This entry is a subentry of Civil War (1861 – 65).
The war between the North and South that followed Abraham Lincoln's election to the presidency in 1860 claimed over 600,000 American lives and seriously threatened the balance of power in the Western Hemisphere. When Lincoln called for 75,000 troops to suppress the southern rebellion after the fall of Fort Sumter in April 1861, the federal government possessed overwhelming superiority in manpower and the material resources needed to conduct war in an industrial age. The Confederacy had a number of factors in its favor, however. To win, the North had to conquer vast territories and break the will of the Southern people. Furthermore, the railroads that made it possible to supply the large military forces it would take to occupy and conquer the South restricted the strategic flexibility of Union commanders. Finally, Southern armies enjoyed the advantage of operating in sympathetic and supportive territory.
The South also benefitted, although not to a crucial extent, from a generally superior level of military leadership. The traditional notion that a Southern dominance prevailed at West Point and the antebellum army has an element of truth to it, but should not be exaggerated. On the whole, Northern students tended to perform better at the technically oriented Military Academy. Consequently, after graduation they were assigned to the more prestigious artillery and engineering units, rather than the cavalry and infantry branches. There lesser‐performing Southern graduates tended to dominate, and the Civil War would be an infantryman's war.
The status of the West Point–trained military officer would be a source of friction for both sides throughout the war. The Union and the Confederacy benefitted immeasurably from the professional knowledge and expertise of the West Pointers. Yet neither society completely appreciated nor understood the specialized skills and standards the professionals deemed essential for conducting a modern war. In the North, suspicion of professional officers was further inflamed by the number of Southern officers who joined the Confederate army; in the South, by the clear preference President Jefferson Davis accorded West Pointers. For their part, professional officers often let their contempt for politics and civilians manifest itself in a haughty cliquishness and were at times unduly harsh in their efforts to impose military discipline.
Even the professionals were inadequately prepared for the revolution in warfare brought about by innovations in military technology. They did not appreciate how the dramatic enhancement of firepower provided by the widespread use of rifled muskets gave an overwhelming advantage to forces operating on the tactical defensive and rendered traditional assault tactics obsolete. And although West Pointers recognized the importance of field fortifications, none really anticipated the extent to which Civil War armies would employ them.
Both sides also encountered significant strategic problems. In the western theater (primarily the area between the Mississippi River and the Appalachian Mountains), three major rivers, the Cumberland, Tennessee, and Mississippi, provided Northern armies with excellent invasion routes. However, they would be vulnerable to raids and turning movements any time they operated away from river supply lines. In the east, Union and Confederate armies, for the most part, focused on the direct overland route between the two capitals, Washington and Richmond, through Fredericksburg Virginia. Yet both sides were capable of conducting strategic turning movements. The North, with its overwhelming naval superiority, could operate from the lower Chesapeake Bay along the rivers that reached into the Virginia heartland, which it did with some success in 1862 and 1864. The Shenandoah Valley could be used for the same purpose by the Confederate armies, and was in 1862, 1863, and 1864.
Although the war was ultimately decided on the battlefield, the diplomatic contest was no less important. By 1860 a state of detente prevailed between the United States and the European powers. The most important of these, Great Britain and France, valued the United States as a check against the ambitions of other European powers in the Western Hemisphere. Both countries also had strong ties of economic interdependence with North and South. Not only did both Britain and France need southern cotton to feed their textile industries, they also had heavy investments in northern land, railroads, and public securities.
Southerners nonetheless went to war confident of success in the diplomatic arena. The European powers, they surmised, would find it difficult to resist the opportunity presented by the rebellion to diminish U.S. power in the hemisphere. To assuage European fears of an overweening Confederacy, southern diplomats and statesmen continually emphasized their limited war aims, and portrayed themselves as a people merely seeking freedom from Yankee tyranny. British freetraders were also expected to resent protectionist trade policies a Republican administration was certain to implement.
