Naturally, all this—at least what could be known of it—was being followed with great zeal in the Confederate capital in Richmond, Virginia. The leaders of that beleaguered cause probably read into it more than was there—after all, much of the Confederate intelligence respecting the Northern mood came from reading northern newspapers. But practically everybody south of the Mason-Dixon Line realized that a Confederate victory, an important one, was necessary somewhere soon if Lincoln and the war-stubborn Republicans were to be swept out of office. The man ultimately chosen to give them that victory was none other than the newly confirmed Episcopalian, John Bell Hood.
By the early spring of 1864 the military situation between the two warring powers had boiled down to a bloody stalemate. In the eastern theater—principally in Virginia—Ulysses S. Grant, latest of five generals in chief of the Union forces, had, by a series of crablike turning movements, forced Confederate general Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia from its entrenchments near Fredericksburg—some fifty miles from the capital at Washington—and into a defensive perimeter around Richmond and Petersburg. But those Forty Days, as the battles would come to be known, were costly for Grant in the extreme—not so much for the fifty-four thousand casualties he sustained; with a one-hundred-fifty-thousand-man army he could afford that—but rather because of the mounting horror and dissatisfaction in the North when the casualty lists began coming in. Most earlier Civil War battles had been fought as one-or two-day affairs—Bull Run, Gettysburg, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and so on—fangslashing dog fights in which the stronger dog quickly established himself and the loser ran off to fight another day. But Grant’s spring offensive introduced a new kind of war, a grinding nightmare of armed embrace in which the victorious dog never turns loose of his victim, but pursues him relentlessly, attacking whenever he can.
But Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was not finished yet. His forces were still intact, and Lee, even in retreat, was a cunning commander who picked and chose his battlefields shrewdly, making Grant pay for every inch of his new strategy. Cold Harbor, for example, cost Grant seven thousand men in a charge that lasted less than an hour. The new commander in chief of the U.S. armies was earning a reputation in certain quarters on both sides as a “butcher” or “murderer” rather than a general. Grant “had such a low idea of the contest,” bawled one editor, “that he proposed to decide it by a mere competition in the sacrifice of human life.” Deserved or undeserved as such sobriquets might have been, the fact was that the North was becoming war wearier by the day, prompting even such stalwart Unionists as Charles Francis Adams, Jr., son of the U.S. ambassador to England, to complain that while he felt confidence in the federal government’s ultimate ability to crush the Confederacy, “For all I can see, we must go floundering on indefinitely through torrents of blood and unfathomable bankruptcy.”
Anyway, that was back east. On the other major battlefield of the war, the western theater, things were looking somewhat rosier for the Union cause. Unlike the eastern theater, where fighting was confined mainly to Virginia, the western theater was a huge expanse of territory bounded on the west by the Mississippi River all the way from New Orleans nearly to St. Louis and stretching eastward to the Atlantic states—more than three hundred thousand square miles, much of it wilderness or farmland, badly connected by roads or rail tracks. Union strategy in this vast department was to strangle the Confederacy by blockading its southern ports and force the capture of the Mississippi, and at the same time to chew up Southern armies state by state. By midsummer, 1863, the Mississippi River had been retaken, and federal armies had pushed Confederate forces out of Kentucky and most of Tennessee. But in autumn of that year, the Confederate Army of Tennessee, then under General Braxton Bragg, won its first significant victory of the war by routing the Union army at Chickamauga, in north Georgia, and advancing back into Tennessee near Chattanooga. However, by winter of 1864, the Union army had shoved the Confederates out again in the battle of Missionary Ridge, and so the two hostile armies faced each other near the Georgia-Tennessee line, waiting for spring and a new offensive. From the halls of the U.S. capitol in Washington to the drawing rooms of Richmond and Charleston, those who had studied the war knew the next moves would probably spell the end of the conflict, one way or the other. And so did many in the two opposing forces, including the newly baptized general, John Bell Hood.
