Battle of Kennesaw Mountain - Background

Background

In March 1864, Ulysses S. Grant was promoted to lieutenant general and named general in chief of the Union Army. He devised a strategy of multiple, simultaneous offensives against the Confederacy, hoping to prevent any of the rebel armies from reinforcing the others over interior lines. The two most significant of these were by Maj. Gen. George G. Meade's Army of the Potomac, accompanied by Grant himself, which would attack Robert E. Lee's army directly and advance toward the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia; and Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman, replacing Grant in his role as commander of the Military Division of the Mississippi, who would advance from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Atlanta.

Both Grant and Sherman initially had objectives to engage with and destroy the two principal armies of the Confederacy, relegating the capture of important enemy cities to a secondary, supporting role. This was a strategy that President Abraham Lincoln had emphasized throughout the war, but Grant was the first general who actively cooperated with it. As their campaigns progressed, however, the political importance of the cities of Richmond and Atlanta began to dominate their strategy. By 1864, Atlanta was a critical target. The city of 20,000 was founded at the intersection of four important railroad lines that supplied the Confederacy and was a military manufacturing arsenal in its own right. Atlanta's nickname of "Gate City of the South" was apt—its capture would open virtually the entire Deep South to Union conquest. Grant's orders to Sherman were to "move against Johnston's Army, to break it up and to get into the interior of the enemy's country as far as you can, inflicting all the damage you can against their War resources."

Sherman's force of about 100,000 men was composed of three subordinate armies: the Army of the Tennessee (Grant's and later Sherman's army of 1862–63) under Maj. Gen. James B. McPherson; the Army of the Cumberland under Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas; and the relatively small Army of the Ohio (composed of only the XXIII Corps) under Maj. Gen. John M. Schofield. Their principal opponent was the Confederate Army of Tennessee, commanded by Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, who had replaced the unpopular Braxton Bragg after his defeat in Chattanooga in November 1863. The 50,000-man army consisted of the infantry corps of Lt. Gens. William J. Hardee, John Bell Hood, and Leonidas Polk, and a cavalry corps under Maj. Gen. Joseph Wheeler.