By the time Sherman’s troops sacked Atlanta, at least half of North Carolina was in Union hands and Union troops were pushing hard to seize the other half. Nearly three years after the “Compromise of 1850” bill’s rejection by Congress, the Confederate Republic was like a champion boxer who’d gotten in the first punch on his opponent only to fall behind as the bout wore on and now found himself on the ropes awaiting the knockout blow. The North’s industrial and manpower edge over the South, which had been considerable from the moment the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, was becoming even more so day by day and proving to be the decisive factor in the conflict as the CRA edged closer and closer to the brink of final defeat.

Indeed, even as Sherman’s advance columns were marching through Atlanta’s streets Union occupation troops in Greensboro guarded a vast and ever-growing stockpile of munitions and other stores which were to be used in the Union Army’s impending offensive to capture Raleigh and its neighbor Durham. In Charlotte the headquarters of the Union Army’s North Carolina expeditionary force was reading the latest intelligence reports on the strengths and weaknesses of the Confederates’ defensive positions in the Raleigh-Durham area. Off the Carolina coast, Union Navy warships were on standby ready to land a diversionary force of marines at Kill Devil Hills in order to keep Confederate forces off balance as to which way the main Union blow would be coming from. A British newspaper correspondent who was traveling with the Union Army at the time wrote in one of his dispatches to his editor back home in London: “The Federals do not do anything by half measures....Julius Caesar, at the very peak of his martial strength, could scarcely begin to dream of commanding a fifth of the number of men the Union armies will have available to them when they begin their decisive engagement with the Rebel host.”

For his part, Confederate president Robert Toombs could imagine all too well the vast numbers the Union Army would be fielding for its push against Raleigh and Durham. Indeed, he could think of little else at that point. His intelligence agents had been sending increasingly dire reports back to the Confederate War Department about the massive Union buildup in the western half of North Carolina. Like the Biblical figure Joshua standing outside the walls of Jericho, Union artillery and infantry regiments along with the requisite cavalry squadrons were preparing to blow their figurative trumpet to knock down Raleigh’s and Durham’s defenses.

The first notes of that horn were sounded on September 22nd, four days after the fall of Atlanta. At 10:30 AM that day, Union cannons started bombarding Confederate defensive positions north and west of Raleigh. Almost as soon as the Confederate artillery began returning fire, Union cavalry and infantry squadrons made bold to mount a thrust against the weaker points of the rest of the Confederate Army defenses surrounding the city; by 11:25 AM Union foot soldiers had discovered a gap in the Confederate perimeter northwest of the Raleigh city limits, and they proceeded to pour through that gap like a herd of stampeding buffalo. Confederate troops did their best to contain the flood, but the Union Army advantage in numbers proved too great to overcome, and by mid-afternoon at least half of metropolitan Raleigh had fallen into Union hands along with several of the surrounding towns.

By midnight on September 23rd what was left of Raleigh’s Confederate Army garrison was holed up inside the state capitol building. The news from Durham wasn’t much better; Confederate troops near that city were being put to rout, if the latest dispatches being telegraphed from its army garrison were anything to go by. Indeed, from noon September 24th onward most of the fighting done in defense of Durham was by volunteer militia troops.

The remnants of Raleigh’s Confederate garrison were captured at 6:00 AM on the morning of September 23rd, causing panic to set in among those few civilians in Durham who hadn’t fled that city. Most of the North Carolina state legislature had fled to a small town along the Virginia state, but a handful of senators had remained trapped within Raleigh to fall into Union hands-- a fact which Northern newspapers were quick to note with great relish. In Boston, where anti-slavery sentiment and support for the Union cause had long been fervent and deep, the local press was particularly gleeful about the unfortunate lawmakers’ seizure; one well-known daily newspaper of the era greeted their capture with the headline “Rats in a cage!”

By October 12th all of North Carolina except for a six-mile strip along the state’s coast was under Federal control. While Union ground troops methodically dismantled what was left of the Confederate Army’s Tarheel State contingent, the Union Navy turned the waters off Cape Hatteras into a “no go” zone for Confederate naval and merchant ships; at the height of their success, Union ironclads patrolling the North Carolina coastline were sinking Confederate vessels almost every hour on the hour. In desperation the Confederates turned to what was then a relatively untested type of naval weapon-- the submarine.

Unfortunately for the Confederate cause, the hopes of President Toombs and his naval staff for this new type of warship were doomed to go unrealized; they simply didn’t have the resources or manpower that was necessary to successfully develop a working combat sub prototype. There were no David Bushnells or John P. Hollands on Confederate soil to even draw adequate blueprints for such a craft. Not until October of 1864, just over a decade after the Southern Rebellion War ended, did a serious submarine research and development program begin in the United States.

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On October 21st the last pocket of Confederate resistance in North Carolina surrendered to Union infantry troops just outside Wilmington. That same day in Virginia Union forces captured the town of Montross; by the next morning Union cavalry advance units were on the outskirts of Robert E. Lee’s old hometown of Arlington. Arlington fell to Union troops on October 25th, an event which Lee would later describe in his postwar memoirs as ”the darkest moment of my life.” As devastated as he was by the news, however, it should be said he took it better than many of his fellow Virginians-- particularly the state’s governor, who was driven to suicide by Arlington’s capture....