ON March 8, 1864, Ulysses S. Grant arrived in Washington, D.C., to take command of the armies of the United States, but before he could lead them against the Confederacy, he needed to be introduced to the capital. After meeting President Lincoln for the first time, Grant found himself the center of attention at a White House reception. By the end of the night the modest rumpled man who had been working as a store clerk when the war began was standing on a sofa so that onlookers could catch a glimpse of the general they hoped would save the nation’s military fortunes. Grant’s victories at Vicksburg and Chattanooga had made him the preeminent Union commander of the war, but he had yet to prove his mettle against Robert E. Lee and his formidable Army of Northern Virginia. Nor was it certain that President Lincoln would be reelected in the fall of 1864, or if he was defeated, that his successor would be willing, or able, to continue the conflict. As the sundered nation began its fourth year of war, both sides could still find reasons to hope that their faith in victory might be rewarded in the months ahead.
The previous year had not begun well for the Union. After its disastrous defeat at Fredericksburg under Ambrose Burnside in December 1862, the Army of the Potomac had suffered from widespread demoralization, alarming desertion rates, and intrigues among its senior generals. Lincoln’s decision in January 1863 to replace Burnside with Joseph Hooker helped restore the army’s morale, but Hooker’s offensive across the Rappahannock River in May ended in a humiliating repulse at Chancellorsville. Confronted by a numerically superior opponent, Lee demonstrated his characteristic audacity by dividing his army and launching a series of counterattacks that drove Hooker back across the river. Although Chancellorsville cost the Confederacy 13,000 men killed, wounded, or missing, the battle bolstered Lee’s already high confidence in the ability of his troops. Determined to seize the strategic initiative in the east, Lee invaded Pennsylvania in June in the hope of gaining a third consecutive victory over the Army of the Potomac. When Hooker’s successor, George G. Meade, defeated him at Gettysburg in July, Lee managed to escape back across the Potomac into Virginia, where the two opposing commanders maneuvered inconclusively for the remainder of the year. While Lee was aware that the Gettysburg campaign had proved a costly failure, many Southerners considered the battle to have been a draw, while many Northerners—especially President Lincoln—understood that defensive victories alone would not win the war in the east.
By the end of 1863 there was no uncertainty regarding the ability of the Union to win offensive victories in the western theater. After spending the winter engaged in a series of futile attempts to reach the Confederate stronghold at Vicksburg through the rivers and bayous of the Mississippi Delta, Grant had shown a willingness to take risks equal to Lee’s. Crossing the Mississippi well below Vicksburg at the beginning of May, Grant had marched his army northeast to Jackson, then turned west to attack his main objective from the rear. Vicksburg’s surrender on July 4, the day after the failure of Lee’s final assault at Gettysburg, gave the Union control of the entire length of the Mississippi and effectively cut Texas, western Louisiana, and Arkansas off from the rest of the Confederacy. “The Father of Waters,” Lincoln gratefully observed, “again goes unvexed to the sea.” During the summer of 1863 William S. Rosecrans also succeeded in gaining control of Middle Tennessee for the Union, skillfully maneuvering Braxton Bragg out of a series of defensive positions and forcing him to retreat into northwestern Georgia. Reinforced by Confederate troops from Virginia and Mississippi, Bragg turned on Rosecrans in September and defeated his Army of the Cumberland at Chickamauga. The victory rallied Confederate spirits but proved short-lived. Union forces under Grant broke Bragg’s siege of Chattanooga, and in November they drove the Confederates off Missionary Ridge and forced them back into northwestern Georgia.
Union forces faced military, political, and humanitarian challenges as they advanced deeper into southern territory. The need to occupy towns and cities, and to guard railroads and bridges against Confederate guerrillas and cavalry raiders, drew troops away from the main northern armies. In fighting guerrillas, Union soldiers increasingly showed less restraint in exercising the “hard war” policies first adopted in 1862, burning farms, imprisoning or expelling civilians suspected of disloyalty, and often summarily executing captured “bushwhackers,” actions that only increased the hatred most white Southerners felt toward the northern occupiers. The question of how civilian governments were to be reconstructed in the South became a potential source of division between President Lincoln and the Radical Republicans in Congress. And both the Union army and the various civilian aid agencies that assisted it found themselves hard-pressed to care for the thousands of former slaves who came into the Union lines each month.
