Western theater of the American Civil War

• 1. Introduction

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  The western theater of the American Civil War sprawled across eight states and changed hands river by river, ridge by ridge. While generals like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson captured the nation's imagination in the east, a quieter, relentless campaign was unfolding across Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Tennessee. The Union armies there did not make headlines the way battles near Washington did. They simply won, and won again, and kept winning. From the fall of 1861 to the spring of 1865, they suffered only one outright defeat in a string of major engagements. That single loss happened at Chickamauga in September 1863. The contrast with the eastern theater, where the war had ground into a near-stalemate for years, could not have been sharper. Some historians have since argued that the west was actually the war's decisive front. What gave Union forces such a consistent edge there? And what did the Confederacy sacrifice in the effort to hold territory so vast it could barely be defended? The answers run through rivers, railroads, and a chain of commanders whose careers were forged in the region's muddy campaigns.

• 2. Geography and the Anaconda

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  Winfield Scott, the Union General-in-Chief, had identified the Mississippi River as one of the key objectives in his overall war plan, known as the Anaconda Plan. The western theater was purpose-built to execute that vision. It occupied the land east of the Mississippi and west of the Appalachian Mountains, with the great river systems of the Tennessee and the Cumberland serving as natural highways for Union armies pushing deep into Confederate territory. Those rivers ran north to south, which suited the invading Union forces perfectly. The Confederacy's railroad network, by contrast, ran mostly north to south as well, which made it difficult to shift reinforcements laterally from the industrialized east to the threatened west. Military historian J. F. C. Fuller later described the entire Union invasion as an immense turning movement, a left wheel beginning in Kentucky, sweeping south down the Mississippi, then turning east through Tennessee, Georgia, and the Carolinas. The Confederacy was left defending an enormous front with numerically inferior forces and a logistical system ill-suited to the task. Beyond these conventional pressures, the western theater was also shaped by conflicts with Native American nations, federal efforts to control slavery in territories across the region, and fierce struggles over political allegiance in the border states.

• 3. Kentucky and the First Moves

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  Kentucky had declared itself neutral when the war began, but that fiction collapsed almost immediately. On the 3rd of September 1861, Confederate Major General Leonidas Polk occupied Columbus, a position considered critical to controlling the lower Mississippi River. Two days later, Union Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant seized Paducah. Neither side would respect Kentucky's neutrality again. Captain Nathaniel Lyon had already secured Missouri for the Union earlier that summer with a victory at Boonville in June, preventing the loss of the second critical border state. The Confederate side of the Kentucky equation was organized by General Albert Sidney Johnston, who commanded all forces from Arkansas to the Cumberland Gap and established political support for a Confederate alternative government centered at Bowling Green, recognized in December 1861. On the Union side, command was fractured into three separate departments by November 1861: the Department of Kansas under Major General David Hunter, the Department of the Missouri under Major General Henry Halleck, and the Department of the Ohio under Brigadier General Don Carlos Buell. Minor Union victories at Middle Creek on the 10th of January 1862 under Colonel James A. Garfield, and at Mill Springs on the 19th of January 1862 under Brigadier General George Henry Thomas, broke the end of the Confederate Western defensive line and opened the Cumberland Gap to East Tennessee. The real blow, however, would come not from infantry maneuver but from the rivers.

• 4. Forts Henry and Donelson

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  Grant moved his troops up the Tennessee River on river transports on the 2nd of February 1862, coordinating closely with Navy Flag Officer Andrew H. Foote. Fort Henry sat on a floodplain, its guns partially submerged by winter flooding, and was nearly indefensible against naval gunfire. Brigadier General Lloyd Tilghman withdrew almost his entire garrison on the 5th of February, marching 11 miles east to Fort Donelson, leaving only a skeleton crew to fight an artillery duel that lasted nearly three hours before resistance ended. Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River was a far tougher proposition. On the 15th of February, Confederate Brigadier General John B. Floyd launched a surprise assault against the Union right flank commanded by Brigadier General John A. McClernand, briefly breaking through, but the escape route was not secured. Grant counterattacked the now-weakened Confederate right. With his forces trapped in the fort and the town of Dover, Tennessee, Confederate Brigadier General Simon B. Buckner surrendered his command of 11,500 men, along with guns and supplies, to Grant's demand for "unconditional surrender". Henry and Donelson were the first significant Union victories of the entire war. Their fall also rendered Confederate General Polk's position at Columbus untenable, and the Memphis and Ohio Railroad link that had allowed Confederate lateral movement was severed. Two major rivers now lay open for deeper Union operations into the South.

• 5. Shiloh and Corinth

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  General Albert Sidney Johnston had concentrated Confederate forces near Corinth, Mississippi, planning an offensive to recapture the initiative. On the 6th of April 1862, the combined Confederate armies under Johnston and General P. G. T. Beauregard launched a massive dawn assault against Grant's unprepared Army of West Tennessee at Pittsburg Landing, opening the Battle of Shiloh. The first day drove Grant back toward the Tennessee River but could not finish him. Johnston was mortally wounded leading an infantry charge that day; Confederate President Jefferson Davis had considered him the most effective general in the Confederacy. On the 7th of April, reinforcements from Buell's army enabled Grant to counterattack and drive the Confederates back. The battle produced almost 24,000 casualties on both sides combined, more than all previous American battles combined, and Grant was heavily criticized both for the losses and for failing to pursue the retreating enemy. That same day, Union Major General John Pope defeated Beauregard's isolated force at Island Number 10, opening the Mississippi River almost as far south as Memphis. On the 28th of April, Admiral David Farragut captured New Orleans, the South's largest city and most significant seaport. Halleck then assembled a massive combined force and moved agonizingly slowly toward Corinth, covering 20 miles in four weeks and then taking another three weeks to advance eight more miles. Beauregard withdrew without a fight on the night of the 29th of May, abandoning the Confederate rail hub intact but keeping his army in the field.

