“I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.”

LIEUTENANT GENERAL ULYSSES S. GRANT, USA, DISPATCH, MAY 11, 1864¹

“We must destroy this army of Grant’s before it gets to the James River. If he gets there it will become a siege, and then it will be a mere question of time.”

GENERAL ROBERT E. LEE, CSA, CONVERSATION WITH LIEUTENANT GENERAL JUBAL A. EARLY, SPRING 1864²

“We cannot change the hearts of those people of the South,” Major General William T. Sherman wrote to Ulysses S. Grant late in 1862, “but we can make war so terrible… [and] make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.”³ Nearly two years later, as the Union and the Confederacy braced for the spring 1864 campaigns that would open a fourth year of fighting, the horrors of war had become amply apparent to the people in both regions. Casualty lists had grown to the hundreds of thousands, and civilians on both sides strained to help their governments cope with never-ending waves of sick and wounded—as well as the white and black refugees fleeing before armies or following in their wake. In the South, where most military battlegrounds lay, civilians already beset by shortages, impressment, and encroachments by the detested Yankees regarded the onset of another year with a mixture of fear and faith—and a determination that would be severely tested by coming trials. “The very air is rent with the groans of the wounded and dying,” Confederate nurse Kate Cumming would write, in December 1864. “Although woe and desolation stare at us every way we turn, the heart of the patriot is as firm as ever, and determined that, come what may he will never yield.”⁴

Famous Union Battle-Flags. Illustration in My Story of the War: A Woman’s Narrative, by Mary A. Livermore, 1888.

Not all had Cumming’s stubborn spirit. In both warring regions, cries for accommodation and peace grew louder as death and destruction surged to new levels and neither side looked capable of achieving a clear military victory. In the Union, as the presidential election of 1864 approached, Lincoln’s administration seemed about to topple, to be replaced by an administration that might settle for disunion and negate the Emancipation Proclamation. In the Confederacy, as casualties and army desertions increased, state and national legislators debated a war measure that had once been unthinkable: “As to calling out the negro men and placing them in the army, with the promise that they shall be free at the end of the war,” Confederate congressman Warren Akin wrote to a friend in October 1864, “I can only say it is a question of fearful magnitude. Can we prevent subjugation, confiscation, degradation and slavery without it. If not will our condition or that of the negro, be any worse by calling them into service.”⁵

Two men in uniform stood at the center of the military struggle that so closely influenced, and was influenced by, the political debates and the rise and fall of morale at home. General Robert E. Lee, who would become general in chief of all Confederate armies, remained a beacon of hope for civilians throughout the Confederacy and an inspiration to his troops; and he retained the absolute confidence of his volatile commander in chief, Jefferson Davis. Appointed general in chief of all Union armies in March 1864, Ulysses S. Grant had achieved great victories in the west, but it remained uncertain, as the spring campaigns began, whether the traits that had served him so well at Fort Donelson, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga would serve the nation well on this larger stage. Establishing his headquarters in the east, he did make a favorable first impression on most officers and men of the Army of the Potomac. But they had turned hopefully toward commanding generals before and been bitterly disappointed. “I have unbounded confidence in Grant, but he puzzles me as much as he appears to [puzzle] the rebels,” Captain Charles Francis Adams Jr. wrote to his father, the U.S. minister to Britain, in June 1864. “He fights when we expect him to march, waits when we look for motion, and moves when we expect him to fight. Grant will take Richmond, if only he is left alone; of that I feel more and more sure. His tenacity and his strength, combined with his skill, must, on every general principle, prove too much for them in the end. Yet I often feel discouraged.”⁶

Confederate standards. Illustration on the inside front cover of the postwar scrapbook compiled by former Confederate general Jubal A. Early.