The Atlanta Campaign: Four Months That Saved Lincoln
Georgia
The road you are driving into Atlanta follows, roughly, the route that William T. Sherman's army took in the summer of eighteen sixty-four, and what happened on this ground may have decided the American Civil War.
By the spring of eighteen sixty-four, the North was exhausted. Three years of fighting had produced two inconclusive theaters of war. In Virginia, Ulysses S. Grant was hammering Robert E. Lee in the Overland Campaign, but the casualty lists were staggering and the newspapers were calling Grant a butcher. President Abraham Lincoln expected to lose his November reelection campaign. His opponent, the Democrat George B. McClellan, was running on a platform that would negotiate peace with the Confederacy and potentially recognize its independence.
Sherman left Chattanooga with roughly eighty thousand men in three armies on May seventh, eighteen sixty-four, a force that grew past one hundred thousand with reinforcements. His opponent, General Joseph Johnston, had sixty-five thousand Confederate troops and a strategy of elastic defense: fall back to prepared ridges, invite Sherman to charge uphill, bleed him, then fall back again. The campaign ran from Dalton south through Resaca, Adairsville, Cassville, New Hope Church, Pickett's Mill, and Kennesaw Mountain, a grinding hundred-mile approach that took nearly four months.
When President Jefferson Davis replaced Johnston with the aggressive John Bell Hood in July, Hood launched three successive attacks around Atlanta's perimeter and was repulsed in each. He evacuated the city on the night of September first, burning military stores as he went. Sherman occupied Atlanta on September second.
The news reached the North the next day and transformed the political landscape overnight. Lincoln's reelection, which had seemed impossible in August, was suddenly certain. He won by a landslide in November, carried the war to its conclusion, and preserved the Union. Atlanta was not merely a military objective. It was the hinge on which the outcome of the entire conflict turned.
