*Includes pictures
*Includes accounts of the fighting
*Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading
With Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia continuing to frustrate the Union Army of the Potomac's attempts to take Richmond in 1862 and 1863, President Lincoln shook things up by turning command of all the armies of the United States to Ulysses S. Grant in March 1864., Lee had won stunning victories at battles like Chancellorsville and Second Bull Run by going on the offensive and taking the strategic initiative, but Grant and Lincoln had no intention of letting him do so anymore. Attaching himself to the Army of the Potomac, Grant ordered Army of the Potomac commander George Meade, "Lee's army is your objective point. Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also."
The Battle of the Wilderness was fought so close to where the Battle of Chancellorsville took place a year earlier that soldiers encountered skeletons that had been buried in shallow graves in 1863. Moreover, the woods were so thick that neither side could actually see who they were shooting at, and whole brigades at times got lost in the forest. Both armies sustained heavy casualties while Grant kept attempting to move the fighting to a setting more to his advantage, but the heavy forest made coordinated movements almost impossible.
As Lee kept thwarting the Army of the Potomac during the Overland Campaign, Grant eventually refused to attack Lee in frontal assaults, and aware that Lee dared not venture out to counterattack, Grant nearly captured Richmond in mid-June by stealing a march on Lee's army and crossing the James River. The fog of war, poor luck, and a skillful impromptu defense by P.G.T. Beauregard stopped Grant from taking Petersburg, which was a critical railroad hub and supply line for Richmond, before Lee's army could confront, thereby saving the Confederacy for the time being. The two armies began to dig in around Petersburg, and unbeknownst to them they would be there for the next 9 months, constructing elaborate trenches and engaging in the kind of warfare that would be the forerunner of World War I.
After successfully breaking the Confederate siege at Chattanooga near the end of 1863, William Tecumseh Sherman united several Union armies in the Western theater for the Atlanta Campaign, forming one of the biggest armies in American history. After detaching troops for essential garrisons and minor operations, Sherman assembled his nearly 100,000 men and in May 1864 began his invasion of Georgia from Chattanooga, Tennessee, where his forces spanned a line roughly 500 miles wide. . Sherman set his sights on the Confederacy's last major industrial city in the West and General Joseph E. Johnston's Army of Tennessee, which aimed to protect it. Atlanta's use to the Confederacy lay in its terminus for three major railroad lines that traveled across the South: the Georgia Railroad, Macon and Western, and the Western & Atlantic.
The timing of the invasion was also crucial. Grant's lack of progress during the summer of 1864 ensured that anti-war criticism of the Lincoln Administration continued before the presidential election. It would fall upon Sherman's forces in the West to deliver the necessary victory. Johnston's army of 50,000 found itself confronted by almost double its numbers, and General Johnston began gradually retreating in the face of Sherman's forces, despite repulsing them in initial skirmishes at Resaca and Dalton. In August, Sherman moved his forces west across Atlanta and then south of it, positioning his men to cut off Atlanta's supply lines and railroads. When the Confederate attempts to stop the maneuvering failed, the writing was on the wall. On September 1, 1864, Hood and the Army of Tennessee evacuated Atlanta and torched everything of military value. On September 3, 1864, Sherman famously telegrammed Lincoln, "Atlanta is ours and fairly won."