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William Tecumseh Sherman had blazed a path from Chattanooga to Marietta in just over a month. With a numerically superior fighting force, better armed and better supplied, he out-manuevered Joseph E. Johnston at Dalton, Resaca, Kingston, and most recently Dallas and north Marietta.

George Thomas Decided to attack at Cheatham Hill, Battle of Kennesaw Mountain

Situated in Ac(k)worth, he had some of the war's most able commanders under him. General George Thomas, the "Rock of Chickamauga," who singlehandedly saved the day during the battle in which he earned the nickname, in command of the Army of the Cumberland. John McPherson led the Army of the Tennessee, the dashing general who was a favorite of both Grant and Sherman, and John Schofield, the rotund Ohioan commanded the Army of the Ohio. Others who played a major role in the engagement were Joseph Hooker, who was never above a little self-aggrandizement. During the Battle of Kolb's Farm Hooker would claim that the entire Confederate Army was attacking him. Daniel McCook, whose family earned the sobriquet "The Fighting McCooks", led the attack at the Dead Angle.

Opposing them stood Johnston's Army of Tennessee. Over the last month, in the initial phases of the Atlanta Campaign, Johnston had been successful at his plan of inflicting greater losses on his enemy than his men suffered. The recent loss of Leonidas Polk a few days before taking a position at Kennesaw Mountain had cost Johnston not only a good field commander and beloved leader, but also a close friend. Polk, an Episcopal bishop, had baptized Johnston at the start of The Atlanta Campaign .

Newly appointed W. W. ("Old Blizzard") Loring was untested in his position as Corps commander. Beside him was W. J. Hardee, the swathy Cajun who time and again proved his worth in battle. At the southern end of the line was the impetuous John Bell Hood, who's attack at Kolb's Farm had stopped the Union soldiers in their tracks. Benjamin Franklin Cheatham was the hard-drinking Tennessean who would come up against a significant part of the Union Army at the Dead Angle. His men fought so hard and bravely that the rise they defended came to be known as Cheatham Hill. And Patrick Cleburne, just north of Frank Cheatham, who had recently been passed over for command of Polk's Corp, in part because he was a foreigner, in part because he advocated freeing the slaves in return for service in the Confederate Army.

In late June, 1864, these men and almost 200,000 of the men they commanded would meet west of the town of Marietta, Georgia, and engage in what William Tecumseh Sherman's biographer would call "A Needless Waste of Lives."

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