1864 and Grant\'s Union Military Strategy

In 1864, Ulysses S. Grant assumed command of the Union Armies, shifting the Union’s military strategy and leading to some key victories. But the Union also faced setbacks in this phase of the war. In this discussion you will discuss the Union’s strategies in 1864 as well as their successes and failures.
Consider the following in a post of at least 550 words:
• How was the Union military strategy in 1864 successful and unsuccessful in the eastern and western theaters of the war?
The military strategy of Ulysses S. Grant and the leadership of President Lincoln are widely credited for the success of the Union Army during the Civil War. But Grant’s strategy at the time was not viewed as an uncomplicated success, despite some eventual, notable victories over his Confederate opponents. According to Brooks (2017), before the promotion of Grant, Lincoln was extremely frustrated by the tactics deployed by his generals. He thought that the Union should take advantage of its superior numbers and overwhelm the Confederate forces. The Confederacy was then engaging the Union through a series of more limited skirmishes, and attempting to take advantage of its greater knowledge of the land on which the battles were being fought. Lincoln himself had little military experience but stressed the need to press the Confederacy at multiple, rather than single points of attack (Brooks, 2017).
Grant decided that the best defense was a strong offense, and resolved to engage the Confederacy offensively throughout (Brooks, 2017). Although this may seem like an obvious plan in retrospect, it was not at the time. Previous Union generals had hoped to blockade the Confederacy and starve its residents, thus triggering pro-peace and anti-secessionist sentiment. But from a morale standpoint, this merely seemed to encourage greater resolve among Confederate states to refuse to surrender. Grant, in contrast, was quite aggressive. Perhaps the most famous example of the new Union strategy was Sherman’s march into Atlanta, where he went burning whatever he encountered, right and left, in a total war strategy (Brooks, 2017). Although the South was a largely agrarian area, the tactics used against it by Lincoln’s later generals have been called one of the first modern or total war strategies. This was a more effective way to starve the South, and eventually prompted the Confederate’s surrender (Brooks, 2017).
But the Union victory upon the shift to a more offensive strategy was not always assured. According to Pearlman (2016), although Grant’s victories in 1863 at Gettysburg and Vicksburg were impressive and critical in the war’s eventual result, “in 1864 heavy casualties and battlefield stalemate produced by political generals nearly doomed the Union” (par.2). Grant put five Union Armies, with five generals in charge of each separate element, rationalizing that he needed to attack the beleaguered Confederacy everywhere, with the assumption it would be weak somewhere (Pearlman, 2016). But Grant’s strategy unraveled when one of his generals obtained permission from Lincoln to change Grant’s plan to attack Mobile, resulting in a bloody defeat. Similarly, the Shenandoah Valley offensive resulted in significant casualties (Pearlman, 2016).
Pearlman (2016) attributes this to the fact that, despite Grant’s strength, many of the lower-level generals appointed by Lincoln were political rather than military appointments and lacked military knowledge and expertise. These lackluster generals often ignored Grant’s direction. Grant himself later criticized the president’s lack of military knowledge or experience in Grant’s memoirs.
Not only were the defeats in 1864 heavy losses in terms of casualties at a time in which morale was flagging, but they occurred around the time of Lincoln’s election. Had the tide not successfully been reversed, it could have cost Lincoln the election, and, in the point of view of many historians, resulted in a defeat of the Union itself without his leadership. Fortunately, Grant was eventually able to leverage the Union’s superior numbers and also better access to critical supplies like food and armaments; Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of slaves in the Confederate states, which resulted in a flood of freed African-Americans to the Union side, was an example of how his political support could act as a compliment to Grant’s military leadership.
References
Brooks, R. (2017). What were the major strategies of the Civil War? Civil War Saga. Retrieved from: http://civilwarsaga.com/civil-war-strategies/
Pearlman, M. (2016). Union at risk: How Lincoln and Grant nearly lost the war in 1864. Civil War Times. Retrieved from:
https://www.historynet.com/the-union-at-risk-how-lincoln-and-grant-nearly-lost-the-war- in-1864.htm