The Wilderness Campaign (May-June 1864) was the first test of the strategy of attrition. Grant directed Meade, leading a force of 100,000, to attack 70,000 men of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in the tangled woodlands just 50 miles northwest of Richmond. The Battle of the Wilderness (May 5-6) cost some 18,000 Union lives. Undaunted, “The Butcher” then ordered Meade southeast to Spotsylvania Court House, where more than 14,000 Union soldiers were killed between May 8 and 18. Still Grant pushed, attacking Lee’s right at Cold Harbor, just north of Richmond. Thirteen thousand Union troops fell between June 3 and June 12.
Following Cold Harbor, Grant marched south of the James River and began the Petersburg Campaign, laying siege to this important rail center just south of Richmond. The siege consumed nearly a year, from June 1864 to April 1865, and it succeeded in hemming in Lee, who was put on the defensive, trying to stave off the assault on Richmond.
In order to restore maneuverability to his army, Lee attempted to draw off some of Grant’s strength by detaching Jubal Early, with Stonewall Jackson’s old corps, in an assault against Washington in mid-June. Although the capital was briefly bombarded, Union General Philip Sheridan pursued Early into the Shenandoah Valley and defeated him at Cedar Creek on October 19.
Just three weeks later, Lincoln was elected to a second term by a comfortable margin. Clearly, the North was prepared to continue the fight, and the defenders of Petersburg, starving, sick, and exhausted, at last broke in March 1865. On April 2, Lee evacuated Richmond. Jefferson Davis and the entire Confederate government fled the Southern capital.
The March to the Sea
While Grant concentrated on taking Richmond, William Tecumseh Sherman, after leaving, Chattanooga in early May 1864, invaded Georgia with 100,000 men. Sherman was opposed by Joseph P. Johnston’s army of 60,000, which repeatedly fell back during the onslaught—although Johnston scored a victory at Kennesaw Mountain on June 27. By early July, Johnston had assumed a position defending the key rail center of Atlanta. However, President Jefferson Davis, enraged by Johnston’s many retreats, brashly replaced him with General John B. Hood. A heroic but utterly reckless commander, Hood attacked Sherman and lost. By September, Hood abandoned Atlanta, and the Northern army’s occupation of this major city greatly boosted Union morale.
After the fall of Atlanta, Hood played a desperate gambit by invading Tennessee, hoping that Sherman would pursue him. But Sherman had his own strategy. Later generations would call it “total war”—war waged against not only an enemy army, but against “enemy” civilians. Instead of pursuing Hood himself, Sherman detached General George H. Thomas to do that. With the main force of his army, Sherman then marched from Atlanta to the Atlantic coast. The “March to the Sea” burned a broad, bitter swath of destruction all the way to Savannah.
In the meantime, General Hood did win a battle at Franklin, Tennessee, on November 30, but General Thomas triumphed at Nashville on December 15-16, 1864, sending the ragged remnants of Hood’s army back toward Georgia. Confederate General Joseph P. Johnston, now in command of the greatly reduced Army of Tennessee, engaged Sherman several times as the Union army stormed through the Carolinas in the spring of 1865. On April 13, 1865, Sherman occupied Raleigh, North Carolina, and on April 26 at Durham Station., Johnston formally surrendered his army.
The Country Courthouse
Although sporadic fighting would continue west of the Mississippi until the end of May, the principal land campaign of the Civil War ended at Durham Station on April 26. However, an earlier event is traditionally considered the symbolic end of the Civil War. Following the collapse of Petersburg and the evacuation of Richmond, Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia desperately foraged for food and arrived at Appomattox Court House, about 25 miles east of Lynchburg, Virginia. Lee’s forces, which now stood at perhaps 9,000 effective troops, were surrounded by the Army of the Potomac under General George Meade.
After heavy skirmishing on the morning of April 9, Lee concluded that his was a lost cause. He met Ulysses S. Grant, who pressed him to surrender all the Confederate armies, which were nominally under his command. Lee refused to do that, but his surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia, over which he had direct command, signaled the inevitable end of the war.
With Malice Toward Some
Confident of ultimate victory, President Lincoln delivered a gentle, healing message in his second inaugural address on March 4, 1865, calling for a consummation of the war with “malice toward none” and “charity for all” in an effort to “bind up the nation’s wounds.” Weary, careworn beyond imagining, Lincoln nevertheless looked forward to the end of the war. On the evening of Good Friday, April 14, 1865, he and his wife, Mary Todd, sought a few hours’ diversion in a popular comedy called Our American Cousin. The play was being presented at Ford’s Theatre, a short distance from the White House.
An Evening at Ford’s Theatre
John Wilkes Booth was a popular young scion of America’s foremost theatrical family. While he had no part in Our American Cousin, Booth was desperate to play a role in the drama of the great Civil War, which was now rushing to conclusion. Back in 1864, the Maryland-born racist had concocted a plot to kidnap Lincoln and ransom him in exchange for Confederate prisoners of war. That plan came to nothing, and now, with surrender in the air, there was no point in simply kidnapping Lincoln. Booth wanted raw vengeance. He conspired with a small band of followers, George A. Atzerodt, David Herold, and a former Confederate soldier called Lewis Paine (real name Louis Thornton Powell). They plotted to murder Lincoln and also kill Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward.
On April 14, Atzerodt backed out of his assignment to kill Johnson. In the meantime, Herold held Paine’s horse while Paine broke into Seward’s residence. He stabbed and clubbed Seward, an aged man who was recuperating from injuries suffered in a carriage accident. It was a bloody scene: Seward, his son Augustus, and his daughter Fanny were all injured, as were a State Department messenger and a male nurse. Yet none of them died.
Booth was more efficient. Booth simply walked into the theater, entered the president’s box, raised his derringer, and pointed it between Abraham Lincoln’s left ear and spine. fie squeezed off a single shot. Booth leaped from the box onto the stage, shouting “Sic semper tyrannis!”—Thus ever to tyrants. But Booth’s right spur had caught on the Treasury Regiment banner festooning the box, and he landed, full force, on his left foot, which broke just above the instep. Booth limped across the stage and made a clean getaway into Maryland and then Virginia. He was not found until April 26, when he was cornered in a barn near Fredericksburg. Union soldiers set fire to the barn, then, seeing the actor’s form silhouetted by the flames, one of the soldiers (a sergeant named Boston Corbett claimed credit) fired a shot that fatally wounded Booth.
Reconstruction Abuses
