Sergeant Hagan and other Rebs who fought in the Atlanta Campaign had a wholesome respect for the men in blue who opposed them; and rightfully so, for the Union rank and file, mostly lads and young adults from the farms of the Midwest, were admirable folk, deeply devoted to the cause of Union. One of them, Pvt. John F. Brobst of the 25th Wisconsin Regiment, wrote his sweetheart before the campaign was launched: “Home is sweet and friends are dear, but what would they all be to let the country go to ruin and be a slave. I am contented with my lot ... for I know that I am doing my duty, and I know that it is my duty to do as I am now a-doing. If I live to get back, I shall be proud of the freedom I shall have, and know that I helped to gain that freedom. If I should not get back, it will do them good who do get back.”
Despite the publication during the past century of many studies on the subject, the Atlanta Campaign—overshadowed both during the war and later by the engagements in Virginia—has not received anything like its due share of attention. Now for the first time, thanks to Richard McMurry’s thoroughness as a researcher and skill as a narrator, students of the Civil War have a clear, succinct, balanced, authoritative, and interesting account of the tremendously important Georgia operations of May to September 1864. This excellent work should be as comprehensible and appealing to those who read history and tour battle areas for fun as it is to those who have achieved expertness in Civil War history.
Bell I. Wiley
CONTENTS
[Foreword by Bell I. Wiley] i [Spring 1864] 1 [Resaca] 7 [To the Etowah] 14 [New Hope Church] 18 [Kennesaw Mountain] 23 [Across the Chattahoochee] 29 [Johnston Removed From Command] 32 [In the Ranks] 34 [Peachtree Creek] 42 [The Battle of Atlanta] 46 [Ezra Church] 48 [The Month of August] 51 [Jonesborough] 54 [Epilogue] 57 [Sherman in Atlanta: A Photographic Portfolio] 59 [For Further Reading] 70 [Civil War Sites in Georgia] 71
SPRING 1864
One of the most important military campaigns of the American Civil War was fought in northwestern Georgia during the spring and summer of 1864 between Northern forces under Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman and Confederates commanded first by Gen. Joseph E. Johnston and then by Gen. John B. Hood. This campaign resulted in the capture of Atlanta by the Unionists, prepared the way for Sherman’s “March to the Sea,” and, in the opinion of many historians, made inevitable the reelection of Abraham Lincoln and the consequent determination of the North to see the war through to final victory rather than accept a compromise with secession and slavery.
Spring 1864 marked the beginning of the war’s fourth year. In the eastern theater, 3 years of fighting had led to a virtual stalemate, with the opposing armies hovering between Washington and Richmond—about where they had been when the war began in 1861. However, the situation was quite different in the vast area between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, a region known in the 1860’s as “the West.” There in 1862 Federal armies had driven the Southerners out of Kentucky and much of Tennessee. In the following year the Northerners secured control of the Mississippi River and captured the important city of Chattanooga. By early 1864, Union armies were poised for what they hoped would be a quick campaign to dismember the Confederacy and end the war. This feeling was well illustrated by an Illinois soldier who wrote his sister on April 22, “I think we can lick the Rebs like a book when we start to do it & hope we will Clean Rebeldom out this summer so we will be able to quit the business.”
To realize these hopes, Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, commander of the Northern armies, planned a simultaneous move on all fronts, with the greatest efforts devoted to Virginia, where he would personally direct operations, and to the region between the Tennessee and Chattahoochee Rivers, where the Federals would be led by Sherman and Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks. Grant hoped that Banks would move from New Orleans, seize Mobile, and advance northward toward Montgomery, while Sherman’s force struck southward from Chattanooga. Had these plans succeeded, the Confederacy would have been reduced to a small area along the coast of Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia. Confederate victories in Louisiana, however, made Banks’ projected campaign infeasible, and Sherman’s drive southward into Georgia, with Atlanta as the initial goal, became the major Union effort in the West.