However, the Confederate cause overseas was compromised during the early months of the war, when the European powers were establishing their initial policies, by overconfidence in their ability to achieve military success and a lack of a seasoned diplomatic corps. The South also underestimated Europe's determination to avoid involvement. Although sympathetic to the Southern struggle for self‐determination, and confident that the Union cause would ultimately fail, Europe was unwilling to recognize the Confederacy without some demonstration of its via bility as a nation. Yet if the South could meet this test, why, European statesmen could fairly ask, antagonize the North by getting involved if the Confederacy was going to win anyway?
The North had the advantage of merely advocating preservation of the status quo, which the European powers, especially Great Britain, had a powerful interest in maintaining. If sufficiently aroused, British statesmen feared the North might attempt to seize Canada. There was also the danger that diminution of American power might promote instability in the Americas, and compel a diversion of energy, resources, and attention away from affairs on the European Continent. Finally, British statesmen had to take into account the fact that their constituents were highly dubious of foreign adventures in the wake of the Crimean War.
This did not mean the North would have an easy time diplomatically. The British prime minister, Lord Viscount Palmerston, held a deep antipathy toward republican government in general, and Americans in particular. Furthermore, Palmerston viewed the war as a pointless one. Secession was in his mind an irrevocable fait accompli, and he doubted the Lincoln administration had either the means or the will necessary to restore the Union. To Palmerston, the question was not whether the South would win her independence, but whether the North would give up the fight before too much death and destruction had occurred. Britain's role, as he saw it, was to keep a pointless war from threatening the peace and stability upon which British imperial interests depended.
Responsibility for the North's diplomatic efforts rested with Secretary of State William H. Seward, a crafty and pragmatic politician who recognized the value of bluster in diplomacy. His sincere advocacy of a war against European intrusions in the Caribbean during the Fort Sumter crisis to revitalize southern Unionism shocked the diplomatic corps in Washington. Although Lincoln rejected the idea of a foreign war, Seward's actions during this critical period successfully fostered an image of American bellicosity that reinforced British and French caution in their dealings with the South.
The Union also benefitted immensely from the skill of the American Minister in Great Britain, Charles Francis Adams. His handling of affairs played a major role in settling a number of crises that threatened the Union war effort. The issue of slavery helped the North. Although European statesmen consistently approached the “American question” from a purely pragmatic standpoint, they and their constituents were unenthusiastic about supporting a nation founded in part to protect the institution of slavery.
In April 1861, however, Lincoln committed a grave blunder by declaring a blockade, which, according to international law, implied the existence of a conflict between two independent states. Britain responded with a proclamation of neutrality—in effect implying belligerent status on the Confederacy. Seward responded with a harsh warning that further steps in favor of the South would lead to a serious breach in U.S.–British relations. In London, Adams toned down Seward's message without losing its essence, and obtained assurances from Palmerston that he had no present intention of recognizing the Confederacy. Although both the proclamations of neutrality and the blockade would remain sources of friction, the North, by fixing the British and French into noninterventionist positions at the outset, had won a major diplomatic victory.
When Lincoln issued his call for volunteers after Fort Sumter, he made it clear that the North was fighting solely for the Union. No effort would be made to molest Southern civilians, their property or institutions, nor would any attempt be made to abolish slavery where it then existed. The president adopted this position for two reasons. First, he realized he needed a broad coalition of support in the North for the war. Adopting radical war aims might alienate more conservative elements of public opinion, particularly in those slave states that remained loyal. Lincoln also believed that the vast majority of Southerners were lukewarm about independence and had been forced to accept secession by irresponsible political leaders. To declare war on Southern institutions would, Lincoln and most northerners feared in 1861, unite the white South behind secession.
