THE END OF 1863 brought entire satisfaction to neither side,
nor could it have been said to have brought much to many
people in either country. Scarcely a home, North or South, did
not now feel the full burden of the war, and few men believed it could
have gone on this long, with as little tangible result. After two years
of solid fighting, and nearly three of war, where now were the fanciful
visions of glory, of the elegant fanfare of war as chivalry, as a modern
tournament out of Sir Walter Scott, all blushing maidens and uniformed
gallants? The blushing maidens were running farms or plantations,
or nursing amputees, and had long learned not to blush. And
all too many of the young heroes were lying face down in the thickets
of Virginia, or languishing in prison camps, or sitting staring at the
wall from wheelchairs. If people could see the end product, they would
seldom go to war as enthusiastically as they do.
The war cared nothing for all this. War, like the famous illustration
of Hobbes's Leviathan, consumes all it comes in contact with, treasure,
resources, above all bodies. Even the most sophisticated of maneuvers,
carried out by a Turenne or a Frederick the Great or a MacArthur, still
ends the same, with charred machines and dead bodies. And the war
became its own justification; the very fact of its horrible nature meant
no one could quit now. To stop short of victory would be to betray all
those who had already suffered. The Union must continue until the
South was defeated; the South must persevere to victory. The question
was not, Should we continue? but rather, How should we continue?
In the Confederate capital, it was obvious that the options were narrowing.
There was no longer hope of foreign intervention, of, say, the
Royal Navy contemptuously brushing aside the Union's blockade to
deliver recognition, money, and supplies to the Rebel cause. Nor was
there, now, much realistic hope of straightforward military victory. The
Mississippi, and with it the entire western Confederacy, were gone, the
invasion of Pennsylvania had failed, and the victory of Chickamauga
had turned to ashes in the disgraceful rout—it was little less than
that—of Chattanooga. There were food riots in Richmond, and everywhere
the chorus of complaint rose to the skies.
It is ironic that President Davis, who died revered as the embodiment
of the Lost Cause, was so thoroughly vilified while he was actually
functioning as the Confederacy's president. Southerners, especially their
politicians, laid a great deal of their dissatisfaction at the president's
door. Much of this was unfair; there were simply weaknesses in Southern
society that made it incapable of meeting the challenge it assumed,
of asserting its independence, both systemic weaknesses and those of
resources. Yet part of the problem was indeed Davis himself.
Personally he could be a charming man, as long as he got his own
way. But he took any disagreement over policy as an affront to Davis
the man, so he tended to see what might have been reasonable and
legitimate policy questions as personal antagonism. And indeed, unless
one were a member of the charmed circle around the president, he was
easy to dislike. His cabinet meetings were unstructured, long digressive
ramblings that seldom reached any decision. He could not bring himself
to delegate authority, especially in the military sphere, and thus
trying to do too much, he left much undone. Above all, he was argumentative;
when his field commanders dared to disagree with him, he
sent them long, carefully reasoned legal briefs, which proved with irrefutable
logic that they, and reality, were wrong, and that he, Jefferson
Davis, was not only right, but that there could not possibly be any
other conclusion than the one he himself had drawn. A reader of these
missives might well suspect that winning his point was more important
to Davis than winning the war; in more homely idiom, he could not
see the forest for the trees, or, he threw the baby out with the bathwater.
All of this might have been tolerable had the South possessed half
a dozen Robert E. Lees, for Davis and his chief field commander remained
remarkably sympathetic and mutually respectful. But it did
not. It had Lee in Virginia, but he wanted to remain there. The other
men who enjoyed Davis's confidence, such as Polk and Bragg, were
lesser men altogether; and other senior generals, such as Beauregard
and Joe Johnston, were not in the president's camp or his good graces
either.
