The winter offensives that Lincoln had sparked with his command shake-ups in the late fall of 1862 had run their course by mid-January 1863. In the high-visibility yet chronically indecisive eastern theater, Fredericksburg had been a spectacular fiasco. The two-headed monster of a command arrangement Lincoln had created in the Mississippi Valley had snagged a target of opportunity at Arkansas Post but had been stopped cold in its primary mission of taking Vicksburg and opening the Mississippi to midwestern commerce, a culmination that now seemed as distant as ever. In Middle Tennessee, Rosecrans had won a victory by staying on the battlefield longer than his opponent was willing to do, gaining a narrow swath of Tennessee countryside but bringing final Union triumph very little closer. Only in the Mississippi Valley, where Grant had taken command firmly into his own hands, was there any prospect of further offensive operations. Rosecrans’s and Burnside’s armies were firmly ensconced in winter quarters, and no progress could be expected from them for months to come, while Grant had encamped his army in front of Vicksburg but for the moment could find no way of getting behind the Confederate stronghold, where lay the only prospect of a successful assault.
It was all very discouraging—to Lincoln, to Union soldiers, and to the northern public. Disaffected members of the New Jersey legislature introduced resolutions complaining that the war was hopeless and the restoration of the southern states impossible. They called for an immediate end to hostilities and the opening of negotiations that could lead only to a permanent division of the country. Newspapers such as the New York World hewed to the same line, while newspapers in the South gleefully picked up and repeated such expressions of northern war weariness and defeatism. Demoralized or disloyal northern civilians sent copies of such negative newspaper articles to soldier acquaintances and relatives of theirs, down south in the camps of the armies in Louisiana, Tennessee, or Virginia. With the newspapers (or instead of them), they sent their own commentary on the current unwinnable war and the hopelessness of ever restoring the Union by force of arms. Some went so far as to urge the soldiers to desert and promise them protection and concealment if they should come back home now. A few radical opponents of the war actually visited the armies’ camps in person to urge their friends to desert, though they risked arrest if discovered by most officers. Despite the officers’ efforts, morale dropped still lower in the nation’s armies among soldiers discouraged by the costly and seemingly fruitless campaigns that had closed out 1862.
On the other side of the lines, morale was, for the most part, correspondingly high. Confederate soldiers and civilians reveled in their armies’ victories, especially the seemingly effortless triumphs of Robert E. Lee, whose fame was by now coming to rival that of his subordinate Stonewall Jackson. The latter had been a darling of the southern press and public since his exploits in the Shenandoah Valley the preceding spring, and now Lee took his place alongside him as one of the Confederacy’s foremost heroes. Confederate morale and even the Confederate people’s sense of nationhood were rapidly coming to center and rest on these two men and their ragtag but seemingly invincible army.
News from the Confederacy’s other two major armies was generally encouraging if not quite as inspiring as that from Virginia. In Mississippi the Confederate commander was, it is true, the thoroughly uninspiring Pennsylvanian John C. Pemberton, but Vicksburg seemed as impregnable as ever, and Confederates enjoyed making jokes about Grant’s ridiculously futile continued efforts at taking it.
The news from Braxton Bragg’s army in Middle Tennessee was the least encouraging that winter. Not only had the Army of Tennessee given up another thirty-mile-wide swath of the state, but the army’s high command was locked in unseemly bickering, with several of Bragg’s subordinates determined never to forgive him for their own bad performances in the Kentucky Campaign. Bragg was anything but a politician, and his most glaring lack was his inability to win the hearts of his subordinates, though in several of their cases the efforts of the most gifted and charming of leaders would have been in vain. In the wake of the Battle of Stones River, a staff officer anonymously published a newspaper article accusing Bragg of retreating against the advice of his subordinate generals. This enraged Bragg since it was the exact opposite of the truth. He let it goad him into sending an ill-considered circular to all of his generals asking if they had counseled retreat after the recent battle and vaguely suggesting that he might resign if he did not have the confidence of his officers. All of them had to admit that they had indeed counseled retreat, but several, influenced by Bragg’s bitter enemies Polk and Hardee, took the opportunity of assuring Bragg that he had no one’s confidence and ought to resign at once.
Davis got wind of the affair and ordered Bragg’s superior, Confederate western theater commander Joseph E. Johnston, to go to Bragg’s headquarters at Tullahoma, Tennessee, and investigate the matter. Though Johnston’s report was highly favorable to Bragg, Davis, perhaps influenced by his old West Point friend Polk, decided that Bragg needed to go. Johnston disagreed, and, besides, relations between Johnston and Davis were such that the general enjoyed few things more than thwarting the president’s wishes. Johnston found excuse after excuse for disobeying Davis’s repeated orders to relieve Bragg and take command of the Army of Tennessee himself until finally the campaigning season began. Johnston was needed in Mississippi, and Davis ordered him there, abandoning his effort to remove Bragg from command of the Army of Tennessee.
The Confederate public spent the winter for the most part in blissful ignorance of the fact that one of their three major armies was commanded by a man in whom the president had no confidence and whom the president had tried unsuccessfully to remove or that its high-command structure was so rife with personal animosities as to render that army almost incapable of concerted action. Through the winter and all the way through the spring season as well, the Union army facing Bragg’s unhappy Army of Tennessee remained inert, doing nothing that might have taken advantage of the disarray in the Confederate high command.
That Union army was William S. Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland. After his bloody victory by default at Stones River, Rosecrans’s stock had soared in Washington, and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton had promised him whatever he needed in the way of supplies and equipment in order to get his army ready for a new advance. Stanton had not dreamed just how much supplies and equipment—and how much time—Rosecrans would believe he needed before he dared face the Rebels in battle again. While other generals, notably Grant, made use of what they had and got on with the war, Rosecrans for six months bombarded Washington with demands for mountains of supplies, hundreds of wagons, thousands of horses and mules, and a variety of new equipment, including the new seven-shot, magazine-fed Spencer Repeating Rifles to equip several of his regiments. Although he received virtually everything he requested, he nevertheless held his army idle in its camps around Murfreesboro while the nation’s other armies launched campaigns and fought battles. Halleck, Stanton, and even Lincoln himself sent repeated messages prodding the reluctant general to fight, but throughout the first half of 1863 all were in vain.
