Was the Battle of Gettysburg the turning point of the war?

Answer 1

Gettysburg has come to be regarded as the turning point of the war, but this is largely a postwar perspective. It was not seen that way at the time, and the Confederates could still have attained their war aim for at least fourteen months after Gettysburg. But Gettysburg has such drama involved ("the high water mark of the Confederacy") that it lends a sense of fate and destiny, not to mention dramatic tension, to post-war publishing on the war.

I've always thought, as the Confederates did at the time, that it was the capture of Atlanta, September 1, 1864, which made their cause hopeless. Lincoln shared this belief. In late August 1864 Lincoln thought he would lose the election of 1864, and had his cabinet officers sign a paper folded so they could not read what was written on it. The paper was a pledge to help Lincoln do everything possible to win the war in the interval between the election and the swearing-in of Lincoln's successor. New Presidents were sworn in on March 4 in those days, so there would have been four more months after the election to try to finish off the Confederacy. Lincoln's opponent in the election was a general he had fired, George McClellan, and the Democrat platform was for an end to the war and a negotiated peace with the south. This would have allowed the south what they were fighting for, to be a separate nation. In August 1864, when Lincoln was gloomily considering his prospects for winning a second term from the war-weary northern people, the military campaigns of 1864 had been underway for four months. Sherman in Georgia and Grant in Virginia appeared no closer to attaining anything decisive, despite truly monumental and horrific casualty lists into the tens of thousands racked up since resuming active fighting at the start of May. These were some of the worst months of the war - the fighting had been continuous and the toll was worse than anything seen so far, with nothing, it seemed to the average person, to show for it.

All this changed overnight with Sherman's capture of Atlanta. Lincoln felt, almost certainly with great accuracy, that it was this which assured his reelection. The Rebels knew that with Lincoln still in office the war would go on without letting up, and that soon they would be at the last ditch.