Despite the publication during the past century of many studies on the subject, the Atlanta Campaign—overshadowed both during the war and later by the engagements in Virginia—has not received anything like its due share of attention. Now for the first time, thanks to Richard McMurry’s thoroughness as a researcher and skill as a narrator, students of the Civil War have a clear, succinct, balanced, authoritative, and interesting account of the tremendously important Georgia operations of May to September 1864. This excellent work should be as comprehensible and appealing to those who read history and tour battle areas for fun as it is to those who have achieved expertness in Civil War history.
Foreword by Bell I. Wiley i Spring 1864 1 Resaca 7 To the Etowah 14 New Hope Church 18 Kennesaw Mountain 23 Across the Chattahoochee 29 Johnston Removed From Command 32 In the Ranks 34 Peachtree Creek 42 The Battle of Atlanta 46 Ezra Church 48 The Month of August 51 Jonesborough 54 Epilogue 57 Sherman in Atlanta: A Photographic Portfolio 59 For Further Reading 70 Civil War Sites in Georgia 71
One of the most important military campaigns of the American Civil War was fought in northwestern Georgia during the spring and summer of 1864 between Northern forces under Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman and Confederates commanded first by Gen. Joseph E. Johnston and then by Gen. John B. Hood. This campaign resulted in the capture of Atlanta by the Unionists, prepared the way for Sherman’s “March to the Sea,” and, in the opinion of many historians, made inevitable the reelection of Abraham Lincoln and the consequent determination of the North to see the war through to final victory rather than accept a compromise with secession and slavery.
Spring 1864 marked the beginning of the war’s fourth year. In the eastern theater, 3 years of fighting had led to a virtual stalemate, with the opposing armies hovering between Washington and Richmond—about where they had been when the war began in 1861. However, the situation was quite different in the vast area between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, a region known in the 1860’s as “the West.” There in 1862 Federal armies had driven the Southerners out of Kentucky and much of Tennessee. In the following year the Northerners secured control of the Mississippi River and captured the important city of Chattanooga. By early 1864, Union armies were poised for what they hoped would be a quick campaign to dismember the Confederacy and end the war. This feeling was well illustrated by an Illinois soldier who wrote his sister on April 22, “I think we can lick the Rebs like a book when we start to do it & hope we will Clean Rebeldom out this summer so we will be able to quit the business.”