Spring 1864 marked the beginning of the war’s fourth year. In the eastern theater, 3 years of fighting had led to a virtual stalemate, with the opposing armies hovering between Washington and Richmond—about where they had been when the war began in 1861. However, the situation was quite different in the vast area between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, a region known in the 1860’s as “the West.” There in 1862 Federal armies had driven the Southerners out of Kentucky and much of Tennessee. In the following year the Northerners secured control of the Mississippi River and captured the important city of Chattanooga. By early 1864, Union armies were poised for what they hoped would be a quick campaign to dismember the Confederacy and end the war. This feeling was well illustrated by an Illinois soldier who wrote his sister on April 22, “I think we can lick the Rebs like a book when we start to do it & hope we will Clean Rebeldom out this summer so we will be able to quit the business.” To realize these hopes, Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, commander of the Northern armies, planned a simultaneous move on all fronts, with the greatest efforts devoted to Virginia, where he would personally direct operations, and to the region between the Tennessee and Chattahoochee Rivers, where the Federals would be led by Sherman and Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks. Grant hoped that Banks would move from New Orleans, seize Mobile, and advance northward toward Montgomery, while Sherman’s force struck southward from Chattanooga. Had these plans succeeded, the Confederacy would have been reduced to a small area along the coast of Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia. Confederate victories in Louisiana, however, made Banks’ projected campaign infeasible, and Sherman’s drive southward into Georgia, with Atlanta as the initial goal, became the major Union effort in the West. [Illustration: _Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman_] Leaders on both sides had long recognized the importance of Atlanta, located a few miles south of the Chattahoochee and about 120 miles from Chattanooga. In 1864, only Richmond was more important to the South. Atlanta’s four railroads were not only the best means of communication between the eastern and western parts of the Confederacy but they were also the major lines of supply for the Southern armies in Virginia and north Georgia. The city’s hospitals cared for the sick and wounded and her factories produced many kinds of military goods. In the words of a Northern editor, Atlanta was “the great military depot of Rebeldom.” In addition, the city’s capture would give the Union armies a base from which they could strike further into Georgia to reach such vital manufacturing and administrative centers as Milledgeville, Macon, Augusta, and Columbus. All of these things were clear to the men who led the opposing armies.