Despite the success of the Union armies, dissension and violence would mark 1863 in the North. When Clement L. Vallandigham, one of the leading Democratic opponents of emancipation and the draft, declared in May that “a wicked, cruel and unnecessary” war was being waged “for the purpose of crushing out liberty and erecting a despotism; a war for the freedom of the blacks, and the enslavement of the whites,” Burnside had him arrested and tried by a military commission in Ohio. Burnside’s actions stirred up a hornet’s nest of controversy over free speech and the permissible boundaries of wartime dissent that continued well after Lincoln banished Vallandigham into Confederate-held territory. In July the enforcement of the draft sent rioters, many of them Irish and German immigrants, rampaging through the streets of New York. Mobs, angry over the draft and emancipation, turned on black New Yorkers, lynching at least eleven African Americans and attacking the homes and businesses of prominent Republicans. The final toll of 105 dead made the New York draft riots the worst act of urban violence in the United States during the nineteenth century. In the meantime, Vallandigham had escaped to Canada, where he campaigned from exile as the Democratic candidate for governor of Ohio. His overwhelming defeat in the fall of 1863 raised Republican hopes for success in the 1864 elections, yet few supporters of the administration expected that it would be reelected if the coming year failed to produce decisive battlefield victories.
Jefferson Davis could take little solace from considering Lincoln’s trials. In the spring of 1863 a series of food riots in southern cities, including the famous Richmond Bread Riot of early April, demonstrated a new militancy on the part of white southern women as they took to the streets to protest rising prices and the Confederate government’s failure to organize effective relief. Often identifying themselves as soldiers’ wives, these hungry women parlayed their sacrifices in sending sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers off to war to win legislative support for an unprecedented public welfare program that proved only partially successful in alleviating hunger and scarcity in the Confederacy. Confederate conscription efforts also met with violent resistance from armed draft evaders and deserters who took refuge in remote regions of the South.
While white Southerners expressed discontent with the demands of war, black Southerners challenged slavery at every level. Every slaveholder could report evidence of what he considered disrespectful behavior, if not outright rebellion. In rare cases, enslaved people committed acts of violence and destruction against former masters. More often, wherever the opportunity presented itself, slaves fled. Gathering family members, they escaped on foot, on horseback, or by boat to the nearest Union outpost. In the opening months of the war, Union commanders had possessed considerable leeway to return runaway slaves, and Democratic generals, especially George B. McClellan, had drawn the scorn of Republicans in Congress and the press for their willingness to protect slaveholders’ rights. But the Emancipation Proclamation, along with legislation passed by Congress in 1862, had turned the Union army into a giant engine for emancipation. In areas such as coastal Georgia and Florida and the Mississippi Valley, the Union army organized expeditions whose main purpose was to free slaves, some of whom were then recruited for service in the rapidly expanding U.S. Colored Troops.
During 1863 the Union army’s use of black soldiers began to have a major impact upon the war. The heroic efforts of African American troops at Port Hudson, Milliken’s Bend, and Fort Wagner helped change northern attitudes about race. Although many Democrats continued to vigorously oppose black enlistment, a sizable number of skeptical white Northerners came to respect the willingness of black men to die for the Union, while the manpower advantage the North gained by turning slaves (and free black men) into soldiers could not be ignored in the Confederacy. In January 1864 Patrick Cleburne, a Confederate division commander with an outstanding battle record, asked his fellow generals in the Army of Tennessee to consider emancipating slaves and enlisting them in the Confederate forces. A copy of his address was sent to Jefferson Davis, who ordered it suppressed. At the same time, the Davis administration continued to refuse to exchange black prisoners, a policy that had contributed to the breakdown of the exchange cartel during 1863 and increased death and hardship among prisoners of war on both sides.
By the beginning of 1864 mass death and suffering had become a permanent presence in the American psyche. The battle of Gettysburg alone had killed about seven thousand men outright, and several thousand more would eventually die of their wounds or be maimed for life. Northerners and Southerners alike contended with the shock of seeing men without arms or legs, disfigured by shrapnel, or ravaged by disease. Still the war continued, as soldiers and civilians on both sides accepted the necessity of a fourth year of fighting with a mixture of determination and resignation. Many in the North expected that Grant would quickly defeat Lee in the spring and capture Richmond, while Confederate hopes focused on the gradual exhaustion of the northern will to fight and the defeat of the Lincoln administration at the polls. As spring came, both sides would plunge again into the maelstrom of battle.
Aaron Sheehan-Dean