The task of developing a military strategy to achieve these political goals feel upon Gen. Winfield Scott, commander of all the Union armies. Scott put forth a two‐part plan, dubbed the “Anaconda” by the press, after the strangling snake, that represented both his and Lincoln's desire for an easy reconciliation between the sections. First, the Union navy would establish a complete blockade of the Southern states. Second, a combined army‐navy force of 80,000 men would capture the Mississippi Valley. Cut off from the outside world, Scott believed economic pressure would lead Southerners to reassert their natural loyalty to the Union with a minimum of bloodshed. Lincoln, however, felt Scott's plan would take too much time to implement and perhaps years to produce desirable results. Despite vigorous protests from many of his professional military advisers, Lincoln ordered an advance on the Confederate position near Manassas Junction, Virginia.
On 26 July 1861, the South won a close, but decisive, victory at the First Battle of Bull Run (Manassas). A chastened Lincoln called Gen. George B. McClellan to Washington and appointed him commander of Union forces around the capital. McClellan's magnetic personality, success building the Army of the Potomac, and record of military victories in western Virginia impressed the president. On 1 November 1861, McClellan replaced Scott as general‐in‐chief of the Union army.
Rejecting the idea that large‐scale fighting could be avoided, McClellan advocated taking the time to assemble, organize, and train an overwhelming military force to render Southern resistance futile. At the same time, he championed a lenient policy toward the South and slavery to make returning to the Union as attractive as possible. McClellan's operational strategy called for the main land offensive to be made in Virginia against Richmond, the Southern capital and industrial center. Supporting op erations would be undertaken into East Tennessee to liberate the loyal population there and break the railroad that connected the eastern Confederacy with the west, and along the Mississippi River. Finally, McClellan wanted the navy to establish enclaves along the Southern coastline to support the blockade and pin down Confederate troops that might otherwise be sent to resist Union operations in Virginia.
In November 1861, however, only McClellan's Army was anywhere near ready to commence operations. To give Gen. Henry W. Halleck in Missouri and Gen. Don Carlos Buell in Kentucky time to organize their forces, McClellan decided to postpone offensive operations until the spring of 1862. By the time spring came, however, dissatisfaction with military delay had dramatically eroded McClellan's personal prestige with the Northern public and his relations with the President.
Among the sources of discontent with military inactivity in the winter of 1861–62 was a crisis in U.S.–British relations. In November 1861, a British mail steamer, the Trent, was stopped by a Union warship that took into custody two Confederate emissaries, James Mason and John Slidell. The Palmerston government was enraged, and quickly made it clear that if the Lincoln administration did not apologize and release Mason and Slidell, there would be serious consequences. To bolster the threat, the British began active military preparations in Canada. After several tense weeks the Lincoln administration backed down and surrendered the two emissaries in late December.
Responsibility for the formation of Southern military strategy fell upon President Davis, a West Pointer, Mexican War hero, and former secretary of war. On the surface, the Confederacy's strategic problem appeared much simpler: Southerners merely had to offer sufficient resistance to convince the North it could not be conquered. However, geography and political factors imposed serious limitations on strategic planning. The location of the Confederacy's small industrial base and vital agricultural areas in the upper South ruled out the adoption of a Fabian strategy. Such a strategy would also have placed the institution of slavery at risk, as the sight of Union armies marching through the South would have undermined the moral authority of the master class and served as a haven for runaway slaves. Perhaps even more important than these material considerations in shaping Southern strategy was a too widely espoused belief that as a point of honor the Confederacy should defend every inch of its soil.
Also widely espoused was a belief that Europe's voracious appetite for cotton would compel intervention. Although not officially sanctioned by the Confederate government, Southerners imposed an effective embargo on cotton exports to increase demand for the crop overseas. “King Cotton diplomacy” proved a disastrous failure, however. Bumper crops in 1857–60 had left British mills with more than enough cotton to process for an already satiated market. By the time the lack of cotton might have seriously affected the British economy, alternative sources in Egypt and India had been developed, and they more than made up the difference. Furthermore, poor harvests during the first two years of the war increased European demand for Northern food crops, making King Corn as important to European statesmen as King Cotton.
