The Battle of Kennesaw Mountain was fought on June 27, 1864, during the Atlanta campaign of the American Civil War. The most significant frontal assault launched by Union Major General William T. Sherman against the Confederate Army of Tennessee under General Joseph E. Johnston, it produced a tactical defeat for the Union forces but failed to deliver the result that the Confederacy desperately needed: a halt to Sherman's advance on Atlanta, Georgia.
Sherman's 1864 campaign against Atlanta began with a series of flanking maneuvers that compelled Johnston's forces to withdraw from heavily fortified positions with minimal casualties on either side. After two months and 70 miles (110 km) of such maneuvering, Sherman's path was blocked by imposing fortifications on Kennesaw Mountain, near Marietta, Georgia. The Union general chose to change his tactics and ordered a large-scale frontal assault on June 27. Major General James B. McPherson feinted against the northern end of Kennesaw Mountain, while his corps under Major General John A. Logan assaulted Pigeon Hill on its southwest corner. At the same time, Major General George H. Thomas launched strong attacks against Cheatham Hill at the center of the Confederate line. Both attacks were repulsed with heavy losses, but a demonstration by Major General John M. Schofield achieved a strategic success by threatening the Confederate army's left flank, prompting yet another Confederate withdrawal toward Atlanta and the removal of General Johnston from command of the army.
In March 1864, Ulysses S. Grant was promoted to lieutenant general and named general in chief of the Union Army. He devised a strategy of multiple, simultaneous offensives against the Confederacy, hoping to prevent any of the rebel armies from reinforcing the others over interior lines. The two most significant of these were by Major General George G. Meade's Army of the Potomac, accompanied by Grant himself, which would attack Robert E. Lee's army directly and advance toward the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia; and Major General William T. Sherman, replacing Grant in his role as commander of the Military Division of the Mississippi, who would advance from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Atlanta.
Both Grant and Sherman initially had objectives to engage with and destroy the two principal armies of the Confederacy, relegating the capture of important enemy cities to a secondary, supporting role. This was a strategy that President Abraham Lincoln had emphasized throughout the war, but Grant was the first general who actively cooperated with it. As their campaigns progressed, however, the political importance of the cities of Richmond and Atlanta began to dominate their strategy. By 1864, Atlanta was a critical target. The city of 20,000 was founded at the intersection of four important railroad lines that supplied the Confederacy and was a military manufacturing arsenal in its own right. Atlanta's nickname of "Gate City of the South" was apt—its capture would open virtually the entire Deep South to Union conquest. Grant's orders to Sherman were to "move against Johnston's Army, to break it up and to get into the interior of the enemy's country as far as you can, inflicting all the damage you can against their war resources."
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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