This must surely be one of the more notable failures of the Confederacy:
its inability to evolve excellent senior commanders. By and large
the Confederacy ended the war with those army commanders it had at
the beginning. Some of course died, most particularly Albert Sidney
Johnston and Stonewall Jackson, but it remains difficult to avoid the
suspicion that giving more responsibility to more junior men, to figures
such as Nathan Bedford Forrest and Patrick Cleburne, or perhaps Edmund
Kirby Smith or Richard Taylor, for example, would have served
the Confederate cause well. Instead such men were left in corps command,
or put in positions where their talents, no matter how remarkable,
were of marginal use to a state fighting for its life. This kind of
narrow-mindedness on Davis's part, and selfishness and insistence on
seniority within the officer corps, was a luxury the South could not
afford.
They were far from beaten yet, however. There were shortages, there
was conscription, much territory had been lost, but those who were
left must fight all the harder. By now the Confederacy was losing
whatever strategic initiatives it had possessed; it looked now like a
matter of doggedly hanging on until the North tired of the effort. If
the cost of winning could be raised prohibitively high for the Union,
then it might give up. In 1864 there was to be a presidential election
in the North; unless there were some startling success for Lincoln and
his crew of Black Republicans, they might be turned out. The Confederacy
could hope to win in the election booth what it had not been
able to win immediately on the field of battle. So it was the same old
story: Tighten your belt, and your grip, and hang on.
And for the Union as well, it was a matter of not giving up. In his
annual message to Congress at the end of 1863, President Lincoln
remarked, "It is easy to see that, under the sharp discipline of civil war,
the nation is beginning a new life." A few weeks earlier, in November,
speaking at the dedication of a national military cemetery at Gettysburg,
he had called for a renewed devotion to "a new birth of freedom,"'
so that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall
not perish from the earth." Those noble phrases, and the ideal they
embodied, must be sustained at whatever cost. But it remained difficult
to see what the cost might be, or how long the Union would have to
pay it.
An immediate problem was the Union command situation, and at
last, after his many tries, Lincoln found the right answer in the right
man. It was of course the man he could not spare, because "he fights."
After the stunning victories around Chattanooga, General Grant had
been busy over the turn of the year neatening up his department, securing
the Union hold in east Tennessee, for example, and undertaking
operations against Joe Johnston in northern Mississippi. In early March,
promoted to the newly revived grade of lieutenant general, the first to
hold it since George Washington, Grant was ordered east to the capital.
Washingtonians, who were used to sounding trumpets, hardly knew
what to make of Grant, a small, compact man in shabby clothes, who
did not seem to have a great deal to say for himself. But it was far
more important that he and Lincoln hit it off, and they seem to have
gotten along well from the start. At their first formal meeting, Lincoln
tendered his general the thanks of the country, and Grant replied that
he had done his best, and would continue to do so. He was now placed
in command of all the Union armies in the field, and he decided, after
a mere week in Washington, that he would have to remain in the east.
His original intention had been to return west and direct operations
from there, but a week around the capital showed him that the political
pulling and hauling here was so great that only the general-in-chief
could resist it.
The day after his visit with Lincoln, he went out to look at the Army
of the Potomac and meet George Meade, whom he had known, in
passing, during the Mexican War. This was a potentially touchy proposition,
in part because Meade's army had recently been reorganized
yet again, melting its several corps down into three, and there were
assorted senior officers on the lookout for new postings. But Meade
himself, in an expression of sentiment rare enough in this war to deserve
recording, told Grant that he recognized Grant might want his own
man in command of this nearest army, and that he, Meade, was quite
willing to step aside for the good of the cause. Grant replied that he
was happy to retain the Pennsylvanian in command, and that, though
he would probably take the field with the army, he would still prefer
to work through parallel headquarters.
This ultimately worked better than it might have been expected to
do, though by the closing stages of the war, under the pressure of
making immediate decisions, Grant virtually usurped Meade's role.
Basically the arrangement worked as well as it did because both men
were conscious of their larger mission, and especially because Meade
was such a gentleman. As Grant later wrote, "Men who wait to be
selected, and not those who seek" offered the most effective service.