Meanwhile Grant tried every scheme he could think of to get his army around Vicksburg so as to have a fair chance in battle against its Confederate defenders. The steep bluffs on which Vicksburg perched represented the edge of Mississippi’s interior plateau. South of Vicksburg the Mississippi River lapped the base of the plateau. North of the town it was the Yazoo River, angling down from the northeast, that ran along the foot of the bluffs. Between the Yazoo and the Mississippi and for a number of miles west of the Mississippi stretched the Mississippi Delta, with some of the South’s richest cotton plantations ranging along the low curving forms of natural levies, formed by various streams and bayous and by former courses of the rivers themselves. Between the plantations lay dark cypress swamps and a maze of sluggish watercourses that scarcely seemed to flow in any direction at all.
Throughout the remainder of January 1863, as well as February and March, Grant’s efforts were aimed at somehow getting his riverboat transport vessels, as well as the navy’s river gunboats, into either the stretch of the Yazoo above Vicksburg or the stretch of the Mississippi below the town without their having to steam past the powerful Confederate heavy artillery batteries on both rivers at and near Vicksburg. Either stretch of either river would provide access to the interior plateau without suicidal assaults on prepared positions like those along Chickasaw Bayou.
One interesting plan was based on the fact that Vicksburg lay on the outside edge of a bend in the Mississippi. The plan involved digging a canal across the tongue of land called DeSoto Point, located on the Louisiana shore on the inside of the bend. In theory this would allow access to the lower reaches of the Mississippi without running the gauntlet of the Vicksburg batteries. Lincoln, who in his youth had taken a flatboat full of midwestern crops down the Mississippi to New Orleans, was intrigued by the idea and followed its progress eagerly. The scheme called for digging a ditch of reasonable size across the bend and then for the river itself to take over and scour the ditch into a new and shorter channel, as it was wont to do even without any human assistance. Unfortunately, the upper end of the canal entered the river in an area of slack water, where erosion was unlikely. Ultimately, the river proved as perverse as ever, refusing to use the new channel offered by thousands of man-hours of Grant’s soldiers’ work.
Another plan involved opening the Mississippi River levy at Lake Providence, Louisiana, fifty miles upstream from Vicksburg. In theory this would make accessible a chain of interconnected swamps and streams, swollen by seasonal high water to just enough depth for the shallow-draft riverboats, so as to allow access to the Red River. The boats would then have easy steaming down the Red River to its mouth, about 130 miles below Vicksburg. Like the canal scheme, the Lake Providence undertaking promised access to the Mississippi, where it lapped the base of the state’s interior plateau without exposing the boats to the guns of Vicksburg. Grant assigned one of his army’s three corps to encamp at Lake Providence and work on clearing the cypress trees that clogged the proposed waterway, but after weeks of work, it became apparent that the boats would never be able to get through by that route.
Yet another plan called for cutting the Mississippi River levy on the Mississippi side at a place called Yazoo Pass, almost opposite the town of Helena, Arkansas, about 175 miles upstream from Vicksburg. This would allow the gunboats to pass into Moon Lake, thence into the Coldwater River, which would lead to the Tallahatchie, which at last would join with the Yalobusha to form the Yazoo. The fleet, followed by the transports, would thus have access to the Yazoo far above Vicksburg and could easily insert Grant’s army onto the interior plateau of Mississippi.
It sounded simple enough, but the waterways were so narrow that details of sailors had to stand on deck with poles and push on the banks to get the sluggish gunboats to turn sharply enough to follow their winding courses. The gunboats’ smokestacks brushed and banged against overhanging trees, sustaining damage while knocking loose a rain of snakes, lizards, opossums, and other arboreal creatures that fell to the decks and had to be swept over the side with brooms by other details of sailors. Scarcely able to advance at all through the swamp channels that passed for watercourses, the fleet finally encountered the Confederates at the junction of the Tallahatchie and Yalobusha rivers, where a detail of Pemberton’s troops had erected a small fort made of cotton bales and armed with two cannon. The almost laughably small Fort Pemberton, as the Rebels called it, nevertheless proved to be enough to stop the gunboats since nature had almost stopped them already. The accompanying troops, surrounded by channels and even swamps too deep to wade, could do nothing to help. By mid-March it was clear that the expedition had failed and would have to withdraw.
About the time the Yazoo Pass Expedition stalled, Admiral Porter implemented a new idea for getting the fleet and transports into the stretch of the Yazoo between Fort Pemberton and Vicksburg. Only a few miles above Vicksburg on the Mississippi, a sluggish, narrow watercourse called Steele’s Bayou led into the interior of the half-drowned delta country. Porter had heard that from it a series of interconnecting waterways led into the Yazoo. While a detachment of his gunboats was still involved in the Yazoo Pass Expedition, Porter led a squadron of his most powerful vessels up Steele’s Bayou on March 16. Travel on the narrow, winding channels proved much like what the other boats had experienced on the previous expedition, with the added complication that sometimes willow withes in submerged thickets fouled the boats’ paddle wheels, holding them stuck fast for hours until sailors could cut their way free.
Confederates felled trees across the channels both in front of and behind the fleet, hoping to trap and capture the vessels. It looked as if they might do just that when sniper fire drove Union sailors from the exposed upper decks, preventing them from clearing the logs or even steering the gunboats by the usual method, in these narrow waters, of pushing off the bank with poles. The sailors fired back at the snipers with their heavy cannon, while Porter made plans to abandon and blow up the vessels and lead the crews in trying to fight their way out through the swamps on foot if the situation became that desperate. He also asked a local slave who had joined his fleet to carry a message through Confederate-controlled territory to reach Major General William T. Sherman, whose supporting infantry of the Fifteenth Corps was several miles behind.
Using his knowledge of the area, the brave African American, whose name unfortunately no one thought to write down, evaded the Confederates and reached Sherman. The general acted with the energy that had already made him Grant’s favorite subordinate. Quickly scraping together a relief force from scattered detachments that had been clearing away obstructions on the streams, Sherman, on foot, led it on a night march, sometimes wading swamps, to reach Porter’s gunboats the next day. Although the operation was a failure, it displayed the excellent army–navy cooperation that made it possible for Grant even to think of trying to take Vicksburg. Porter, who was not actually subject to Grant’s orders, had nevertheless been willing to take his gunboats into extremely narrow and hazardous waters in order to help Grant’s effort succeed. Sherman did not let Porter down but extended himself and his troops to the utmost in order to get the navy out of its jam. Grant had actively fostered this sort of cooperation and mutual loyalty, and the strong team he had built augured well for ultimate success. For now, though, it was clear only that the Steele’s Bayou route was impractical as a means of bypassing Vicksburg.
