The Atlas of the Civil War

By Skyhorse

From the first shots fired at Fort Sumter in 1861 to the final clashes on the Road to Appomattox in 1864, The Atlas of the Civil War reconstructs the battles of America's bloodiest war with unparalleled clarity and precision. Edited by Pulitzer Prize recipient James M. McPherson and written by America's leading military historians, this peerless reference charts the major campaigns and skirmishes of the Civil War.

Each battle is meticulously plotted on one of 200 specially commissioned full-color maps. Timelines provide detailed, play-by-play maneuvers, and the accompanying text highlights the strategic aims and tactical considerations of the men in charge. Each of the battle, communications, and locator maps are cross-referenced to provide a comprehensive overview of the fighting as it swept across the country.

With more than two hundred photographs and countless personal accounts that vividly describe the experiences of soldiers in the fields, The Atlas of the Civil War brings to life the human drama that pitted state against state and brother against brother.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Release date: Jun 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781510756700

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Copyright © 2015, 2022 Colin Glower Enterprises

First published in the United States in 2005 by Courage Books, an imprint of Running Press Book PublishersFirst Skyhorse Publishing edition 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-5640-3

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-5670-0

Printed in Malaysia

Contributors

EDITOR:

JAMES M. MCPHERSON

George Henry Davis Professor of American History

Princeton University, New Jersey

Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, Vol. VI in the Oxford History of the United States. His other books include The Struggle for Equality, Marching Toward Freedom, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution and What They Fought For, 1861–1865

STACY D. ALLEN

Historian

Shiloh National Military Park,

Shiloh, Tennessee

EDWIN COLE BEARSS

Special Assistant to Director

National Park Service (Military Sites)

Arlington, Virginia

ALBERT CASTEL

American Civil War Historian

Emeritus Professor of History,

Western Michigan University

WILLIAM M. FOWLER, JR.

Professor of History

Northeastern University,

Boston, Massachusetts

Editor of the New England Quarterly

D. SCOTT HARTWIG

Supervisory Park Ranger

Gettysburg National Military Park,

Gettysburg, Virginia

LAWRENCE L. HEWITT

Professor of History

Department of History and Government

Southeastern Louisiana University,

Hammond, Louisiana

FRANK O’REILLY

Historian and author

Fredericksburg, Virginia

WILLIAM G. PISTON

Associate Professor

Department of History,

Southwest Missouri State University,

Springfield, Missouri

DR. WILLIAM GLENN ROBERTSON

Professor of History

U.S. Army Command and General Staff College,

Leavenworth, Kansas

Contents

PROLOGUE

by James McPherson

KEY TO MAPS

THEATER MAPS

1861: THE COMING OF WAR

Introduction by James McPherson

April 12–14: Fort Sumter

Clashes in Missouri

July 5: Engagement at Carthage

August 10: Wilson’s Creek

September 12–20: Siege and Capture of Lexington

November 7: Battle of Belmont

Western Virginia

June 3: Philippi Races

July 11: Rich Mountain

September 10–13: Cheat Mountain Campaign

Virginia

June 10: Big Bethel

July 21: First Manassas (Bull Run)

October 21: Ball’s Bluff

South Atlantic Coast

August 27–30: Hatter as Inlet

November 7: Port Royal Sound

1862: A WAR FOR FREEDOM

Introduction by James McPherson

Eastern Kentucky and Tennessee

January 10: Middle Creek.

January 19: Logan’s Cross Roads (Mill Springs)

