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Atlanta 1864: Last Chance for the Confederacy (Great Campaigns of the Civil War)

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Richard McMurry writes an interesting account covering the1864 military and political events in North Georgia stating "Gettysburg had brought no alteration in the relative strength or position of the opposing armies or in the course of the war" noting that Union successes at Gettysburg, Vicksburg and Chattanooga boosted Northern morale and assured that southerners couldn't gain a military victory and secure Federal recognition of Confederate independence. The author outlines the responses of the Confederacy and Union to this strategic dilemma with a narration of Sherman's North Georgia campaign that ultimately resolved the problem.

Lincoln appointed Grant commander of the Federal Armies and Jefferson Davis appointed Joseph E. Johnston, a general he did not trust; commander of the Army of Tennessee and the text states "All the Rebels would pay a very high price for Jefferson Davis long-standing evasion of the command personnel problems in the West." The author makes the fascinating observation that " By 1864 two irrefutable facts about the conflict should have been clear....neither side was likely to win the war in Virginia. The Confederates were too skilled to loose, at least as long as Lee lived, but not strong enough to win.The Northerners...were too strong to lose the war in Virginia but not skilled enough to win it there."

McMurry notes that Grant having nearly achieved military victory in the West, Grant made two decisions that made a Northern victory costly while enhancing Confederate independence chances. The strategy in Virginia to defeat Lee and prevent moving Rebel troops elsewhere; and two, appointing Sherman in Georgia instead of Thomas. Both decisions resulted in "Ten of thousands of Americans --North and South-- paid for this misjudgment with their lives...." and "The outcome of the war remained doubtful much longer..." The author observes that Thomas finished the war as a general "who never suffered defeat on a battlefield where he was in command" concluding "On the basis of his record, Sherman did not merit such a promotion...."

Both Sherman and Johnston had command personnel problems. Johnston inherited a command muddle which one historian described as a "pit of vipers". The narrative and analysis of Sherman's campaign from North Georgia to Atlanta is informative. Sherman dependence on the Western & Atlantic Railroad limited his strategic options to only advancing toward Atlanta because that was where the railroad ran.

The writer makes the intriguing statement that Union General McPherson's seizure of Snake Creep Gap on May 7th probably "determined the outcome of the campaign." adding the fascinating opinion "....if Grant had allowed Thomas to succeed to the command of the Military Division of Mississippi by seniority, the 1864 campaign in Georgia would have ended two or three weeks after its opening with "....a crushing Federal victory that, for all practical purposes would have ended the war in the West....ripping open the entire center of the Confederacy" and "save many lives during the last eleven months of the war."

As the campaign proceeded, Johnston would fortify a strong position and hope Sherman would attack. Sherman was not going to launch a massive assault against strong fortifications and moved against the Confederate left and flanked them out of every prepared position including Dalton, Resaca, Allatoona, Kennesaw Mountain, and Smyra. On July 8 Sherman crossed the Chattahoochee and the battle for Atlanta was imminent.

Davis replaced Joe Johnson with Hood on July 18, 1864 and the text notes "Rarely has a general assumed command of an army under more inauspicious circumstances than those facing John Bell Hood.... His army was backed up to a city it had to hold" which limited his strategic options and maneuvering room. Hood reversed Johnston's conservative policy striking Sherman at Peachtree Creek, Atlanta and Ezra Church but failed to cripple or destroy the opposing force.

Sherman ,after trying artillery for several days, realized the only way to force Atlanta's evacuation was to cut off all rail traffic into and out of the city. Interestingly, the text also notes "Hood too, sought some means of ....forcing his opponent to give up his position at Atlanta." Hood initiated an unsuccessful cavalry raid on railroads supporting the Federals. Sherman finding cavalry ineffective against railroads used infantry to cut the Macon & Western Railroad isolating Atlanta and Hood forcing the Rebels to abandon Atlanta. The Rebels after opening government warehouses to anyone (military or civilian) to take food, clothing etc.the Rebels burned what they couldn't take with them including five locomotives and 28 freight cars containing ammunition which exploded leveling adjacent buildings in a scene well depicted in the movie Gone With The Wind. Hood's infantry cleared Atlanta by 01:00 AM, September 2. Shortly after daylight Mayor James Calhoun rode north of Atlanta and surrendered the city.

