The Battle of Atlanta took place during the Atlanta campaign of the American Civil War on July 22, 1864, just southeast of Atlanta, Georgia. Continuing their summer campaign to seize the important rail and supply hub of Atlanta, Union forces commanded by William T. Sherman overwhelmed and defeated Confederate forces defending the city under John B. Hood. Union Major General James B. McPherson was killed during the battle, the second-highest-ranking Union officer killed in action during the war. Despite the implication of finality in its name, the battle occurred midway through the Atlanta campaign, and the city did not fall until September 2, 1864, after a Union siege and various attempts to seize railroads and supply lines leading to Atlanta. After taking the city, Sherman's troops headed south-southeastward toward Milledgeville, the state capital, and on to Savannah with the March to the Sea.
The fall of Atlanta was especially noteworthy for its political ramifications. In the 1864 election, former Union General George B. McClellan, a Democrat, ran against President Abraham Lincoln, although he repudiated his own party's platform, which called for an armistice with the Confederacy. The capture of Atlanta and Hood's burning of military facilities as he evacuated were extensively covered by Northern newspapers, significantly boosting Northern morale, and Lincoln was re-elected by a significant margin.
War weariness was growing in the North and President Abraham Lincoln's prospects for re-election were diminishing as a result, when on March 9, 1864, Lincoln commissioned Ulysses S. Grant as the only Union Army lieutenant general, then the highest grade in the United States Army. On March 10, Lincoln gave Grant command of all the armies of the United States. On March 12, Grant's appointment as general-in-chief was publicly announced. Major General William T. Sherman was assigned to command the Military Division of the Mississippi, including the Department of the Ohio, Department of the Cumberland, Department of the Tennessee and the Department of Arkansas. Sherman took command on March 18. The assignment made Sherman commander of the Union armies in the Western theater of the war.
Grant devised a strategy for Union victory through simultaneous campaigns against several Confederate armies. Grant wanted to prevent Confederate armies from reinforcing each other in turn and to fatally weaken the entire Confederate Army. Sherman would lead one of two key campaigns. The objective of Sherman's campaign was to defeat and disperse the Confederate Army of Tennessee under the command of General Joseph E. Johnston, to capture the vital railway center of Atlanta. to destroy or damage Confederate war resources as much as possible and to split the Confederacy again as had been done at Vicksburg, Mississippi, and Port Hudson, Louisiana, in July 1863.
The American Civil War (1861–1865) was the deadliest conflict in American history, killing an estimated 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers and an unknown number of civilians. The Confederate States of America, formed by eleven seceding Southern states, faced the Union in four years of warfare across 23 states and territories. Major engagements included First and Second Bull Run, Antietam (the bloodiest single day in American history, September 17, 1862), Chancellorsville, Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863), Vicksburg (surrendered July 4, 1863), and Sherman's March through Georgia and the Carolinas (1864–1865). President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, transforming the war's stated purpose to include the abolition of slavery and enabling the enlistment of approximately 180,000 Black men in the United States Colored Troops. Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. The war resolved the question of secession and ended American slavery, though Reconstruction would face sustained resistance in its attempt to secure civil rights for formerly enslaved people.
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