The advance corps reached James River, at Wilcox's Landing and Charles City Court House, on the night of the 13th.
During three long years the Armies of the Potomac and Northern Virginia had been confronting each other.

In that time they had fought more desperate battles than it probably ever before fell to the lot of two armies to fight, without materially changing the vantage ground of either.

The Southern press and people, with more shrewdness than was displayed in the North, finding that they had failed to capture Washington and march on to New York, as they had boasted they would do, assumed that they only defended their Capital and Southern territory.
Hence, Antietam, Gettysburg, and all the other battles that had been fought, were by them set down as failures on our part, and victories for them.

Their army believed this.

It produced a morale which could only be overcome by desperate and continuous hard fighting.