With Richmond firmly in Union hands, the way to the Virginia coast was for the most part clear. Lee’s beloved Army of Northern Virginia was almost a ghost of the magnificent fighting machine it had once been and Lee himself was at a loss for any solution to the ever-growing number of problems facing what was left of his command. Whatever resistance could still be mounted against Union forces in Virginia would from this point forward have to be handled largely by ill-equipped, poorly trained, half-starved volunteer militias. And some of those militias harbored pockets of seething discontent toward the Confederate government; official Confederate Army records which survived the end of the war indicate there were at least three known instances of mutiny among these militias between January and March of 1854. Two of those mutinies resulted in court-martials, and all but one of those court-martials led to harsh prison sentences or even to executions-- usually by firing squad.

But for every man who was now bitter towards the Confederate cause, there were a surprising number of men still willing to fight for it. Even now, with the sand in the hourglass beginning to run out on the Confederate Republic for good, the Southern cause still held a powerful grip on the minds and hearts of many men and women living in the Southern states. And despite the collapse of previous Confederate diplomatic initiatives vis a vis Britain and France, some members of the Confederate Republic’s shrinking economic and political elite were continuing to hold out a shred of hope that foreign intervention might yet save the CRA’S chestnuts fire.

However, on February 1st, 1854 an event happened that made even the most die-hard optimists in the Confederacy begin to suspect that the jig was almost up: Union Navy warships off Virginia’s coastline started bombarding Newport News. Newport News was the last remaining seaport in the state still under Confederate control, and its capture would effectively crush the Toombs government’s last hopes of keeping Virginia in the Confederate orbit. The port’s defenders did the best they could with the guns and ammunition they had to try and keep the Union warships at bay, but in the end the Union naval firepower proved too much to overcome and on February 4th a detachment of Union marines accepted the surrender of Newport News from the city’s mayor. This act effectively marked the end of Confederate control of Virginia once and for all; for the rest of the war, and a good two-odd decades after the war ended, Robert E. Lee’s old home state would be administered mainly by a succession of military commandants. Virginians would have to wait until the late 1870s before they could again freely elect a government for their own state.

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The end of Confederate resistance in Virginia came just as the Confederate Army’s strategic position in Mississippi was beginning its final collapse. Morale, supplies, ammunition, men-- everything seemed to be running out at the same time. Those citizens wealthy enough to do so were taking the opportunity to book passage on steamships bound for Europe, Mexico, South America, or anywhere else they could escape the wrath of the Union Army. Some other Mississippi citizens ventured out to the rich frontier lands in the Great Plains or else arranged to smuggle themselves into Canada; there were even a few who, ironically, relocated to Northern cities under an assumed identity and made a new life for themselves right under the nose of the very government which was vanquishing their former homeland on the battlefield.

Those Mississippians who chose to stay and fight were largely from the middle and lower classes. Many of them had been bracing for just such an eventuality since the battle between USS Plymouth Rock and CSS Savannah back in September of 1852, and accordingly stocked up private supplies of guns and ammunition against the day when the Union Army came marching down their streets. Indeed, some Confederate Army field commanders in the Mississippi theater blamed this kind of stockpiling for the munitions shortages that the regular forces were increasingly having to put up with.

In reality, those shortages had less to do with hoarding by nervous civilians than with the simple hard truth that the South’s industrial capacity could no longer meet the demands of war. Those factories that hadn’t been destroyed or captured by Union troops were simply going dark as their workers fled for dear life; more than a few factory owners opted to blow up their own plants rather than let Union soldiers set one foot inside them. A Biloxi newspaper writer who was present at one such demolition would recollect a few months later that the roar from the explosions as the demolition charges were being set off were-- in his own words --“loud enough to rouse the Devil himself out of the depths of the abyss”.

With the state’s Gulf coastline firmly in Union Army hands by this point in the war and the Union Navy’s blockade of the Southern coast tighter than ever, any ideas about reinforcing or re-supplying Confederate troops in Mississippi were out of the question. For that matter most of the major land routes had been cut off too; Union Army victories in Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas during the previous twelve months meant little if anything could reach the Mississippi garrison in terms of supplies or men. And even in those few areas near the state’s borders still under Confederate control, there was no guarantee you could move anything-- carriage drivers and railroad workers were deserting their posts in ever-increasing numbers. Some Confederate officers were heard to marvel that it was a miracle even an oxcart was able to travel in Mississippi anymore.

On March 17th, 1854, approximately a month and a half after Union forces completed their conquest of Virginia, the Confederate Army in Mississippi commenced its final struggle for control of the Magnolia State. That day Union troops on Mississippi’s southern coast started marching northward towards Hattiesburg while another contingent of Union ground forces launched a southward push from Tennessee aimed at capturing Oxford. Just to exacerbate the Rebels’ problems, the Union Army also mounted a diversionary thrust out of southern Louisiana in the direction of Yazoo City. Within just over two weeks of the start of these combined thrusts, the Confederates has lost most of their one remaining cavalry regiment in Mississippi and Union Army advance units had marched close enough to Hattiesburg to be able to see its taller buildings with the aid of a spyglass. Three more days after that Union artillery crews started shelling Confederate defensive positions near Oxford.

Among the Union regiments at the forefront of the battle for Oxford was the 47th New Hampshire Infantry, by now one of the most famous if not the most famous of the black volunteer units fighting for the Union cause. The 47th bore at least forty percent of all the battle deaths incurred at Oxford; they also suffered a substantial number of non-combatant casualties, most notably the deaths of two of the regiment’s platoon sergeants from lengthy illness. President Fillmore was sufficiently moved by the 47th’s valor in the fight for Oxford to issue the entire regiment an executive citation for their heroism under fire.

By the second week of April Oxford had fallen and Hattiesburg was completely encircled; more than one Confederate soldier broke and ran at the sight of the apparently endless waves of Union soldiers heading towards their battle lines, and even those who stayed and continued to fight couldn’t entirely suppress the nagging dread lodged within their souls about their fates as well as that of the country which they were defending. One Confederate infantryman who fought at Hattiesburg wrote in his diary the night before he was killed in action: “Fortune seems to be against us at every turn...I believe it would not be fully wrong to suspect God has passed a final and most harsh judgment upon us.”

Yazoo City fell to Union forces on May 2nd, an event historians would later regard as the straw which broke the camel’s back for the Confederate Army in Mississippi once and for all. It had been hoped by the front-line Rebel soldiers in the state and their commanders that Yazoo City might serve as a rallying point for the Confederacy to at last regain the initiative in the war, but its capture effectively put an end to that hope. Morale was shattered and the desertion rate among remaining Confederate troops in the Magnolia state rose dramatically. In an attempt to compensate for these losses state lawmakers passed a bill granting the remaining slaves in Mississippi provisional freedom in return for serving in combat with the state militia; in Charleston Confederate president Robert Toombs signed a pair of executive orders releasing hundreds of Confederate sailors and merchantmen to serve on land as part of the Confederate Army.

But it was too little, too late: the Union armies in Mississippi mowed through the fragile remnants of Confederate land forces there like a scythe through fields of wheat, and on May 28th, 1853 the last significant Confederate stronghold in the state, Biloxi, was captured by Union cavalry brigades. With Biloxi’s fall, everybody but the most die-hard of Southern loyalists regarded the Confederate Republic as a doomed entity likely to collapse before the first blush of summer. It was around this time that President Toombs’ critics started to demand something that once would have been unthinkable-- Toombs’ resignation from office....