By this time Grant had come to the conclusion that the only practical way to get the gunboats and transports past Vicksburg was to run them down the Mississippi itself, directly under the guns of the Vicksburg batteries. When he approached Porter with his plan, the admiral agreed to try it but warned that the move would not be reversible. Once the gunboats had run downstream past Vicksburg they would not be able to return until Grant took the Confederate fortress city since the slow upstream run would be suicidal if the Rebels were still manning their guns on the Vicksburg bluffs. Grant agreed, and both officers began preparing their forces. The Army of the Tennessee began a slow and tortuous advance through the tangled swamps and back-channels of the delta country west of the Mississippi, building dozens of bridges and scores of miles of corduroy road (a road surfaced by saplings laid side by side to prevent wheeled vehicles from sinking into the mud).
Meanwhile, Porter prepared a squadron of his best ironclads to run the Vicksburg batteries on the night of April 16, 1863. With coal barges lashed to their sides to provide extra fuel in the remote lower reaches of the Mississippi, the gunboats moved out silently through the dark night, hoping to avoid detection by the Confederates on the bluffs. The Rebels proved too alert, and the heavy guns roared to life as the Union vessels moved into the difficult sharp bend of the river directly in front of the town. The sailors fired back as best they could with their own cannon while helmsmen struggled to keep the vessels on course through the treacherous eddies produced by the bend. For several minutes the roar of the guns was audible many miles away, but when the guns fell silent and the smoke cleared, Porter’s fleet had successfully passed the batteries with only minor damage.
Six nights later army volunteers ran a group of leased transports past the batteries after civilian crews had balked at taking these frail, unarmed, and unarmored craft under the muzzles of the Confederate guns. The civilian boatmen’s misgivings proved somewhat justified, as the Confederate gunners, without the hindrance of return fire, sank two of the transports and badly shot up the rest. Nevertheless, Grant’s resourceful midwestern soldiers-turned-boatmen picked up their shipwrecked comrades, patched up the surviving vessels, and somehow got past the batteries with most of the flotilla intact and usable, ready to ferry Grant’s army across the river south of Vicksburg.
While the gunboats and transports ran the Vicksburg batteries and Grant’s army worked its way down through the swamps on the west bank of the Mississippi and prepared to cross the river, Pemberton remained confused. A simultaneous Union cavalry raid, which Grant had ordered for just that purpose, ranged virtually the whole length of the state of Mississippi, from the lines of Grant’s rear-area forces near Memphis all the way past Jackson and down to where a small Union army under Nathaniel P. Banks was approaching the secondary Confederate bastion on the Mississippi River at Port Hudson, Louisiana. The expedition’s commander, Brigadier General Benjamin Grierson, proved wily and resourceful in creating maximum disruption of Confederate rear areas while dodging all the troops that Pemberton dispatched to catch him. With his enemy thus distracted as planned, Grant prepared to launch his main campaign into the state of Mississippi.
On April 29, 1863, Grant’s army landed on the east bank of the Mississippi River about forty miles below Vicksburg near the settlement of Bruinsburg and moved rapidly inland. The next morning his army defeated a detachment of Pemberton’s Confederate army at Port Gibson. Rather than advancing straight north toward Vicksburg through a terrain of steep ridges and deep ravines, Grant moved northeast. On May 12 one of Grant’s corps defeated another Confederate detachment near the town of Raymond. Two days later, Grant’s troops marched into Mississippi’s capital, Jackson, before turning westward to approach Vicksburg directly from the rear. On May 16 he met and defeated Pemberton’s main field army at Champion Hill, about twenty miles east of Vicksburg. When Pemberton made a stand the next day at the main crossing of the Big Black River, Grant routed him again.
Mentally, Grant kept at least one step ahead of Pemberton, whose befuddled efforts at stopping Grant led to Confederate defeats in five consecutive battles as the campaign progressed through the interior of Mississippi. In a revealing measurement of the abilities of the rival commanding generals, Grant outnumbered Pemberton on every battlefield even though Pemberton had more troops in Mississippi than Grant did.
By May 18, Pemberton’s army had taken refuge inside the fortifications of Vicksburg itself. Grant had made contact with the Mississippi River just above Vicksburg, reestablishing a short, secure supply line. His lines extended along the north and east sides of Vicksburg far enough to the south to cut off the Rebels there from receiving supplies and prevent them from escaping. In less than three weeks since landing in Mississippi, Grant had outmaneuvered Pemberton, won five battles, gained the advantageous position behind Vicksburg that had seemed impossible to reach, and bottled up the Confederate army in what was each day looking more and more like a trap. The campaign had been risky, and Grant had overcome both enemy resistance and incredibly difficult terrain. The result was an operational masterpiece that rivaled and perhaps exceeded Stonewall Jackson’s spring 1862 Shenandoah Valley Campaign as the most brilliant of the war.
Even from the rear Vicksburg proved to be a very strong position, and Pemberton’s demoralized soldiers found that within its heavily fortified lines they had a chance to stop the blue-clad soldiers who had chased them through Mississippi. Grant’s all-out assaults on the city on May 19 and 22 both ended in bloody failure. Regretfully but with grim determination, Grant and his army settled down to a methodical siege, bombarding Vicksburg and digging their trenches ever closer so as to set up a final assault that would be guaranteed success. Meanwhile, Confederate soldiers and civilians inside Vicksburg went on short rations as supplies grew increasingly scarce.
During the winter of 1863, while Grant had tried one plan after another to get at Vicksburg from a direction that offered hope of success, Lincoln had decided that the situation in Virginia required a new general there. Burnside’s popularity in the Army of the Potomac had been dismally low since the debacle at Fredericksburg and had sunk lower after the abortive January offensive that his men were bitterly calling “the Mud March,” after the onset of a rainy spell turned the Virginia roads into deep quagmires in which the army’s guns and wagons bogged down. The discontent extended to the army’s generals as well, most of whom were McClellan favorites still bitterly seething about the removal of “Little Mac,” as the adoring troops called him. Some of the generals complained to Lincoln to the point that the president became convinced that the Army of the Potomac could no longer function with its present commander. Sadly, because he admired Burnside’s modesty and dedication, Lincoln replaced him with Major General Joseph Hooker.
