Both the Federal and Confederate armies lay relatively stationary after the battles outside Atlanta on July 20-22. Major-General William T. Sherman, commanding the three Federal armies trying to capture the vital city, busied himself with positioning and transitioning the command of the Army of the Tennessee to Major-General Oliver O. Howard. General John Bell Hood, commanding the Confederate Army of Tennessee, fell back into defensive works just outside Atlanta and waited for Sherman to make a move. Troops of both sides buried the dead and tended to the wounded.
By the 25th, Federal engineers had completed construction on a bridge spanning the Chattahoochee River. This bridge was 90 feet high and 760 feet long, and it had been built in just five days. This enabled the delivery of supplies to a base behind Major-General George H. Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland on Peachtree Creek, north of Atlanta.
As Sherman developed a plan to get to Atlanta, he wrote his wife Ellen, “We have Atlanta close aboard, as the sailors say, but it is a hard nut to handle. These fellows fight like Devils and Indians combined, and it calls for all my cunning and strength.” President Abraham Lincoln wrote Sherman offering his “profoundest thanks to you and your whole Army for the present campaign so far.”
Sherman’s chief engineer, Captain Orlando Poe, concluded that the Confederate defenses on Atlanta’s perimeter were “too strong to assault and too extensive to invest.” Sherman therefore decided to create a “circle of desolation” around the city. This would involve bombarding Atlanta and cutting off its four railroads, thereby starving the army and the city into submission.
The Federals already controlled the Western & Atlantic Railroad, which supplied them from Chattanooga. They had done extensive damage to the Georgia Railroad running east to Augusta, and the Atlanta & West Point running southwest into Alabama. Only the Macon & Western, running southeast to the Atlantic Coast, was left to supply the soldiers and civilians in Atlanta.
Laying partial siege to the city, Sherman planned to shift his armies from north and east of the city to west and south in a counterclockwise movement. His objective was the intersection of the Atlanta & West Point and Macon & Western railroads at East Point, southwest of Atlanta.
The Federal armies were arranged in a rough semicircle, with Thomas’s army north of Atlanta, Major-General John Schofield’s Army of the Ohio to Thomas’s left (northeast), and Howard’s Army of the Tennessee to Schofield’s left (east). Sherman intended to shift Howard’s army to Thomas’s right, so that the semicircle ran from north to west.
Once Howard’s army shifted to the right, Schofield’s and Thomas’s would follow suit, moving along the Chattahoochee River toward East Point. Sherman also dispatched two Federal cavalry forces to harass the Confederate flanks and attack the Macon & Western Railroad from both the east and west. Howard’s Federals started moving around Schofield and Thomas before sunrise on the 27th.
Meanwhile, Hood remained poised to attack when the opportunity presented itself. Apprised of the Federal moves, he dispatched Major-General Joseph Wheeler’s cavalry to stop the Federal troopers. He then assigned two of his corps under Lieutenant-Generals Alexander P. Stewart and Stephen D. Lee (newly arrived from Mississippi to take over from Major-General Benjamin F. Cheatham) to stop the Federals from threatening the vital railroads southwest of Atlanta.
Bibliography
- Bailey, Ronald H., The Battles for Atlanta: Sherman Moves East. Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, 1983.
- Castel, Albert (Patricia L. Faust ed.), Historical Times Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Civil War. New York: Harper & Row, 1986.
- Foote, Shelby, The Civil War, A Narrative: Red River to Appomattox. New York: Vintage Civil War Library, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (Kindle Edition), 2011.
- Woodworth, Steven E., Nothing but Victory: The Army of the Tennessee, 1861-1865. New York: Vintage Civil War Library, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition, 2005.