What where the turning point of the civil war?
~May 18 to July 5, 1863, and most particularly July 3 and 4. Grant began the siege of Vicksburg on May 18 and the city fell on July 4. Gettysburg was contested on July 1-3, with minor skirmishing on July 4 and Lee’s withdrawal on July 5. Had George Meade followed orders, and the the pleas, of his Commander-in-Chief, Abe Lincoln, he would have trapped Lee’s defeated, depleted and exhausted Army of Northern Virginia on the banks of the Potomac. The river was flooded and Lee couldn’t cross. Unlike Dunkirk, there was no flotilla of fishing boats to spirit him away. He had no escape. Not only was Gettysburg the turning point in the East, it could have been and should have been the end of the war in Virginia. Lincoln and the Federal forces won three major battles that Independence Day. Gettysburg and Vicksburg were important, but Lincoln’s greatest victory is that he, at long last, had found the Commander he had been looking for. Prior to that July, the Army of the Potomac had been led by in