In January 1862, Confederate forces west of the Mississippi, under the command of Gen. Albert S. Johnston, held a badly overextended line that stretched from Columbus, Kentucky, on the Mississippi River to Mill Springs in eastern Kentucky. At the center of the line stood Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and Fort Donelson on the Cumberland. In February, both fell to a joint army‐navy force commanded by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. This opened the Confederate heartland to invasion. With his flanks exposed by the penetration of his center, Johnston abandoned Kentucky and most of Tennessee. The industrial center of Nashville fell, and Union forces moved quickly up the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers.
Political pressure and a belief that the burden of simultaneously serving as field commander and general in chief was too much led Lincoln to remove McClellan from the latter post in March 1862. Lincoln named no replacement, and instead intended to perform the functions of general in chief himself. He did, however, combine the western departments and appoint Henry Halleck as their overall commander. Upon assuming this position, Halleck decided to concentrate his forces for an operation against the strategic rail point at Corinth, Mississippi. Before Halleck could complete his concentration, Johnston, on 6 April 1862, attacked unprepared Union forces under Grant near Shiloh Church by the Tennessee River. Grant's army managed to hold on despite extremely heavy losses, and, reinforced by forces under Buell, launched a successful counterattack the next day. The Confederates retreated to Corinth, having lost the Battle of Shiloh; Johnston, who had been mortally wounded; and their bid to reverse Southern fortunes in western Tennessee.
In March, McClellan launched a combined navy‐army campaign from the lower Chesapeake Bay. After a month‐long siege before Yorktown, McClellan commenced a steady advance toward Richmond in the Peninsular Campaign. By early June, the Army of the Potomac was within ten miles of the Confederate capital, and the end of the rebellion appeared at hand.
But then two men emerged who would transform the war in Virginia, Gen. Robert E. Lee and his lieutenant, “Stonewall” Jackson. They recognized that if the Confederacy remained wholly on the defensive and continued to concede the strategic initiative, it would inevitably be crushed by superior numbers. To prevent this, they decided to seize the initiative by assuming the strategic and tactical offensive while attempting to defend the South.
It has been argued that Lee's aggressive strategy led him into tactical blunders and high casualties that bled the Confederacy white. Clearly, in retrospect, the ultimate objective of an offensive strategy, the destruction of the opposing army in battle, was a practical impossibility given the size and firepower of Civil War armies. Yet Lee recognized that if the South could only frustrate Northern military operations until the 1864 elections, the Northern public might replace the Lincoln administration with one more amenable to Southern independence. In May and June 1862, Jackson, with Lee's active support and encouragement, conducted a brilliant campaign in the Shenandoah Valley that induced the Lincoln administration to hold back reinforcements from McClellan's army. Lee then called Jackson's force to Richmond, and took the offensive. In the Seven Days' Battle of 25 June–1 July 1862, McClellan responded to Lee's and Jackson's attack by conducting a successful fighting retreat to a new position on the James River.
The setback on the Peninsula and the tremendous casualties suffered by McClellan and by Grant at Shiloh had a profound effect on Northern opinion. Until the Seven Days' Battle, Lincoln had resisted calls for a more radical approach out of fear that it would stimulate Southern resistance. In July 1862, however, Lincoln saw little evidence that the conservative policy was convincing many southerners to lay down their arms. Lincoln also perceived a hardening of Northern public opinion, and began moving toward a more radical position on the war. In July, he read to his cabinet a draft of a proclamation emancipating the slaves in the Confederacy, but was persuaded to await a military victory before issuing it.
To achieve that victory, Lincoln organized a new army in Virginia and placed it under the command of John Pope, who issued a series of orders promulgating a tougher policy toward Southern property and civilians. Next, Lincoln restored the position of general in chief and appointed Halleck to the post. Finally, Lincoln then, through Halleck, ordered McClellan's army back to Washington to unite with Pope's forces. But Pope proved no match for Lee. In a brilliant campaign, Lee forced Pope back to the old battlefield of Bull Run before all of McClellan's army could join him, and, on 29–30 August 1862, won a crushing victory at the Second Battle of Bull Run.
