ABSTRACT
All the other high points of the campaigns of 1863 are overshadowed by four soaring peaks: Chancellorsville and Gettysburg in the east, Vicksburg and Chattanooga in the west. A brief campaign rather than a single battle, Chancellorsville was the high peak of Robert E. Lee’s military career. While the Confederate strategists wrangled and Lee prepared for his invasion, Grant was rampaging through Mississippi in a campaign which Abraham Lincoln described, with pardonable exaggeration, as ‘one of the most brilliant in the world’. Vicksburg also finally confirmed Grant’s status as a Union hero, and the campaign which preceded its capture remains his strongest claim to fame as a general in the field. As for Rosecrans, the campaign which he had launched with style and verve had ended in defeat for his army and humiliation for himself, and his troubles were far from over, for his army was in grave danger of being locked up inside Chattanooga.
