The dream of an independent Southern nation, which had started in a rush of nationalist fervor and schoolboy enthusiasm, was ending in the heat of Union gunfire and a miasma of overwhelming despair. By any objective military standard, the Confederate Republic of America was finished; Union forces controlled eight of the CRA’s eleven former states entirely and held the majority of two others as well. Only in South Carolina, where the opening shots of the Southern Rebellion War had been fired, was the Confederate government still able to exercise jurisdiction over a substantial amount of territory-- and even there a massive Union contingent was chipping away at the beleaguered remnants of the once-proud Confederate Army.

Nowhere was the Confederate Republic’s plight more apparent than in Texas, where the government of new Confederate president Alexander H. Stephens was considered a sick joke at best. The state legislature in Austin was buzzing with talk of either re-establishing Texas as an independent nation or of breaking away from the dying Confederacy to rejoin the United States. Those who remained loyal to the Confederate Republic were fast becoming an endangered species; in some places the Confederate flag was now starting to be openly mocked. Desertions from Confederate Army units stationed in Texas were now more the rule than the exception; the deserters usually either snuck over the Rio Grande or headed west to join the steady stream of wagon trains heading over the prairies to California.

Yet there were still those in the Lone Star State willing to cleave to the Southern cause even at that desperate juncture. One dramatic example of this sentiment is the Battle of San Angelo on June 7th, 1854, one of the last major engagements of the Southern Rebellion War to be fought west of the Mississippi. Despite being outnumber three to one by the Union regiments attacking the town, San Angelo’s defenders fought with a valor which impressed officers on both sides of the engagement. The Union cavalry colonel who would eventually accept the town’s surrender would write in his campaign journal two days after the battle ended: “We were amazed at the total lack of fear the Rebel troops displayed in the course of the battle... It is my considered opinion those men would have been willing to face the legions of Hell itself had they been called upon to do so.” When photographs of the battlefield were printed in newspapers back East, readers were stunned to see the sheer volume of rebel corpses strewn about in all directions. (Incidentally, the printing of the San Angelo pictures marked one of the first times in American history that photos of a battlefield had been published in a newspaper.)

Earlier in the war the Confederate Army would have sent regiments of infantry and cavalry to San Angelo in an attempt to oust the Union Army from the town and put the town back in Confederate hands. But the Confederate Republic’s armed forces had by this time so badly declined both in numbers and quality there was little if anything that could be done to break the Union hold on San Angelo. Certainly the regular army was in no position to initiate a counteroffensive to retake the town; even the famed Texas state militia had trouble organizing any kind of sustained action against the Union occupation troops. A ragtag company of volunteer riflemen tried on June 11th to drive the Union troops out of San Angelo only to have their disorganized assault repulsed by the Union side with great ease.

Besides being one of the last major battles in the western theater of the Southern Rebellion War, the Battle of San Angelo was also the final major operation of the 47th New Hampshire Infantry, by this time the most feared and respected of the Union Army’s black regiments. On both sides of the Mason-Dixon line the 47th’s reputation for dauntless courage and lethal marksmanship was well-renowned, and more than a few minds had been changed along the way about the worthiness of the black man to wear an American military uniform. One of the surest proofs of this change came as the men of the 47th were marching to San Angelo to face the Confederates; a Maryland lieutenant who had once detested the very idea of the regiment’s existence was seen to snap to attention at their approach and shout, “Send those Rebs to Hell, 47th!”

When word of the volunteer rifle company’s defeat reached Austin on June 14th it was the straw that broke the camel’s back for most of the Texas state leadership. Fearing disaster for the Lone Star State if it continued supporting the Confederate cause, Texas’ governor had an emergency session of the state legislature convened on June 15th to vote on the question of whether the state should leave the Confederate Republic. By a near-unanimous margin the legislature voted in favor of withdrawing from the CRA; by a narrow majority they recommended to the governor that he petition Washington for re-admission to the Union as soon as the war was over. For Alexander H. Stephens the news Texas was quitting the Confederacy felt like a death in the family-- without the Lone Star State’s financial and troop backing, the already slim hopes of a Confederate victory were now nonexistent. In his postwar memoirs Stephens would remember falling into what he called “a melancholy even blacker than the darkest night” in the days immediately following the Texas state legislature’s vote to leave the CRA; there are even rumors he contemplated suicide.

On June 18th, three days after the fateful vote to cut all ties between Texas and the Confederate Republic, the commander of what was left of the state’s regiments on the eastern front of the war signed a truce with Union forces that permitted him to withdraw his men back to the Lone Star State in return for surrendering their rifles and cannon to the Union Army. Within less than ten days after the truce went into effect, the last Texan troops had pulled back west of the Mississippi to make the long march home.

On June 29th, 1854 President Stephens instructed Robert E. Lee to make contact with A.V. Dunbar’s field headquarters, now less than six miles outside Charleston, to inquire about the Union surrender terms. That afternoon Lee and his favorite horse, Traveler, were escorted by Union pickets to Dunbar’s tent to begin the long painstaking process of negotiating an end to the bloodiest war in American history. While Lee conferred with Dunbar, Charleston residents were reading Jefferson Davis’ final wartime editorial in the Charleston Mercury-- and true to form, Davis couldn’t resist taking one last shot at his old foe Robert Toombs. This time Davis’ detractors were conspicuously quiet; with the CRA in its death throes and most Southerners cursing Toombs’ name like that of the Devil himself, few if any people felt especially inclined to defend the man who’d started the Southern Rebellion War and was now also viewed as the chief reason for the South’s looming defeat in that war.

The conflict came full circle on July 10th, 1854 when Union and Confederate representatives met at 3:00 PM in the afternoon at Fort Sumter, where the first shots of the war had been fired, to sign the articles of surrender which formally ended hostilities. After three years, four days, and one and a half hours the Southern Rebellion War was finally over...