50 e lusive v ictories
For more than two years Lincoln searched for a commander who could
use this army eff ectively, discarding one after another (McClellan twice,
Burnside, Hooker, and Meade). Eventually U. S. Grant, the most
accomplished general on the Union side, came east to oversee the Army
of the Potomac (Meade retained formal command), but even he could
not make it more agile. He prevailed in the end because he was able to
pin Lee’s army in a siege at Petersburg while other Union forces swept
through the South and wore down and defeated the other rebel armies.
In the West, the Union forces were divided into two main armies,
the Army of the Tennessee and the Army of the Ohio/Cumberland,
which sometimes operated in coordination and under unifi ed direction
but also pursued separate campaigns. In central Tennessee, Buell’s Army
of the Ohio had many of the sluggish traits exhibited by his friend
McClellan’s eastern formation. When Buell was ousted in 1862, his suc-
cessor, William Rosecrans, persisted in the habit of insisting that every
supply deficiency be corrected before he began a campaign. Much
quicker to move and less demanding of logistical fulfi llment before it
did so was Grant’s Army of the Tennessee, in which Sherman emerged
as his close deputy. First in Tennessee and later in Mississippi, Grant
showed relentless determination as his troops penetrated deeply into
the South, mostly using rivers as highways. But once these campaigns
shifted to land, they also pointed up the vulnerability of long supply
lines in hostile territory. For example, when Vicksburg and the opening
of the Mississippi seemed within Grant’s reach in late 1862, a devas-
tating raid on his main supply base at Holly Springs, Mississippi, and
cavalry raids on his line of communications forced him to backtrack to
Memphis and added months to the campaign.
It was in the western theater that Union armies learned how to live
off the land, thereby depriving the Confederates of essential local sup-
plies while also delivering to the civilian population the painful lesson
that the price of rebellion was economic ruin and social upheaval. And
northern commanders in the West discovered that a lean force that
brought with it enough to fi ght several engagements could survive occa-
sional disruptions in its line of communications by Confederate cavalry
raids. Th e practice of stripping bare farms and towns along the line of
march, moreover, fi t well with the turn to the hard war that the Lincoln
administration embraced when it chose to broaden war goals to include