An 1837 West Point graduate, Hooker had served with distinction in the Mexican War and then had commanded a division and later a corps within the Army of the Potomac, generally performing well. Aside from that previous service, Hooker’s reputation had been shaped by both his well-known penchant for whiskey and prostitutes and his habit of harshly criticizing each of his army commanders. In a letter that Lincoln wrote to Hooker on assigning him to command the Army of the Potomac, the president gently but firmly admonished the new commander that his undermining of his predecessors, particularly Burnside, had not been commendable and might well have created a spirit within the high command of the army that would make Hooker’s own job more difficult. He also referred to a troubling statement Hooker had recently made to a reporter. “I have heard,” Lincoln wrote,
in such way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the Army and the Government needed a Dictator. Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. Only those generals who gain success can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship.1
Despite the concerns that had prompted Lincoln to write such a letter, Hooker’s tenure in command of the Army of the Potomac began with much promise. He proved to be an able administrator, raising the army’s morale as well as the state of its training and discipline. He also adopted an excellent plan for dealing with Lee as soon as spring weather dried Virginia’s dirt roads. The plan was not unlike the scheme that Grant was simultaneously devising—and would simultaneously carry out—in the Vicksburg Campaign. Brigadier General George Stoneman (West Point, 1846) would lead the Army of the Potomac’s cavalry on a raid deep into enemy territory to confuse Lee. Then while part of Hooker’s army continued to threaten Lee at Fredericksburg directly across the Rappahannock River, the bulk of the army would march upstream, cross the river, and march rapidly to get behind Lee and fall on him from the rear. That the campaign that followed took a much different course than Grant’s Vicksburg Campaign was due mainly to the fact that Stoneman was not Grierson, Lee was not Pemberton, and, most of all, Hooker was not Grant.
On April 27, three days before Grant landed his forces on the east bank of the Mississippi, Hooker put his own army in motion and his troops began crossing the Rappahannock a number of miles above Lee’s headquarters at Fredericksburg. The main body of the Army of the Potomac crossed the Rappahannock unopposed, marched south, and crossed the Rapidan, a tributary of the Rappahannock. Still they met no opposition, and Hooker could only assume that he had stolen a march on Lee exactly as he had planned.
Indeed he had, but that turned out to be almost the last thing that went right for Hooker. Stoneman’s raid proved ineffective and accomplished nothing beyond depriving Hooker of most of his cavalry and thus of his means of discerning Lee’s movements. By contrast, Jeb Stuart, leading Lee’s excellent cavalry, alerted the Confederate commander to Hooker’s approach. Under cover of a dense fog, Lee withdrew most of his army from its positions around Fredericksburg, unnoticed by the large Federal corps of Major General John Sedgwick (West Point, 1837), which Hooker had left on the other side of the Rappahannock to threaten and hopefully to pin down Lee’s main body. Leaving only a single reinforced division to watch Sedgwick at Fredericksburg, Lee marched with the rest of his army to counter Hooker’s turning maneuver.
The main bodies of the two armies made contact on May 1, just as the Federals were about to emerge from a region of dense thickets and scrub forest known locally as the Wilderness of Spotsylvania, which stretched for a number of miles along the south bank of the Rapidan. Fighting erupted, and Hooker’s troops were doing well when inexplicably he ordered a withdrawal into the heart of the Wilderness, where he ordered his army to take up a defensive position. Within the tangled underbrush of the Wilderness, the Army of the Potomac’s two-to-one superiority in numbers was less significant, and its even more dramatic advantage in artillery meant nothing at all. Hooker’s subordinate generals were stunned and confused, able to think of no reason why their army would choose to fight in a place like that, and, indeed, no reason existed except that Hooker had lost his nerve.
Hooker had boasted publicly all winter of what he would do when he finally got at the enemy. “May God have mercy on General Lee,” he had blustered, “for I shall have none.” Now, as for the first time his main army came to grips with Lee’s, Hooker began to wilt. From his headquarters, located at a Wilderness crossroads called Chancellorsville, the rest of that day and throughout most of the next proceeded a stream of messages to his corps commanders, alternately urging them to assume strong defensive positions and to be prepared to pursue the enemy, who, Hooker asserted, must soon retreat. Hooker may have hoped that Lee would stage a doomed frontal assault like the one the Federals themselves had launched at Fredericksburg or, better yet, that the Confederate commander would see the futility of the situation and retreat without fighting at all. The Army of the Potomac’s commander, who had always had a reputation for aggressiveness, now confused the advantages of the tactical defensive with the helplessness of complete passivity.
Feeding Hooker’s wishful thinking that Lee would soon go away were reports on May 2 from one of his favorite generals, Third Corps commander Daniel Sickles. A Tammany Hall politician, Sickles had finagled a general’s commission in the army when the war had broken out. His previous claims to fame had been a censure by the New York state legislature for escorting a notorious prostitute into its chambers and later an acquittal, on the nation’s first-ever plea of temporary insanity, after ambushing and fatally shooting his wife’s paramour. After Sickles had joined the army, he had gotten along well with Hooker since both men’s tastes in recreation ran to whiskey and prostitutes. As the Army of the Potomac waited in its new defensive position in the depths of the Wilderness to see what its commander or the enemy would decide to do next, Sickles sent several dispatches to Hooker’s headquarters claiming that, through gaps in the foliage created by the scanty local road network, he and his men had actually seen the Rebel army moving in retreat. Hooker ordered him to pursue, and Sickles probed forward and skirmished ineffectively with a Confederate column moving along one of the few, narrow woodland tracks in the area.
In fact what Sickles had seen and briefly encountered was not a retreat at all but one of the boldest offensive movements in American military history. Lee had thrown away the tactical rulebook, figuratively speaking, and for the second time in as many days had divided his army in the face of a much larger enemy force. This time Lee sent Stonewall Jackson with 70 percent of the Army of Northern Virginia’s remaining available troops on a roundabout march along little-known roads that Jeb Stuart’s cavalry, some of them local boys, had discovered, leading to a position squarely athwart the Army of the Potomac’s right flank. There by the late afternoon of May 2 Jackson had, with much difficulty in the dense underbrush, deployed his twenty-eight-thousand-man corps ready to launch a flank attack on the unsuspecting troops of Hooker’s flank, which Stuart had assured Jackson and Lee was “in the air,” that is, not anchored on any natural feature such as a river. The Union officers, thinking the tangled thickets of the Wilderness impassable for a military formation, considered them a sufficient anchor.
Jackson struck at about 5:30 p.m., and the Union flank crumpled. Over the next two hours Jackson’s men advanced two miles and took four thousand prisoners as one Federal unit after another struggled desperately to redeploy in the thickets and face the attackers, only to be engulfed and overrun by Jackson’s yelling Rebels, beating their way steadily forward through the brush. By nightfall the Confederates had paused to regroup. Their success had been phenomenal, but a substantial part of Hooker’s larger army still stood between Lee’s and Jackson’s separate Confederate forces, offering the Union commander the opportunity to inflict an annihilating defeat if he somehow regained his nerve.
