With Atlanta captured and then sacked, the Confederate Republic’s last hope for retaining control of the state of Georgia was in effect gone. Atlanta had been the most critical link in the industrial and military chain that held the state together; with that link broken the Federals had gained an iron grip on Georgia, and the Confederate Army would slowly but surely be pushed out of it in the weeks and months after Atlanta was destroyed. By Christmas Eve the last Georgian state militia detachment would find itself surrounded on all sides by Union troops, an island of gray in a sea of blue uniforms. General William T. Sherman, by that time one of the most feared if not the most feared field generals in the Union Army, proclaimed himself “well and fully satisfied” with what his men had accomplished in the Peachtree State; President Fillmore was apparently just as impressed, because in the weeks and months immediately following Atlanta’s destruction he began to speak of the possibility of appointing Sherman to a position in the Union Army general staff in Washington once the war ended.

Up in Charleston the possibility of evacuating the Confederate government was starting to be seen more and more as a necessity; a worried President Robert Toombs was determined not to let Union troops get their hands on him. “I will not be hanged like a common criminal.” he vowed more than once, and as a further insurance policy against the prospect of becoming a Union POW he’d persuaded his personal physician to give him a vial of hemlock with which he intended to poison himself if he couldn’t get out of the Confederate capital alive. No one other than Toombs’ most trusted cabinet members knew about the suicide plan, but everyone suspected the Confederate president was at last beginning to lose hope for a final Southern victory over the Federals.

The citizens of Roanoke, Virginia shared much if not all of the Confederate president’s growing pessimism about the fortunes of the Confederate Republic. Those who could leave Roanoke were making plans to evacuate the first chance they got; those who couldn’t leave were either preparing themselves to make a last stand in defense of their homes and shops or getting ready to take their own lives rather than endure Union occupation. The commander of the Confederate Army troops charged with defending Roanoke had his hands full trying to keep the flood of refugees from drowning his men as they scrambled to prepare their defensive positions for the expected Union onslaught. In the two weeks directly prior to the start of the Battle of Roanoke, according to military records in the University of Virginia’s Southern Rebellion War archives, at least eight civilians and twelve Confederate soldiers died as a result of being trampled by runaway horses or run over by an errant carriage when the evacuation of the city deteriorated into what one Confederate officer would later call “a most badly disordered and terror-driven stampede”.

The first days of October 1853 saw an avalanche of bad news for the Confederate government; not only were President Toombs’ last hopes for British intervention on the Southern side dashed forever, but the Confederate Army was losing its final decisive struggle for control of the Appalachians to Union forces. As Confederate troops were forced to retreat further and further back into the Virginia hinterlands, there was a nagging sense of unease among Roanoke’s citizens about their own futures as well as that of their city.

That unease proved well-founded: on October 12th, 1853, the day after Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin learned of the British government’s final refusal to grant the Confederacy official recognition as an independent state, Union infantry forces in Virginia captured Salem and started surrounding the city of Roanoke. Three days later Union Navy vessels sailed up the Chesapeake River and started to bombard Confederate supply depots near Montross. News of these events touched off a wave of panic throughout the rest of Virginia; in Robert E. Lee’s old hometown of Arlington, those civilians who had the means to do so began evacuating that city by any way possible. “We shall be a ghost town before too long if things continue in this fashion.” said Arlington’s them-mayor in a letter to his son, who was a lieutenant in one of the Confederate Army’s dwindling number of cavalry regiments.

On October 15th, three days after Salem fell and Union troops surrounded Roanoke, Union marines landed on the Chesapeake’s banks and began advancing on Montross proper, further strangling already much- restricted Confederate supply lines in Virginia. These landings would serve as a template for future Marine Corps amphibious operations; in fact, the great-grandson of one of the regimental commanders who led the Chesapeake landings would himself command an amphibious operation in the South Pacific during World War II. The response of Confederate forces to the Union amphibious assaults was at best uneven; while many of the regular troops in the area fought with unquestionable valor, at least two state militia units simply broke and ran at the sight of the Union marines marching towards them.