March – June: Cumberland Gap Operations

February 6–16: Forts Henry and Donelson

Northwestern Arkansas

March 7–8: Pea Ridge

December 7: Prairie Grove

April 6: Shiloh

April 7: Shiloh

Upper Mississippi Valley

February 28 – April 8: New Madrid and Island No. 10

April 29 – May 30: Corinth Campaign

April 14 – June 5: Plum Run Bend and Fort Pillow

June 6: Memphis

Lower Mississippi Valley

April 24: Forts St. Philip and Jackson

April 25: New Orleans

May – August: Vicksburg and Baton Rouge

New Mexico Campaign

February 21: Vaiverde

March 26–28: Glorieta

North Carolina Campaign

February 8: Roanoke Island

March 14: New Bern

April 25: Fort Macon

Showdown at Hampton Roads

March 8: Virginia sinks Congress and Cumberland

March 9: Monitor vs. Virginia

McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign

April 5 – May 4: Siege of Yorktown

May 5: Williamsburg

May 31 – June 1: Seven Pines/Fair Oaks

Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley Campaign: Phase 1

March 23: Kernstown

May 8: McDowell

May 23–25: Front Royal and Winchester

Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley Campaign: Phase 2

Escaping the Trap

June 9: Cross Keys

June 9: Port Republic

Seven Days Battles: Phase 1

June 12–15: Stuart’s Ride around McClellan

June 25: Oak Grove

June 26: Mechanicsville

June 27: Gaines’ Mill

Seven Days Battles: Phase 2

June 29: Savage’s Station

June 30: White Oak Swamp and Glendale

July 1: Malvern Hill

July 14 – August 27: Second Manassas (Bull Run) Campaign: Phase 1

August 9: Cedar Mountain (Slaughter’s Mountain)

August 22: Catlett’s Station

August 25–27: Jackson’s Turning Movement

August 28 – September 1: Second Manassas: Phase 2

August 28: Gorveton

August 29–30: Second Manassas

September 1: Chantilly

September 4–20: The Antietam Campaign: Phase 1

September 14: South Mountain and Crampton’s Gap

September 15: Harper’s Ferry

September 17: Antietam

December 13: Fredericksburg

Confederate Cavalry Raids in Kentucky and Tennessee

July 4 – August 1: Morgan’s Raid

July 6–27: Forrest’s Raid

Confederate Invasion of Kentucky

August 14: Kirby Smith’s Advance

August 28: Bragg’s Advance

October 8: Perryville

October 9: Confederate Retreat

Iuka and Corinth

September 19: Iuka

October 3–4: Corinth

Grant’s First Vicksburg Campaign

December: Grant’s and Sherman’s Advances

December: Forrest’s and Van Dorn’s Raids

December 27–29: Chickasaw Bluffs

December 30 – January 2 (1863): Stones River (Murfreesboro)

1863: THE TURNING OF THE TIDE

Introduction by James McPherson

Grant’s Second Vicksburg Campaign: Phase 1

January 8: Arkansas Post

February – April: Unsuccessful Efforts: Lake Providence; Yazoo Pass; Steele’s Bayou

April 16: Running the Batteries

May 1: Port Gibson

Grant’s Second Vicksburg Campaign: Phase 2

April 17 – May 2: Grierson’s Raid

May 11–14: Raymond and Jackson

May 16–17: Champion’s Hill and Big Black River

May 18 – July 4: Siege and Capture of Vicksburg

May 8 – July 9: Port Hudson Campaign

April 26 – May 1: Chancellorsville: Phase 1

May 1–6: Chancellorsville: Phase 2

Gettysburg Campaign: The Invasion of Pennsylvania

Lee Moves North

June 9: Brandy Station

July 1: Gettysburg

July 2: Gettysburg

July 3: Gettysburg

July – August: Two Raids

July 2–26: Morgan’s Raid North of the Ohio

August 21: Quantrill’s Lawrence Massacre

April 7 – September 6: The Campaign Against Charleston

April 7: Naval Attack on Fort Sumter

July 18: Attack on Fort Wagner

June 24 – September 9: Tullahoma Campaign and Capture of Chattanooga

September 10–18: Chickamauga Campaign

September 19–20: Chickamauga

September 21 – November 25: Chattanooga

November 24: Lookout Mountain

November 25: Missionary Ridge

August 15 – December 4: Knoxville Campaigns

September 2: Capture of Knoxville

November 14–29: Longstreet’s Effort to Recapture Knoxville

October – November: Operations in Virginia

October 9 – November 9: Bristoe Campaign

November 26 – December 1: Mine Run Campaign

1864: TOTAL WAR

Introduction by James McPherson

February – March: Operations in Mississippi and Florida

February 3 – March 5: Meridian Campaign

February 20: Olustee (Ocean Pond)

