Seven Days Battles 1862 - Lee's Defense of Richmond

On 2 June 1802, Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America, ordered his military advisor, General Robert E. Lee, to take command of the Confederate forces around Richmond. The previous two months had seen the Union Army of the Potomac grinding, apparently inexorably, up the Tidewater Peninsula towards Richmond, the Southern capital. The advance had been ponderous, slowed as much by the caution of its commander. General George B. McClellan, as the actions of the defending Confederates. By late May, the Union forces were entrenched just four miles from the eastern outskirts of Richmond. The tide of war appeared to be flowing heavily against the Confederacy. The conflict was a little over a year old, but the last Confederate victory had been at the first battle of Manassas (known in the North as Bull Run) 11 months before. Since then, there had been nothing but defeats; the fall of Forts Henry and Donelson led to the loss of" western Tennessee during the winter of '61, and in April 1862 the Confederate army of General Albert S.Johnston was defeated at Shiloh, with Johnston killed in the process. The same month saw the loss of the strategically important port-city of New Orleans, while a Union naval blockade of Confederate ports was beginning to bite.
Download (rapidshare.com)