Lee then decided to cross the Potomac River into Maryland. Lee did this hoping to feed his army in Maryland rather than Virginia, recruit Marylanders into his army, and win a decisive victory on Union soil that would bring the North to the peace table. Lincoln reluctantly restored McClellan to command. The speed with which McClellan got his army reorganized and on the march surprised Lee, who had divided his army, and allowed the Federal commander to seize the strategic initiative. Compelled to abandon his plan of pushing into Pennsylvania, Lee reconcentrated his army near Sharpsburg, Maryland. There, on 17 September 1862, the two armies fought the battle of Antietam, the bloodiest single day of combat in American military history. Although McClellan and his subordinates mismanaged the battle and failed fully to commit their superior forces, Lee was forced to return to Virginia.
While Lee was in Maryland, Confederates under Gen. Braxton Bragg were on the offensive in the West. After the capture of Corinth, a force under Buell was pushed east toward Chattanooga and East Tennessee. To counter this, Bragg decided to seize the strategic initiative by invading Kentucky. The invasion began well, but a drought that had plagued Buell's advance on Chattanooga also took a severe toll on Bragg's army and slowed its advance, giving Buell time to return to Kentucky. The two armies met in the Battle of Perryville, Kentucky, on 8 October 1862. Neither side gained a decisive victory, but Bragg, with his supply line overextended, was compelled to retreat to Tennessee.
Confederate victories in the summer of 1862 reinforced the Palmerston government's conviction that the Union could not be restored. Furthermore, suffering among British textile workers was increasing as the lack of cotton started to pinch. Consequently, after Second Bull Run, Palmerston began to seriously ponder an effort to bring the North and South to the negotiating table. It was hoped that an offer of mediation that did not explicitly recognize Confederate independence, would be amenable to the North now that the impossibility of the task of conquering the South had been proven. To facilitate the process of bringing the combatants to the table, the British sought partners in the venture abroad. France, although facing a crisis in Italy, had long been sympathetic to the Southern cause. But Russia, a staunch supporter of the north, was much cooler to the proposal for mediation.
On 22 September 1862, Lincoln finally issued his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation expecting that it, in combination with the victory at Antietam, would demonstrate both the Union's ability to achieve success on the battlefield and, by making the war one between slavery and freedom, destroy British interest in intervention. He was wrong on both counts, at least in the short term. The stalemated condition of the war after Antietam seemed only to demonstrate that even if the North could win battles, it could never do so in so overwhelming a fashion as to conquer the South, and that some form of outside intervention was necessary to stop the war. More importantly, the Palmerston government feared the Emancipation Proclamation would incite slave insurrections in the South and make restoration of a stable political, social, and economic environment in North America impossible. Consequently, Palmerston allowed members of his government to seriously discuss an armistice plan put forward by France.
Republican defeats in the 1862 congressional elections, however, were not significant enough to suggest the North's commitment to military victory had eroded to the point where an offer of mediation would be accepted. If Britain was to bring the North to the negotiating table, clearly there would have to be some coercion involved. At this point Secretary for War George Lewis brought a memorandum before the cabinet. Lewis shared Palmerston's view that the Union could not be restored by force of arms, and that the purpose of the Emancipation Proclamation was to foment servile insurrection in the South. Yet in his memorandum, Lewis concluded that the South had yet to earn recognition. More importantly, Lewis gave a pessimistic assessment of Britain's ability to compel the North to accept an armistice or develop a workable solution that both sides would accept. Lewis's arguments carried the day. The British pulled back, and the crisis ended.
After Antietam and Perryville the Union high command attempted to impose an element of coordination among its main armies. In December, major operations were undertaken by Union armies at Fredericksburg in Virginia, Chickasaw Bayou in Mississippi, and Murfreesboro in Tennessee. Neither side achieved a decisive success, however, and as 1862 ended, the war settled into a stalemate.