By this stage of the war, both Northern and Southern armies had become highly modernized in technology and refined in tactics and strategy. Both relied heavily on the telegraph, steamboats, and railroads for communication and transportation, although by mid-1864 the Confederacy had been depleted of many of those valuable tools. Still, the South’s practice of destroying Union-used rails, boats, and wires had evened things up to some extent.
At a first glance, the federal armies would appear to be much superior to the ragtag Confederates. Northern manufacturies had been churning out mountains of supplies ever since the war began—everything from uniforms to weapons to such accoutrements as saddlebags, frying pans, haversacks, shoes and boots, razors, wagons, ambulances, medical supplies, and field glasses—all the things that keep an army on the move. The Confederacy, on the other hand, had fewer and fewer of such manufacturies as the war progressed, less and less of necessary raw materials, and, owing to the Union blockade of its ports, even scantier ways to purchase them from abroad, now that its vast wealth of cotton lay rotting on its docks.
But until just before the end of the war, the Southerners made do. In its victories in the early years, the Confederates—especially the cavalry—captured vast stores of federal equipment, which they turned to their own use. In the east, Lee’s army somehow managed to keep many of its soldiers in “Confederate gray” uniforms, but in the west, where the clothing fashion was more relaxed, most enlisted troops dressed in “butternut homespun,” rough-weaved clothing dyed a sort of brownish yellow. Many men with captured Union blue overcoats boiled them in bleach and then again in a butternut or grayish dye. Shoes were a major problem, and the ill-shod Southerners often took the boots of dead federal soldiers after battle, as well as anything else they could use. As long as they obeyed the orders of their generals, kept their weapons well served and their battle morale high, these ragamuffins proved that uniforms do not make soldiers.
Except for manpower—in which the federals enjoyed a large advantage—the armies were about evenly matched. Confederate esprit tended to offset federal superiority in numbers and manufacturing. To cope with any disparities, the Confederates evolved a strategy of trying to strike with enough force to surprise, isolate, and destroy crucial segments of the Union armies and then exploit the ensuing confusion and panic into victory. Stonewall Jackson wrote the book on this technique. Northern armies, on the other hand, had come to rely on their overwhelming numbers to wreck the Confederates’ logistics system, then simply grind their armies down by attrition.
By 1864, it had increasingly become the practice of both armies to fight from behind entrenchments. After the first year or so of the war, troops concluded that entrenchments were rarely taken by assault, and that the attackers as opposed to the defenders usually suffered horrible casualties. Fredericksburg was a classic example of this; the assaulting federal army suffered nearly eleven thousand casualties, compared to less than half that for the defending Confederates. In Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg, the reverse was true, with the Confederates being slaughtered. Still, the Confederate practice was almost always to assume the offensive, and the South bled itself nearly dry on this policy.
Most Confederate leaders still relied on the Napoleonic strategy of massed forces, rapid movements, and attacking the enemy. This offensive policy worked well enough in the first half of the war, for a number of reasons. First, the Southern soldier was more apt to be willing to face the greater danger of assault because he was fighting for his family’s very home and hearth, repelling what he considered to be an invasion of his sovereign
country. He was also likely to be more experienced in shooting, horsemanship, and other arts of war. Furthermore, he believed his cause was just—that his people had the right to form their own government and be let alone by the North. Union soldiers often had vaguer motives to drive them and frequently disagreed among themselves on the merits of those motives—restoration of the Union, abolition of slavery, for example.
In fact, in what were then considered western states of the Union—Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Minnesota—there was a large body of public opinion very much opposed to the war, and it carried over to the sons who were fighting it. These westerners resented the powerful influence of the New England states—which they charged had started the war in the first place with their strident anti-slavery rhetoric. These westerners were further disenchanted by the hardships the war had placed upon their lives—in particular, the inability to use the Mississippi River to transport their crops and the concomitant price gouging by the Northern railways, most of which were owned by northeasterners—principally New Englanders. These feelings became so intense that by 1864 there was serious talk of a “western Confederacy” seceding from the Union, which would have fragmented the United States, instead of just splitting it. In any case, all these factors were very important in the individual soldiers’ lives, because, other things being even—or relatively even—in an infantry attack, where every second could be deadly, morale was always a critical element.
