Why Union morale hit bottom in summer 1864

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 2:57:11

   That sets up. Grant is now planning for how the whole war is going to go. And he envisions five components. The two most important are he's going to move against Lee. And his plan is lock up with Lee, inflict the greatest possible damage on Lee, prevent Lee from sending reinforcements anywhere else. And if all goes well, Richmond would fall. But he's not mainly interested in Richmond. He's interested in Lee's army, which is what Lincoln has been trying to get his generals to be interested in the whole time. Destroy Lee's army and, of course, Richmond Falls. So how was he thinking about the clash with Lee, Grant versus Lee? Grant versus Lee is just confronting him. And they're still near Fredericksburg where they, on the Rappahannock River frontier, engaged with him. And what they ended up with was a period of six weeks of

2. 2:57:58

   continuous combat that began with the Battle of the Wilderness on May the 5th and 6th. The old pattern in the Civil War, Lex, was you fight a battle, one side retreats. It might be weeks, might be months before you fight again. What happened here is Lee and Grant fought the Battle of the Wilderness, 12,000 Confederate casualties, 18,000 Union, 30,000 casualties at the Wilderness. They marched for one day. They start another battle, Spotsylvania Courthouse, 12,000 more Confederate casualties, 18,000 more Union casualties. So now you've had 60,000 casualties in two battles with no interval. That continues through May, Cold Harbor. They end up near Richmond at Cold Harbor in early June. Grant launches frontal assaults there. They come to nothing. His men are, many of them are butchered. The bottom line is

3. 2:58:46

   that in the six-week campaign, Grant suffers 65,000 casualties, which is as big as Lee's whole army had been. Lee suffers 35,000, which is a higher percentage of his army than Grant lost, or about the same percentage, actually. But it is a kind of continuous campaign. No one in Sedan before, and it shatters both armies. It eviscerates the officer corps in both armies. A lot of soldiers just break down. We would talk about PTSD now, probably. They just hadn't been used to something like this. And this kind of continuous warfare, we can attribute that to Grant. Yes. And this is where the Grant the Butcher image comes in. But also probably, as hard as it is to say, it's an active military a genius. Well, he's doing what he wanted to do. He's bleeding Lee's army and at the same time pushing it back toward Richmond. And what it ends up in is the siege at Petersburg, Virginia,

4. 2:59:46

   which is just south of Richmond and controls the communications into Richmond. And it's a siege of actually Petersburg and Richmond. And that is the thing that Lee feared the most. And Grant had put him in exactly that position. But the perception behind the lines in the United States is endless casualties. Who's winning? We can't even tell who's winning. We have these casualties. And so union morale drops to its lowest point of the entire war in July and August 1864, because while this is going on, Sherman is moving against Atlanta and he is taking his time, not fighting these big battles, but he's not capturing Atlanta either. The whole summer goes by. Atlanta hasn't fallen. Richmond hasn't fallen. There's an election coming up in the fall in the United States. And Lincoln decides, the morale gets so bad, he calls his cabinet together

5. 3:00:38

   in late August and makes them sign what's been called the blind memorandum. And what the memorandum said is, we're not going to be reelected. And we're going to have to win the war before the Democrats come in, because we know they won't win the war. Lincoln did not think they would win. That's in August. And so I think the United States civilian morale, the lowest point of the war for the United States is in July and August 1864. And if we'd been able to stick our microphones in people's faces and said, well, but what about Gettysburg? That was the turning point of the war.