" And most
important of all he placed in supreme command of the forces in Tennessee
the silent man whom his patience and faith had saved to the Nation, the
conqueror of Vicksburg--Ulysses S. Grant.
On November the 24th and 25th, the new Commander raised the siege of
Chattanooga, and drove Bragg's army from Missionary Ridge and Lookout
Mountain back into Georgia.
At last the President had found the man of genius for whom he had long
searched. Grant was summoned to Washington and given command of all the
armies of the United States East and West.
The new General at once placed William Tecumseh Sherman at the head of
an army of a hundred thousand men at Chattanooga for the purpose of
reinvading Georgia, sent General Butler with forty thousand up the
Peninsula against Richmond along the line of McClellan's old march,
raised the Army of the Potomac to one hundred and forty thousand
effective fighters, took command in person and faced General Lee on the
banks of the Rapidan but a few miles from the old ground in the
Wilderness around Chancellorsville where Hooker's men had baptized the
earth in heroic blood the year before.
Grant's army was the flower of Northern manhood and with its three
hundred and eighteen great field guns the best equipped body of fighting
men ever brought together on our continent.
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