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Course: US history > Unit 5
Lesson 2: The Civil War- Slavery and the Missouri Compromise
- Increasing political battles over slavery in the mid-1800s
- Start of the Civil War - secession and Fort Sumter
- Strategy of the Civil War
- Early phases of Civil War and Antietam
- The Emancipation Proclamation
- Significance of the battle of Antietam
- The battle of Gettysburg
- The Gettysburg Address - setting and context
- Photographing the Battle of Gettysburg, O'Sullivan's Harvest of Death
- The Gettysburg Address - full text and analysis
- Later stages of the Civil War - 1863
- Later stages of the Civil War - the election of 1864 and Sherman's March
- Later stages of the Civil War - Appomattox and Lincoln's assassination
- Big takeaways from the Civil War
- The Civil War
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Later stages of the Civil War - 1863
The American Civil War's later stages saw the North's Anaconda Plan squeezing the South. Key victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in 1863 strengthened the Union's control. Ulysses S. Grant's leadership led to the capture of Tennessee, setting the stage for the war's final year.
Want to join the conversation?
Did the Union victory at Shiloh secure Tennessee for the North?(15 votes)
I'd say it was more likely the Battle of Nashville that really secured Tennessee for the Union forces, where Hood's forces were forced to retreat and later surrender. Wilson's cavalry was responsible for massive casualties that the South couldn't sustain, and ultimately ended any reasonable chance at continued fighting in the region.
Source/Further Reading: http://militaryhistory.about.com/od/civilwarinthewest/p/nashville.htm(18 votes)
At4:31, Kim says that the Union has had a multitude of generals. On average, how many were there? Thank you.(7 votes)
From the author:The "multitude of generals" I was talking about here was at the very highest level -- the commander of all the Union armies. During the war, there were four, not counting Lincoln himself (who took over for awhile): Winfield Scott, George McClellan, Henry Halleck, and Ulysses S. Grant. By comparison, the Confederacy had only one commanding general throughout, Robert E. Lee.
However, through the ranks there were other generals who commanded armies, corps, divisions and brigades (in descending order of rank). Here's a link to an infographic on army organization that I found useful for understanding: http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/army-organization/?referrer=https://www.google.com/(22 votes)
the
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DETERMINER
1. denoting one or more people or things already mentioned or assumed to be common knowledge. Compare with a.
"what's the matter?"
"call the doctor"
"the phone rang"
2. used to point forward to a following qualifying or defining clause or phrase:
"the fuss that he made of her"
"the top of a bus"
"I have done the best I could"
3. used to make a generalized reference to something rather than identifying a particular instance:
"he taught himself to play the violin"
"worry about the future"(20 votes)
On the eastern side kinda near Florida where it says blocked how was it blocked? Cause i mean maybe i miss understand how it showed it kinda looks like its in the water?(2 votes)
You just put naval patrols out there to stop and seize anything that attempts to bring cargo in or out. Blockades sometimes work. Sometimes, just the threat of a blockade stops insurance companies from insuring cargoes, which pretty much dries up commerce.(0 votes)
4:31Video transcript
- [Voiceover] All right, so
we've been talking about the later stages of the American Civil War, and in the last videos, we talked about the Battle of Gettysburg and the Gettysburg
Address, which happened in November of 1863 as Abraham Lincoln went to the site of the Battle of Gettysburg
to dedicate the cemetery that was being built there to hold the battlefield dead, which numbered in the thousands. In the next few videos, I'd like to take you
through the last stages of the Civil War starting with late 1863. If you think back to the
very beginning of the war, the North strategy was
called the Anaconda Plan. The Anaconda is a kind of snake
that squeezes its victims, so the plan of the North was
gonna be to squeeze the South by completely surrounding it and then not allowing
anything to get in or out. So, the South would have no choice but to surrender as they
ran out of supplies. So, the Anaconda Plan is going fairly well in this late period of the war. So, now you recall that they were going to blockade the Atlantic Ocean so that the South couldn't ship any of its cotton or receive
any supplies from Europe, so that's not happening, and, to take control of
the Mississippi River, which goes here, doo, doo, doo. So, the other reason why
Abraham Lincoln was so happy after the North won the
Battle of Gettysburg is because Ulysses S. Grant
had just taken Vicksburg, which meant that the Union had control of the Mississippi River, so you can see that the plan to surround the South
is going pretty well. This blockade extended all
the way down around Florida. The last real area here that
the Union needs to control is this sort of middle region here. You know that these are the border states, so there's still slavery
allowed in places like Kentucky and Tennessee and Maryland, and another thing that's kind
of hard to see from this map is that there are mountains here. This is the Appalachian
Mountain Range, and so this is gonna be a difficult area
to strategize through. So, thanks to this mountain range, there are two real main theaters of war during the Civil War. There's the Eastern Theater of the war, which is over here, and that includes a
lot of the battles that are gonna take place in
the Shenandoah Valley area of Virginia, and through Georgia, so kind of the tidewater
Piedmont region of the East is one of the main areas
where battle takes place during this Civil War. But the other theater
is this Western Theater, and that includes the Mississippi River and these key border states
of Kentucky and Tennessee. When last we left off with
the Battle of Gettysburg, Robert E. Lee, who's the
commander of the Armies for the Confederacy had
made an attempt to invade the North and got as far
as southern Pennsylvania where the Union troops led by General George Meade turned the Confederates away and so now, they're headed back to Virginia. There's gonna be some
really fierce fighting here in this northern part of Virginia known as the Wilderness Campaign as Lee retreats to Richmond. That's the Eastern Theater, and I'll draw the blue line
that's gonna be following them here as well. Now in the Western Theater of the war, Ulysses S. Grant has just provided a
major victory by taking Vicksburg, and now controlling
all of the Mississippi River. Abraham Lincoln has been
looking for a great general to lead his armies, Now, Lee has been the commander
of the Confederate armies this entire time, but
the Union army has had a multitude of commanders
from Winfield Scott to George McClellan,
but in Ulysses S. Grant, Lincoln finally finds his general. So, after the victory at
the Siege of Vicksburg, Grant goes up into Tennessee and finally captures Tennessee. He takes Chattanooga and
firmly puts Tennessee in control of the Union. So, look how well the Anaconda
strategy is going now. We've got Tennessee, we're almost there. After taking Chattanooga,
Lincoln makes Grant the commander of all the Union armies. He is the General in Chief, and it's going to be Grant who ultimately leads the Union to victory and when he meets up
with Lee, as he will do once he heads to Richmond
and then later Appomattox, he's going to be the one
who really ends the war by forcing Lee's surrender. But we'll get to that. So that's 1863, the period at which Grant becomes Commander of the Armies, Lee is turned away from his
second invasion of the north and flees to Richmond, and the stage is set for the final year, and little bit more of the war, which we'll get to in the next video.