The first major battle of the Civil War was fought in the summer of 1861 when the Confederate army protecting the southern capital of ___1___ defeated the ill trained Union army at ___2___ . After months of training under its young new commander, General ___3___ , the Army of the ___4___ made a second attempt to capture Richmond. But the army of Northern Virginia, under its brilliant leader, general ___5___, assisted by ___6___, successfully blunted McClellan�s advance up the peninsula between the York and ___7___ rivers and forced him to retire. McClellan was then replaced by General _____8______ who fared even worse at the hands of Lee when his army was thoroughly beaten in the late summer of 1862 at ______9_____. Union hopes rose the next month at the battle of ___10__ , which ended Lee�s invasion of Maryland and forced him to retreat across the ___11__ into Virginia.
In the West, Union forces were more successful from the beginning because of the leadership of such fighting Generals as ___12__ , who achieved early fame by demanding unconditional surrender at Ft. Donalson. He was able to survive near disaster at the bloody battle of ___13___ , where he was caught by surprise in April, 1862. In his best fought campaign of the war Grant then cooperated with the Union Navy in besieging the Confederate stronghold of ___14__ on the Mississippi river. It surrendered on July 4, 1863, thus cutting off the trans-Mississippi Confederate states of ___15__ and ___16__. Grant then was transferred to East Tennessee, where he won a series of desperate battles in the vicinity of ___17__. These Confederate defeats opened the way for ___18__�s devastating march through ___19__, from Atlanta to the sea at ___20__.
But in the Eastern theater Confederate fortunes continued to flourish as Lee�s well positioned army slaughtered thousands of General Burnside�s attacking troops in December, 1862, near the Virginia town of __21___. Lee followed up this cheaply won triumph with a more costly victory (May 1863) at ___22__ that took the life of his great lieutenant, ___23__. Hoping to end the war, Lee undertook his second invasion of the North that came to a decisive end in Pennsylvania at the epic three day battle of ___24__.
The final stages of the war began in 1864 when General ___25__ was brought east to lead the revitalized Army of the Potomac in another invasion of Virginia. Unlike earlier Union generals, he refused to be deterred by setbacks as he suffered some 50,000 casualties in wearing down Lee�s badly outnumbered troops through a series of furious battles in the ___26___campaign. Northern opinion recoiled from terrible Union losses at the battle of ___27___ on June 3, 1864, but Lincoln supported his fighting General. In the spring of 1865 Lee was forced to evacuate Richmond and the end came shortly after when he surrendered the entire Army of Northern Virginia to Grant at ___28___ in April, 1865.