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RICHARD CARWARDINE
Lincoln's Proclamation, 11/2009Book Chapter
Shortly after the Union’s military disaster at the second battle of Bull Run in late summer 1862, Confederate troops crossed the Potomac just twenty-five miles northwest of Washington. Commanding some forty thousand men, Robert E. Lee euphorically urged Maryland slaveholders to throw off their “foreign yoke.”¹ If hindsight reveals that the Union capital faced no real threat of capture and that Marylanders were not going to rise en masse, it remains the case that Lee’s invasion acted as a hammer blow to northern morale after a summer of desperate military failure. On the day Lee invaded Maryland—September 4—several