The armies went into winter quarters and the Union high command adjusted its overall strategy. In Halleck, Lincoln had a man who would carry out his wishes without the acrimony and conflict that had characterized his relationship with McClellan. Halleck helped shape Lincoln's strategic thought and translated the president's wishes into military strategy. Both agreed that in making the Confederate capital the main target of strategic planning, McClellan had given insufficient priority to the security of Washington. They decided the Army of the Potomac would operate along the overland route with its focus more on defending Washington and neutralizing Lee's army than capturing Richmond. As long as it did not uncover Washington, the Army of the Potomac was to keep Lee's army busy to prevent it from detaching forces to reinforce Confederate armies in the west, and, if possible, catch Lee in a tactical or strategical mistake. Although willing to accept the prospect of stalemate in Virginia, Lincoln understood that Lee's aggressive generalship had offered an opportunity in Maryland to achieve a decisive victory. Such an opportunity might come again.
With the shift to a defensive strategy in the east and the change in Northern war aims, operations in the west took on greater importance and received greater priority. Halleck and Lincoln recognized that the adoption of emancipation as a war aim raised the stakes for the Confederacy, and dramatically reduced the chances for a quick end to the war. Despite its political, psychological, and material importance to the Confederacy, simply capturing Richmond would not end the rebellion. The entire South would have to be conquered. Halleck and Lincoln gambled that the Union armies could either win the war by 1864, or at least gain enough victories in the west to sustain popular support for the Lincoln administration and ensure its reelection that year.
By 1863, the Union had established control of the entire Mississippi Valley except for a stretch between Vicksburg, Mississippi, and Port Hudson, Louisiana. A Union army‐navy expedition in 1862 had reached Vicksburg, but had been unable to take the town. In the summer of 1863, Grant, in a brilliant campaign, captured that fortified city commanding the Mississippi. Marching overland on the Louisiana side, and crossing the Mississippi below town, Grant moved quickly inland, drove off a force sent to assist the army defending Vicksburg, then turned back toward the town. After victories at Champion's Hill on 16 May and the Big Black River on 17 May, Grant drove the Confederate army back into the defenses of Vicksburg. On 4 July 1863, after a month‐long siege, Vicksburg surrendered, followed by Port Hudson less than a week later; thus allowing the Mississippi, in Lincoln's words, to flow “unvexed to the sea.” The Confederacy was divided in two.
After the Union defeat at the Battle of Fredericksburg, Lincoln appointed Gen. Joseph Hooker commander of the Army of the Potomac. Hooker did a magnificent job reinvigorating the army, but in the field he proved no match for Lee and Jackson. In his tactical masterpiece, although outnumbered two‐to‐one, Lee won a brilliant victory at the Chancellorsville, Virginia in May 1863. The victory came at a tremendous cost, however. Jackson died after being accidentally shot by his own men.
Lee then embarked on another invasion of the North, this time into Pennsylvania. Lincoln recognized that Lee's action provided a second opportunity to catch the rebel army far from its base and administer the crippling blow McClellan had failed to deliver at Antietam. Having lost faith in Hooker, Lincoln replaced him with Gen. George Gordon Meade on 30 June 1863. Two days later the armies came into contact near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. For three days—1–3 July 1863 —Lee attacked the Union army in quest of decisive victory. Meade held his ground and the rebel army was compelled to return to Virginia. It had suffered such severe losses at the Battle of Gettysburg that it would never be the same again. The war in the east returned to a state of stalemate, with the two armies engaging in a war of maneuver that produced no major results.
