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 thousand veterans in conjunction with Farragut's fleet against Mobile. But the Red River Expedition spoilt that combination in the spring and postponed it till August, when Farragut did nearly all the fighting, and the coöperating army was far too late to produce the distracting effect that Grant had originally planned. General Franz Sigel was sent to the upper Shenandoah Valley, both to guard that approach on Washington and to destroy the resources on which Lee's army so greatly relied. General George Crook was given a mounted column to operate from southern West Virginia against the line of rails running toward Tennessee through the lower end of the Valley. The most notable new general was Philip H. Sheridan, whom Grant selected for the cavalry command. Sheridan was thirty-three, two years older than his Southern rival, Stuart, and, like him, a young regular officer who rose to well-earned fame the moment his first great chance occurred. Sherman we have met from the very beginning of the war and followed throughout its course. He was continually rising to more and more responsible command; but it was only now that he became the virtual Commander-in-Chief of all the river armies and the chosen coöperator with Grant on a universal scale. He was of the old original stock, his first American ancestors having emigrated from England in 1634. An old regular, with special knowledge of the South, and in the fullness of his powers at the age of forty-four, he had developed with the war till there was no position which he could not fill to the best advantage of the service.