Elsewhere in Virginia, the mood in the state capital Richmond was one of fear bordering on outright panic. Union general A.V. Dunbar, in a dispatch written to Secretary of War Philip Kearney on October 19th, noted with great satisfaction that “the state of confusion and tumult that of late has taken hold of the citizens of Richmond is impossible to exaggerate”. Indeed, bedlam might have been too mild a word to use for describing the atmosphere of quasi-anarchy which was increasingly becoming the prevalent condition of life in Richmond. So-called “crime clubs” were founded in the city’s seedier districts to capitalize on the misfortunes befalling the local police; some modern historians are of the opinion these clubs may have been a prototype for the organized crime families that have since become an integral part of the modern American underworld. It got to the point where Confederate president Robert Toombs found it necessary to impose martial law on the Virginia state capital to restore any semblance of order in the city-- and even then rape and murder continued to plague Richmond for months to come.

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The Confederate Army did everything it possibly could to dislodge Union forces from Roanoke, but it was like trying to soak up Norfolk Harbor with a napkin. By October 18th Roanoke was largely under Union control, with its former Confederate garrison reduced to a handful of squads conducting guerrilla-style hit-and-run raids against the Union troops; the last pocket of Confederate resistance in Roanoke would be overrun by Union infantry platoons on November 1st. On November 2nd the chief of staff for the Union expeditionary force in Virginia sent out a dispatch to Union Secretary of War Philip Kearny saying that “events of the past twenty-four hours, combined with our recent successes at Arlington and Montross, fills me with confidence that a final triumph over the rebels is not long off.”

The chief of staff’s confidence was considerably justified; like a once-stately mansion whose walls have been eaten away by a colony of termites, the Confederate Republic was surely and steadily crumbling before its citizens’ eyes. Already the British and French governments had ruled out any further negotiations with the dying CRA for military or financial assistance, and by Christmas Eve a Confederate delegation which had been sent to Spain to seek that country’s aid to bolster the Confederate cause would also return home empty-handed. The Confederate Republic was living on borrowed time-- and the loan was getting closer every day to being called due.

As bad as the Confederate Army’s situation in Virginia had become, it was equally dire in Tennessee; within a week after the last pockets of Confederate resistance in Roanoke had been eliminated Union Army artillery regiments in the Volunteer State advanced to within shelling range of Knoxville and commenced a ferocious bombardment of the city that was loud enough to be heard as much as twelve miles outside the city limits. One Knoxville resident who survived the war and went on to become a historian at Georgetown University wrote in his personal journal: “I now feel a great sympathy towards the poor souls who were marooned in Constantinople when the Turkish Army began its bombardment of that august citadel. The constant crashing of Yankee cannon shells is enough to set a man’s teeth on edge and strain his heart until it’s fit to burst....How one endures such trials and avoids going utterly insane, I am at a loss to understand.”

There were likely more than a few people in Knoxville who shared these sentiments as Union artillery kept up its assault on the great city and Union infantry troops commenced their own attack on its main defensive works. Within three days after the Union Army bombardment of Knoxville started the city’s hospitals were overflowing with wounded and many of the windows in its taller surviving buildings had become sniper’s nests as the rebel forces tried valiantly but fruitlessly to hold back the Union tide. On the fourth day of the battle Union Army advance scouts found a weak spot in the Confederate defenses near the northwestern corner of the city, and Federal infantry and cavalry were quick to exploit that weak spot. After two more days’ intense house- to-house fighting, the last pockets of Confederate resistance in the city surrendered to Union troops. With Knoxville in Union hands, the Confederate Republic’s last hopes for retaining control of the state of Tennessee began to fade out once and for all. One of the best known Southern Rebellion-themed poems in American literature, “The Ballad of Barbara Fritchie”, was inspired by an encounter between a Knoxville widow and a Union platoon leader shortly after the city fell; when it was first published in a New York literary magazine, it became one of the most popular such verses to have gotten published in an American periodical up to that time.

