l incoln’s s hadow 51
emancipation. Applied broadly by Sherman in his Atlanta campaign
and the subsequent march across Georgia in 1864 (when Sherman
simply abandoned his communications and vanished with his army
until emerging on the Atlantic coast at Savannah), this would ulti-
mately prove a key to the Union triumph.
Lincoln tried repeatedly to coordinate the movements of the Union
armies to prevent the concentration of rebel forces against any single
thrust, but his generals, fretting over their specifi c logistical problems,
lacked his larger strategic vision. Typically they responded to his urging
and even his direct orders by pointing out their diffi culties with insuf-
fi cient munitions, too few wagons and horses, and other shortcomings.
Their professional mind-set and conventional training gave them a
special appreciation of the demands of a tough campaign in enemy
country; careful preparation now would prevent disaster later. Lincoln
saw the bigger picture. If multiple armies attacked in unison, the Con-
federates could not concentrate against any one of them, and each
Union force would enjoy a local advantage. Both sides had a point, of
course, and the tension between them could not be resolved so long as
the war was limited in scope.
Not until 1864 did all the elements come together in a way that put
Lincoln and his generals on the same page. I have noted some of these
pieces—the widening of war objectives to encompass the elimination of
slavery, the concomitant recognition that the will of white southerners
to resist would have to be crushed, and the discovery by Grant around
Vicksburg that depriving the population of what it needed to survive
had both military and psychological benefi ts. To this we can add the
emergence of Union military leaders in the West, Grant and Sherman,
who were prepared to continue campaigns despite heavy casualties
because they realized the enemy was less able to make good his losses.
Lincoln recognized by the third winter of the war that vastly more
soldiers died of disease in camps than in even the bloodiest engage-
ments, so nothing was to be gained by suspending operations. Th e
implication: once a campaign started, it must continue until brought to
a successful conclusion.
In 1864, the Civil War assumed “modern” form, more closely resem-
bling the bloodletting of the Western Front in 1917 than the episodic
engagements common in the fi rst two years of the confl ict. Once Grant