The Army of the Confederate States (also called Confederate Army or Southern Army) was a military force of the Confederate States of America (also called Confederate Army) during the American Civil War (1861-1865) that fought against the United States Armed Forces to maintain the institution of slavery in the southern states. The Northern Virginia Army, also known simply as the Lee’s Army, was the most important combat force in the eastern theater of the Civil War. The Confederacy not only operated along internal lines but could also use the railroad to move troops to places threatened by Union operations.
General Confederate Robert E. Lee defeated Union General George G. Meade in the three-day Battle of Gettysburg, Pa., leaving 51,000 dead, wounded, or missing. Lee was referring to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, himself a former US Army officer and Secretary of War, whose military advisers exercised complete control of the strategic and logistical aspects of Confederate armies, a role similar to that of the current US Army Chief of Staff. After being appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Confederate Army, Davis appointed Lee General on February 6, 1865, shortly before the collapse of the Confederacy.
The two armies were about the same size in July 1861, with fewer than 200,000 soldiers on each side but at the height of troop strength in 1863, Union soldiers were almost 2 to 1 superior to Confederate soldiers. At the end of the war, the Confederate Army retained its ability to resist and although it suffered from bottlenecks, it managed to get what it needed to keep fighting. While Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s men were able to gather supplies, they could do little to pull Union troops out of Vicksburg, Mississippi.
The largest Confederate Field Army, the Army of Northern Virginia, surrendered in 1865 to the Appomattox Courthouse, marking the end of major combat operations in the US Civil War. The main forces at that time in southern Tennessee were the Union Army of the Cumberlands under Major General William Starke Rosecrans and the Confederate Army of Tennessee under command of General Braxton Bragg.
When the American Civil War broke out, 313 officers left the US Army to join the Confederate Army. The Tennessee Army, renamed in the late summer of 1863, consisted of a right-wing under the command of Lt. Gen. Leonidas Polk and comprised the divisions of Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Cheatham, Major General Daniel Harvey Hill’s Corps, and Major General William H.T.’s Reserve Corps 174,223 men had surrendered to the forces of the Union Army by the end of the war.
Abraham Lincoln’s election was called an act of war by southern politicians who predicted that army soldiers would come to seize slaves and force white women to marry black men. During the war, Lincoln freed slaves and allowed freedmen under U.S.C.T. To join the Union Army of the United States Colored Troops.
Originally named the Confederate Army of Potomac, the Confederate forces were renamed the Army of Northern Virginia when Robert E. Lee took command on 1 June 1862 and fought to defend the city of Richmond against Union troops. The battle was not a major turning point in the war, but for Lee and the Confederate Army, it continued for nearly two more years in a campaign that signaled a crisis of confidence in soldiers through an unconditional trust in their slaves. Lee and his troops became central icons of the interpretation of the “lost cause” of war, in which the defense of the rights of states rather than slavery as the cause of the conflict was the central principle, and in which Confederate soldiers defeated the Union despite overwhelming advantages in men and resources.
On 9 April, Confederate General Robert E. Lee and his famous Northern Virginia army surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant. On April 12, 1861, after diplomatic wrangling over Lincoln’s pledge to supply the Union troops at Fort Sumter, the Confederates fired shots at the fortress, and the Union troops capitulated, triggering the Civil War. When Davis ordered a new phase of the war to shift to guerrilla tactics, many troops followed Lee and capitulated.
Immediately after, the battle continued with the withdrawal of the Confederate Army from Virginia, and other camps for slaves and enslaved men abandoned their posts. Union Captain Alfred Lee of the 82nd Ohio whose failure to drive the Union Army from its positions prompted him to order a final assault on July 3 under the command of Generals George Pickett, James Johnston, and Pettigrew. The Confederacy moved many of the Banks troops to Louisiana where a major Union offensive was planned for the spring of 1864. This enabled Confederate troops under the command of John S. Ford to recapture most of the territory occupied by Union troops.
The surrender in Appomattox was the most important surrender of the Civil War, when General Robert E. Lee, the most respected commander, surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant his Northern Virginia army. After a crushing defeat in the war, the Confederate States of America began to exist. The soldiers of the Confederate Army were ready to defend the South against the Union Army as an object of attack.
Secretary of War Edwin Stanton requested and received further clarification of whether the forces in Loudoun County, Virginia, which were part of the Northern Virginia Army, had themselves fallen under Lee’s surrender. The Confederate Army was modeled on the US Army, consisting of a large provisional force that existed at the time of the war, and a smaller permanent regular army. Soldier demographics for the Confederate Army are not readily available due to incomplete or destroyed recruitment records. As Kevin M. Levin argues in a well-researched book, such claims “shocked” those who served in the Army during the American Civil War.