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For citizens of what was left of the Confederate Republic in late November of 1853, there was very little to be thankful for when the Thanksgiving holiday came. Their army’s supplies were steadily running out, their navy was losing ships hand over fist, their economy was on the ropes, and their slaves were deserting the plantations in growing numbers to don the uniform of the Union Army. Northerners, naturally, were in a different frame of mind; for them Thanksgiving was a time to rejoice in the fact that after nearly two and a half years of bitter fighting, they could finally see the proverbial “light at the end of the tunnel”. The question was now less if the Union would win the war than how long it would take for what was left of the Confederate Army to finally acknowledge the hopelessness of its situation and throw in the towel. Already politicians were looking ahead to the postwar era and strategizing ways to court potential voters among the ranks of the Union soldiers who would shortly be mustering out and returning to the civilian world.

Many a Confederate soldier spent Christmas 1853 in a Union prison camp; by that point in the war Union troops were bagging Confederate prisoners in such vast numbers that A.V. Dunbar would quip to one of his staff officers “they could start their own city if they had half a mind to”. If this claim sounds exaggerated, the exaggeration is only a modest one; modern U.S. Army research data indicates the total number of Confederate POWs incarcerated in Union camps by December of 1853 was equivalent to the full pre-Southern Rebellion War population of Atlanta. Morale among these POWs was in steep decline-- a notable contrast to that of Union prisoners detained in Confederate camps, who in spite of their incarceration were in high spirits at the realization that the Union cause would soon vanquish the rebels once and for all. Some of the bolder sorts among the Union POWs in the Confederate prison camps banded together to organize escape attempts to rejoin their comrades; the most famous such breakout, at the Andersonville prison camp in Georgia just before New Year’s Eve, saw 130 Union prisoners escape right under the noses of their Confederate guards, with 113 of the escapees successfully reaching the Union lines.

New Year’s Day 1854 saw the Union Army begin advancing inexorably towards Richmond, Virginia like a tidal wave crashing towards shore. Robert E. Lee, struggling to save the Army of Northern Virginia from what increasingly looked like an inevitable disintegration, watched in distress as Union advance columns drove for Richmond and surged in the direction of his old home at Arlington. By January 5th Union troops had gotten close enough to Richmond that they could make out faces in the windows of the city’s taller buildings; three days later they would be on the outskirts of the city itself. Those who still could got out of Richmond as fast as possible; those who couldn’t escaped prayed that the Confederate soldiers entrusted with defending the city could pull off a miracle against encroaching Union forces; and the Confederate soldiers themselves braced for what both sides knew would be a fight to the finish.

It was precisely 9:30 AM on the morning of January 8th, 1854 when Union riflemen and artillery crews began opening fire on Confederate positions in Richmond’s outer districts. Despite being short on most types of ammunition, including cannonballs, the city’s defenders were quick to return fire and resisted the Union attack with determination that impressed officers on both sides of the battle lines. No less a figure than A.V. Dunbar himself was heard to marvel: “Given how those men stood against our guns, I believe they would have been willing to face the Devil himself had they been told to do so.” As it turned out, they might have found the Devil an easier opponent to deal with; after the second day of fighting more than half of Richmond’s army garrison had been wiped out and the rest were surrounded by Union infantry and cavalry troops. The remnants of that garrison surrendered late on the afternoon of January 12th, joining what was now a veritable tsunami of Confederate POWs being shipped to Union prison camps.

The fall of Richmond to the Union Army brought home the terrible hopelessness of the Confederate Republic’s plight as few other things could have done. Richmond had been one of the Confederacy’s most vital cities during the CRA’s brief history, and its capture meant that the Republic’s already declining fortunes had taken a sharp and permanent turn for the worse. Within six months after Richmond fell into Union hands, the Confederate Republic itself would fade into extinction....