Another. Lee basically takes a waiting game. What is grant going to do. Grant is going to move one way or the other. Lee is uncertain. So he for fits the initiative to his opponent. This is unlike the lee that we usually see. But in this instance he has no choice. He sends his cavalry out past each ends of his lines sort of to act as a trip wire to let him know where the federals are coming from and then waits. The army was commanded by general George Gordon lee, the hero of gettysburg, mead at this point was in a hot seat. He failed to destroy lees army at gettysburg. He was being investigated by congress. We all know how bad that can be. And so mead was in a bad situation. Grant visited him and was impressed by mead, because what mead told grant was that he would step down willingly and let grant bring some of his own people from the west to run the army of the potomac. Grant decided to keep mead on. He needed somebody with meads knowledge of that army in order to run it in detail. A
To read. I will be making frequent reference to this map as it will help us understand the course of the campaign. As general in chief of all unit forces in 1864, u. S. Grant devised accord mated offensive by a number of union army stretching from louisiana all the way to virginia. As you know already, the two most important of these offenses were those of the army of the , andac here in virginia that of william t sherman, who commanded what was called the military division of the mississippi. Grants orders to sherman for the campaign, dated april 4, 18 64, were pretty straightforward. Grant told sherman to move against the confederate armies of tennessee commanded by general joseph e johnson, and to , get into the interior of the enemies country as far as you can and inflict as much damage as you can. At the same time, sherman was supposed to prevent johnson from of his armyements to reinforce either lees army in virginia or Confederate Forces out in louisiana. That is shermans object
Men ever went into battle. We fight for the principles of free government, and for the existence of a nation whose institutions are the hope of the downtrodden people of every land. Our success in this Campaign Must ensure the integrity of the United States by the final overthrow of the rebel down. Success will give a new life to our country, and a new faith to the stability of free government to the world. It will also determine the next presidency as certainly as if the votes were counted. But if we fail in this campaign, that failure will be the greatest disaster in modern history. Upon general grant there now concentrates the deepest interest with which the world ever watched the actions of a single soldier. He is the foremost man in the greatest contest of the age. When the nation and the world wanted to know how the civil war was going, they looked to virginia. That spring, robert e. Lee and his army showed clearly as the confederacies greatest hope. Ulysses s. Grant had come eas
Nevertheless, while other Union Commanders were failing, grant had climbed steadily up the military ladder with resounding victories, stretching from fort henry in 1862, through vicksburg to Missionary Ridge in 1863. He was clearly the norths man of the hour. When lincoln ordered an east early in 1864 to take command of all federal forces. The somewhere near 500,000 combat ready soldiers grant would have authority over the largest post any american officer had ever led. The new Lieutenant General wasted little time in making his strategic intentions known. In the past, grant asserted, union armies had quote, acted independently and without concept like a bulky team of mules, no two pulling to the. And this allowed confederates to shift men from one sector to the other to meet the most pressing danger. Union generals seemed content to maneuver. But that was not the road to victory, grant announced. The north had far superior numbers, and materiel. It was time to switch games. To stop pl
I cant remember when i first saw the picture, and i certainly did not know where cold harbor was at the time. Im sure i thought it was a port town somewhere in virginia. I may not remember in which book i first saw the photograph, but i know that immediately and lastingly linked the words cold harbor and death in my mind. In subsequent years, i came to read more about the events of the spring of 1864 that culminated at cold harbor, that deadly slog from the rapid ann to the james that saw the u. S. Suffer 50,000 casualties, in the confederacy, another 30,000plus, the bloodiest six weeks of the war. I learned of the thousands who fell in the Early Morning on june 3rd. And i do know that there are differing schools of thought about what that number was. I learned that ulysses s. Grant would harbor terrible regrets about his decisions at cold harbor to the very end of his days. And i learned that even in a war in which the military and the public had become accustomed to horribly long cas