Nearly two years, however, would pass before the war ended. Brought east to take command of Union forces, Grant in 1864 began a war of attrition against Lee’s army in Virginia. That is, he was willing to accept high numbers of casualties, knowing that the North could replace its manpower losses while the South could not. Grant understood that to bring the North’s manpower advantage into play, he must attack continuously “all along the line,” thereby preventing the enemy from concentrating its forces or retreating to safety after an engagement.
In May 1864, the 115,000-man Army of the Potomac crossed the Rapidan River to do battle with Lee’s forces in Virginia. A month of the war’s bloodiest fighting followed. Grant and Lee first encountered each other in the Wilderness, a wild, shrub-covered region where, one participant recalled, “it was as though Christian men had turned to fiends, and hell itself had usurped the place of earth.” Grant’s army suffered 18,000 casualties, while Lee’s far smaller forces incurred 7,500. Previous Union generals had broken off engagements after losses of this magnitude. But Grant continued to press forward, attacking again at Spotsylvania and then at Cold Harbor. At the end of six weeks of fighting, Grant’s casualties stood at 60,000—almost the size of Lee’s entire army—while Lee had lost 30,000 men. The sustained fighting in Virginia was a turning point in modern warfare. With daily combat and a fearsome casualty toll, it had far more in common with the trench warfare of World War I (discussed in Chapter 19) than the almost gentlemanly fighting with which the Civil War began.
Generals Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant, leaders of the opposing armies in the East, 1864-1865.
Grant had become the only Union general to maintain the initiative against Lee, but at a cost that led critics to label him a “butcher of men.” Victory still eluded him. Grant attempted to capture Petersburg, which controlled the railway link to Richmond, but Lee got to Petersburg first, and Grant settled in for a prolonged siege. Meanwhile, General William T. Sherman, who had moved his forces into Georgia from Tennessee, encountered dogged resistance from Confederate troops. Not until September 1864 did he finally enter Atlanta, seizing Georgia’s main railroad center.
As casualty rolls mounted in the spring and summer of 1864, northern morale sank to its lowest point of the war. Lincoln for a time believed he would be unable to win reelection. In May, hoping to force Lincoln to step aside, Radical Republicans nominated John C. Fremont on a platform calling for a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery, federal protection of the freedmen’s rights, and confiscation of the land of leading Confederates. The Democratic candidate for president, General George B. McClellan, was hampered from the outset of the campaign by a platform calling for an immediate cease-fire and peace conference—a plan that even war-weary northerners viewed as equivalent to surrender. In the end, Fremont withdrew, and buoyed by Sherman’s capture of Atlanta, Lincoln won a sweeping victory. He captured every state but Kentucky, Delaware, and New Jersey. The result ensured that the war would continue until the Confederacy’s defeat.