Atlanta 1864: Last Chance for the Confederacy

CHAPTER TWO Grand Strategy for 1864

  Grand Strategy for  Even before leaving for Washington to accept his lieutenant general’s commission from the hands of President Lincoln, Grant knew that he would be elevated to higher command. Earlier, in response to a request from Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck, who functioned as Lincoln’s chief of staff, Grant had put together some ideas about what he thought the Federal armies should attempt in  and how they should go about the work. He first proposed that the Unionists undertake major operations in eastern North Carolina, south of Richmond, where they could threaten the railroads supplying the Rebel capital. Shifting large numbers of troops to that area, however, would at least have created the appearance of leaving Washington itself exposed to the Confederates. Such a campaign, furthermore, would remind many Northern voters of the Yankees’ failed  effort in southeastern Virginia. For those reasons, the Lincoln administration found Grant’s suggestion politically unacceptable. By the time he got to Washington in March, or soon thereafter, Grant had worked out another proposal for the spring campaign. Not long after the promotion ceremony he won Lincoln’s approval for his revised plan. Grant’s basic task was simple. He had to destroy the Confederate States of America—a would-be nation that for all practical purposes had been reduced to Central and southern Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama south of the Tennessee River, and the eastern half of Mississippi. Two great armies defended that area, one in North Georgia, the other in East-Central Virginia. Scattered lesser forces here and there across the South added their mite to the strength of Rebeldom. Knowing from the first that they were outnumbered, the Confederates had realized early in the conflict that their best chance was to shift their Grand Strategy for   available troops about to concentrate as many of them as possible for the defense of whatever area was menaced by the Yankees. The Secessionists thus used their interior lines to shuttle troops from unthreatened regions to endangered points. By keeping their soldiers on the move, they could partially compensate for their inferior numbers and bring together their largest available force where and when it was most needed. Several times in the war’s first three years the Rebels had shifted troops to counter Federal offensives. Almost all those transfers had been over relatively short distances, but in the fall of  Confederate reinforcements brought west by rail from Virginia had played a crucial role in turning back a Federal thrust into North Georgia. The telegraph, the railroads, and the faster communication and transportation they brought made this strategy feasible. If the Southerners could continue this method of waging war and combine it with some good generalship, hard fighting, and a bit of luck, they could hold on to enough of their territory to sustain their claim to national sovereignty. Indeed, in their ability to shuttle troops rapidly from one area to another, the Confederates, in some respects, would find themselves better off in . The territorial losses they had suffered in  and  had squeezed their armies closer together, reducing the distances they would have to travel to reinforce one another. The Union armies, by contrast, were farther apart than they had been earlier in the war because they were on exterior lines. (A Yankee army at Chattanooga was farther removed from Federal forces in Virginia—by the route it would have to travel—than it had been the year before, when it was at Nashville.) Well aware that the Secessionists had often thwarted Union offensives by using troops from one area to help defend another, Grant reasoned that the Northerners should counter the Rebel strategy by pressing forward on several fronts simultaneously, or, as he put it in an early April letter, “to work all parts of the army together.” If the Yankees could do so, the Confederates, threatened at several points, would be unable to concentrate at any. In technical terms, Grant proposed to use “concentration in time” (all Union armies advancing simultaneously) to offset the Southerners’ “concentration in space.” With numerical superiority everywhere, the Yankees could reasonably count on winning somewhere—and it really did not matter where. Once the Federals broke through at some point, the Secessionists would have to weaken their forces at other places to  Grand Strategy for  attempt to repair the damage. The other points would then be even more vulnerable to the Northerners...