This Week in History recalls memorable and decisive events and personalities of the past.
2nd September 1864 – American Civil War: Union forces enter Atlanta, a day after the Confederate defenders flee the city, ending the Atlanta Campaign
The American Civil War remains to this day the deadliest conflict in American history. The conflict arose from the great unsettled question of America’s founding, that being the institution of slavery. By the 1860s sharp divisions in political allegiance, culture and economics had emerged between the free states of the North and the slave-owning states of the South.
The conflict intensified as the United States spread out west, purchasing land from European powers and capturing land from Mexico, and brought new states into the Union. At first every new free state was matched by the addition of a slave state. As the 1860s approached this compromise broke down and North and South attempted to secure control of the US senate by ensuring that all new states were either free or slave.
The tensions were brought to a crisis point in 1860 when the presidential election was won by Republican Abraham Lincoln, a candidate who believed in the gradual abolition of slavery, whose party was anti-slavery and received almost no support from the southern states and yet still triumphed in the election.
Southerners realised they were heading for political marginalisation, and many were fearful the South would forcibly liberate all of the slaves and begin a race war in the southern states.
In an effort to protect slavery and escape northern political domination, the southern states declared independence and formed the Confederate states of America under a constitution that enshrined slavery explicitly.
Conflict soon broke out between the newly independent states and the Federal government, starting the American Civil War. At first the Confederates shocked the world by winning many victories against the numerically superior and better equipped northern states, which had not only had a much larger population but also a much stronger economy and industrial base. Between 1861 and 1863 the Confederates time and again smashed Union armies and even advanced into the northern state of Pennsylvania.
Confederate victories were fleeting, however. In 1862, much of the Confederate fleet was destroyed in battles with the superior Union fleet. And then the Union captured the important city of New Orleans.
This isolated the Confederate states from trade and supply as the Union imposed a blockade and the Confederate economy began to collapse.
In July 1863 Confederate troops invading the North were dealt a decisive blow by the Union armies at the Battle of Gettysburg, which forced them to retreat back into the south. Union armies now had the initiative.
In September 1863, the Union launched the Chattanooga Campaign to rescue besieged Union troops in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By the end of the year, the confederates were driven out of Tennessee.
This allowed the Union in 1864 to launch the Atlanta Campaign, a strike into the heart of Confederate territory which sought to decisively break the back of the confederacy.
This campaign was led by Union general William Tecumseh Sherman, and began in May 1864.
Initially the Confederates in Georgia fought defensively, retreating in order to avoid flanking manoeuvres by Sherman’s army. However, this was seen as not aggressive enough and so the Confederate government replaced the general leading the confederate forces in Georgia, Joseph E. Johnston, with the more aggressive John Bell Hood, who launched numerous attacks against the Union troops, suffering heavy casualties.
Confederate troops were cut off from their supply lines in late August 1864 and forced to retreat. On 1 September the Confederates abandoned Atlanta, destroying most of the supplies they had stored there to prevent capture.
On 2 September 1864, Sherman’s troops entered the city.
Before the end of the year, Sherman would launch his infamous ‘march to the sea’, an aggressive march across Georgia from Atlanta to the port city of Savannah, during which the Union army engaged in a ‘scorched earth’ campaign, devastating the countryside and industry, further crippling the confederate economy.
Thousands of slaves were freed during this march, and would follow the Union army as it travelled across the country.
With the Confederate economy destroyed, the freeing of thousands of slaves, and the coasts blockaded, it was only a matter of time before the entire Confederacy collapsed.
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