In early 1864, Lincoln promoted Grant to Lieutenant General, giving him command of all the Union armies. Grant turned his armies (the armies of the Tennessee and Cumberland now combined) over to General Sherman and headed to Washington to take command of the entire war effort.  His plan was to have Sherman march south into Georgia from his position at Chattanooga, in order to take the vital Confederate heartland at Atlanta.  At the same time Meade's Army of the Potomac would attack Lee's Army of Northern Virginia (with Grant in camp with Meade) from the north and General Benjamin Butler would attack Richmond coming up from the south along the James River (similar to McClellan's Peninsula Campaign two years earlier.)

It would be total war, designed to crush the South's economic and emotional as well as military capacity to wage war.  Under Grant's command the war would be fought very differently, smaller battles, but one immediately after another, with no letup in the hits the Union troops were to make on the Confederate troops.   Grant would continually attempt to swing around Lee's forces, with Lee being forced to give ground little by little in order not to be flanked or surrounded by Grant's forces.

Lee now understood that he was in trouble, with the Union troops unwilling to break off after a battle but instead hanging onto his troops like bulldogs, wearing the Confederates down little by little.

The two sides met near Spotsylvania in a wooded area with dense underbrush, that came to be termed the "Wilderness."  They bloodied each other severely, with no clear victor and with huge losses registered on both sides.  Grant’s intent to swing eastward around Lee was met by Longstreet, who managed to hold off Hancock.  Likewise an effort by Longstreet to reverse the action also failed when he himself was wounded (by his own men).  On the third day of the action Grant broke off the engagement.  But by no means was he in any way dissuaded from his origin plan.

The next day Grant and Lee met in battle as Grant again attempted to swing  southeast around Lee ... who had retreated to the crossroads of the Spotsylvania Court House and had dug in there.  When Grant attacked Lee he found that he could not break the four-mile long Confederate line.  He attacked at one well-defended point in the line (that came to be known as the "Bloody Angle"), losing huge numbers of his troops in the effort.  After 24 hours of brutal hand-to-hand fighting, after which he accomplished no gains, he backed his men off. He did not give up the fight  but attempted several other strategies over the next days none of which yielded him any advantages.  The Confederates attempted a counter assault.  But that too turned out to fail.  Finally Grant broke off and headed his troops southeast in another attempt to swing around behind Lee.

Union cavalry had taken control of the crossroads of Cold Harbor, about 10 miles northeast of Richmond and were soon joined by the bulk of Grant’s army.  The Confederates again dug in, creating a line of defense about 7 miles long.  Union attempts to overrun both the northern and southern extremities of this line failed horribly.

At the Spotsylvania Court House and Cold Harbor, Grant learned a lesson that he would not repeat: do not break off from your adversary long enough to give him a chance to dig in. Grant's attack on Lee's Bloody Angle at Spotsylvania had proven to be very costly to Grant, and at Cold Harbor a dug-in Lee proved impossible to dislodge by direct assault.  From this, Grant learned to never again attempt a direct assault on a well-defended position, as modern arms give the defenders a tremendous advantage.¹

Once again Grant swung his forces east and south, determined not to give up despite the terrible thrashing his men had received at both Spotsylvania Court House and Cold Harbor.  He had lost over 52,000 men in the period since he started his Overland Campaign in early May.  But Lee had lost 33,000 men, a much larger loss proportionately to his total troop size, and thus was much less able to afford such a high loss.

Meanwhile Butler’s campaign in the Peninsula had resulted only in his army being surrounded ... necessitating Grant’s coming to the rescue.  But all the action in Virginia nonetheless tied down Lee in the defense of Petersburg ... preventing him from coming to the aid of the Confederate troops trying to hold off Sheridan’s attacks in the Shenandoah Valley and Sherman’s advance through Georgia.

At this point Grant decided to move his troops south past Richmond and seize the town of Petersburg, a vital rail link to Richmond. But Beauregard was able to hold off Grant long enough for Lee to get his forces in place to protect Petersburg, and a long Union siege set in.  At one point the Union troops dug a long tunnel under the Confederate lines, then exploded it with the intention of rushing troops in through the gap in order to seize the city.  But the Union troops were slow to move forward and found that the crater they had created was so deep that they could not easily move across it, but instead down in it they had become easy targets for the gathering Confederates.  With this failure, the siege of Petersburg settled down to a long stalemate.

¹During World War One (1914–1918) European military strategists failed to learn this same lesson and for four murderous years would throw their troops into the enemy's grinder of breech-loading rifles, machine guns and canister artillery, killing hundreds of thousands of troops without gaining any particular advantage in doing so.  They just could not break themselves free from the habit of designing battles with grand frontal assaults, as in the day of troops possessing only slow-loading muskets, in which direct and quick frontal assault was the best tactic in gaining battlefield victory.  In the days of modern weapons this was now a pointless and murderous tactic to put soldiers through.  But the European generals were slow to figure this out.  Grant, however, was not so dimwitted!

