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The Western Theater of the American Civil War encompassed major military and naval operations in the states of Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina, Kentucky, South Carolina and Tennessee, as well as Louisiana east of the Mississippi River. (Operations on the coasts of the states, except for Mobile Bay, are considered part of the Lower Seaboard Theater.) The Western Theater was the avenue of military operations by Union armies, chief among them the Army of the Tennessee, directly into the agricultural heartland of the South via the major rivers of the region (the Mississippi, the Tennessee, and the Cumberland). The Confederacy was forced to defend an enormous area with limited resources. Union operations began with securing Kentucky in Union hands in June 1861. Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's Army of the Tennessee had early successes in Kentucky and western Tennessee in 1861–1862, marched towards and captured Vicksburg in 1862–64, and combined with the armies of the Cumberland and of the Ohio, who had been working their way through central Tennessee in 1862–63, to capture Chattanooga in 1864. Chattanooga served as the launching point for Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman, who was put in charge of the combined armies by Grant following his elevation by Abraham Lincoln to General-in-Chief in command over all operations in the Eastern Theater, to capture the Confederate rail hub of Atlanta and march to the Atlantic. Operations in theater concluded with the surrender of Southern forces to the Union army in North Carolina and Florida in May 1865 following General Robert E. Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House. ==Theater of operations== The Western Theater was an area defined by both geography and the sequence of campaigning. It originally represented the area east of the Mississippi River and west of the Appalachian Mountains. It excluded operations against the Gulf Coast and the Eastern Seaboard, but as the war progressed and William Tecumseh Sherman's Union armies moved southeast from Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1864 and 1865, the definition of the theater expanded to encompass their operations in Georgia and the Carolinas. Operations west of the Mississippi River were in the Trans-Mississippi Theater. The West was by some measures the most important theater of the war. Capture of the Mississippi River has been one of the key tenets of Union General-in-Chief Winfield Scott's Anaconda Plan.〔Woodworth, pp. 21–22.〕 Military historian J. F. C. Fuller has described the Union invasion as an immense turning movement, a left wheel that started in Kentucky, headed south down the Mississippi River, and then east through Tennessee, Georgia, and the Carolinas. With the exception of the Battle of Chickamauga and some daring raids by cavalry or guerrilla forces, the four years in the West marked a string of almost continuous defeats for the Confederates; or, at best, tactical draws that eventually turned out to be strategic reversals. Union generals consistently outclassed most of their Confederate opponents, with the possible exception of cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest.〔Fuller (1956), pp. 49–81.〕 Lacking the proximity to the opposing capitals and population centers (and the accompanying concentration of newspapers) of the East, the astounding Confederate victories, and the fame of Eastern generals such as Robert E. Lee, George B. McClellan, and Stonewall Jackson, the Western theater received considerably less attention than the Eastern, both at the time and in subsequent historical accounts. The near-steady progress that Union forces made in defeating Confederate armies in the West and overtaking Confederate territory went nearly unnoticed.〔Woodworth, pp. 18–19.〕 The campaign classification established by the United States National Park Service〔U.S. National Park Service, (''Civil War Battle Studies by Campaign'' )〕 is more fine-grained than the one used in this article. Some minor NPS campaigns have been omitted and some have been combined into larger categories. Only a few of the 117 battles the NPS classifies for this theater are described. Boxed text in the right margin show the NPS campaigns associated with each section. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Western Theater of the American Civil War」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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