The Confederacy suffered three staggering military disasters in July 1863. Stunned Southerners struggled to grasp the unthinkable. General Robert E. Lee was human after all; Gettysburg proved that conclusively. Bastions believed unconquerable could be breached; the loss of Vicksburg left no room for doubt. And the precipitate retreat of General Braxton Bragg's Army of Tennessee from Middle Tennessee to Chattanooga before Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans' advancing Army of the Cumberland showed how readily huge swaths of the Confederate heartland could be sliced away with hardly a fight. Desperate measures were needed to arrest the people's descent from disillusion to defeatism.
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