Jackson hoped to forestall any such prospect and maintain Confederate momentum by launching a moonlight attack. With his staff he rode forward to see whether the new Union right was still “in the air” or whether the Yankees had succeeded in anchoring it to the Rapidan River. Jackson and his entourage completed their scout and turned back toward Confederate lines. As they approached along the narrow track between the darkened woods, nervous pickets (outpost guards), several hundred yards down the battle line from them, exchanged a few shots, a common occurrence when the armies lay only a short distance apart at night. This time, as was also not usual, the outburst of firing by the pickets set off a general volley that rolled along the main battle line for several hundred yards as jittery soldiers fired blindly into the darkness whence they suddenly suspected the foe might be approaching. Caught only a few dozen yards downrange, Jackson’s entourage was riddled. Several officers fell. Jackson took a bullet in the right hand and another in the left arm. The latter was a serious wound that shattered the bone not far below the shoulder and necessitated amputation. The surgeons did not consider his injuries life threatening, but Jackson was out of the fight. Command of his wing of the army fell to cavalry commander Jeb Stuart.
With his ablest general down and the larger Union host standing between the still-severed wings of his own army, Lee was in a very dangerous position despite the dramatic success his troops had enjoyed during the final hours of daylight. That night, however, Hooker came to the rescue by withdrawing his troops to a tighter defensive perimeter, opening the way for Lee to reunite his army. Instead of counterpunching, the Union commander called for help from Sedgwick, still back at Fredericksburg with a single corps. So the next day Sedgwick brushed aside the Confederates at Fredericksburg and struck out to join Hooker, approaching from Lee’s rear. Lee left a small force to watch Hooker’s still-enormous army and with the bulk of the Army of Northern Virginia turned and pounced on Sedgwick while Hooker remained cowed and inert. The lone Union corps did well to escape back across the river.
Lee then turned his attention back to Hooker. Hooker’s withdrawal to form a tighter perimeter had given up a clearing of high ground that formed one of the only decent artillery positions in the Wilderness. From that vantage point the usually inferior Confederate artillery had a heyday, pounding the Federals around Hooker’s headquarters at Chancellorsville. A shell hit one of the porch columns of the Chancellor house while Hooker was leaning against it, leaving the Union commander stunned and confused, though his subsequent conduct of the battle was no worse than before. Beaten back from the Chancellorsville clearing by relentless Confederate attacks and bombardment, Hooker had his men take up another line still farther to the rear and finally ordered a retreat across the Rapidan, ending what would be known as the Battle of Chancellorsville.
The battle would go down in history as the greatest achievement of the Lee–Jackson partnership. It was also the last. Like thousands of Civil War soldiers, Jackson suffered the amputation of a limb, in his case the left arm. His recovery progressed well for several days, but then pneumonia set in, and Jackson died a week after the battle. His loss crippled the previously superb command system of the Army of Northern Virginia and was a severe blow to Confederate morale.
Yet although the Battle of Chancellorsville would be studied and celebrated for more than a century to come, the clash in the Virginia Wilderness had accomplished nothing beyond killing and wounding some thirty thousand men and persuading Fighting Joe Hooker to take his army back to the camps it had left when the campaign started. No territory changed hands for more than a few days, and when the campaign was over the Confederacy was no closer to victory than it had been before, unless that victory could be brought by means of attrition, a dubious proposition by which the Confederacy could only hope to counter the Union’s greater numbers with its own supposedly greater devotion to its cause. Like every other battle in the eastern theater of the war up to that time, Chancellorsville had been a bloody but ultimately indecisive clash, full of heroism and mighty feats of arms but offering little realistic chance of changing the course of the war.
It was different in the West. There the Union forces, chiefly those under Grant’s command, were steadily draining the life out of the Confederacy, not through attrition but rather through well-conceived operations with increasingly skillful and confident troops within a theater of the war that, unlike Virginia, offered the Union genuine opportunities to inflict serious strategic damage on the Confederacy. Almost each western campaign thus far in the war had cost the Confederacy territory, population, agricultural production, transportation facilities, and sometimes even some of the South’s scarce industrial capacity. By late spring 1863 it was becoming increasingly clear that unless something could be done to break Grant’s grip on Vicksburg, he would soon deliver the most damaging blow yet by capturing the fortress town and its thirty-thousand-man garrison and cutting the Confederacy’s already tenuous connection with its trans-Mississippi states of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas, with their abundant supplies of beef, leather, and other commodities much needed in the rest of the Confederacy, especially by its armies.
How to do this was a question much on the mind of Jefferson Davis and his advisers that May. As Grant’s lightning campaign through Mississippi began to unfold disastrously for the Confederacy, Davis had ordered Joseph Johnston to the state, but the western theater commander proved little help. By the time he arrived in Mississippi, Grant was already between him and Pemberton. Thereafter Johnston had assembled a small army from troops in the area and reinforcements Richmond sent him, but he held his force north of Jackson and did nothing. Davis and Secretary of War Seddon sent him reinforcements from Bragg’s army and from the Atlantic and Gulf coasts until Johnston had about thirty thousand men. They begged him to move aggressively against Grant, but Johnston demurred, claiming that he had only twenty-three thousand men and urging Richmond to send him enough troops to make success certain.
In this situation Davis and his advisers considered sending Lee and/or some of his troops to Mississippi. One proposition they entertained was sending Longstreet’s corps, most of which had been in North Carolina on detached duty during the Battle of Chancellorsville. Lee, not surprisingly, disagreed. Instead, in conference with Davis and the cabinet in Richmond, he advocated an operation that he and Jackson had been planning since that winter for carrying the war into Pennsylvania as soon as the army’s artillery horses had eaten enough spring grass to regain their strength. They were ready now, and Lee wanted to go north. The summer heat and diseases of the lower Mississippi Valley would, Lee claimed, force Grant to give up his siege of Vicksburg and retreat north. The general was persuasive, and, after long discussions, both cabinet and president agreed. Lee’s army would remain intact and would march north while the Confederates in Mississippi would fend for themselves.
Lee began his movement on June 3, shifting units of his army successively west along the south bank of the Rappahannock while its rear guard continued to confront Hooker across the river at Fredericksburg. By June 8, two of Lee’s three corps had reached the neighborhood of Culpeper Court House, Virginia, about thirty-five miles northwest of Fredericksburg. The next day, Hooker, suspicious that the Rebels were in motion on the other side of the river, launched his cavalry, under Major General Alfred Pleasonton (West Point, 1844), on a reconnaissance-in-force across the Rappahannock. The result was the Battle of Brandy Station, the largest cavalry fight of the war.
