******

The first days of June 1853 were a time of great sorrow for the citizens of Asheville, North Carolina. Like Constantinople in 1453 or Berlin in 1945, Asheville was steadily becoming a city under siege-- even before the first Union cannonball crashed into its streets, its residents were gripped with fear over the news of the setbacks which Confederate armies had endured and were continuing to endure all over the South. Even the bravest of Asheville’s citizens were feeling a bit of trepidation over the fate that awaited their town once Union forces reached its doorstep; the particularly nervous ones had already begun seeing Union soldiers or spies behind every lamppost. In a sense, the city was a microcosm for scores of other Confederate cities during the latter half of the Southern Rebellion War, sufficiently so that 20th- century novelist Margaret Mitchell would one day be inspired to use it as a backdrop for much of the action in her classic romantic saga Gone With The Wind.

     However, the atmosphere in Asheville felt anything but romantic when on the afternoon of June 2nd its citizens received the grim news that another North Carolina city, Franklin, had been captured by Union soldiers. For some of those who had been wavering about whether they should stay in Asheville or flee to safety elsewhere, this bulletin convinced them to flee; for people who had already made up their minds to abandon the city, word of Franklin’s fall served as vindication of their decision. Durings the next two days the roads leading out of Asheville were jammed with long convoys of refugees intent on getting out before the city turned into a war zone.

     Those roads were still packed when Union artillery forces commenced their bombardment of the city on the morning of June 5th, 1853. The shrinking number of civilians still in Asheville were just finishing their breakfast when the first cannonball smashed into its city hall; a Georgia plantation owner’s daughter who had the serious misfortune to be passing through town when the bombardment started wrote in her diary that “it seemed like the gates of Hades itself had burst open” when the municipal building was hit. And very few people on either side of the battle lines would have been inclined to dispute that assessment. One of the Union forces’ own artillery gunners wrote in a letter home to a college friend that he could see “great walls of flame” rising in the middle of the city at the height of the initial barrage. By sunset on June 6th, nearly one-third of Asheville had been destroyed by Union cannon fire.

      At mid-afternoon on June 7th Union infantry and cavalry took over the primary responsibility for pressing home the assault on Asheville; likewise Confederate infantry and cavalry assumed the chief burden for defending the city. But while for the Union armies it was a matter of choice-- the Union commander wanted to give his artillery crews time to rest up before the final push --for the Confederate side it was a painful necessity, brought on by an acute munitions shortage plaguing the Confederates’ artillery detachments. By 10:00 AM on the morning of June 8th, all but two blocks of Asheville were in Union hands; at 1:25 PM that afternoon the last pocket of Confederate resistance within the city surrendered to the Union Army. The Battle of Asheville was over.

******

     The Union victory at Asheville sparked enthusiastic celebrations in many Northern cities; though nobody was under any illusion the war was over, the end certainly looked that much closer, and the Union’s star was on the ascent. One Boston newspaper of the time summed up the mood of the general public when it printed an editorial which bore the headline “Today Asheville, tomorrow Charleston”. In Charleston itself Jefferson Davis’ verbal broadsides against President Toombs reached a level of bitterness that at times even alarmed Davis himself(“I fear I am becoming a savage”, he confided to his wife Varina according to an entry in her personal diary). Across the Atlantic Britain and France saw the events at Asheville as a vindication of their decision not to recognize the Confederate Republic as a separate nation; freed blacks, inspired by the example of the 47th New Hampshire Infantry as well as the Union victory in Asheville, flocked in huge numbers to Union Army recruiting stations in hopes of getting the opportunity to help their fellow African-Americans also gain freedom. At his field headquarters A.V. Dunbar, on his way to becoming one of the most famous Union Army generals of the war if not the most famous, wrote numerous letters of commendation to the officers and men of the detachments that had taken part in the city’s capture. News of Asheville’s fall even reached the sultan of the Ottoman Empire, who instructed his generals to study the cavalry tactics used in the city’s capture and find ways to adapt them for use in his own army’s ongoing conflict with Russia.   The fall of Asheville to the Union Army came as a harbinger of doom for the residents of another North Carolina town, Waynesville. Many of them had relatives in Asheville, which was just a handful of miles away, either as citizens of that city or as Confederate Army personnel fighting in its defense. They understood all too well that when Asheville went, it would only be a question of time before their own city fell into Union hands. And sure enough Union advance troops swept into Waynesville on June 11th, capturing the city before most of its defenders could even load their rifles. “We was caught with our britches down.” a corporal from a Georgia infantry company ruefully confessed to a Union lieutenant after federal soldiers had completed their occupation of Waynesville.

