The summer and fall campaigns of 1863 marked the pivotal five-month-long turning point of the Civil War. Famous and well-noted campaigns around Vicksburg, Mississippi, and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania have rightly been highlighted as turning-point moments. Less well-known, however, are the campaigns that unfolded in Middle and East Tennessee between June and November, 1863. Despite being eclipsed by the dramatic surrender of the Confederates’ last bastion on the Mississippi River and by the stunning defeat of Lee’s Army in Pennsylvania, the 1863 Tennessee campaigns initiated broad military, logistical, political, and social changes that transformed the Confederacy’s capacity to make war, unleashed the transformative power of the Emancipation Proclamation, freed white Unionists from the control of Confederate authority thus making available a tremendous untapped reservoir of manpower, and opened a violent and bloody guerrilla war that raged for years after the end of the war. The campaign also transformed the landscape where the armies concentrated and set in motion more than a century of environmental catastrophe in some parts of Tennessee. Finally, in creating a memorial landscape in the late 1880s and 1890s that became the model for the nation’s National Military Parks the veterans of the 1863 Tennessee campaigns set the tone and created the legal foundations that shaped and continue to shape the way Americans remember and commemorate the Civil War.

“Where is the proper place to break it?” asked Major General Henry W. Halleck of his officers as they peered at the Confederate line drawn on a map of the western theater. It was a cold December 1861 evening and several officers, including George W. Cullum and William T. Sherman, had gathered to discuss strategy. It was an obvious question that begged to be answered as the men examined the long Confederate defensive line that ran from the Mississippi River to the mountains of eastern Kentucky and Tennessee near the Cumberland Gap. Halleck was one of the main Union generals Abraham Lincoln had tapped to find the best possible route of advance through this enemy defensive line and into the heart of the Confederacy, and he was certainly aware of the enormity of the task.

The first of these themes (the accurate depiction of war) brings together research on a series of writers who attempted to describe the battles of the Civil War in their fiction such as Ambrose Bierce, John Esten Cooke, Herman Melville, and Frances E. W. Harper. The second (the social construction of gender norms) involves the analysis of narratives that depict shifting gender roles during the conflict such as Augusta Jane Evan’s novel Macaria and Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, a book which provides an excellent opportunity for discussing the relation of nonfiction genres such as memoir to literary forms.

Several important military operations took place in Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas, and the Indian Territory (Oklahoma) during the first two years of the Civil War. Historians sometimes dismiss the struggle in the trans-Mississippi as a sideshow having little to do with the “real war” east of the Mississippi River, but in fact it was an integral and often significant part of the larger conflict. Operations in the trans-Mississippi usually were smaller in scale than those in other theaters, but they shaped the course of events on both sides of the Great River.

The victory of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia at the Battle of Second Manassas on August 30–1, 1862 left its commander, Robert E. Lee, with three strategic options. He could besiege the Union capital, Washington, D.C.; he could withdraw to Warrenton, Virginia, where his exhausted and poorly supplied army could resupply and recover; or he could carry forward his summer offensive by crossing the Potomac and invading Maryland, and, if circumstances allowed, Pennsylvania. Lee dismissed the first out of hand. His army had neither the logistics nor strength to attempt a siege. The second surrendered the initiative to the enemy and permitted the Federals to reorganize and train the many new regiments raised in response to President Lincoln’s call for 300,000 new volunteers in July 1862. Lee believed the third option offered the greatest opportunities and it kept the initiative in his hands, something he always sought. He related to Confederate president Jefferson Davis that his army was not “properly equipped for an invasion of an enemy’s territory,” but from both a political and military perspective there was sound logic to invasion. The Union Army of the Potomac and Army of Virginia were disorganized and demoralized. Invading Maryland would force the Federals to place an army in the field before they had reorganized. Lee believed it would also force the Federals to withdraw their garrisons at Martinsburg and Harpers Ferry, Virginia, clearing the Shenandoah Valley of all Union troops. Politics figured importantly in Lee’s strategic thinking. He held out little hope for European recognition of the Confederacy. The key to victory was Northern morale and will. In Lee’s view, eroding it with Confederate battlefield successes offered the best prospect for a negotiated peace. Victories on Southern soil were helpful but victory on Northern soil carried the prospect of being politically decisive. Given the condition of the army, invasion was a gamble, but a carefully calculated one on Lee’s part.

The Union’s 1865 Carolinas campaign brought hard war to the Confederacy’s civilian population, emancipated thousands of slaves, and helped bring the Civil War to a close. The campaign began in January 1865 when Union major general William Tecumseh Sherman and 60,000 soldiers marched north from Savannah, and it ended on April 26, 1865 with Confederate general Joseph Johnston’s surrender at Durham Station in North Carolina. The campaign employed unconventional tactics earlier used along Sherman’s March to the Sea (see Chapter 16) in order to inflict physical and psychological damage upon the enemy. To do so, seasoned Union soldiers tore up railroads, burned fields and homes, confiscated food and various supplies, took or killed livestock, raided countless Southern homes, shredded personal treasures, liberated enslaved African Americans, and taunted elite white women. Throughout the month and a half of active campaigning through the Carolinas, Sherman’s troops averaged 10 miles of marching daily and faced little military resistance from the Confederate army.