The chief duties of Civil War cavalry were gathering information about the enemy army and preventing enemy cavalry from gathering information about one’s own. Stopping Pleasonton’s probe was therefore the duty of Jeb Stuart and his Confederate cavalry. Stuart and his troopers had enjoyed great success thus far in the war, partially because southern culture made it easier to raise effective volunteer cavalry there than in the North, partially because Stuart was a flamboyant but highly effective commander, and partially because the Army of the Potomac’s cavalry had been saddled with commanding generals like McClellan, who had kept the army sitting still while Stuart literally rode circles around it. He had done so twice thus far in the war.
By June 1863, the situation was changing. The Yankee troopers had been steadily gaining skill and confidence and were now more or less the equals of Stuart’s horsemen and more numerous. Pleasonton was no Stuart, and Hooker was certainly no Lee, but the two Union officers now managed to give the Union riders a fair shot at Stuart’s troopers. Stuart himself unwittingly helped by being preoccupied with a grand review of his cavalry he had staged the day before for the admiring ladies of Culpeper. Pleasonton’s probe took him and his riders completely by surprise. The result was a daylong battle of galloping horses and swinging sabers. Stuart finally drove back Pleasonton’s squadrons but not before being forced to call on Confederate infantry for assistance. The appearance of those gray-clad foot soldiers on the battlefield at Brandy Station tipped Lee’s hand and gave Pleasonton the information for which he had come. Such military information is only as good as the analysis of the general who receives it, in this case, Hooker.
In the century and a half that has passed since the Civil War, some historians have criticized Lincoln for being too ready to sack a defeated general. If anything, Lincoln was too patient with the succession of generals who commanded the Army of the Potomac. Hooker’s case is an example. He had lost his nerve the moment his army had contacted Lee’s at Chancellorsville, but Lincoln had patiently allowed him a second chance. Now as the evidence indicated Lee was moving north, Hooker showed once again that he lacked the nerve to come to grips with the renowned Confederate general and his army. First he misinterpreted the news of Brandy Station. Then he hesitated, unwilling to accept the situation that was developing in front of him. When Lee’s lead corps reached the Shenandoah Valley and turned northeast toward the Potomac, it was no longer possible to mistake the Confederate general’s purpose. Hooker responded by coming up with a series of plans, each of which involved having someone else, perhaps a subordinate with a corps or two, deal with Lee while Hooker and the main body of the Army of the Potomac went elsewhere, perhaps to Richmond. Lincoln wisely rejected Hooker’s schemes, one after another, reminding his general that Lee’s army and not Richmond was the proper target and urging him to strike aggressively at that army while it was stretched out and vulnerable during its northward march.
Hooker demurred, but he did put his army in motion, marching north to stay between Lee’s army on the west and Washington on the east. The long-suffering soldiers of the Army of the Potomac had to put in hard marches, sometimes thirty miles or more in a day, in order to make up for their general’s late start. By late June, Lee’s army had entered south-central Pennsylvania through the Cumberland Valley, an extension of the Shenandoah Valley north of the Potomac. The Rebel army’s lead elements, following the northeasterly curve of the valley, were approaching Harrisburg. Hooker demanded that Washington give him control of the Harpers Ferry garrison and, when his superiors rejected his demand, requested to be relieved of command, assuming that Lincoln and Halleck would not dare to remove the commander of the Army of the Potomac with Lee deep in Pennsylvania and a major battle in the offing. They dared. Hooker had not realized how low his stock had sunk in Washington. Lincoln, on June 28, replaced him with Fifth Corps commander George G. Meade (West Point, 1835).
That same day Lee also received a nasty shock, learning for the first time of Hooker’s northward marches and of the Army of the Potomac’s consequent presence only a few dozen miles from his own. That information came from a spy, not, as it should have, from Jeb Stuart, Lee’s chief of cavalry and de facto chief of intelligence. Lee had hitherto assumed that his opponent’s army was still deep in Virginia since Stuart had brought him no word of its movement.
That was Stuart’s duty, but he was by this time far out of position to perform it. Stung by the embarrassment of Brandy Station, Stuart had decided to stretch his orders from Lee and make another daring ride around the Army of the Potomac, thus restoring his reputation. The superiority on which that reputation had been based was gone forever now, and the newly confident blue-clad riders successfully screened Stuart’s horsemen away from the Federal main body, forcing him to take a wide outside track. On top of that, just as he started his ride, the Army of the Potomac started its rapid northward marches, forcing him to go that much farther to get around it. By the time he and his troopers completed the circuit and rejoined Lee, they were too late to provide the reconnaissance he needed. Lee had to make this campaign without the superior scouting that had been a large measure of his own previous superiority.
During late June the various units of Lee’s army were spread out for the purpose of plundering the Pennsylvania countryside. At the outset of the campaign Lee had issued high-sounding orders to his troops admonishing them not to treat Union civilians as the Union armies had treated Virginia civilians. In fact, however, Lee fully intended his army to live off the land, and its behavior in Pennsylvania differed little from that of Union armies in the South. Lee’s troops took all the food, clothing, shoes, and livestock they could find, occasionally offering payment, at gunpoint, in Confederate paper money they knew to be worthless but more often simply taking what they wanted. On their superiors’ orders they burned bridges, railroads, and depots, as well as the Caledonia Ironworks, whose owner, Thaddeus Stevens, was a leading congressional abolitionist and advocate of racial equality. Some of the troops added their own unauthorized acts of vandalism along the way.
Lee’s army also had a policy of seizing and carrying off into slavery in the South every black person it encountered—man, woman, or child, escaped slave or freeborn citizen of Pennsylvania. Those who received timely warning and could do so fled as the Army of Northern Virginia approached. Those who did not or were too slow were caught and driven along under guard.
On learning that the Army of the Potomac was nearby, Lee ordered the scattered units of his own army to unite. The most centrally located point from their various positions and the hub of the south-central Pennsylvania road net was the town of Gettysburg, and Lee’s orders directed his troops in that direction with a view to uniting at nearby Cashtown. The concentration of forces was nearing completion when, on the evening of June 30, Lee approved a request from one of his division commanders who wanted to take his division—one of nine infantry divisions in Lee’s army—and probe toward Gettysburg the next day.
