Justifiably dismayed by McDowell’s performance at Bull Run, President Lincoln called General George B. McClellan to command the main Union force. Jefferson Davis combined Beauregard’s troops with those of General Joseph E. Johnston, who was given senior command of the Confederate forces in Virginia. Now the major action centered in Virginia as McClellan set about building a large army with which to invade Richmond, which became the Confederate capital in May 1861.

Despite the triumph at First Bull Run, the outlook seemed grim for the Confederates. Richmond could not withstand a massive assault. Yet McClellan, a popular commander who succeeded in transforming the Union army from an undisciplined rabble into a cohesive body of credible soldiers, suffered from a Hamlet-like tendency to ponder and delay. Eventually exasperated, Lincoln would peg him with homely accuracy: McClellan has a “bad case of the slows,” the president pronounced.

McClellan repeatedly delayed his assault on Richmond, finally losing the initiative, so that lie had to settle into an arduous campaign on the Virginia peninsula. In that campaign’s principal series of battles, called the Seven Days (June 26-July 2, 1862), more men were killed or wounded than in all the Civil War battles fought elsewhere during the first half of 1.862, including another encounter that became a byword for slaughter, Shiloh (April 6-7,1862). Shiloh pitted General Ulysses S. Grant’s 42,000-man Union against a 40,000-man Confederate force under General Albert S. Johnston. Grant lost 13,000 men, and the Confederates lost more than 10,000 in a battle that resulted in strategic stalemate on the war’s western front.

Back in Virginia, the Seven Days saw the placement of Robert E. Lee at the head of the South’s major army, which he renamed the Army of Northern Virginia. Lee led his forces in a brilliant offensive against the always-cautious McClellan, launching daring attacks at Mechanicsville, Gaines Mill, Savage’s Station, Frayser’s Farm, and Malvern Hill. In fact, Lee lost twice as many men as his adversary, but he won a profound psychological victory. McClellan backed down the peninsula all the way to the James River.

Appalled and heartbroken by McClellan’s repeated failure to seize the initiative, Lincoln desperately cast about for a general to replace him. On July 11, Lincoln appointed Henry W. Halleck. It was not a good choice. Halleck dispatched a regrouped army into Virginia under John Pope, but Lee met him with more than half the Army of Northern Virginia. At Cedar Mountain on August 9, “Stonewall” Jackson drove Pope back toward Manassas junction, then Lee sent the “Stonewall Brigade” to flank Pope and outmarch him to Manassas. After destroying the Union supply depot, Jackson took a position near the old Bull Rijn battlefield. Pope lumbered into position to attack Jackson on August 29, just as Lee sent a wing of his army, under James Longstreet, against Pope’s left on August 30.

The action was devastating. Pope reeled back across the Potomac. At this point, the “invading” Union army had been effectively swept out of Virginia, and the Confederates went on the offensive. For the North, it was the low point of the war.

Lee was a keen student of Napoleon Bonaparte’s strategy and tactics, the key to which was the principle of always acting from boldness. Thus Lee boldly conceived a double offensive: in the West, an invasion of Kentucky; in the East, an invasion of Maryland. Neither of these so-called “border states” had seceded, yet both were slave states, and capturing them would significantly expand the Confederacy. Moreover, if Louisville, Kentucky, fell to the Confederates, Indiana and Ohio would be open to invasion, and control of the Great Lakes might pass to the rebels. For the Union, the war could be lost.

But things didn’t happen this way. Confederate general Braxton Bragg delayed, lost the initiative, and was defeated at Perryville, Kentucky, on October 8, 1862. In Maryland, Lee’s invasion went well—until a copy of his orders detailing troop placement fell into the hands of George McClellan (restored to command of the Army of the Potomac after Halleck’s disastrous performance at Second Bull Run). The Union general was able to mass 70,000 troops in front of Lee at Sharpsburg, Maryland, along Antietam Creek. On September 17, in the bloodiest day of fighting up to that time, McClellan drove Lee back to Virginia. Indeed, only the belated, last-minute arrival of a division under A.P. Hill saved Lee’s forces from total annihilation.

Antietam was not the turning point of the war, but it was nevertheless a momentous battle. It provided the platform from which Abraham Lincoln issued the so-called “preliminary” Emancipation Proclamation.

The fact is that Lincoln was no enthusiastic advocate of emancipation. To be sure, he personally hated slavery, but as president, he was sworn to uphold the Constitution, which clearly protected slavery in the slave states. More immediately, Lincoln feared that universally declaring the slaves free would propel the four slaveholding border states into the Confederate fold. For many Northerners, the moral basis of the Civil War was the issue of emancipation. But Lincoln moved cautiously.

In August 1861, Lincoln prevailed on Congress to declare slaves in the rebellious states “contraband” property. As such, slaves could be seized by the federal government, which could then refuse to return them. In March 1862, Congress passed a law forbidding army officers from returning fugitive slaves. In July 1862, Congress passed legislation freeing slaves confiscated from owners “engaged in rebellion.” In addition, a militia act authorized the president to use freed slaves in the army. With these acts, Lincoln’s government edged closer to emancipation.

Secretary of State William H. Seward warned that a proclamation of emancipation would ring hollow down the depressingly long corridor of Union defeats. It was not until Antietam, a Union victory—albeit a costly one—that Lincoln felt confident in issuing the preliminary proclamation on September 23, 1862. This document did not free the slaves, but rather, warned slave owners living in states “still in rebellion on January 1, 1863” that their slaves would be declared “forever free.” When that deadline came and passed, Lincoln issued the “final” Emancipation Proclamation-which set free only those slaves in areas of the Confederacy that were not under the control of the Union army (areas under Union control were no longer, technically, in rebellion); slaves in the border states were not liberated.

Timid, even disappointing as the Emancipation Proclamation may seem from our perspective, it served to galvanize the North by explicitly and officially elevating the war to a higher moral plane: slavery was now the central issue of the great Civil War.