March 10 – May 22: The Red River Campaign

April 8: Mansfield (Sabine Cross Roads)

April 9: Pleasant Hill

March 1 – May 3: Steele’s Arkansas Campaign

April 3: Elkins Ferry

April 29–30: Jenkins’ Ferry

May 5–7: The Wilderness

May 8–12: Spotsylvania, Phase 1

May 13–19: Spotsylvania, Phase 2

May 21 – June 3: North Anna and Cold Harbor

June 4–15: Cold Harbor to Petersburg

June 16–18: Assaults at Petersburg

May 5–16: The Drewry’s Bluff Campaign

May 9–24 and June 7–28: Sheridan’s Raids

May 11: Yellow Tavern

June 11–12: Trevilian Station

May – June: Operations in the Shenandoah Valley

May 15: New Market

June 5: Piedmont

June 17–18: Lynchburg

June 27 – August 4: Early’s Washington Raid

July 9: Monocacy

July 11–12: Washington

July 23–24: Second Kernstown

July 30: Chambersburg

Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign: Phase 1

May 7–12: Rocky Face Ridge

May 14: Resaca

May 18–19: Cassville

Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign: Phase 2

May 26 – June 1: Dallas and New Hope Church

June 27: Kennesaw Mountain

July 9: Crossing the Chattahoochee

July 20–28: Battles for Atlanta

July 20: Peachtree Creek

July 22: Atlanta

July 28: Ezra Church

August 1 – September 2: Atlanta Campaign, Final Phase

August 5–6: Utoy Creek

August 31 – September 1: Jonesboro

Forrest’s Operations in Mississippi and Tennessee

April 12: Fort Pillow Massacre

June 10: Price’s Crossroads

July 14: Tupelo

August 21: Memphis

Mobile Bay Campaign

August 5: Battle of Mobile Bay

August 8: Capture of Fort Gaines

August 23: Capture of Fort Morgan

June – October: Siege of Petersburg

June 22–23: Weldon Railroad

July 30: Battle of the Crater

August 18–21: Globe Tavern

August 25: Reams Station

September 30 – October 2: Poplar Springs Church

October 27: Hatcher’s Run

July – October: Siege of Richmond

July 27–29: and August 13–20: Deep Bottom

September 28–30: New Market Heights

October 7: Darbytown Road

Sheridan and Early in the Shenandoah Valley: Phase 1

September 19: Third Winchester (Opequon Creek)

