After failed attempts to capture Vicksburg, Mississippi due largely to the swampiness of the terrain, General Grant sought to instead attack Vicksburg from “downriver” (627). Since this strategy required going deep into Confederate territory without a supply line, Grant had his army loot provisions from nearby plantations.

With Johnston’s army moving to save Vicksburg, Grant launched several assaults on the city and hoped to occupy it “before Johnston could build up a relief force in his rear and before summer heat and disease wore down his troops” (633). The Confederacy military was stretched so thin it could not send any more troops to reinforce Vicksburg’s defenses. By July 3rd, 1863, Grant occupied Vicksburg.

Grant believed that the fall of Vicksburg made it inevitable that the Confederacy would lose the war. In any case, soon after Vicksburg was captured, the strategic location of Port Hudson, Louisiana was made vulnerable and was also taken by Union forces. With that, the entire Mississippi River was under Union control.

In Virginia, the Confederacy through Lee and Jackson scored a victory at the Battle of Chancellorsville through the tactic of splitting their forces in order to take the Union armies by surprise. However, Jackson was hit by two bullets in the fighting and died from pneumonia caused by the wounds. Further south, an attempt by the Union navy to take the vital port city of Charleston, South Carolina failed.

These defeats were enough to damage Northern morale. Lee hoped to erode public morale even further by going on the offensive. While Davis originally wanted to send Lee to the west, Lee convinced him to sign off on a northward campaign to try to shatter Northern support of the war. Lee marched toward Gettysburg, a town in eastern Pennsylvania. It was hoped that another victory after Chancellorsville would finally convince France and Britain to recognize the Confederacy. Lee also planned to attack Washington, DC from the north while another Confederate army would come at the city from the south.

However, the Battle of Gettysburg, fought from July 1st-3rd, 1863, ended in a Confederate defeat with both sides suffering high casualties. Lee lost 28,000 troops, “more than a third of [his] army” (664). Some Southerners recognized the defeats at Vicksburg and Gettysburg as dooming the Confederacy.

While fleeing southward from Pennsylvania, Lee managed to elude Union forces. Even then, the war was turning decisively in the Union’s favor. Lincoln had endorsed a “strategy of concurrent pressure on all main Confederate armies to prevent one of them from reinforcing another” (669). As a result, Union soldiers occupied most of Arkansas.

Elsewhere, Union efforts wavered. An expedition headed toward Tennessee led by General Rosecrans culminated in the Battle of Chickamauga in Georgia, where Rosecrans lost to a Confederate army led by General Bragg. Lincoln fired Rosecrans and gave Grant command of operations in “the whole region between” the Mississippi River “and the Appalachians” (676). Even by the time of Grant’s arrival, Union forces were encircling the strategically important city of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Under Grant’s command, the Union took over Chattanooga by November 1863.

One hope for the Confederacy lay in two new ships being developed in Liverpool, England. These were “two armor-plated vessels carrying turrets for nine-inch guns and a seven-foot iron spike attached to the prow to pierce wooden ships below the waterline” (682). However, because of the British government’s neutrality, the legality of building these ships was under question. Under diplomatic pressure from the United States, the British government detained the two ships.

The Confederacy continued negotiations with France. Emperor Napoleon III succeeded in overthrowing the Mexican president Juarez and replacing him with a puppet monarchy led by the Austrian royal Ferdinand Maximilian, who was crowned Emperor of Mexico. The Lincoln administration refused to recognize Ferdinand Maximilian’s government as legitimate, and made a show of force by sending a squadron to occupy a position near the Texas-Mexico border. Problems with the other European powers made Napoleon III reluctant to start trouble with the United States, so Napoleon III eased up the French presence in Mexico and scuttled the Confederacy’s efforts to build a fleet of ships in France.

The Peace Democrats were also in decline in the North. The shocking racist violence of the New York draft riot had turned Northern public opinion more against racism, as did the heroism showed and the losses suffered by a Black regiment of soldiers who fought against the Confederates in Charleston, West Virginia. In the public mind, “abolition and Union” (687) began to be seen as inseparable, leading Republicans to further electoral victories around the country.

Elections were also held in the Confederacy in 1863, “when southern morale was at a low ebb” (690). Political parties did not exist in the Confederacy, but this became a “source of weakness” since Davis had no political party that could “mobilize support” for his policies and “exercise institutionalized discipline over congressmen or governors” (690). It also made it harder for Davis’s government to organize opposition to critical politicians. The election resulted in Davis’s supporters having “a narrow majority in Congress” (692) and the number of members of the Confederate Congress who supported negotiations for reunification “grew from one-third to half” (692).