After his quick visit, Grant returned to the west to bring about a
command reorganization there, and to mature his plans for the campaign
that would soon open. Sherman was now to command the Military
Division of the Mississippi; he and Grant had already reached
substantial understanding on how the war should be conducted from
this stage on. There has been some discussion among historians as to
who developed what plan when, but the two principals never argued
about it; they enjoyed a very real synchronicity of minds, and had a
clear picture of what they wanted to do.
Thus when Grant returned to Washington at the end of the month,
and discussed his situation with President Lincoln, he had already
worked out his main line of advance. The president had himself produced
a plan, for a waterborne end-run around Lee's army, and he
propounded it with great detail and equal diffidence. He admitted that
he really was not a soldier, and that he had no desire to be one, but
the generals he had had in the past seemed incapable of action on their
own, and so totally unconscious of the political pressures upon the
government, that he had been forced essentially to be his own generalin-
chief. Grant listened politely, assured the president that he would
indeed act, and went away, keeping his own counsel.
Ulysses S. Grant now commanded some 550,000 men in a whole
welter of commands. It was impossible both to administer this number
and to direct it operationally, so he retained Henry Halleck as his chief
of staff, at last finding the position for which Old Brains was actually
suited. Grant's war strategy called for two main offensives, and a number
of supplementary operations. First of all, he recognized that the
character of the war had changed; it was a fight to the finish, and it
could be won only by destroying the Confederate will to fight. That
in turn could be accomplished either by depriving the Confederacy of
the resources with which to sustain the struggle, which was desirable,
or by killing Confederates, which was lamentable but necessary. To
this end he told Meade: Your object is Robert Lee's army; you go where
he goes; fight him and destroy him. He told Sherman the same thing:
Destroy Johnston's army.
In practice this meant for Meade an advance straight ahead, or as
near as might be, toward Richmond, and bringing Lee to battle. For
Sherman it meant advancing from Chattanooga southeast toward Atlanta.
Joe Johnston, now in Bragg's place, was in the way, and he too
was to be brought to bay, fought, and destroyed.
Supplementary operations were designed to assist these main thrusts,
and these were extremely important, for on them, and their success or
failure, rests much of Grant's reputation. Taken in their bare outlines,
the two main thrusts of Grant's operation looked like little more than
a recipe for butchery. There was, however, more to it than that. Grant
intended that Sherman's advance should be supported by a land move
against Mobile. In southern Louisiana, around New Orleans, General
Nathaniel Banks commanded a substantial force. Unfortunately, Banks
was already committed to another operation, and thereby hangs a tale.
The American Civil War meant that the United States was in no
position to enforce the famous Monroe Doctrine, which had stated that
European intervention in the western hemisphere would meet American
disapprobation and, if necessary, resistance. Therefore when Mexico
went bankrupt, as it periodically did during the nineteenth century,
and defaulted on payment of its bonds to European investors, Emperor
Napoleon III of France decided to take over the country and establish
there a colonial empire. To rule it he found an out-of-work archduke,
Maximilian of Austria, and this unfortunate and his lovely and ambitious
wife, Carlotta, were soon sitting uneasily in Mexico City, supported
by a French army and unmindful of Voltaire's famous dictum
that you can do anything with bayonets except sit on them. Because
of all this, the Washington government intensely desired to assert a
Federal presence in the state of Texas, and over the winter of 1863—64
developed the idea of an expedition up the Red River from New Orleans,
penetrating into western Louisiana and ultimately, it was expected,
into the Lone Star State itself. This entire area was already cut
off from the Confederacy, of course, and was known in Confederate
quarters as "Kirby Smithdom," after the able general who commanded
it in splendid isolation. Both Grant and Sherman thought this was a
useless diversion of effort, and even General Banks, to give him rus
due, was against it. But it looked good in Washington; Halleck, musing
over Jomini, thought it was a sound idea, and there were numerous
politicians and speculators who were all too well aware that the Red
River area was bursting with cotton, just begging to be confiscated
and sold.