September 22: Fisher’s Hill

Sheridan and Early in the Shenandoah Valley: Phase 2

October 9: Tom’s Brook

October 19: Cedar Creek

March 2 (1865): Waynesboro

September – October: Price’s Raid in Missouri

September 27: Pilot Knob

October 22: Byram’s Ford

October 23: Westport

October 25: Marais des Cygnes

October – November: Hood’s Tennessee Campaign

October 1–22: Hood’s Operations Against Sherman’s Communications

November 19–29: Advance to Spring Hill

November 30: Battle of Franklin

December 15–16: Battle of Nashville

November 15 – December 21: Sherman’s March from Atlanta to the Sea

1865: THE TRIUMPH AND THE TRAGEDY

Introduction by James McPherson

Fort Fisher

December 8–27 (1864): First Campaign

January 6–15: Second Campaign

February 1 – April 26: Sherman’s Carolinas Campaign

March 16: Averasboro

March 19: Bentonville

The Fall of Petersburg and Richmond

February 5–7: Hatcher’s Run

March 25: Fort Stedman

March 31: White Oak Road

April 1: Five Forks

April 2: Petersburg Assault

April 2–9: The Road to Appomattox

EPILOGUE by James McPherson

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

Prologue

The Civil War was the most violent and fateful experience in American history. At least 620,000 soldiers were killed in the war, 2% of the American population in 1860. If the same percentage of Americans were to be killed in a war fought in the 1990s, the number of American war dead would exceed five million. An unknown number of civilians, nearly all of them in the South, died from causes such as disease, hunger or exposure inflicted during the conflict. As a consequence, more Americans died in the Civil War than in all of the country’s other wars combined. The number of casualties incurred in a single day at the battle of Antietam (September 17, 1862) was four times the number of Americans killed or wounded on the Normandy beaches on D-Day, June 6, 1944. More Americans were killed in action that September day near Sharpsburg, Maryland, than were killed in combat in all the other wars fought by the United States in the 19th century.

How did this happen? Why did Americans fight each other with a ferocity unmatched in the Western world during the century between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the beginning of World War I in 1914? The origins of the American Civil War lay in the outcome of another war fought by America fifteen years earlier: the Mexican War. The peace treaty signed with Mexico in 1848 transferred 700,000 square miles of Mexican territory to the United States. However, the dramatic victory of American forces in the Mexican War fulfilled the prediction made by the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1846 at the war’s outset: The United States will conquer Mexico, but it will be as the man swallows arsenic, which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us.

The poison was slavery, which many Southern politicians wanted to introduce into the new territories; anti-slavery Northerners wanted to keep slavery out of them. In the House of Representatives, they had the votes to pass the Wilmot Proviso (offered by Congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania) stating that slavery should be excluded from all territories acquired from Mexico. In the Senate, Southern strength defeated this Proviso. South Carolina Senator, John C. Calhoun, introduced instead a series of resolutions affirming that slaveholders had the constitutional right to take their slave property into any United States territory they so wished.

These opposing views set the scene for a crisis when gold was discovered in California in 1848. Eighty thousand gold seekers poured into the region in 1849. To achieve some degree of law and order, the Forty-niners organized a state government and petitioned Congress for admission to the Union as the thirty-first state. As California’s new constitution prohibited slavery, this request met with fierce resistance from Southerners. The crisis escalated when the American President, Zachary Taylor, encouraged the huge territory of New Mexico (embracing the rest of the cession from Mexico) also to apply for statehood without slavery.

Pro-slavery Southerners threatened to secede from the Union if they were denied their right to take slaves into these territories. If, by your legislation, you seek to drive us from the territories of California and Mexico, Congressman Robert Toombs of Georgia informed Northern lawmakers, "I am for disunion." The controversy in Congress became so heated that Senator Henry S. Foote of Mississippi flourished a loaded revolver during a debate, and his colleague Jefferson Davis challenged an Illinois congressman to a duel. In 1850 the American nation seemed held together by a mere thread, with armed conflict between free and slave states an alarming possibility.

But cooler heads prevailed. The Compromise of 1850 averted a showdown. This series of laws admitted California as a free state, divided the remainder of the Mexican cession into the territories of New Mexico and Utah, and left to their residents the question as to whether or not they would have slavery. (In fact, both territories did legalize slavery, but few slaves were taken there.) At the same time, Congress abolished the slave trade in the District of Columbia, ending the shame – in Northern eyes – of the buying and selling of human beings within sight of the White House and the Capital. But the Compromise of 1850 compensated the South with a tough new fugitive slave law that empowered federal marshals, backed by the army, to recover slaves who had escaped into free states. It thus postponed, but did not resolve, the sectional crisis.

During the 1850s, polarization between North and South intensified. The fugitive slave law embittered Northerners compelled to watch black people – some of whom had lived in their communities for years – being forcibly returned in chains to slavery. Southern anxiety grew as settlers poured into those Northern territories that were sure to join the Union as free states, thereby tipping the sectional balance of power against the South in Congress and the electoral college. In an attempt to bring more slave states into the Union, Southerners agitated for the purchase of Cuba from Spain and the acquisition of additional territory in Central America. Private armies of filibusters, composed mainly of Southerners, even tried to invade Cuba and Nicaragua to overthrow their governments and bring these regions into the United States – with slavery.

