In all his plans Grant calculated, as he had an entire right to do, upon an enormous superiority of force, whether measured by the number of men under his command, or by the extent of equipment, or by the perfection of his supply departments or by the limitless reinforcement which he was privileged to call to his aid, where his adversary was forbidden by strenuous circumstance, to add a single brigade or regiment or company or man to his fighting force. It was his plan to hurl against Lee a force so overwhelming that in the ordinary calculations of war it should crush him completely. To that end he ordered Meade on the twenty-seventh of April to advance with his entire army from the position he occupied near Bull Run to the Rappahannock. On the same day he ordered Burnside, who lay at Annapolis with 20,000 men, to advance and occupy Meade's former position, thus bringing to bear the whole of the forces in northern Virginia as a column of offense against Lee. At the same time Grant ordered Butler to push up on the south side of the James river, and secure a strong and threatening position in rear of the Richmond defenses. Reinforcements were held ready to go to Butler's aid in the event that Lee should fall back upon the defenses of the Confederate capital. On the same day Sherman was directed from Grant's headquarters to mass his forces and begin that splendid advance against Johnston and Atlanta, which was intended first to neutralize and then to destroy the only great Confederate army other than Lee's which remained in the field. Other and minor operations were ordered from the Valley of Virginia, from West Virginia, from eastern Tennessee, from New Orleans and from other points, all of which were intended to accomplish two purposes--one of them the interruption of Confederate communications, and the other to prevent the sending of any reinforcements to Lee. General Grant has himself frankly stated in his "Memoirs," page 419, that "to get possession of Lee's army was the first great object. With the capture of his army Richmond would necessarily follow." Here we have the purpose of the campaign in a nutshell. If General Grant could have succeeded in capturing Lee's army or destroying it in the field, there is no possible doubt whatever that Richmond would have followed, as he said, and the Confederate resistance would have ended early in the summer of 1864. For Sherman's operations against Johnston, Atlanta and the far South were completely successful, as we shall see hereafter. The resisting capacity of the Confederacy was prolonged solely through the fact that Grant's hope of quickly capturing or destroying Lee's army was baffled for the time, and postponed to another year.