• 6. Vicksburg: Grant's Masterwork

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  Abraham Lincoln believed that Vicksburg, Mississippi, was a key to winning the war. Perched on high bluffs over a sharp bend in the Mississippi and called the "Gibraltar of the Mississippi," the city resisted all approaches. Admiral Farragut had already failed against it in May 1862. Grant's first campaign was a two-pronged drive: William T. Sherman sailed down the river with 32,000 men while Grant moved through Mississippi by rail with 40,000, but Confederate cavalry under Earl Van Dorn cut Grant's supply line at Holly Springs, forcing him back. Sherman was repulsed at Chickasaw Bayou in late December. In the spring of 1863, Grant devised a bolder solution. On the 16th of April, Union gunboats and troop transports ran past the Vicksburg guns at great risk and ferried Grant's army across the river at Bruinsburg, south of the city. A cavalry raid through central Mississippi by Colonel Benjamin Grierson, known as Grierson's Raid, drew Confederate forces away from Grant's crossing. Rather than marching directly on Vicksburg, Grant drove northeast to cut the communications between the city's garrison under Major General John C. Pemberton and the forces at Jackson under General Joseph E. Johnston. Sherman's corps captured Jackson on the 14th of May; the army then turned west. The decisive engagement came at Champion Hill, after which Pemberton withdrew into his entrenchments. After two costly frontal assaults failed, Grant settled in for a siege. The soldiers and civilians inside Vicksburg endured Union bombardment and starvation while Johnston, cut off and cautious, never came. On the 4th of July 1863, Pemberton surrendered his army and the city. By the 8th of July, after Banks captured Port Hudson, the entire Mississippi River was in Union hands and the Confederacy was split in two.

• 7. Chickamauga and Chattanooga

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  Rosecrans spent nearly six months after Stones River occupying Murfreesboro before advancing on Chattanooga in a brilliant, near-bloodless campaign of maneuver in June 1863, the Tullahoma Campaign, that drove Bragg out of Middle Tennessee entirely. Rosecrans then crossed the Tennessee River and pursued Bragg into the mountains of northwestern Georgia, where a trap had been laid. The Confederate high command had reinforced Bragg with a division from Mississippi and a corps from the Army of Northern Virginia under James Longstreet. At the Battle of Chickamauga on the 19th and the 20th of September 1863, a command misunderstanding opened a gap in the Union line just as Longstreet's corps arrived. Longstreet drove through and sent the Union army in retreat, the only major Union defeat in the western theater. A defensive stand by Major General George H. Thomas, commanding the Union XIV Corps and earning the name "The Rock of Chickamauga," prevented a complete rout. Rosecrans fell back to Chattanooga, where Bragg besieged the city from the high ground. Grant, given command of the Military Division of the Mississippi on the 17th of October, replaced Rosecrans with Thomas and opened the "Cracker Line" supply route into the city. Forty thousand reinforcements arrived from Sherman's Army of the Tennessee and from the Army of the Potomac under Joseph Hooker. On the 24th of November 1863, Hooker took Lookout Mountain. The next day, Thomas's troops, ordered merely to make a diversionary attack on Missionary Ridge, charged straight up the imposing slope without further orders and broke the Confederate line. Bragg, who had survived previous failures partly because of his personal friendship with Jefferson Davis, was finally relieved of command.

• 8. Atlanta, the March, and the End

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  When Grant went east as general-in-chief in March 1864, Sherman took command of the Military Division of the Mississippi with three armies totaling 98,000 men against Johnston's 50,000 in the Confederate Army of Tennessee. Sherman pressed Johnston southeast through mountainous terrain in a series of flanking movements, almost always around Johnston's left flank. The one exception, the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain on the 27th of June 1864, saw Sherman order a frontal assault against his subordinates' advice and lose 3,000 men against Johnston's 1,000. Jefferson Davis, frustrated with Johnston's retreating strategy, replaced him with the more aggressive Lieutenant General John Bell Hood just before the Battle of Peachtree Creek on the 20th of July. Hood attacked repeatedly, losing heavily each time. Sherman cut Hood's supply lines and Hood evacuated Atlanta on the night of the 1st of September 1864, burning military supplies and installations and setting off a great fire. Sherman then turned south on what became known as the March to the Sea, leaving Atlanta on the 15th of November 1864 in two columns roughly 60 miles apart, under Major General Oliver Otis Howard on the right and Major General Henry Warner Slocum on the left. At Savannah on the 17th of December, Sherman encountered about 10,000 troops under Major General William J. Hardee; after prolonged artillery bombardment, Hardee evacuated. Sherman telegraphed Lincoln: "I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the City of Savannah." The subsequent Carolinas Campaign drove through South Carolina, the first state to have seceded, with Columbia surrendering on the 17th of February 1865 and Wilmington falling on the 22nd. Johnston signed an armistice with Sherman at Bennett Place, a farmhouse near Durham Station, on the 18th of April 1865, three days after Lincoln's assassination, with formal military surrender following on the 26th of April. Wilson's cavalry officially took control of Tallahassee, Florida, on the 20th of May 1865, the last Confederate state capital east of the Mississippi River to be captured, marking the close of operations in the western theater.