Following his victory at Vicksburg, Mississippi, in July, 1863, General Ulysses S. Grant, accompanied by General William T. Sherman and his corps, went east to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where a Union army was under siege. Chattanooga was a railroad center and the largest city in eastern Tennessee, an area noted for its Union sentiments. Braxton Bragg, leading the Confederate forces, had won a victory south of the city at Chickamauga (September 20, 1863), forcing the Union Army to fall back into Chattanooga. Grant arrived in mid-October.

Following his victory at Vicksburg, Mississippi, in July, 1863, General Ulysses S. Grant, accompanied by General William T. Sherman and his corps, went east to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where a Union army was under siege. Chattanooga was a railroad center and the largest city in eastern Tennessee, an area noted for its Union sentiments. Braxton Bragg, leading the Confederate forces, had won a victory south of the city at Chickamauga (September 20, 1863), forcing the Union Army to fall back into Chattanooga. Grant arrived in mid-October.

After restoring the supply line that Bragg had cut, Grant launched his attack on November 25. He planned to strike Bragg’s flanks, with a feint in the center. The troops of George H. Thomas, commander of the Union Army of the Cumberland, made the feint up Missionary Ridge, drove out the Confederates who had been facing them in their trenches, and to the amazement of the Union commanders, continued, without orders, right up the hill to destroy Bragg’s line. Bragg lost sixty-seven hundred troops, Grant fifty-eight hundred. With Vicksburg and Chattanooga firmly in the hands of the Union, the Confederate position in the West had become tenuous at best.