While fighting his way toward Atlanta, William T. Sherman encountered his biggest roadblock at Kennesaw Mountain, where Joseph E. Johnston's Army of Tennessee held a heavily fortified position. The opposing armies confronted each other from June 19 to July 3, 1864. Hess explains how this battle, with its combination of maneuver and combat, severely tried the patience and endurance of the common soldier and why Johnston's strategy might have been the Confederates' best chance to halt the Federal drive toward Atlanta.

Revisit one of the most important and bloodiest days of the Civil War, the Confederate battle at Kennesaw Mountain in Georgia, in this exciting view of the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain in the summer of 1864. In the summer of 1864, Georgia was the scene of one of the most important campaigns of the Civil War. William Tecumseh Sherman's push southward toward Atlanta threatened the heart of the Confederacy, and Joseph E. Johnston and the Army of Tennessee were the Confederacy's best hope to defend it. In June, Johnston managed to grind Sherman's advance to a halt northwest of Atlanta at Kennesaw Mountain. After weeks of maneuvering, on June 27, Sherman launched a bold attack on Johnston's lines. The Confederate victory was one of the bloodiest days of the entire campaign. And while Sherman's assaults had a frightful cost, Union forces learned important lessons at Kennesaw Mountain that enabled the fall of Atlanta several months later.

Excerpt from The Road Past Kennesaw: The Atlanta Campaign of 1864 The Atlanta Campaign had an importance reaching beyond the immediate military and political consequences. It was conducted in a manner that helped establish a new mode of warfare. From beginning to end, it was a railroad campaign, in that a major transportation center was the prize for which the contestants vied, and both sides used rail lines to marshal, shift, and sustain their forces. Yanks and Rebs made some use of repeating rifles, and Confederate references to shooting down moving bushes indicate resort to camouflage by Sherman's soldiers. The Union commander maintained a command post under signal tree at Kennesaw Mountain and directed the movement of his forces through a net of telegraph lines running out to subordinate head quarters. Men oi both armies who early in the war had looked askance at the employment of pick and shovel, now, as a matter of course, promptly scooped out protective ditches at each change of position. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

"A project of the New Georgia Encyclopedia"

Draws on diaries, unpublished letters, and other archival sources to trace the events of the Civil War campaign that sealed the fate of the Confederacy and was instrumental in securing Abraham Lincoln's reelection.