There were two main factions opposed to the Davis administration. The Tories or Reconstructionists pushed for peace negotiations at any cost. The other faction supported the war, but rejected Davis’s policies, especially “some of the total-war measures” (692). Davis’s own vice president, Alexander Stephens, who attacked legislation backed by Davis that suspended habeas corpus and supported efforts to negotiate a peace with the Union, was an adversary.

Uneasiness with the Confederacy was also acute in North Carolina. The newspaper editor William H. Holden had drawn “a large following among yeoman farmers and workingmen” (695) for his characterization of the Civil War as a rich man’s war, and he criticized the Confederate government for restricting civil liberties. Holden organized anti-war meetings and proposed that the government of North Carolina should “open separate negotiations with the North” (696). Still, Holden’s bid to become governor of North Carolina was overwhelmingly defeated.

Republicans disagreed on how to handle Confederate states that returned to the fold, a process that would become known as Reconstruction. Opinions ranged from treating them like “‘conquered provinces’” (699) to viewing them like the Western territories, something to be gradually reincorporated into the Union. Lincoln himself offered a “blanket offer of amnesty” (700) to all except the leading officials of the Confederacy, something bitterly opposed by abolitionists. They believed the South could only be fully reincorporated by dissolving the planter class and destroying Southern institutions.

When the Union occupied New Orleans and most of Louisiana, it became a testing ground for Reconstruction. Lincoln approved a plan to organize “a Union Association” (704) that would draft a new state constitution abolishing enslavement and adopting a number of political reforms. However, it was believed the process was best done by electing new officials under the old constitution with at least 10% (704) of legible voters who had sworn an oath of loyalty to the Union, before holding a new constitutional convention. Such proposals provoked opposition from radical Republicans. However, while the Louisiana convention did outlaw enslavement, Republicans in the state convention faced sizable opposition to granting African-American suffrage.

There was also concerns over what would happen to African Americans once freed from enslavement. The fact they often lacked education and would not have homes remained an issue. Charity organizations from the North supplied freed African Americans with economic aid, education, clothing, and medicine. Such efforts led to the creation of what would become the Freedmen’s Bureau.

Some freed African Americans managed to secure farmland once held by plantation owners. Other freed African Americans had to settle for employment working in agricultural roles on former plantation lands run by Union officers, Northern owners, or even former Southern plantation owners who had sworn loyalty to the Union. Some freed African Americans working in the fields “could see little difference between this system of ‘free’ labor and the bondage they had endured all their lives” (711).

As for the issue of enslavement in general, Lincoln came to believe that the only way to abolish enslavement was not through Congressional legislation, but through a Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia were “lean, tough veterans” (719), but their Union counterparts were about to reach the end of their three-year terms. Confederates and General Grant were both aware of these circumstances, but Grant believed it was possible to end the war before many soldiers’ enlistment ended in November 1864.

Believing that the Union’s individual armies in the East undermined themselves by not sharing information and tactics, Grant “worked out plans for coordinated advances on several fronts to prevent any one of the Confederate armies from reinforcing another” (722). Recent campaigns near Richmond and in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia floundered. In May 1864, Grant hoped to take out Lee’s army in the Wilderness region of Virginia and near the town of Spotsylvania, Virginia. While two Union corps fought Lee’s Confederates from the right and the left, another regiment joined the assault on the right as well, a tactic remembered as “the famous Bloody Angle of Spotsylvania” (730). When the battle was over, both sides had suffered massive casualties. The battle ended in a draw as Grant withdrew, hoping to “lure Lee out” (733) of the trenches he had created for his army to a more favorable battleground.

An attempt by one Union army to attack Lee’s forces from the rear ended in failure in a battle at Lynchburg, Virginia, which ended with the army retreating to West Virginia. Another campaign to destroy Confederate railroad lines at Trevilian Station ended with the Union forces having to abandon their plans due to the defeat at Lynchburg, and the Confederacy being able to repair the railroad. Likewise, Grant’s “corps commanders failed him” (740) at the Battle of Cold Harbor, giving Lee another victory.

The string of defeats and the vast numbers of casualties affected public opinion in the North. Democrats attacked Grant as a “‘butcher’” who was “sacrificing the flower of American manhood to the malign god of abolition” (742). In the Confederacy, there was hope that if they could withstand the Union onslaught until the United States presidential election of 1864, a new presidential administration more inclined toward negotiating a peace might come to power.

While Grant’s tactics involved trying to wear down the enemy through confrontations, General William Sherman’s Union army in Georgia “engaged in a war of maneuver” (743). Sherman finally confronted the enemy in a battle in Kennesaw Mountain in Georgia. He was beaten, a defeat that “bolstered southern morale and increased northern frustration” (750).