The author concludes with an excellent analysis of the generalships of Sherman, Johnston and Hood noting that Sherman as a field general was "probably not much above average". However, by 1864 Sherman had developed a grasp of the geopolitical-psychological strategy, matched by few, realizing that a war can be won "by destroying the enemy's society and its logistical-economic-social infrastructure and he put that doctrine into practice on a grand scale...." McMurry states Davis contributed to the Rebel command failures in Georgia through his failure to involve himself in western matters.

McMurry concludes "Grant's much-vaunted plan did not work" and "It was a Confederate policy....that kept Lee from sending troops to reinforce the Rebels in Georgia, not the pressure of Grant's assaults on the Confederates in Virginia." Failure of Grant's plan resulted in tens of thousands of casualties.

A strong point throughout this work are the brief parallel accounts given of military and political activities in other areas providing a balanced account of the situations facing both Northern and Southern governments and their commanders. The books ends with two appendices analyzing Grant's strategy and Johnston's railroad strategy plus two excellent appendices titled "Numbers and Losses" and "The Atlanta Campaign and the Election of 1864".

Lots of military historians have gone over this ground, but McMurry takes an iconoclastic stance that yields fascinating results.

His broad argument is that Grant made an error in putting Sherman in charge of the "west" rather than Thomas. Grant made a second, and related, error in personally directing Meade, while leaving Sherman to himself. These goofs caused many thousands of lives on both sides. The war could have been brought to an end much sooner had the full weight of the federals been put behind a drive to and then beyond Atlanta, under Thomas' leadership and perhaps with Grant's supervision, with Meade left in control of the Army of the Potomac.

On the confederate side, I see this book as rehabilitating Hood, and as driving a stake through whatever remains of Joe Johnston's once-high but always undeserved reputation.

Another book that tackles the subject of who lost Atlanta. Joe Johnson certainly set the stage by retreating and not seriously contesting Sherman's movements toward one of the South's largest cities. Johnson thought Sherman would charge his entrenched positions, and Sherman had no desire to take thousands of casualties. So the move toward Atlanta was one of feints and flanking movements which resulted in Sherman moving closer to Atlanta and Johnson giving up valuable real estate.

This is a nicer book than Atlanta will Fall, because it is less harsh on Joe Johnson. It is charitable to both Johnson and Hood, although it does point the finger at both for losing Atlanta. Hood is depicted as a cavilier soldier who aggressiveness would result in thousands of Army of Tennessee soldiers deaths.

This is a short read, and although a little revisionist, it backs its arguments up with solid facts, as noted in the Appendixes. A good, solid read about Sherman's drive to Atlanta.

This book languished on my "to read" stack, always getting pushed down as "better books" arrived. On trips through the area, I would resolve to read this next but never did. After hearing the author speak on Johnston, resolve became action. I must confess this is the "better book" and should have been read sooner.

This is what a campaign overview should be. Intelligently written, directly to the point with enough detail to sustain the story without slowing the narration. Mr. McMurry has an excellent in-depth understanding of the subject. This allows him to combine information and insight that informs and entertains at the same time. He easily places the campaign within the context of the war and the people within their inter-personal histories. The personalities and how they relate or fail to relate is the heart of the CSA's problem and the seeds of the questions we still ask. The Confederate Army of Tennessee is a study in management failure; McMurry gives these problems a national perspective by linking them to Davis' personality. This provides an answer to the South's inability to find new generals that was crippling her by 1864.

The maps are campaign level and linked to the chapter. They were detailed enough to meet the needs of movement but do not provide a campaign level picture. There are no battle maps, this is a campaign overview and battle maps, while nice, are not required. I found the author to be to hard on Grant in saying that his 1864 strategy failed. Few would consider it a resounding success but total failure is overly harsh. The North is winning because they fond at least two good fighting generals. The South is losing because they cannot find more than one.

If you require a well written, intelligent and fun to read overview of the Atlanta Campaign, this is it.

The author's stated goal in writing this book is to bring fresh perspective to well-covered material, and he certainly accomplishes that. This fairly short book provides a concise history of the campaign from Dalton to Atlanta, but at heart it is really more of an essay, arguing several points and re-examining things that have been too easily accepted.