So when Grant wanted Banks and his army available to move against
Mobile, in support of Sherman's move on Atlanta, he was told that
Banks was busy elsewhere, but never mind, the expedition should be
successfully completed in time for a campaign to the eastwards. Unfortunately,
that estimate left out of consideration the competence of
Kirby Smith, and his able subordinate Richard Taylor, and the incompetence
in field command of Nathaniel P. Banks.
The other two subsidiary moves Grant intended were in support of
Meade's operations. On the Army of the Potomac's strategic right flank,
General Franz Sigel, commanding the Department of West Virginia,
would advance south up the Shenandoah Valley, and thus cover that
standard avenue from which emanated so many threats to Washington.
And on the strategic left flank, there was General Benjamin Butler's
Army of the James, two corps strong, located down at the mouth of
the Chesapeake. Grant directed that this force, of 33,000 men, should
advance up the James River and threaten Richmond from the east and
rear while Meade advanced overland across the old Virginia battlefields.
In this way Lee's army, and Richmond and all it contained, should be
caught between two pincers, one or the other of which, if not both,
should score a striking success.
All five of these operations, two directed against Joe Johnston's army
and the area supporting it, and three directed against Lee's army and
the area supporting it, provided the Union at last with a coherent
strategy that should achieve several things. There was concentration
both in time and in place, with separate Federal armies operating in
such a way as to deprive the Confederacy of the ability to defeat them
in detail. And there was as well what might be called a logic of objectives,
with the Union aiming both at the main Confederate armies, but
also at the main areas from which those armies derived their sustenance.
Not since early 1862, with the campaigns that ended with the Seven
Days and Shiloh, had the Union produced an overall strategy that was
so potentially rewarding, and if everyone did his part, the result would
be the final destruction of the rebellion.
The flaw is of course immediately apparent: the command personalities.
Grant in the east with Meade under him, Sherman in Tennessee,
were men who could deliver. But Commissary Banks, Spoons Butler,
and Sigel? The retention of these three in field command defies military
sense, for all three had proven inept at best, and downright incompetent
at worst, when entrusted with actual operations. Whatever their
administrative skills—and all three did indeed possess talents in that
area—it was courting disaster to retain them in positions that called
for so much responsibility, and contained in them not only the seeds
of local failure, but the possibility as well of dislocating the entire
overall concept. Unfortunately, all three had political capital to be
employed on their own behalf. Butler had strongly identified with the
Radical Republicans, and when he was removed from command in
New Orleans in December of 1862, he was almost immediately reappointed
to command of the Army of the James down at Fortress Monroe.
He could be relieved only at Lincoln's peril. This did not become
an issue, however, as Grant for some reason rather liked him, and was
content to have him remain in the field. Banks was in the same boat,
a former Speaker of the House of Representatives, and a former governor
of Massachusetts. With those credentials, it hardly mattered if
his military record was as lackluster as it was; indeed, he received the
official Thanks of Congress for his reduction of Port Hudson after the
fall of Vicksburg, an unnecessarily costly operation that he had handled
with notable ineptness. Sigel was in a slightly different situation, but
his importance derived from the fact of his influence among the
German-born immigrants who had so strongly supported the Union
cause; for many of them the rallying cry had been "I fights mit Sigel!"
After many defeats, their fellow soldiers had often jokingly changed
that to "I runs mit Sigel!" but the fact remained that he was important
politically, and he happened to be in the wrong command at the wrong
time.
The potential for all this to go awry is best illustrated by the fate of
the infamous Red River expedition, not even part of Grant's overall
plan, but a previously decided operation that was supposed to be completed
in time for Banks to move east against Mobile in conjunction
with Sherman's drive toward Atlanta.
On paper the campaign looked as if it ought not to cause too many
problems. Kirby Smith was located at Shreveport, in the the northwest
corner of Louisiana; he had about 30,000 men under his command,
and his base had become an important supply depot for the western
Confederacy, and the main link with Texas. Banks, Sherman, and General
Frederick Steele, who commanded the Union Department of Arkansas,
were all ordered to cooperate against him, and they agreed that
Banks would command the main force, of some 17,000 men, who
would move up the bayou system from New Orleans to Alexandria.