Early on the morning of July 1, that division, under the command of Major General Henry Heth, encountered Union cavalry near Gettysburg. The blue-jacketed troopers fought a skillful delaying action until the Union First Corps arrived and handed Heth a severe drubbing. By that time it was mid-morning, and Lee had arrived from Cashtown along with most of the rest of the Confederate Third Corps. Almost simultaneously the Confederate Second Corps, still marching to join Lee’s main body after having threatened Harrisburg, approached Gettysburg from the north while the Third Corps faced it from the west. Shortly after noon the Confederates recognized and made the most of this opportunity to strike the Union defenders of Gettysburg from two directions.
Despite the arrival in the meantime of the Union Eleventh Corps, the Federals were badly outnumbered. Lee’s seventy-five-thousand-man army was divided into three corps plus cavalry and artillery, while Meade’s eighty-six-thousand-man force was composed of seven corps plus the usual artillery and cavalry. Thus, Lee’s corps averaged twice the size of the Union formations of the same name. The more numerous Confederates drove the Yankees through the town of Gettysburg, capturing many along the way. The surviving Federals took refuge on a hill that overlooked the town from the southeast and was known, because of the presence of the municipal cemetery, as Cemetery Hill. Lee ordered Second Corps commander Richard S. Ewell to continue the attack against the bluecoats on the hill if he thought he could do so without too much trouble. Ewell did not think so, and he was almost certainly right. The hill was a strong defensive position, held by a substantial number of well-led troops. With Ewell’s decision not to press the attack, the day’s fighting ended.
Meade, who arrived on the battlefield well after nightfall, had not done particularly well that day. The day before he had decided to concentrate his own army in a defensive position just across the Maryland line some miles to the south along Pipe Creek and had sent an order for such a movement to each of his corps commanders. The orders had not yet reached the commanders of the First and Eleventh corps before their troops became involved in the fighting at Gettysburg, but they did reach the other five corps commanders in time to make them hesitant and uncertain about whether they should march to join the fighting at Gettysburg, of which couriers informed them and which some could hear in the distance, or whether they should march as ordered toward Pipe Creek. Meade did not adequately clarify the situation until it was too late to help his hapless troops at Gettysburg. Indeed he seemed as uncertain as any of his corps commanders, remaining thirteen miles away at Taneytown, Maryland, throughout the day and sending various subordinates to direct the fighting at Gettysburg. During the evening, however, and through the course of the night, four more of Meade’s corps arrived at the Union position south of Gettysburg.
Thus, on July 2 Meade had six of his seven corps and Lee eight of his nine divisions present to continue the fight. The remaining troops of each side would arrive later that day. Before they did, Lee renewed his attack. Hoping to repeat the success of Chancellorsville, he sent Longstreet with three divisions on a roundabout march to strike at the Union left flank while Ewell attacked the Union right flank with three more divisions. As it turned out, Lee had received incorrect information about the location of the Union left, but by the time Longstreet reached that neighborhood, late in the afternoon, the Union commander in that sector, Daniel Sickles, had, in violation of Meade’s orders, moved his troops to a vulnerable position.
Longstreet struck, and intense fighting raged for hours around landmarks that would later be famous: a peach orchard, a wheat field, a boulder-strewn hillside the locals called Devil’s Den, and a higher hill they called Little Round Top. Meade sent reinforcements steadily throughout the evening and almost blundered by pulling too many troops away from his opposite flank. A subordinate talked him into leaving at least a minimal force to guard the right, and this proved fortunate when in the last minutes of twilight Ewell struck there. In confused night fighting the Federals on the right managed to hold on to most of their positions, as had those on the left.
Still determined to build on the success he had won in the first day’s fighting, Lee planned to attack again on July 3. Since he had tried both Union flanks and found them strong, he reasoned that the Union line must be thin in the center, along a gentle fold of ground that ran south from Cemetery Hill and was called Cemetery Ridge. Longstreet, with three new divisions in place of the exhausted ones he had used in the previous day’s fight, would attack there. Simultaneously, Ewell would renew the attack on the Union right that had seemed promising as darkness closed in the night before. His troops would assault Federals on a wooded eminence called Culp’s Hill. While those two attacks struck the Union center and right, Stuart, who had finally arrived with his weary cavalry late on July 2 to a frosty reception from Lee, would lead his troopers on a ride far around the Union right flank and into the rear of the Army of the Potomac so as to strike the center of the Union line from the rear while Longstreet was assaulting it from the front.
As events played out on July 3, Lee’s Napoleonic plan went badly awry. The Federals on Culp’s Hill, now reinforced, preempted Ewell with a predawn attack of their own bent on regaining the positions they had lost the night before. Ewell’s lines surged forward in their own attack, and several hours of fighting followed. By mid-morning Ewell’s troops were fought to a frazzle, and the Union right flank remained solidly in possession of Culp’s Hill. Meanwhile, Longstreet, who disagreed with Lee’s plan of battle, had moved slowly and was not ready to launch his assault on the center. Shortly after noon Longstreet’s cannon unleashed a preparatory bombardment. Stuart launched his ride to swoop down on the Union rear, but before his squadrons could get close they were met and turned back by Union cavalry under the command of a twenty-three-year-old newly promoted brigadier general named George Armstrong Custer.
On the other side of Cemetery Ridge, the Confederate preparatory bombardment lifted, and Longstreet’s three divisions of infantry advanced in the long, straight ranks that were the standard fighting formations of the Civil War. The open farmland of the shallow valley between the armies gave a rare opportunity of viewing eleven thousand men in such formation, and it was an impressive sight. Long-range Union artillery tore at the Confederate lines as they marched steadily forward. Then when they were about three hundred yards from the Union lines, the batteries opened up on them with canister, and the Union infantry added their rifle fire, mowing down hundreds of attackers.
The Confederates pressed on to within a few yards of the Union line and in one place actually drove it back a few yards, several hundred gray-clad soldiers stepping over the low stone wall the Federals had held in that sector and occupying a small copse of trees that was the only landmark in that open stretch of ridge. Then Union reinforcements surged forward and overran them, sending the rest of the Confederate attackers stumbling back toward their starting point three-quarters of a mile away. Longstreet’s grand assault, often called Picket’s Charge, after one of the three division commanders, was over.
