Atlanta 1864: Last Chance for the Confederacy

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.

this is a digest since all the facts of the Atlanta campaign couldn't be covered in 200 pages. From the start when the author suggested that the liberation of Andersonville Prison in southern Georgia would have given the Yankees another couple of thousand soldiers i had to question it since Andersonville was a "humanitarain disaster". Indeed if Sherman had freed up this camp he would have had such a handful he wouldn't have been able to fight Johnson's army at all. That is why he choose to ignore it,he knew what was there but he never mentioned it and only sent a light cavalry raid to attempt it.Twelve thousand internees living virtually in their own sewage would not have been a positive addition to his army.Joe Johnson was a counter-puncher and we'll never know what he would have done,cause even at Richmond when he struck the Yanks a few miles from Richmond,he was wounded and Lee took over.The private confederate soldier may have griped at Johnson but at as they say,"a griping soldier is a happy soldier",not like the silent fear the troops had when Hood took over. I've read the memoirs of CSA soldier Sam Watkins and according to him Joe Johnson was loved like a father cause despite the marching and entrenching he spared his soldiers lives.Hood was represented by some accounts as addicted to painkillers and became more aggressive the more body parts he lost.A fine brigade commander but as the "Peter Principle" states,promoted beyond his capacity.His promotion shows how desperate the Confederacy was in fact.Nevermind the northern 1864 elections,the south was even more in need of a victory.On the other hand the author does point out that Hood tried to attack the Yanks when they were moving before they could get entrenched,so his attacks at Atlanta were not completely insane,unless you were in the attacking formation.The fog of war always bad was even worse,during the Civil War remember there are no walkie-talkies so a commander must count on a certain amount of chaos in troop movements. Johnson on the other hand kept things pretty simple and compact and the Confederate Army was an intact force when Hood took it over.When Hood was relieved after his failure to defeat Sherman it was little more than a "third column". I did like the way the author stressed the different railroad connections and their importance in the campaign,strategy over tactics. unfortuneately for the confederate army the north was alot better equipped to implement theirs.

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 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 th

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.