When grant took control of the union forces where did he personally lead attacks?

Answer 1

Grant did not personally lead attacks, in the sense of getting out in front of the men and leading a charge on the enemy. Grant was a lieutenant general (three stars), the first in the US Army since George Washington. He stayed behind the lines and directed overall operations. Grant had served for the first two and one half years of the war in the west. In the Civil War the "west" meant the area between the Appalachian Mountains and Mississippi River. Because of his success in the west Lincoln brought him to the east, promoted him to the unheard of rank of lieutenant general (he was the only one), and placed him in overall command of the Union armies. Grant left his protege, Sherman, in command in the west, and they coordinated the actions of their armies in such a way as the Union had been very foolish not to do before, to take maximum advantage of the Union's vast superiority in numbers of men. Grant left Meade in command of the Army of the Potomac, the main Union field army in the east, but made his headquarters with Meade's army, so he could oversee its operations. This also got Grant out of Washington and the omnipresent atmosphere of politics, which he detested.

At the same time as Sherman was attacking in Georgia, Grant got the army under his direct supervision in motion. Attacking simultaneously made certain the Confederates would be unable to move men from an idle army to reinforce one which was under attack.

Grant's first move was to follow the path Hooker had taken almost exactly one year before. He moved west, from Fredericksburg, Virginia, up the north bank of the Chickahominy River, and crossed over to the south side at an unguarded ford. This put his army in The Wilderness, where Hooker had fought the Battle of Chancellorsville one year earlier. The Confederates swiftly attacked, hoping to repeat their success of the previous year. The Confederates knew their best chance of success was to catch Grant in The Wilderness, where his vastly superior numbers and heavy preponderance of artillery was of little use. Their was a ferocious battle, with horrible casualties over two days. All previous Union commanders in the east had pulled back to the north side of the River after taking such losses as Grant had, but Grant was made of sterner stuff. He pressed forward. Over the next six weeks Grant lost more men than Lee had in his army, but Grant did not stop. These six weeks beginning with The Wilderness are known as "The Overland Campaign".

Grant kept moving forward and to the left, trying to get around the right flank of Lee's army. This forced Lee to hurry and get in front of Grant, to keep Grant from having a clear path to Richmond. On leaving The Wilderness Lee was so pressed his army had to march all night by torchlight and cut a new road through the woods to travel on. The Rebels reached Spottsylvania Courthouse only a very short time before Grant. Spottsylvania was another awful struggle, the armies remaining there thirteen days. There were several days of tremendous fighting. At one point, the two armies were divided only by the front of Confederate entrenchments - the heap of dirt thrown up in front with logs placed on top, and were shooting each other between the logs. Wounded men were trampled to death. Leaving Spottsylvania Grant tried again to flank Lee, all the while getting closer to Richmond. Though Grant lost enormously during these six weeks, the Confederates were losing heavily in men too. Grant finally actually slipped away from Lee, and tried a very clever move. His engineers constructed a fantastic, 2200 foot long pontoon bridge over the James River, and Grant crossed strong forces to the south side and moved against Petersburg. Petersburg was almost undefended, and was in another department from Lee's. Lee's department was Virginia, north of the James River. Taking Petersburg would cut off all supplies to Richmond and force its surrender, because there was only a single railroad line running north the twenty-five miles from Petersburg to Richmond. All railroad lines from the south converged in Petersburg. Beauregard commanded the department of the southern Virginia and North Carolina, and got enough troops into Petersburg to stop the Yankees from taking the town. The Yankees did not try too hard, and, if they had, the war might have soon been over.

Grant had lost many men, but so had the Rebels. Grant was now near Richmond, and Lee did not have sufficient strength to have troops in the defensive earthworks at Richmond and Petersburg, and also keep an army in the field. So as a result of this six weeks of ferocious campaigning Lee was forced into the defenses of Richmond and Petersburg and lost his freedom of movement. Without freedom of movement Lee's strategic audacity and tactical daring, which had evened the odds for Confederates so many times, were useless. Lee himself had said some months before that if ever he was forced into the defenses of Richmond, then "it would only be a matter of time". The Rebels were not yet ready to give up though. The Rebels manned a long line of trenches extending from north of Richmond to south of Petersburg, lying to the east of those cities. The Yankees built their own extensive trenches opposite these, and massive supply dumps and railroad supply lines from landings on the water to the supply depots.

From this time, in mid June 1864 until early April 1865, Grant kept extending his lines to the left, forcing Lee to extend his right. Every time this happened Lee had to stretch his thin force farther. Lee could not make good his losses in men and individual starving Confederates made the choice every night to give it up and go over to the Yankee lines and surrender themselves, for a chance at something to eat. These leftward extensions of Grant kept breaking the connections of Petersburg to the south, until finally the last one was broken and Richmond and Petersburg were cut off. Then Lee abandoned his positions and gave up the two towns, and tried to move west with his army. Lee expected supply trains to meet him on this march with food, but the Yankees captured them, and the Confederates lost a day, looking for food in the vicinity with little to show for it. Part of Grant's pursuing army got in front of Lee and cut him off, and Lee was surrounded at Appomattox Courthouse, and forced to surrender. Lee had made it about fifty miles west of Richmond in the week since leaving the entrenchments.

Grants Virginia campaigns covered an area between Fredericksburg and Petersburg, maybe eighty miles north to south, and then the fifty miles west to Appomattox. There were the large battles of The Wilderness and Spottsylvania Courthouse, followed by more than ten months of WWI-style trench warfare during Grant's siege of Richmond and Petersburg.