The American Civil War was not a war of religion. The divisions within America’s most important denominations by the war’s beginning were the result of differing and patently sectional ideas about slavery, and not doctrine. The majority of the war’s nearly 4 million armed participants from both the North and the South were Protestants of one kind or another. Ethnically identifiable and predominantly Catholic regiments like those that made up the Union’s Irish Brigade were of a kind with the Confederacy’s 24th Georgia and 10th Louisiana Infantries. Of only 150,000 Jews in America in 1861, 6,000 Jewish men wore Union blue and likely 3,000 or so Confederate gray. Not only was America’s greatest existential crisis not a war of religion then, in many ways it was the very antithesis of a war of a religion. During the American Civil War, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish Americans on both sides of the conflict made war against their fellow believers in spite of the overwhelmingly similar religious traditions they shared.

The American Civil War was a moment of transition, with its feet firmly planted in the warfare of the past but with new technologies, often not understood or fully exploited by combatants or civilian leadership, and with mass armies equipped by industrialized societies. Nevertheless, technological developments in the market, transportation, and information revolutions, as well as new developments in weapons and other military technologies, shaped its essence. Simultaneously, the Civil War era represented a period of transition, and as participants’ grasp of these technological changes evolved, so too did the nature of military operations. The arena for all this change was the vast geographic spaces of the North American continent, and looming over all was the specter of destruction.

“The progress of our arms,” Abraham Lincoln declared in his second inaugural address on March 4, 1865, “upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself.” The president made this statement eminently satisfied with the work of recent months done by the men who led the forces that had been raised to persuade the South that their bid for independence was a doomed enterprise. Lincoln’s satisfaction was undoubtedly all the sweeter due to the fact that he had not always felt that way about his military’s leadership. Indeed, as recently as August 1864, Lincoln had felt great trepidation over the prospects for his reelection due to a sense that the public was dissatisfied with the results the Union war effort had produced to that point. Yet, by March 1865, under the leadership of men like Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, and David Farragut, Union military forces had driven their Confederate counterparts to the brink of total defeat.

In the last eight months of 1864 Union general William Tecumseh Sherman conducted some of the Civil War’s most significant military operations. When the general invaded Georgia in May, the Union war effort was in doubt, war weariness was ubiquitous in the North, the Lincoln administration’s days were seemingly numbered, and Confederate victory appeared a likely possibility. When the general captured Savannah at year’s end, Lincoln had secured reelection, the Empire State of the South had been gutted, and the Rebels had allowed their last viable chance at independence to slip through their grasp. Due to Sherman’s victories in Georgia, first during the Atlanta campaign (May 7–September 2, 1864) and then during his storied “March to the Sea” (November 15–December 21, 1864), the ultimate triumph of Union armies was all but guaranteed as the sun set on 1864.

When the American Civil War began in April 1861, statesmen around the world realized that the conflict held the potential to shape the future of the Western Hemisphere. Despite the rapid economic and territorial growth of the United States in the years after the War of 1812, the geopolitical development of the Americas remained unsettled. During the more than three-quarters of a century that preceded the Battle of Fort Sumter, a series of wars and revolutions had swept the hemisphere. As a result, the United States emerged independent; victorious slave insurgents founded the nation of Haiti; and Spanish Americans established a number of independent republics in South and Central America. To many observers it appeared that the people of the Americas had forever rejected the principles of monarchy and colonialism.

When the American Civil War began in April 1861, statesmen around the world realized that the conflict held the potential to shape the future of the Western Hemisphere. Despite the rapid economic and territorial growth of the United States in the years after the War of 1812, the geopolitical development of the Americas remained unsettled. During the more than three-quarters of a century that preceded the Battle of Fort Sumter, a series of wars and revolutions had swept the hemisphere. As a result, the United States emerged independent; victorious slave insurgents founded the nation of Haiti; and Spanish Americans established a number of independent republics in South and Central America. To many observers it appeared that the people of the Americas had forever rejected the principles of monarchy and colonialism.

On May 14, 1860, New York’s Harper’s Weekly published a double-page lithograph, depicting eleven “Prominent Candidates for the Republican Nomination at Chicago” just a few days before the party convention. The artist arranged the portraits in two groups of five on the right and left, with New York’s William H. Seward occupying the central place. A past senator and governor, Seward was a strong-minded abolitionist and one of the early architects of the Republican party. Many felt that the nomination was his to lose. To Seward’s left were five men in three rows: Missouri’s Edward Bates, New Jersey’s Alexander Pennington, Ohio’s Salmon P. Chase, transplanted Californian John C. Frémont, and Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois. Frémont had been the Republican standard-bearer four years before, but this time around he was not seen as a likely choice. Chase, on the other hand, had a substantial reputation as an ardent Radical and a leading Republican. The fairly moderate Lincoln was also a serious possibility, although he lacked the national stature of Seward or Chase.

On May 14, 1860, New York’s Harper’s Weekly published a double-page lithograph, depicting eleven “Prominent Candidates for the Republican Nomination at Chicago” just a few days before the party convention. The artist arranged the portraits in two groups of five on the right and left, with New York’s William H. Seward occupying the central place. A past senator and governor, Seward was a strong-minded abolitionist and one of the early architects of the Republican party. Many felt that the nomination was his to lose. To Seward’s left were five men in three rows: Missouri’s Edward Bates, New Jersey’s Alexander Pennington, Ohio’s Salmon P. Chase, transplanted Californian John C. Frémont, and Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois. Frémont had been the Republican standard-bearer four years before, but this time around he was not seen as a likely choice. Chase, on the other hand, had a substantial reputation as an ardent Radical and a leading Republican. The fairly moderate Lincoln was also a serious possibility, although he lacked the national stature of Seward or Chase.