     With both Asheville and Waynesville now in Union hands, the way was clear for Union Army regiments to begin marching on Charlotte. Of all the cities in North Carolina still under Confederate control, only the state capital Raleigh ranked higher in strategic value in the eyes of Union field commanders. Charlotte boasted highly profitable cotton and banking industries; it was also a key Confederate Army command hub at the time Asheville fell to Union forces. For those reasons, and a good many others, Charlotte’s capture was accorded a high priority by the Union Army general staff.

     On June 16th, five days after Waynesville was captured, the Union expeditionary force in North Carolina started a three-pronged pincer movement on Charlotte. Its immediate goal was to isolate Charlotte and cut the city’s defenders off from outside reinforcements; its longer- term objectives were to fortify and expand the Union Army foothold in North Carolina and establish staging areas for attacks on other parts of the Tarheel State. There was even some hope the maneuver could pave the way for eventual cross-border feints into South Carolina.

                            ******          It took nearly three weeks for Union troops to make it to the outskirts of Charlotte, but over those three weeks one of the pincer movement’s major objectives was achieved when Union cavalry squadrons mounted successful hit-and-run raids on the South Carolina cities of Spartanburg and Greenville. These raids created further uncertainty in the minds of the Confederate Army general staff about the Union Army’s ultimate plans in the Carolinas and tied down Confederate units which might otherwise have been employed in Charlotte’s defense. The forays against Spartanburg and Greenville also garnered valuable intelligence data for Union commanders regarding Confederate land defenses in South Carolina. Last but not least, these feints helped to expand the ranks of the Union Army’s all-black regiments; hundreds of plantation slaves would desert their masters to follow the cavalry detachments involved in the raids back to the Union lines and enlist in the Union Army.

    Interestingly enough, Charlotte’s population had been swelled by at least 20 percent above its normal size by refugees from Asheville. To some of these refugees it seemed as if they had fled one siege only to run smack into another. The steady diminishing of the supply flow between Charlotte and the outside world as the Union pincers tightened their grip around the city only served to stretch already tight nerves among the civilian population to the breaking point. When Union Army advance detachments finally reached Charlotte’s outskirts early on the afternoon on July 5th the prevailing mental state among its residents, both permanent and temporary, was one of borderline paranoia.

     It was just before 1:40 PM on July 5th when Union and Confederate troops began exchanging gunfire at the Charlotte city limits. For the next thirty-six hours the crack of rifles and the roar of cannon would continue without letup as the opposing sides struggled for control of Charlotte; early on the morning of July 7th, however, the tide began to shift for keeps in favor of the Union forces as the first major rebel defensive position was overrun by Union cavalry squadrons. By the time the field kitchens began serving that afternoon’s lunch, at least one- third of Charlotte was in Union hands and the remaining two-thirds of the city was under bombardment. At sunset all but two square blocks of Charlotte were under federal control.

      The official end of the struggle for possession of Charlotte came on July 9th with the surrender of a Confederate cavalry platoon to Union officers in the ruins of its city hall. Unofficially, there would continue to be sporadic skirmishing between Union forces and small groups of volunteer militiamen outside the city until July 13th; the battle’s last casualty wasn’t recorded until early August, when a missing Union Army lieutenant was confirmed dead after his remains were discovered near a deserted farm in the countryside northwest of Charlotte.