Identifications of Union and Confederate armies can be confusing, and were so at the time. Union armies were generally named after bodies of water—rivers mostly—thus, Army of the Ohio, Army of the Potomac, Army of the Cumberland, and Army of the Tennessee. Confederates named their armies after geographic terrain: Army of Northern Virginia, Army of Tennessee, for example. In these armies, the tactics of assault were formalized. Most times, a line of skirmishers was sent forward to “feel” the enemy positions and quickly retire to the main line when they encountered a large force. The main attack was carried out by a line of divisions abreast, the brigades of which were marched two deep toward a focal point in the enemy line. Regiments and companies in the brigades were also marched two deep, with “file closers”—lieutenants and sergeants—in the rear to prevent straggling. Rarely was an entire army thrown into the attack at one time; it was simply too unwieldy to control. A corps, consisting of perhaps fifteen to twenty thousand men in a line of battle about a half mile to a mile wide, was about the largest force that could be managed in a single assault.
Thus countless hours were spent on drill parade. The importance of drill—unlike in modern armies, where it is more a traditional formality than a useful practice—was therefore paramount. When the troops weren’t fighting or tending to other duties, they were drilling—obliques, half-steps, step-and-a-halfs, right turns, close-files, by the right and left flanks, and so on, all of it as intricately orchestrated as a French minuet. This was because on those large battlefields where thousands of men were marched shoulder to shoulder to mass their fire at an enemy, all were expected to arrive at a precise spot at a precise time and in a particular order to produce the desired effect, and the slightest variation in terrain—a hidden gully, a bramble thicket, or even a fallen tree—could throw the whole plan out of whack. The drilling and automatic obedience to an officer’s marching command were of great significance.
The firepower of an assault could be stunning. Both armies were equipped with the standard infantry weapon of the day, a .50 pluscaliber Springfield, Enfield, or similar percussion-cap rifle that could fire a conical lead slug a thousand yards at a rate of about two shots a minute. Thus, in the full fury of an assault, assuming that one corps had attacked another, it would not be inconceivable that during any given minute sixty thousand deadly projectiles were ripping through the air toward flesh and bone. The size and weight of the bullet were sufficient to disable most men no matter where it hit them, even the hand or foot.
Not only that, but attacks were accompanied and defended against by artillery fire, which the troops feared even more than rifle bullets because its effects were so ghastly. The standard artillery weapon of both armies was the smooth-bore twelve-pound Napoleon, but both sides had a variety of other guns, rifled Parrots that could throw a projectile up to a mile and a half, modern Whitworths that could crack a shell more than two miles with devastating accuracy, and an assortment of others. An assaulting column could soon expect to come under the fire of these mutilating weapons, which, like the rifle, could fire at a rate of about two rounds a minute. At that speed, the artillery of one corps—usually between eighty and one hundred guns—could hurl nearly two hundred shots a minute toward the assaulting column. The muzzle velocity of these guns was slow compared with twentieth-century weaponry; soldiers could often actually see the rounds arcing toward them like deadly black grapefruits. One veteran of the Atlanta campaign recalled a companion who, seeing one of the seemingly slow cannonballs bouncing over the ground near him, stuck his foot out as if to stop it, and in a split second the foot was ripped completely off his leg. In the Stones River battle, General Rosecrans was horrified when his chief of staff, riding beside him, had his head taken off by a cannon shot. Worse for attacking troops was the “canister” that defenders blew at them when they neared the lines of defense. This consisted of a load of iron balls the size of large marbles that turned the cannon into an enormous shotgun, mowing down whole ranks of men in one sweep. Sometimes the artillerymen even loaded the cannon with pieces of chain and other scrap metal.