So too was the Battle of Gettysburg, though the participants were not yet aware of the fact. Lee expected that Meade would counterattack. He did not, and the armies spent the next day at a standoff. During the days that followed, as Lee retreated back to the Potomac and especially when he and his army were temporarily trapped on the north side of the flood-swollen river, Lincoln desperately hoped that Meade would follow up his victory with an aggressive pursuit that trapped and destroyed the Army of Northern Virginia. Instead Meade followed cautiously and paused long enough for Lee to get across the Potomac, much to Lincoln’s disgust. Meade had his reasons. He had been in command scarcely more than a week, and his army had taken severe losses, including three of its seven corps commanders. Lee’s army, though beaten, would still have fought well on the defensive. Lincoln’s frustration was understandable since decisive results seemed to beckon, but, as usual in the eastern theater of the war, those results remained just out of reach.
Curiously, in view of all this, Gettysburg stands in the popular imagination as the great decisive battle and turning point of the war. In fact, it was nothing of the sort. It was not even a turning point within the indecisive eastern theater of the war. Militarily it was just one more bloody and inconclusive clash of the armies, full of sound and fury and acts of sublime heroism on both sides but bringing the end of the war not one day closer.
From the time Lee took command of the Army of Northern Virginia at the end of May 1862 until the time Grant took over direct operational supervision of the Army of the Potomac at the beginning of May 1864, a complete deadlock existed on the war’s eastern front. During that time, everything south of the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers was Confederate territory and everything north of those streams Union. From time to time one army or the other would strike its tents and make a foray into the other’s territory. A bloody battle might result, as had been the case at Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg, or the armies might maneuver around each other in a menacing minuet without coming to the point of mass bloodletting, as was to be the case with the lesser-known Bristoe Station and Mine Run campaigns in the second half of 1863. Either way, when each campaign was over the armies returned to the positions they had held before it started. In those six campaigns Lee had crossed the Rappahannock on the offensive three times, and his enemies had crossed it on three of their own offensives, and the results, other than several tens of thousands of men killed or wounded, was to demonstrate that with the present commanders and relative sizes of armies an almost perfect balance existed. Lee could not remain north of the Rappahannock, and his enemies could not remain south of it.
The only difference with the Gettysburg Campaign was that Lee’s army returned to Virginia with many new horses and several months’ worth of a much-needed supply of food that it had plundered from the civilian population of Pennsylvania. It also brought along perhaps a hundred or so Pennsylvanians of African descent whom it had kidnapped and carried south to be sold into slavery. It is ironic in the extreme that Confederate propaganda, both during the war and since, succeeded in establishing as fact the myth that Lee’s noble soldiers left civilians and their property untouched during their march to immortality at Gettysburg, in contrast to the blue-clad “Yankee vandals” in their marches through the South. The real contrast was that the “Yankee vandals” did not kidnap civilians.
While the Gettysburg Campaign took its ultimately indecisive course in the East, momentous events were taking place in the Mississippi Valley. Day after day Grant’s siege lines pressed closer and closer to the Vicksburg defenses until by the first days of July they were in many places within a dozen yards or so of the Rebel parapet. Twice during the siege Union troops tunneled under the Confederate fortifications and set off massive powder charges, hurling men and guns through the air, along with the logs and earth of which the fortifications had been constructed, and leaving yawning craters where stout bastions had been. Each time, Confederate reserves moved up to hold the line and prevent a Union breakthrough. Yet as Grant’s approach trenches crept ever closer and food inside the city grew ever scarcer, it became increasingly clear that a coordinated Union assault would soon strike the entire Confederate perimeter at the same time and that Pemberton’s troops would have little or no chance of stopping it. The gray-clad defenders could not know it, but Grant had set July 7 as the day for the assault.
It never came to that. On July 3, as Pickett’s division was preparing for its march to immortality half a continent away at Gettysburg, Pemberton requested surrender negotiations. Grant agreed to accept the capitulation of Pemberton’s thirty thousand troops and then to parole them, a practice common during the war up to that time. Prisoners would give their parole—their word of honor—that they would not take up arms again until they had been officially exchanged by the release of an opposing soldier from prison or from his own parole. It was, quite literally, an honor system for prisoners of war, and the amazing thing was that it had worked up until that point in the conflict. Captured soldiers were thus spared the misery of months or years cut off from family in an enemy prisoner-of-war camp, while the captors were spared the burden of transporting and maintaining them. The system could work as long as each side, especially the one with more paroled prisoners, placed the value of honor above the value of the military advantage that might be gained by the early release of its troops. That situation ended with the enormous surrender at Vicksburg. Confederate authorities promptly and illegally returned the thirty thousand men to duty without exchange. With that, the parole system was over since Union commanders could not henceforth trust the Confederates to keep their word. As a result, prisoner-of-war populations began to grow steadily on both sides.
The surrender ceremony at Vicksburg took place on July 4 as Lee was beginning his retreat from Gettysburg. Three days later, having heard of Vicksburg’s surrender, the subsidiary Confederate bastion at Port Hudson, Louisiana, surrendered to besieging Union forces under Nathaniel P. Banks. The twin victories severed the Confederacy from its trans-Mississippi resources and reopened the river as an artery of Union commerce, enabling Lincoln to note in a speech a few weeks later, “The Father of Waters goes again unvexed to the sea.”
Meanwhile another Union army had scored a significant success within the Confederate heartland. In a nine-day campaign in late June and early July, Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland, after months of urging by the authorities in Washington, had finally moved and had maneuvered Bragg’s Army of Tennessee almost out of the state whose name it bore, all the way from Tullahoma, near the center of the state, back to Chattanooga, a handful of miles from the Georgia line. Bragg, handicapped by dissension among his subordinate generals almost to the point of mutiny, was unable to counter effectively. The campaign produced no major battle and only a few relatively minor clashes between small detachments. Yet, though it was less significant than Vicksburg, it was much more significant than Gettysburg since it transferred thousands of square miles of formerly Confederate territory firmly and permanently into Union control, inflicting a severe loss on the Confederacy in agricultural production, recruitment, and morale. In one sense, however, the Tullahoma Campaign was more like Gettysburg than Vicksburg. It left the defeated Confederate army intact and able to fight another day, as the Federals would learn with sorrow three months hence during the bloody Chickamauga and Chattanooga campaigns.
Nevertheless, the Union armies had scored major victories on all three main fronts of the war, along the eastern seaboard at Gettysburg, in Tennessee in the form of the Tullahoma Campaign, and most significantly at Vicksburg, where Grant’s victory had secured the Mississippi Valley under Union control. In a letter to be read at a public rally in Illinois that August, Lincoln reviewed the recent victories and those who had fought to achieve them. Then he concluded, “Thanks to all. For the great republic—for the principle it lives by, and keeps alive—for man’s vast future—thanks to all. Peace does not appear so distant as it did. I hope it will come soon, and come to stay; and so come as to be worth the keeping in all future time.”2