******

      During the latter half of July and the early part of August 1853, the Union Army followed up its capture of Charlotte with a series of dramatic victories in the Carolinas and in the Gulf Coast region. Within two weeks after Charlotte fell, Union forces in North Carolina had seized Winston-Salem and Greensboro and routed a band of guerrillas who’d tried to storm a Union supply depot near the town of Kannapolis; on July 26th, Union advance troops in Louisiana sealed off the last remaining overland escape routes out of New Orleans. In the first week of August Union marines overran Mobile, Alabama and Union Navy ironclads sank the flagship of the Confederate Navy’s main Gulf Coast squadron. Two days after that ship was sunk, Union interdiction patrols off the Louisiana coast knocked off three of the Confederate Republic’s most celebrated blockade runners in one fell swoop. Within eight days after the blockade runners went down, many of the very same Union cavalry troops involved in the hit-and-run raids on Greenville and Spartanburg returned to those cities to fight for a more permanent foothold there; around that same time, Union Navy warships stationed off Mississippi’s Gulf coast began shelling the port of Biloxi.

    By August 20th 80 percent of the Mississippi and Alabama coastlines were in Union hands and the Union Army had also expanded its foothold in Louisiana. Not even the unquestionable daring and strategic genius of A.S. Johnston could prevent Union troops from steadily pushing into the heart of New Orleans; to give the reader an idea of how fierce the struggle for possession of the Crescent City ultimately got, a plaque displayed about five blocks from where the Louisiana Superdome stands today mentions that on the spot where the plaque is located an entire regiment of Louisiana militia was wiped out in just two days’ fighting with Union cavalry.

******

    But as terrible as things were for the Confederates in the Gulf, they’d gotten downright catastrophic up in Georgia. There, Sherman’s troops were burning everything that could be burned and wrecking the state’s industrial infrastructure so severely that after the Southern Rebellion War ended some people would be sure it was beyond any hope of repair. The mayor of Rome, Georgia wrote in despair to President Toombs on August 27th: “Looking about me, I am forced to conclude that the end of days is upon us unless a miracle occurs.”

    The end of days didn’t come-- but neither did the miracle Rome’s mayor was hoping for. His city fell to Union troops on September 3rd; two days later Union cavalry detachments breached Marietta’s defenses and methodically picked them apart, enabling infantry troops to occupy Marietta itself along with a number of towns and villages neighboring it. But these were just preliminaries: the true main event would come at Georgia’s state capital, Atlanta.

    For both sides Atlanta constituted the brightest jewel in the State of Georgia’s crown; a Union victory there would immeasurably enhance the federals’ strategic position in the South, while on the other side of the coin a Confederate triumph would give President Toombs’ armies a morale boost as well as much-needed breathing space to regroup for the next round of fighting. For General William T. Sherman, whose “scorched earth” tactics were pouring fresh salt on the Confederate Republic’s already severe wounds, Atlanta represented an ideal opportunity to take his technique to its logical zenith. To raze Atlanta, he felt, would not only accomplish the practical aim of crippling the nerve center of Georgia’s state economy but would also serve as a symbolic act of retribution against her leaders for having been one of the key early parties to the Confederate uprising against the Union.

     So when a dispatch rider informed him late on the morning of September 12th that Union advance parties had reached the outskirts of Atlanta proper, Sherman did not hesitate to order his troops over to the attack. Not that they needed such orders-- many of them had been champing at the bit for weeks to storm the city, and there were a few cases where Sherman had actually needed to restrain his field commanders from being too bold in taking on Atlanta’s defenders. The fight for Atlanta would be a long and bitter one, with some buildings in the city being so heavily damaged in the fighting that they ended up crumbling to the ground of their own volition long before Sherman’s troops had the chance to put them to the torch.

    It took Union forces six long days to finally gain control of metropolitan Atlanta from the Confederates, but once the victory was achieved General Sherman wasted no time in notifying his superiors of his accomplishment. He telegraphed the War Department headquarters in Washington and President Fillmore at the White House with the simple announcement “Atlanta is ours, fairly won.” After dispatching another telegram, this one to the commander of the Union expeditionary force on the Gulf Coast saluting him and his troops on overrunning the last pocket of Confederate resistance in New Orleans, Sherman ordered the telegraph office blown to kingdom come along with every other building in Atlanta which had survived the battle.

    Etchings of the great city’s destruction soon appeared in the front pages of newspapers on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line; they would haunt Confederate military and political leaders’ nightmares for months to come....