There they would meet 10,000 more contributed by Sherman, and
commanded by Brigadier General Andrew J. Smith; these would come
up the Red River, convoyed by Admiral David Porter, of Vicksburg
fame. Finally, Steele was to march 15,000 men south from Arkansas,
to link up with the others as opportune. In the event, Steele got started
so late the campaign was ended before he took any part in it, so that
left Banks with 27,000, more or less concentrated, to deal with Kirby
Smith's 30,000 more or less scattered.
The real problem lay less with the Confederates than with Union
timing, and especially with the rapid falling of the river levels, for as
the Federal flotilla advanced upriver, the water got more and more
shallow. Porter and Smith reached Alexandria on March 19, but Banks
was a week late, and it took yet another week to get the ships past the
rapids just upstream from the town. Meanwhile, Confederate General
Richard Taylor, commanding Kirby Smith's field forces along the river,
retreated upstream, creating as much delay as he could with his cavalry.
The two armies bumped into each other on April 8 at Sabine Cross
Roads, and Banks got badly beaten up, having about 2,500 of his men
taken prisoner. He then took up a position at Pleasant Hill, and when
the Confederates attacked the next day, they were repulsed in turn,
suffering considerably. At the end of the day Kirby Smith arrived and
ordered a retreat for the next morning. When day came, however, he
found to his delight that Banks had beaten him to it, and was going
back himself. Meanwhile Porter and a shipborne contingent had
pushed on upriver, only to be stopped finally by obstructions in the
river and Confederate field artillery, who found stalled riverboats a juicy
target.
The combined Federal forces thus fell back again, to Alexandria,
Porter losing a couple of ships to harassing fire on the way. When they
got there, they ran into real trouble. The river had fallen to a depth of
three feet, and Porter's boats drew seven. He was faced with the possibility
of having to abandon his ships, or burn them, and retreat overland
with the army units.
The navy was saved from such humiliation by the timely interven-
tion of Colonel Joseph Bailey. A lumberman in civilian life, Bailey said
they could dam the river, build up a head of water, and then blow the
dam and float the boats through on the flood. It took about a week to
do this, but it worked; the water built up behind the dam, the riverboats
were brought down, the dam was successfully exploded, and the
boats went triumphantly off downstream on the artificial crest of floodwater.
Meanwhile, Taylor had been busily sniping away at boats, Banks's
troops, and anything else that looked like it was wearing blue, and his
cavalry and light artillery made a thorough nuisance of themselves
along the flanks of the Federal retreat. Taylor thought he might try to
bag the entire expedition, but Kirby Smith disagreed, and the two fell
into an angry correspondence that permanently soured their relations
and the western Confederate command structure. The same happened
on the Union side; a number of officers resigned in disgust or were
relieved, charges flew back and forth, Porter and Banks exchanged
bitter notes, and the whole sorry affair collapsed in finger-pointing.
Kirby Smith had burned sixty million dollars' worth of cotton rather
than see it fall into Yankee hands, and Banks was relieved of command
in May, his military career at last over. All the whole expedition really
did was throw off stride Grant's coordination of his western offensives.
Nonetheless, in spite of this dislocation of the overall plan on one of
its margins, the Union still possessed a substantial superiority of men
and materiel, and Grant was prepared to utilize it to the fullest possible
extent. Among the more than half a million men the Union had under
arms, literally thousands were either training, or in garrison, or on
leave, or doing useful duty in secondary theaters of operations, for
example along the Atlantic coast supporting the blockade. But that
generalization is true of the Confederacy as well as the Union; in any
organization, military or civilian, it is always amazing how few people
actually do the work for which the organization is intended, and how
many provide the support or backup services.
