ABSTRACT
The opening line of a popular song that first appeared in Harper's Weekly toward the end of the year: All Quiet Along the Potomac To-Night, became imbued with a wholly appropriate but far less reverential sentiment as 1861 gave way to 1862. On the right was the Potomac, on the left were the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah Valley, and the base of the triangle lay between the James and Appomattox Rivers, with Richmond at the midpoint between the Chesapeake Bay and the Blue Ridge boundary. The Confederacy did not always heed Jackson's advice, but when it did, it reaped the benefits. It would be many years before the Union made its greater numbers effective in the way Lincoln proposed, and in the intervening period there were many lessons to be learned. Bull Run, however, had already taught both sides perhaps the most important lesson of all: the American Civil War was not a war of the Napoleonic age.
