Since the success of Confederate General Braxton Bragg in halting Union General William Rosecran's advance south in late September 1863, little had happened in America's Great Civil War outside of Virginia. Yet a new day was in the making. There was a new Union commander, Ulysses S. Grant who was, a year before the war an unsuccessful farmer and fir-wood peddler and then clerk in the family's tannery in Galena, Illinois. "Old Rosey", William Rosecrans, was shifted to St. Louis and oblivion. Privations in Chattanooga had been severe but Joseph Hooker, sent by Grant with twenty thousand seasoned troops from the northern Army of the Potomac, had broken through from Bridgeport, Alabama and reopened a supply/communication line. "The cracker line" from Chattanooga connected with Union resources in Nashville and elsewhere north. James Longstreet, greatly outnumbered and out gunned, had attempted to halt Hooker but was repulsed at the Battle of Wauha.
U. S. Grant, the conqueror of Ft. Donelson and Ft. Henry and new commander of the Union efforts in the mid-south, intended to have an active offensive to push the Confederates south. He was on his way from his headquarters in Memphis to begin a new Union offensive. The winter looked bleak for Confederate fortunes. Grant meant business, even before spring. He had sent Hooker on his break through and Sherman was on his way to Chattanooga to add re-enforcements there.
Grant, a forty-one-year-old native of Point Pleasant, Ohio, east of Cincinnati on the Ohio River, was a diminutive, underachieving West Point student. He graduated near the bottom of his class in 1843. He served in the Mexican War of which he said later, "I have never altogether forgiven myself for going into that . . . I thought so at the time, when I was a youngster, only I had not moral courage enough to resign."
He proved nevertheless a hero. Assigned a quartermaster, he chanced shot and shell to supply his soldiers with ammunition during the bloody attack on Mexico City September 1847. When an infantry assault was stymied by a heavily defended Mexican walled position, he scraped up a small cannon, had it hauled up a well-placed church's steeple and fired hell down on the defenders.
Posted in lonely and isolated forts, especially Vancouver, Oregon Territory and Humbolt, California, after the war, he pined for his wife, Julia, and his two little boys in St. Louis. Abusing liquor to dull his loneliness or make it worse, he was urged to resign as a company commander (captain) in 1854. He scratched out a living for Julia and their four children by the hardest, first by farming near his father-in-law outside St. Louis. Then, he sold firewood and later real estate. He failed at those efforts and as a bill collector in St. Louis. From 1860 he worked until the outbreak of the war (April 1861) in his father's Galena, Illinois tannery and leather store.