Meanwhile, further to the West, by the month of May Sherman was ready to begin his assault on the northwestern region of Georgia.  Opposing him was Johnston and his Army of the Tennessee.  Sherman too preferred flanking movements around the enemy rather than frontal assaults and thus time and again Sherman would swing (usually to his right) around the Confederates, forcing them to fall back to avoid being surrounded.²  And bit by bit this ballet continued, slowly advancing Sherman down through northern Georgia

By July Sherman's army was on the northern outskirts of Atlanta.  At this point the Confederates in Georgia (now under the command of John Bell Hood) were resolved to give no more ground to Sherman.  But six weeks of attacks on Sherman's forces bled the Confederates greatly.  Furthermore, Sherman had sent troops around to the south of Atlanta, cutting off Confederate supplies to the city. Realizing that they were about to be trapped, on the night of September 1st Hood managed to pull most of his troops out of Atlanta, burning what supplies he had left to avoid having them fall in the hands of Sherman.  Atlanta now belonged to Sherman.

Hood left a section of Atlanta burned out because of some of the measures he took to destroy supplies.  But this would be small in comparison to the widespread torching – indiscriminately undertaken by Union foot soldiers who understood that there would be no punishment to come their way for acts of arson.  In early November, fires thus swept through Atlanta. Sherman ultimately did nothing.

Atlanta's destruction demoralized greatly the Southern spirit.  But that too ultimately served Sherman's purposes quite well.  For after all, this was what war was all about: to fight until such time as your enemy has lost all desire to continue.

²A notable exception was at Kennesaw Mountain where Sherman attacked Johnston directly, losing 7,000 troops in the process – whereas the Confederates lost only 700.  The frontal assault thus was a maneuver that Sherman (like Grant) learned to avoid.

Meanwhile the North learned of another major victory against the South. Mobile, at the Southern tip of Alabama on the Gulf coast was the last major Confederate port east of the Mississippi still open to the Confederates.  Rear Admiral David Farragut was commanded to seize it.³

Mobile was protected by three forts at the mouth of its huge bay and a number of Confederate ships in the bay itself, plus an array of floating mines (called "torpedoes" at the time) and the ironclad ram CSS Tennessee.  Farragut commanded 18 ships, including four new ironclads.  Additionally, 1,500 troops were put ashore west of the bay to take the western-most fort (Fort Gaines) guarding the bay.

On the day of the direct assault on Mobile Bay, Farragut pushed his men to ignore the "torpedoes"⁴ and get past the forts as quickly as possible.  Then the four Union ironclads took on the Tennessee, which received such a pounding that it finally brought the ruined ironclad to surrender.  With that, the Confederate fleet was virtually defenseless against the Union fleet, which now controlled Mobile Bay.

Now Union attention was turned to the forts, two of which were fairly quickly brought to surrender.  The third, Fort Morgan, would hold out for two more weeks before it too surrendered.  This now left the city of Mobile itself isolated, though still well protected by Confederate forces.

³Despite Union efforts to blockade the bay, blockade running was still taking place out of Mobile.

⁴Farragut was fabled to say "Damn the torpedoes; full steam ahead" though this was most likely a glamorization of the victory created a number of years after the event.

Things had looked quite negative for Lincoln in the early months of 1864 as both the Republicans and Democrats made preparations to choose candidates for the presidency.  No president had been re-elected since Jackson’s re-election in 1832.  The Abolitionist Radicals had created a new party and Frémont was named its presidential candidate.  Also some "War Democrats" joined the Republicans in refashioning the Republican Party as the National Union Party, with the intention at first of nominating someone other than Lincoln, most likely Salmon Chase. 

But Lincoln was still widely popular among Republican politicians and Chase stepped aside once that became clear.  In early June Lincoln was thus named the presidential candidate for the National Union (Republican) Party, with Andrew Johnson, a Southerner loyal to the Union (and military governor of Tennessee), named as his running mate.  On two key points the Party's platform was quite clear: unconditional surrender of the Confederacy and a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery everywhere within the U.S.

The opposing Democratic Party was split between War Democrats and Peace Democrats, the former continuing to support the war as it stood, the latter demanding a negotiated peace.  The Party finally created a compromise, by nominating the popular General McClellan as a War Democrat for president, and anti-war Congressman George Pendleton as their candidate for vice president.  But the balanced ticket only confused Americans as to what exactly the Democratic Party's intentions were if the McClellan-Pendleton combination were elected to office.

In any case, by November's elections, things had turned very favorably for the North. Lee was clearly on the defensive deep in Virginia, Mobile Bay had been taken from the Confederates, Sherman had conquered Atlanta and the Shenandoah Valley had been neutralized.  The North seemed clearly to be winning the war and thus Northern voters were now swinging strongly behind their president.

Thus in the elections, Lincoln won the popular poll by over 400,000 votes and the electoral college tallied 212 votes for Lincoln and only 21 for McClellan.⁵ Americans clearly wanted Lincoln returned to office for four more years.

⁵Of course the eleven Southern or Confederate states still in rebellion did not participate in the election.