  It is true that nowhere in his correspondence is the idea of menacing Washington directly mentioned, nor is there the slightest evidence that he suggested it to Lee.  But in his letters to his superiors he confines himself strictly to the immediate subject, and on no single occasion does he indulge in speculation on possible results.  In the ability of the Commander-in-Chief he had the most implicit confidence.  “Lee,” he said, “is the only man I know whom I would follow blindfold,” and he was doubtless assured that the embarrassments of the Federal Government were as apparent to Lee as to himself.  That the same idea should have suggested itself independently to both is hardly strange.  Both looked further than the enemy’s camps; both studied the situation in its broadest bearings; both understood the importance of introducing a disturbing element into the enemy’s plans; and both were aware that the surest means of winning battles is to upset the mental equilibrium of the opposing leader.