The Confederate army achieved the first victory of the Civil War at the First Battle of Manassas, or Bull Run, which took place in July 1861. While Bull Run bolstered Confederate morale, the continuing inaction of Union general George McClellan provided even more proof to the Southern leaders of their own sound strategies. Seeing McClellan and the federal army and militias camped in the vicinity of Washington, D.C., unable or unwilling to come out for a decisive battle, convinced Southern leaders that the war would soon be over, that their cause was just, and that the Confederacy would prevail.

Early Confederate victories continued during the Peninsula Campaign of 1862, in which Confederate general Joe Johnston stopped a vast Union army that was driving on Richmond along the peninsulas west of Chesapeake Bay. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson led his Confederate army up the Shenandoah Valley of eastern Virginia...