McMurry reconsiders the military performances of Johnston, Hood, Sherman, and Grant, with no one faring particularly well in his review. He also re-examines Grant's overall strategy for 1864, the political and personal complications of Confederate President Jefferson Davis' working relationships with the armies in the fields, the ruinous personal politics of the Army of Tennessee, the effect of the Atlanta campaign on the 1864 presidential campaign, and the question of whether Nathan Bedford Forrest and his Critter Company could really have destroyed the Union rail lines by riding east from Mississippi. His examinations of these matters and many highly hypothetical issues are unusually lucid, well-conceived, and logical, and he argues his points so well it's hard to disagree.

The details of the campaign itself are, as always, difficult to follow with total understanding; the geography is challenging even to a local native. The book really excels in providing a broader historical context for the events it describes.

Richard M. McMurry is best known to me as the principle modern biographer of John Bell Hood. His book on that general was judicious and intelligent, if short, but Hood wasn't a particularly prominent character in the Civil War, at least for the first half of the war, so it seemed reasonable. Atlanta 1864 is as far as I know his second book, and while it's good, it's also very short and cursory.

The book covers the campaign in the spring and summer of 1864, when Sherman challenged first Johnston and then Hood for the city of Atlanta, which turned out to be decisive in the outcome of the war. The campaign has been controversial ever since, not the least because the two principle Confederate commanders engaged in a vicious debate for some years after the campaign, and only ceased when Hood died suddenly. Frankly, this aspect of the campaign would have been interesting to go over again, but the author only briefly deals with it, instead concentrating on the campaign itself, and the events that occurred in 1864.

Sherman has a very good reputation as a general, and much of that rests on the Atlanta campaign that is the book's focus. Johnston too has a good rep, and Hood, by contrast, has a very poor one as an army commander. Much of the author's attention is taken up going over the performance of these three men during the campaign, looking at the decisions they made in a strategic sense, whether they could have chosen to do something else more advantageous, and how their decisions fared. All three generals come in for some criticism, though Sherman gets by with the least. Johnston is criticized for a variety of things, and praised for little, while poor Hood appears to have been out of his depth, in the mind of the author.

The campaign itself is detailed only briefly, with battles occupying a paragraph or two, and strategic maneuvers a page or so. The decision to fire Johnston and replace him with Hood, made by Davis in the midst of the campaign, gets a whole chapter. The campaign is put into context with a couple of chapters that detail what was happening in other parts of the country, politically and militarily. Everything is laid out so that it's easy to understand, and the discussion is reasonable.

I don't agree with all of the conclusions of the book (for instance, I think Grant's Overland Campaign of 1864 was a success, not a failure) but the discussion is interesting, and nothing's particularly out of place or unreasonable. I would recommend this book to any Civil War buff. It's a very good book.

I confess I often find military history very hard to follow with all those ridges, flanks, obstacles and maps that never seem to correspond to what you are reading. This book is clarity itself and explains the campaigns from a number of points of view, giving clear assessments, which one can agree or disagree with, but will surely respect as having been made thoughtfully. An admirable little book.

McMurry provides a well written concise review of the 1864 campaign for Atlanta. I read Castel's Decision in the West immediately prior to reading McMurry's book. McMurry pays homage to Castel, and rightly so. Castel's book is a 600 page blow by blow account, McMurry's book is more of a summary. Both books are very good. Both are critical of Sherman as a battlefield general, laudatory of Thomas, and a lot more understanding towards Hood, at least as to the Atlanta campaign. I come away with the opinion that Grant and Sherman played favorites to such an extent that they detracted fromt the war effort and probably cost a lot of lives. It is also patently obvious that if Joe Johnston was the best Jefferson Davis could do in 1864 to command the Army of Tennessee, the Confederacy was dreadfully short of generals who could command armies. I followed these two books with The Day Dixie Died, which focuses on the Battle of Atlanta. I highly recommend all three books for anyone who wants to gain an understanding of the campaign that probably won reelection for Lincoln and the war for the North.

Very little info on the actual battles that were fought. Instead there are details of the overall campaign. Good info about decisions the generals and the problems that they faced with their staffs'. Also good information about logistics in the campaign. Very good book, wonderful read.

Bought this for my father in law's birthday as he is a Civil War buff and specifically wanted something with details about Sherman's Atlanta campaign. He was delighted and says that this is a great book full of information.