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what was strategic thinking of the union general Grant and the confederate general Lee?
What where there major goals in these stratagies?
~Essentially, Grant led three campaigns against Lee and he won them all. His strategy was pretty much the same as the orders he gave Sherman regarding the March to the Sea. "Attack."
Grant took over as General-in-Chief of Federal forces on March 12, 1864. He crossed the Rapidan into Virginia on May 4. George Meade commanded the Army of the Potomac under Grant's direction. Grant's objective was to pursue and engage Lee at every opportunity. His orders to Meade were simple: "Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also." Grant gave up on the prior Union strategy of trying to take Richmond. Instead, he decided to win the war.
In the Overland (or Wilderness) Campaign, many of the twelve battles were inconclusive: tactical victories for Lee, strategic victories for Grant. The Union objective was to push the Army of North Virgina south away from Washington, and to engage. It was now a war of attrition. Jefferson Davis acknowledge from the time of his inauguration that the South could not win such a war. He knew it, Lee knew it, Bragg knew it, Stuart knew it, Longstreet knew it, Lincoln knew it. Lincoln had only to find a general on his side that knew it too. Vicksburg found him his man in the form of US Grant. Lincoln was no fool and he gave Grant command and turned him loose.
About half way through the six week Wilderness Campaign, the battle of North Anna was fought. Although the results of the battle were pretty much inconclusive, Grant said for the first time that Lee had lost the war. It didn't matter if Grant won or lost a particular battle. Every time the armies engaged, whether or not Lee took or held the objective, Grant won. If he suffered a setback in the field, he just reloaded and went at it again. This was a new breed of foe for the Confederates, who were used to the likes of McClellan and Meade and Fremont. Grant had more reserves, and a vast pool of potential conscripts from which to draw more. Grant had the industrial might of the North behind him. Grant could feed, clothe and arm his forces. Most of all, he had the determination and guts to end the war. The Confederacy had pretty much exhausted it's meager resources and what they had left, Grant was bleeding off or his subordinates in the South and West, notably Sherman, were burning and killing. It was no contest.
The Richmond-Petersburg Campaign was more or less a sequel to the the Overland campaign. Grant continued to pursue Lee across eastern Virginia, doing battle at every opportunity and inflicting severe punishment on his Army. Like a bulldog on steroids, Grant would simply not let up. Lee won a few battles of significance, such as Petersburg I and Petersburg II. and he finally holed up in Petersburg. Grant 'laid siege' to Petersburg for the next ten months. It was not a siege in the traditional sense and a series of nineteen battles were contested in the Petersburg/Richmond area over that 10 months. Lee "won" several of the battles, maybe as many as 60% of them, and he emerged ever weaker each time he fought. His "victories" were costing him his army, just as Grant intended. Petersburg was more like the trench warfare of WWI than anything, and it certainly did not resemble the Civil war battles that preceded it. Is it possible that finally, after 3 1/2 years of fighting, both sides had figured out that 18th century tactics just did not work against 19th century weaponry? Too late we get smart. A lot of good boys and men died on both sides before that message sunk in.
Grant had his ace in the hole, namely William T. Sherman. Sherman succeeded Grant as Commander of the Western Theater. He was of like mind with Grant, and Grant's order to attack, pursue and attack again was easy for him to follow. Sherman's scorched earth policy pushed the western theater all the way from the Mississippi to the Atlantic beaches of Georgia then north through the Carolinas. While Lee was trapped in Petersburg, Sherman was approaching. Lee knew Sherman's arrival was Lee's doom. Lee tried to break Grant's lines and lost more than half his force in the effort. Meanwhile, Grant's army had also been holding Richmond under siege at the same time. Lee abandoned both cities and tried to link up with the remnants of the Confederate armies who were retreating from Sherman's onslaught.
The Appomattox campaign was the anti-climactic finale. Grant chased Lee from Richmond/Petersburg. Fourteen battles over the next two weeks, some minor, some major, were contested in Grant's relentless pursuit of Lee's Army of North Virginia. The Federals won eleven of those battles, one was inconclusive. The last, at Appomattox Courthouse, culminated in Lee's surrender on April 9. The war was over in Virginia. Jefferson Davis would be captured in Georgia less than a month later, bringing the war to a close. Lincoln never saw the end of the war. Five days after Lee's surrender, Lincoln went to see "Our American Cousin". Joe Johnston surrendered to Sherman on April 18, and through May, the remaining Confederate armies threw in the towel.
Grant suffered some tactical losses and some significant ones along the way, but he gave better than he got Each of his campaigns during his 13 months at the helm of the Federal forces was a resounding strategic success.
Lee's strategy was equally basic. He simply wanted to hold on and fight defensive battles while anti-war sentiment, draft riots and desertion depleted Federal ranks and forced peace. He knew he couldn't win the war, but he hoped he could win the peace. Then Sherman took Atlanta and Lincoln's dismal popularity and approval ratings soared and Lincoln won the '64 election. Peace was NOT at hand. All Lee could do was try to feed his troops and watch them bleed and die. Still, he wouldn't give up. He let Grant continue the slaughter until his starving troops began to desert en masse or, if they stayed, couldn't fight. Even the southern strategy of granting emancipation to any slave who would take up arms against the North failed to replace his lost and irreplaceable troops. Many of his best Generals were dead, captured or wounded during the three Grant campaigns. Finally, he had had enough - at least a year and half a million deaths too late, but he finally did quit.
Jefferson Davis was in charge of southern strategy, not Lee. Late in the war, Davis finally realized he was not a strategist or tactician and he gave his generals some planning authority, but by then it was too late. Before Grant took charge of the Federal Armies, Southern strategy was to defend and to fight defensive battles from fortified high ground. The one offensive gambit by the Confederacy was the Gettysburg Campaign. The objectives were twofold. One, if The Army of North Virginia could get between the Army of the Potomac and Washington, there was actually a chance of winning the war. Two, if the South could win a major offensive campaign or battle, that might be enough to bring Great Britain into the war on the side of the CSA and if Britain joined, so to might Spain, France and other European powers. Such alliances could have countered the southern lack of manpower, industry, food, arms, ammunition and provisions. That was a pipedream. The key was Britain. No other European nation was about to get involved unless and until the British did (for fear of ending up in a war with the Brits) and given the diametrically opposed views on slavery between the CSA and Great Britain, an alliance simply was not possible.
Davis' grand offense didn't work. Lee was crushed at Gettysburg in no small part because of the poor leadership and insubordination of Richard Ewell, which all but took the entire II Corps out of the fight. Dan Sickles tried to give the battle right back with his incompetence and insubordination, but Winfield Hancock saved his butt. Had Meade followed up the win at Gettysburg as Lincoln first ordered then pleaded with him to do, he could have trapped Lee's defeated and exhausted army on the swollen banks of the flooded Potomac with no escape. The war could have been over and done with in July, 1863. If Grant had been Meade's superior then and at the scene, it would have been. At the time, Grant was busy taking Vicksburg, where the Union victory was pursued.
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