There was another problem to be faced as well, one this time of
organization rather than of strategy. At some point in 1864, enlistments
were going to expire for many of the three-year volunteers of
1861, the men who had formed the backbone of all the Union armies
since the real fighting began. It was in the face of this threat that the
Union had resorted to conscription, and it was a threat not faced by
the Confederacy, as it had had the wisdom or foresight to enlist and
conscript men for the duration. But in the North, there was a very real
possibility that so many men might leave the army as to make it almost
impossible to pursue the war.
In the spring of 1864, then, the government undertook vigorous
measures to get soldiers to re-enlist. It offered bounties of four hundred
dollars, plus whatever bounty the separate states might offer in addition.
It conferred on these men the title "veteran volunteers" and gave
them a little chevron to wear as a mark of distinction. It offered thirtyday
furloughs. Most important, in view of unit cohesion, it decreed
that in any regiment where three quarters of the men re-enlisted, it
would keep the formation together, designating it a veteran regiment.
In spite of all these inducements and a great deal of patriotic oratory,
less than half the men, about 136,000, signed up again. A great many
of them obviously thought they had done their bit, and it was time
for others to make the same sacrifices. Oliver Wendell Holmes, for
instance, left the army in July of 1864. He felt guilty about doing so
for the rest of his life, though after three serious wounds he was probably
not really fit for service anyway.
One of the most interesting questions connected with the whole
manpower issue was that of enlisting blacks. Here, on both sides of the
line, was a quite contentious source of bodies. In the Confederacy, few
could bring themselves to face the issue, and it hardly seemed feasible
to ask black men to fight in support of a system that was based on
keeping them in servitude. Yet Patrick Cleburne thought it might be
done, and in the dying days of the war, the Confederate Congress tried
to do it. More important, and less fraught with contradiction, was the
widespread use of blacks as support personnel and laborers on fortifications.
Ironically, slave-owners often protested vehemently against the
drafting of their slaves for military labor; in this as in so many other
things, they refused to face the facts of the day.
The issue in the North was less complicated but no less contentious.
In the early stages of the war, in spite of attempts by individual blacks,
and by the few acknowledged black leaders, to get black men into
uniform, there was general agreement that this was a white man's war.
The North, after all, though less systemically racist than the South,
was hardly less racist in its individual attitudes. Yet blacks were casually
recruited into the navy, and a few free blacks managed to get
into the army. Then as the Union armies found themselves a haven for
more and more blacks fleeing from servitude, or liberated by Federal
progress around the fringes of the Confederacy, the regulations, and
after them the attitudes, began to shift. General David Hunter began
recruiting blacks as early as the spring of 1862 in his Department of
the South, and when enlistments lagged, he began conscripting them,
both moves that President Lincoln officially disapproved. Actually,
many were eager to serve, believing, as Frederick Douglass said in an
often-quoted passage, "Once let the black man get upon his person the
brass letters U.S. . . . and a musket on his shoulder . . . and there is no
power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship
in the United States." Not only did blacks believe it, but many
whites feared exactly that.
Still, as in other wars before and since, any blood would do; gradually
black enlistment gathered strength in the North, and finally there were
300,000 black soldiers in 166 regiments of United States Colored
Troops. They were officered almost exclusively by whites, for some time
they were paid at lower pay scales, and they were most often used as
labor and support troops. Under the stress of combat conditions, however,
these inequities slowly went by the board, and black units gradually
won acceptance by fellow combat soldiers. Sharing the
opportunity to die is, after all, one of society's great equalizers.
In practice, this particular opportunity was long denied the blacks,
and less than half of the regiments saw actual fighting, all of it of
course in the later part of the war. The first black unit in combat was
the 79th U.S. Colored Infantry, which fought at Island Mounds, Missouri,
in October of 1862. One of the most famous black actions was
the ill-fated assault by the 54th Massachusetts on Battery Wagner,
outside Charleston, South Carolina, on July 18, 1863, in which the
regiment lost 272 out of 650 men. The event came hard upon the New
York draft riots, and led President Lincoln to ask publicly who deserved
better of the republic, the black man who fought to preserve it or the
white man who rioted to destroy it?
