warlike
ends were greater still.

The Southern situation, therefore, was not encouraging from the
naval and military point of view. The border States had long been
lost, then the trans-Mississippi; and now the whole river area was
held as a base by the North. Only five States remained effective:
Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia. These formed an
irregular oblong of about two hundred thousand square miles between
the Appalachians and the sea. There were a good eight hundred
Confederate miles from the Shenandoah Valley to Mobile. But the
three hundred miles across the oblong, even in its widest part,
were everywhere threatened and in some places held by the North.
The whole coast was more closely blockaded than ever; and only
three ports remained with their defenses still in Southern hands:
Wilmington, Charleston, and Mobile. Alabama was threatened by land and
sea from the lower Mississippi and the Gulf. Georgia was threatened
by Sherman's main body in southeastern Tennessee. The Carolinas
were in less immediate danger. But they were menaced both from the
mountains and the sea; and if the Union forces conquered Virginia and
Georgia, then the Carolinas were certain to be ground into subjugation
between Grant's victorious forces on the north and Sherman's on
the south.

Grant fixed his own headquarters with the Army of the Potomac at
Culpeper Court House, north of the Rapidan. Lee's Army of Northern
Virginia was at Orange Court House, over twenty miles south. Grant,
taking his own headquarters as the center, regarded Butler's Army
of the James as the left wing, which could unite with the center
round Richmond and Petersburg. The long right wing ran through
the whole of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, clear away to
Memphis, with its own headquarters at Chattanooga. There Sherman
faced Johnston, who occupied a strong position at Dalton, over
thirty miles southeast. The great objectives were, of course, the
two main Southern armies under Lee and Johnston, with Richmond
and Atlanta as the chief positions to be gained.

All other Union forces were regarded as attacking the South from
the rear. Wherever coast garrisons could help to tighten the blockade
or seriously distract Confederate attention they were left to do
so. Wherever they could not they were either depleted for the front
or sent there bodily. The principal Union field force attacking
from the rear was to have been formed by Banks's forty tho