Gettysburg and Vicksburg greatly diminished Southern prospects overseas. Beginning in 1863, the North's campaign to prevent intervention also benefitted from Great Britain and France's preoccupation with events in Europe, including the Polish insurrection of 1863 and the controversy over Schleswig‐Holstein in 1864. Yet in violation of the Monroe Doctrine, the French government of Napoleon III, in 1863, took advantage of the U.S. Civil War to install a puppet regime in Mexico under Emperor Ferdinand Maximilian. Confederate agents offered to recognize the new Mexican government in exchange for French recognition of Southern independence. Napoleon, however, remained unwilling to do this without Britain.
The French enterprise in Mexico did not go unnoticed by the Lincoln administration. After the capture of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, Nathaniel Banks was directed to conduct operations in the Trans‐Mississippi West, in part to capture cotton in that region, but also to show the flag. Although a campaign along the Red River in Louisiana failed, Banks was able to occupy Brownsville, Texas. After Lee's surrender at Appomattox in April 1865, the federal government sent 50,000 soldiers to the Mexican border. But by then Napoleon had already begun scaling back his enterprise. In 1867, the French misadventure collapsed, and Maximilian was executed by the Mexicans.
The most serious controversy on the diplomatic front during the last two years of the war was prompted by the efforts of Confederate Secretary of the Navy Stephen Mallory to obtain ironclad ships in Europe to break the Union blockade. The British government facilitated this enterprise by applying a narrow interpretation of a law that prohibited the construction and arming of warships in British territory. The Southern agent, James D. Bulloch, exploited this loophole by arranging for ships to be built unarmed in Britain, whence they would be sent to the Bahamas to complete construction. In 1862, Bulloch was able to acquire the steam and sail cruisers Florida and Alabama; both would enjoy productive careers as commerce raiders.
Bulloch then contracted with the Laird firm in Britain for two new vessels with rams to break the blockade. As they neared completion in the summer of 1863, Union minister Adams issued a series of hotly worded protests to the British Foreign Office warning of the consequences of allowing the ships to be released. Palmerston resented the tone of Adams's protests, but, with the Polish insurrection threatening the peace of Europe, could not afford a conflict with the United States. In September, his government ordered the detention of the ships.
In addition to its diplomatic triumphs, the Union achieved a second major military objective in 1863, the occupation of East Tennessee. That summer Union Gen. William S. Rosecrans conducted a brilliant campaign of maneuver and seized East Tennessee without a fight. After pausing briefly at Chattanooga, Rosecrans pushed on into Georgia. In September Bragg brought the Confederate retreat to a halt, and, his force augmented by reinforcements from Virginia, prepared a counterstroke to crush one of Rosecrans's three widely separated wings. Rosecrans awakened to the danger in the nick of time and quickly reconcentrated his army near Chickamauga Creek. However, a blunder by one of Rosencrans's subordinates allowed the Confederate army to win a smashing victory on 20 September 1863. Instead of following up his victory at the Battle of Chickamauga with a vigorous attack, Bragg decided to lay siege to the Union army in Chattanooga. Washington reacted to the crisis by placing Grant in command of all Union forces west of the Appalachian Mountains, and sent him two corps from the Army of the Potomac. After reestablishing a secure line of supplies, Grant smashed the Confederate line at Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge near Chattanooga on 24–25 November 1863.
In early 1864, Grant was called to Washington and promoted to general‐in‐chief. Grant appointed Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman to replace him as overall commander in the western theater, and assigned him the task of bringing Bragg's army, now under the command of Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, to battle by campaigning against Atlanta. Grant would accompany Meade's army as it campaigned against Lee. Supporting movements would be made in the Shenandoah Valley and along the James River. To prevent the Confederacy, as it had at Chickamauga, from exploiting its interior lines, the Union armies would all begin their campaigns at the same time.
