The Atlanta Campaign: Volume 2: From the Etowah River to Kennesaw Mountain, May 20 to June 27, 1864 [Hardcover]

Details Shermans grueling advance from the Etowah River to Kennesaw Mountain during the 1864 Atlanta Campaign.The scope, drama, and importance of the 1864 Atlanta Campaign was on a par with Ulysses S. Grants Overland Campaign in Virginia. Despite its criticality and massive array of primary source material, the operations in North Georgia have lingered in the shadows. Award-winning author David A. Powells first of five installments, The Atlanta Campaign: Volume 1: Dalton to Cassville, May 119, 1864, treated the opening phase of the campaignweeks of maneuver and several days of heavy fighting at Resaca, after which the Confederates slipped out of Shermans traps and escaped across the Oostanaula and Etowah rivers. This second volume, From the Etowah River to Kennesaw Mountain, May 20June 27, 1864, marches with the armies and their leaders deeper into Georgia.The heavyweight match unfolding between U. S. Grant and Robert E. Lee from the Wilderness to the trenches of Cold Harbor increased the pressure on Sherman to do everything he could to prevent Joe Johnston from sending troops to reinforce the Virginia army. Sherman had closed half the distance to Johnstons base at Atlanta, but the Army of Tennessee had grown in numbers and the odds that were once 2 to 1 in his favor were now nearly even.Sherman opened the second phase of the campaign on May 23 by throwing his army across the Etowah. Instead of moving down the railroad to Allatoona, however, he marched west of Marietta to Dallas. The next five weeks were by some measures the hardest of the entire summer as maneuvering gave way to trench warfare, first along the New Hope Line, then Pine and Lost mountains, along the Mud Creek Line, and finally, atop the imposing slopes of Kennesaw Mountain. The daily grind, punctuated by periodic assaults at New Hope Church, Picketts Mill, Gilgal Church, Pigeon Hill, and Cheatham Hill took a terrible toll on both armies. The heavy rain through most of June made life in the fl3,