Southerners less sophisticated or thoughtful than General Cleburne
often responded with a visceral hatred to black soldiers, refusing to
exchange those unfortunate enough to be taken prisoner, maltreating
them and their white officers, who were regarded as traitors to the race.
The most notorious example of this was the taking of Fort Pillow on
the Mississippi River north of Memphis. It was invested and stormed
by Nathan Bedford Forrest's troops on April 12, 1864, and in the
general confusion that followed the collapse of the defense, a large
number of the black contingent of the garrison was killed. Union
charges that it was a blatant massacre were denied by Confederates,
who insisted it was but an incident of war, and there has been argument
about it ever since, though the weight of evidence does indeed suggest
a massacre.
All of these various issues, the federal election, the manpower problem,
troop retention, the role of black soldiers, would of course become
unimportant if the Union could win the war in the spring and summer
of 1864. And if it could not, then they might become very important
indeed. In the Confederacy as well as in the North men could count
and read a calendar, and thinking persons knew that the war was approaching
a crisis. The resolution of that crisis was going to depend
very largely upon the armies facing each other in northern Georgia and
northern Virginia.
As the blossoms burst across the hills of Tennessee and Georgia,
William Tecumseh Sherman gathered his forces for the great advance.
He had three armies under his command, his old favorite and former
command, the Army of the Tennessee, now commanded by James B.
McPherson, 24,000 strong; the Army of the Ohio, 13,500 men, formerly
Burnside's force around Knoxville, and now under John M. Schofield;
and finally the boss of the shield, George H. Thomas's Army of
the Cumberland, 61,000 strong. All told there were nearly 90,000
soldiers, as good as any men in the world and commanded by officers
who would have made Napoleon's marshals think twice.
Facing them was Joseph E. Johnston, who had replaced the unfortunate
Bragg after the defeat at Chattanooga. Johnston's Army of Tennessee
contained about 50,000 men, growing to 60,000 early in the
campaign; it was divided into corps commanded by Hardee, Polk, and
John Bell Hood, with Joe Wheeler as its cavalry commander. On paper
Sherman vastly outnumbered Johnston, but the Union army had been
hard hit by reorganization and the re-enlistment furloughs, and would
take a while to work up to full stride. More important than the disparity
in numbers was the fact that the Confederate Army of Tennessee
was still not a happy army; morale remained down, the officer cadre
was still unsettled, and there was a poor-relation feeling about the
whole thing. About to fight for its life and the life of the Confederacy,
it was going to have to do better than it had done in the past.
Meanwhile, across the mountains, there was brewing one of the great
passages of arms in all military history. For his greatest challenge,
Robert E. Lee commanded 64,000 men in the still superb Army of
Northern Virginia. Jeb Stuart was in charge of Lee's cavalry corps, and
Longstreet, Richard Ewell, and Ambrose Powell Hill each led a corps
of infantry. The Army of Northern Virginia might not be quite what
it had been this time last year, but it still thought it could lick all the
forces of Heaven and Hell combined, and on its record, it was certainly
entitled to such an opinion of itself.
It needed such confidence, for north of the Rapidan River lay the
Federal forces in daunting numbers. Under his direct control, Grant
had George Meade's Army of the Potomac, now disposed in three corps,
II under Hancock, V under Warren, and VI under Sedgwick. Ambrose
Burnside commanded a separate IX Corps under Grant himself, an
awkward arrangement, soon set aside, necessitated by Burnside's seniority.
Grant had brought Philip Sheridan east to command his cavalry,
now reorganized into a separate corps and ready for some serious
action. Altogether the Federal forces totaled 118,000 men, outnumbering
the Confederates nearly two to one.
At midnight on May 3, 1864, the Army of the Potomac quietly
marched eastward toward the fords across the Rapidan, crossed to the
southern bank, and began passing through the Wilderness.
World History
