Lincoln knew that Lee’s eyes were always fixed on the vast amount of supplies in the depots around the Washington area. Of 60,000 effective bayonets from formations covering Washington was too dangerous. Lincoln opposed the North Carolina phase, fearing that Grant’s diversion Lee’s communicationsīy a campaign across the middle of North Carolina on the axis New Bern–Neuse River–Goldsboro–Raleigh–Greensboro, and on Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in the hope of defeating it in an open battle. In concert, the four armies were to move on Atlanta, on Mobile (after Banks took Shreveport), on General Robert E. Grant’s plan of January 1864 projected a four-pronged continental attack. The President told Grant again that he had to heed the demands of Union diplomacy, but at the same time he encouraged Grant to enlarge his strategic proposals to include estimates for a grand Federal offensive for the coming spring of 1864. The Red River campaign, Grant believed, would not provide as dramaticĪ demonstration. Grant’s rebuttal explained that Napoleon III would really be impressed with a large Army-Navy operation against Mobile Bay. Lincoln again balked because the Texas seacoast would be abandoned. For the Mobile-Montgomery plan, Grant asked for Banks’ resources in the Gulf Department. Grant reasoned that Lee would vacate Virginia and shift strength toward Atlanta. Strength for a spring offensive to Atlanta. As a possible winter attack, Grant revived the touchy Mobile campaign while the Chattanooga victors were gathering After his own victory at Chattanooga in November, however, Grant wasted few hours in writing the President what he thought the next strategic moves should be. Grant’s plan was further stymied after the Union defeat at ChickamaugaĪnd the subsequent need to break the siege at Chattanooga. Banks’ Department of the Gulf was left out of the consolidation of the other western commands under Grant in October 1863. This was a clear violation of the Monroe Doctrine, but Lincoln could do little more than protest and demonstrate at the time. Napoleon III had sent French soldiers to that country to install Maximillian, archduke of Austria, as emperor, taking advantage of the U.S. The President favored a demonstration by Banks up the Red River to Shreveport to show the American flag to the French occupying Lincoln vetoed Grant’s plan in part by deferring the Mobile-Montgomery All military resources within this isolated Rosecrans was to advance overland through Chattanooga to Atlanta. Navy would play a major role in this attack. Banks and Grant’s Army of the Tennessee to Mobile and up the Alabama River to Montgomery. Within this region, Grant urged a "massive rear attack" that would take Union armies in the Gulf Department under Maj. After this great step, he proposed to isolate the area west of the line Chattanooga-Atlanta-Montgomery-Mobile. Western departments and the coordination of their individualĪrmies. Grant first called for the consolidation of the autonomous Having cleared the Mississippi River, Grant wrote to Halleck and the President in the late summer of 1863 about the opportunities now open to his army. The twin, uncoordinated victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, 900 miles apart, only pointed out the North’s need for an overall strategic plan and a general who could carry it out. But their hold on the communications base at Nashville was always in jeopardy as long as the elusive armies of the Confederacy could escape to fight another day at another key point. In the Western Theater, Union armies, often operating independently of one another, had scored great victories at key terrain points. Lincoln had watched the Confederates fight from one victory to another inside their cockpit of northern Virginia. Halleck had been given that title after George B. Grant as the man whose strategic thinking and resolution could lead the Union armies to final victory.Īcting largely as his own General in Chief, although Maj. In July 1863, Lincoln leaned more and more toward Maj. Committed to the policy of destroying the armed power of the Confederacy, he sought a general who could pull together all the threads of an emerging strategy and then concentrate the Union armies and their supporting naval power against the secessionists. During the final year of the war the people of the North grew restless and as the election of 1864 approached, many of them advocated a policy of making peace with the Confederacy. Even after the great victories of 1863, the situation in 1864 reflected this lack of unity of command. Rom Bull Run to Chattanooga, the Union armies had fought their battles without benefit of either a grand strategy or a supremeįield commander.
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