If, however, the assaulting column got through these formidable obstacles, the defending troops would likely break and run. An assault carried an impetus of its own, with an unequivocal “shock value,” not unlike the tank attack of a modern armored unit. But few assaults launched by either side against a well-entrenched enemy ever succeeded in advancing much inside the lethal one-hundred- to four-hundred-yard killing ground where the full intensity of artillery canister and rifle fire could be brought to bear. When an assault did succeed, however, the result was often disastrous for the defenders; the line was pierced, or caved in, and defeat was in the air.
All through the winter of 1863 and most of the spring of 1864 the Confederate Army of Tennessee braced itself in the northwest Georgia mountains just south of Chattanooga, preparing for the attack it knew would come when the Union commander, General William Tecumseh Sherman, had fortified himself to his liking. For getting his army kicked out of Tennessee, General Braxton Bragg was replaced as Confederate commander by Joseph E. Johnston, a general quite popular with the soldiers, who had once commanded the Army of Northern Virginia before Lee. On the 4th of February, after recuperating from the loss of his leg, John Bell Hood joined Johnston and was promoted to lieutenant general and given command of an army corps.
Sherman, in coordination with Grant in Virginia, began his main offensive in north Georgia against Johnston May 12, the morning after Hood’s baptism, by engineering a huge attack against both Confederate flanks. It had taken the Union armies three years to drive the Confederates out of the upper South and retake the crucial Mississippi, but much of the Deep South, including Georgia and South Carolina, had scarcely been touched by the fighting. Now Sherman was preparing to give those states a taste of his theory of warfare, which, in both concept and execution exceeded even Grant’s harsh methodology. “All that has gone on before is mere skirmishing,” he told his wife in a letter on the eve of battle.
Like Grant, who was moving on Richmond, Sherman had a strategic goal: the city of Atlanta, the Deep South’s most important center for arsenals, foundries, warehousing, war goods manufacturing, food stores supply, and railroad shipping. Also like Grant, Sherman would rely on the turning movement as his basic tactical weapon. Given that both Sherman and Grant outnumbered their Confederate opponents by roughly two to one, the turning movement was an obvious and practical device to gain their objective. Instead of the hell-for-leather frontal assaults that had proven so costly in the
early years of the war, the turning movement—in Sherman’s case relying on numerical superiority of forces—simply called for holding the enemy in place with one powerful body while another part of the army sidled around a flank, got in his rear, and rendered his position untenable.
Use of the turning movement was not a gimmick new or exclusive to Civil War armies—Alfred von Schlieffen, the renowned nineteenthcentury German military strategist, avowed, “Flank attack is the essence of the whole history of war”—but most certainly it was elevated, enhanced, and refined to an art by both Union and Confederate generals. From the outset, commanders on both sides based the bulk of their military strategy on their reading of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe half a century earlier and—to a greater or lesser extent—on their personal experiences in the war with Mexico nearly a quarter century before. Studies at West Point in those days were sure to have included such classic turning movements as Napoleon employed in his Italian and Austrian campaigns, as well as those of victorious U.S. generals Winfield Scott at Cerro Gordo and Zachary Taylor at Monterey during the Mexican conflict. In the Civil War, the turning movement had become the major set piece in the overall grand strategy of the Union armies. In the eastern theater—in Virginia—five Union generals had tried it, and all had failed, mostly because a wiley Robert E. Lee had anticipated their maneuvers and countered them with flanking movements of his own. In the west, the federal strategy had been more successful, with the Confederates being flanked all the way out of Kentucky and through Tennessee to Vicksburg, and now Sherman was poised for another go at it. At the tactical level, modern advancements in the ranges of both heavy and light armaments—coupled with the vastly increased rate of firepower during the Civil War—practically mandated the turning movement rather than a straightforward charge, and Sherman was among those generals who thoroughly grasped this vital development.