- [Voiceover] All right, so we've been talking about the
later stages of the American Civil War,
and in the last videos,
we talked about the Battle of Gettysburg
and the Gettysburg Address, which happened in
November of 1863
as Abraham Lincoln went to the site
of the Battle of Gettysburg to dedicate the cemetery
that was being built there
to hold the battlefield dead,
which numbered in the thousands.
In the next few videos,
I'd like to take you through the last stages
of the Civil War starting with late 1863.
If you think back to the very beginning of the war,
the North strategy was called the Anaconda Plan.
The Anaconda is a kind of snake that squeezes its victims,
so the plan of the North was gonna be to squeeze the South
by completely surrounding it
and then not allowing anything to get in or out.
So, the South would have no choice
but to surrender as they ran out of supplies.
So, the Anaconda Plan is going fairly well
in this late period of the war.
So, now you recall that
they were going to blockade
the Atlantic Ocean
so that the South couldn't ship
any of its cotton or receive any supplies from Europe,
so that's not happening,
and, to take control of the Mississippi River,
which goes here, doo, doo, doo.
So, the other reason why Abraham Lincoln was so happy
after the North won the Battle of Gettysburg
is because Ulysses S. Grant had just taken Vicksburg,
which meant that the Union had control
of the Mississippi River,
so you can see that the plan
to surround the South is going pretty well.
This blockade extended all the way down around Florida.
The last real area here that the Union needs to control
is this sort of middle region here.
You know that these are the border states,
so there's still slavery allowed in places like
Kentucky and Tennessee and Maryland,
and another thing that's kind of hard to see from this map
is that there are mountains here.
This is the Appalachian Mountain Range, and so this is
gonna be a difficult area to strategize through.
So, thanks to this mountain range,
there are two real main theaters of war
during the Civil War.
There's the Eastern Theater of the war,
which is over here,
and that includes a lot of the battles that
are gonna take place in the Shenandoah Valley area
of Virginia, and through Georgia, so
kind of the tidewater Piedmont region of the East
is one of the main areas where battle takes place
during this Civil War.
But the other theater is this Western Theater,
and that includes the Mississippi River
and these key border states of Kentucky and Tennessee.
When last we left off with the Battle of Gettysburg,
Robert E. Lee, who's the commander of the Armies
for the Confederacy had made an attempt to invade
the North and got as far as southern Pennsylvania
where the Union troops
led by General George Meade
turned the Confederates away and so now,
they're headed back to Virginia.
There's gonna be some really fierce fighting here
in this northern part of Virginia
known as the Wilderness Campaign
as Lee retreats to Richmond.
That's the Eastern Theater,
and I'll draw the blue line that's gonna be following them
here as well.
Now in the Western Theater of the war,
Ulysses S. Grant
has just provided a major victory by taking
Vicksburg, and now controlling all of the Mississippi River.
Abraham Lincoln has been looking for a great general
to lead his armies,
Now, Lee has been the commander of the Confederate armies
this entire time, but the Union army has had
a multitude of commanders from Winfield Scott
to George McClellan, but in Ulysses S. Grant,
Lincoln finally finds his general.
So, after the victory at the Siege of Vicksburg,
Grant goes up into Tennessee
and finally captures Tennessee.
He takes Chattanooga and firmly puts Tennessee
in control of the Union.
So, look how well the Anaconda strategy is going now.
We've got Tennessee, we're almost there.
After taking Chattanooga, Lincoln makes Grant
the commander of all the Union armies.
He is the General in Chief,
and it's going to be Grant who
ultimately leads the Union to victory
and when he meets up with Lee, as he will do
once he heads to Richmond and then later Appomattox,
he's going to be the one who really ends the war
by forcing Lee's surrender.
But we'll get to that.
So that's 1863, the period at which Grant
becomes Commander of the Armies,
Lee is turned away from his second invasion of the north
and flees to Richmond,
and the stage is set for the final year,
and little bit more of the war,
which we'll get to in the next video.