The year 1864 ended triumphantly for the Union armies of the Western Theater. On 16 December, Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas’ Army of the Cumberland routed Confederate General John Bell Hood’s Army of Tennessee at Nashville, Tennessee. Five days later, Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman’s army group concluded the “March to the Sea” by capturing Savannah, Georgia. In contrast, the Union war effort in the east appeared less than impressive. On Christmas Day, a Federal joint expeditionary force failed to capture Fort Fisher, a massive earthen fort that guarded Wilmington, North Carolina, the Confederacy’s last open seaport. In Virginia, the armies led by Union General in Chief Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and his Confederate adversary, General Robert E. Lee, remained deadlocked around Richmond—the capital of the Confederacy—and Petersburg. Despite the apparent stalemate in the east, Grant and Sherman, the senior Union general in the West, were confident that their strategy to defeat the Confederacy was working. While Grant’s Army of the Potomac and Army of the James kept Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia pinned down in its fortifications, Sherman had torn a swath of devastation across Georgia from Atlanta to Savannah, and Thomas had crushed the Confederacy’s second-largest field army.
75 pages