On 4 May 1864, the Army of the Potomac began its sixth campaign against Richmond. Over the next few weeks the Virginia theater endured the bloodiest month of the war, as the two armies fought the Battle of the Wilderness and the battles at
After a futile attempt to break Lee's lines at Cold Harbor, Grant crossed the James River in June 1864, bypassing Richmond in hopes of seizing Petersburg and the railroads supplying Lee's army. When commanders on the scene failed vigorously to attack the lightly guarded town, Lee was able to bring his army down to defend Petersburg. The armies then settled into the Siege of Petersburg, a campaign of siegecraft that presaged the trench warfare of World War I. Throughout the fall and winter of 1864–65, Grant continually extended his left flank to the west, one by one seizing the railroads leading into Petersburg and inexorably forcing Lee to stretch his lines ever more thin.
Meanwhile, after a several‐weeks campaign of maneuver, Sherman's army reached the outskirts of Atlanta in July 1864. However, he had not “bagged” Johnston's army, nor did the town's capitulation appear in any way certain. Northern morale plummeted as Grant and Sherman's grand offensive, which had began with such promise, bogged down in frustrating and bloody stalemate before Petersburg and Atlanta.
But Confederate leaders were not encouraged by the situation. Uncomfortable with the idea of allowing Grant and Sherman to maintain their grip on Petersburg and Atlanta, they decided to take the offensive. Realizing Grant's army was too strong for them to attack directly, Confederate leaders sent a force under Gen. Jubal Early on a raid in the Shenandoah Valley. In the west, the cautious and defensive‐minded Johnston was replaced on President Davis's orders by Gen. John Bell Hood, an aggressive young corps commander. Early reached the outskirts of Washington, but, after Grant sent back a full army corps to defend the capital, Early was forced to return to the valley. The Union forces around the capital and in the valley were then organized into a single force under the command of Gen. Philip H. Sheridan. Sheridan then pursued Early into the Shenandoah Valley, winning battles at Winchester, Fisher's Hill, and Cedar Creek in September and October 1864. Sheridan then undertook a campaign to destroy the valley, burning crops and any other resources that could be of use to the Confederate war effort.
In Georgia, Hood launched a series of costly and unsuccessful attacks on the Union army during the last week of July 1864. Afterwards, the Confederate army retreated to the defenses of Atlanta, but was forced to abandon the town in September 1864. The fall of Atlanta, combined with Sheridan's victories in the Shenandoah Valley, and a victory by naval forces under David Farragut at Mobile Bay in August, reinvigorated Northern morale and set the stage for Lincoln's reelection that November.
Sherman then obtained Grant's approval for a type of operation the two had been experimenting with for some time—large‐scale raids using army‐size forces. Recognizing that Southern civilians and their resources were as important as Southern armies in sustaining the rebellion, Sherman made them the objective of his campaign. The famous (or infamous, depending on one's viewpoint) Sherman's March to the Sea cut a sixty‐mile wide trail of destruction through Georgia. Not only was severe damage inflicted on Southern resources, but the fact that the North could morally and materially undertake such an operation had a severe impact on Confederate morale.
After reaching the coast at Savannah, Georgia, in December 1864, Sherman turned northward to join Grant for the final battle of the war. That same month, a desperate attempt by Hood to invade Tennessee ended with the destruction of his army at the Battles of Franklin and Nashville. Johnston was restored to command to resist Sherman's movement through the Carolinas, but lacked the resources or manpower to be effective. Before Sherman could reach Virginia, Grant captured the last Confederate supply line at the Battle of Five Forks on 1 April 1865. Lee evacuated Richmond and Petersburg and made a bold attempt to link up with Johnston. Grant cut off Lee's retreat near a small crossroads town called Appomattox, Virginia. There Lee surrendered on 9 April. A few days later, Johnston surrendered to Sherman at Raleigh, North Carolina. With the surrender of the two major field armies resistance throughout the South ended despite the pleas of President Davis. The war was over, and with the sectional conflict finally settled, the United States was free to complete the task of conquering the continent and move toward realizing its destiny as one of the great nations of the world.
[See also Army Combat Branches; Army, U.S.: 1783–1865; Commander in Chief, President as; Confederacy, the Military in the; Marine Corps, U.S.: 1775–1865; Navy, U.S.: 1783–1865.]
Bibliography
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