Nothing did more to divide North and South than the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and the subsequent guerrilla war between pro- and anti-slavery partisans in Kansas territory. The region that became the territories of Kansas and Nebraska was part of the Louisiana Purchase, acquired by the United States from France in 1803. In 1820, the Missouri Compromise had divided this territory at latitude 36° 30’, with slavery permitted south of that line and prohibited north of it. Regarded by Northerners as an inviolable compact, the Missouri Compromise lasted for 34 years. But in 1854, Southerners broke it by forcing Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, and leader of the Northern Democrats, to agree to the repeal of the ban on slavery north of 36° 30’ as the price of Southern support for the formal organization of Kansas and Nebraska territories.

Douglas capitulated under Southern pressure, even though he expected it to raise a hell of a storm in the North. It did. The storm was so powerful that it swept away many Northern Democrats and gave rise to the Republican party, which pledged to keep slavery out of Kansas and all other territories. One of the most eloquent spokesmen for this new party was an Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln, who believed that "there can be no moral right in the enslaving of one man by another. Lincoln and other Republicans recognized that the United States Constitution protected slavery in the states where it already existed. But they intended to prevent its further expansion as the first step toward bringing it eventually to an end. The United States, said Lincoln at the beginning of his famous campaign against Douglas in 1858 for election to the Senate, was a house divided between slavery and freedom. ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free By preventing the further expansion of slavery, Lincoln hoped to place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction."

Douglas won the senatorial election in 1858. But two years later, running against a Democratic party split into Northern and Southern halves, Lincoln won the presidency by carrying every Northern state. This was the first time in more than a generation that the South had lost effective control of the national government. Southerners saw the writing on the wall. A substantial and growing majority of the American population lived in the North. The pro-slavery forces had little prospect of winning any future national elections. Thus, to preserve slavery as the basis of their way of life, during the winter of 1860–1861 the seven lower-south states seceded one by one. Before Lincoln took office on March 4, 1861, delegates from these seven states had met at Montgomery, Alabama, adopted a Constitution for the Confederate States of America, and formed a provisional government with Jefferson Davis as president. As they seceded, these states seized the national arsenals, forts, and other property within their borders – with the significant exception of Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. When Lincoln took his oath to preserve, protect, and defend the United States and its Constitution, the united states had already ceased to exist.

The inauguration of Jefferson Davis as President of the Confederate States, at the State House, Montgomery, Alabama, February 18, 1861.

Secession transformed the principal issue of the sectional conflict from the future of slavery to the survival of the Union itself. Lincoln and most of the Northern people refused to accept the constitutional legitimacy of secession. The central idea pervading this struggle, Lincoln declared after war had broken out in 1861, is the necessity that is upon us, of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose. Four years later, looking back over the bloody chasm of war, Lincoln said in his second inaugural address that one side in the controversy of 1861 "would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came."

James M. McPherson

Key to Maps

Eastern Theater

Western Theater

Trans-Mississippi Theater

Coastal War

Abraham Lincoln, photographed by Mathew Brady on February 27, 1860, the day before he delivered his Cooper Union speech. Lincoln was later to state that, Brady and the Cooper Union speech made me President.

1861: The Coming of War

WHEN ABRAHAM LINCOLN took the oath of office as the sixteenth – and, some speculated, the last – president of the United States on March 4, 1861, he knew that his inaugural address would be the most important such speech in American history. On his words would hang the issues of union or disunion, peace or war. His goal was to prevent the eight slave states that had not yet seceded from doing so, while cooling passions in the seven states that had seceded, hoping that in time their old loyalty to the Union would reassert itself. He pledged in his address not to interfere with the institution of slavery where it exists. Referring, however, to Fort Sumter and three other minor forts in the seceded states, he pledged to hold, occupy, and possess the property, and places belonging to the government – without defining exactly what he meant or how he would do it. In his eloquent peroration, Lincoln appealed to Southerners as Americans who had shared with other Americans four score and five years of national history. We are not enemies, but friends, he said.

Though passion may have strained, it must not break, our bonds of affection. The mystic