Mac Owens continues his series on the Civil War by considering Lee’s Virginia-Maryland campaign of 1862. "Rather than viewing the Seven Days’ Battles, Second Manassas/Bull Run, and Antietam as isolated events, it is much more fruitful to see them as parts of a whole during which Lee’s objective was, first, to save Richmond, which was in danger of falling to a Union siege, and then to inflict the sort of catastrophic defeat on a Union force that he thought was necessary to convince the people of the North that the cost of subduing the Southern Confederacy was too great." 
Agreed!
Lee had an overall strategic objective. Which he pursued relentlessly. Which was driving as much of the Union Army as possible from the territory of Virginia. It wasn't a coincidence that he named his Army the Army of NORTHERN Virginia.