Specific battles in the civil war

Recently in class, we have been discussing more specific battles in the civil war. There were to essential questions for this unit. Who was the ultimate victor in each of the theaters of war: East, West, Naval? What are some of the commonalities you can identify in the reasons for the results of the battles? To get information on this, we did a scavenger hunt with QR codes that linked to small google docs full of information. My battle, the battle of Chattanooga, can be found at this link: http://bit.ly/1DkJBfT.

Afterwords, we discussed as a class and created a padlet discussing which group won in each theater.

For the first essential question, the union won in naval and western theaters. They had better naval technology allowing them to easily dominate in that theater. They won battles such as the battle of Baton Rouge due to having more resources and again better naval technology.

The union dominated in the western theater as well. The union had an affective army as well as resources beyond what the confederate did. This allowed them to win in battles such as the Chattanooga campaign and others.

However, the Confederates managed to defend rather well against the union in the eastern theater. The union's army lacked leadership it needed to overcome the confederates in this theater. They struggled to find a necessary leader that they needed to overcome the confederates, with new generals being appointed every couple of battles. While the Confederate armies dominated for the first part of the war, Union forces beat them once they found the leadership they needed.


As far as commonalities go, most of them are pretty obvious. In the naval theater, the Union have more advanced ironclads and more of them, too. In the western theater, the Confederate were running out of resources, and the Union took advantage of that. They attacked using the resources the Confederate lacked, and won because of it.

In the eastern theater, things get more complicated. The Confederates tended to win while the Union lacked leader ship. However, over time, as the Union got the appropriate leadership they needed, they began to win battles.

When analyzing the statistics of these battles, it can become rather clear why the Union won, beyond generalized strategies.

A map depicting the strategy of the Chattanooga campaign

Map citation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chattanooga_Campaign#/media/File:Chattanooga_Campaign_Nov_24-25.png