GRANT,
SHERMAN, AND
TOTAL WAR
1864
A cohesive strategy in place at last, the Union
pressed the Confederacy so hard that by year’s
end great stretches of Virginia and Georgia
lay in ruins, one major Confederate army was
destroyed at Nashville, and the other caught
in a death grip in the Petersburg trenches.
❮❮ A decisive battle
At the end of 1864, George H. Thomas’s Union forces
held Nashville while John Bell Hood’s Army of
Tennessee dug in on the heights to the south. Waiting
for the right moment to attack, Thomas burst from
the city’s fortifications and in two days of battle—
December 15–16—routed the Confederates,
effectively ending the war in the Western Theater.