Before the Southern Rebellion War began Richmond, Virginia was one of the most prosperous cities in the Old South, and today it’s a popular tourist destination and commercial hub in the New South. But in January of 1854 it was on the verge of becoming a ghost town; more than eighty percent of the city’s adult population had fled in panic after receiving word of Knoxville’s capture by the Union Army , and many of those hadn’t evacuated already were making final preparations to evacuate as Union regiments in Virginia and Tennessee relentlessly hammered away at what was left of Confederate land forces in those two states. Most of the civilians who were still in Richmond when a Union cavalry advance detachment reached the outskirts of the city at 9:15 AM on the morning of January 8th were either too old, too sick, or too poor to be able to leave.

Indeed, according to diaries and newspaper accounts which have survived the war, Richmond was by then more of an army garrison than a bona fide city. One captain who was attached to a Mississippi cavalry regiment observed in his personal journal: “The stately mansions which were once the pride and joy of the wealthier families of this city are now imbued with an air of decay, like the ruins of a Greek temple or a Roman amphitheater....a man can walk for hours, sometimes all day, in these streets without setting eye on a man who isn’t in a uniform of one kind or another.” The author of that journal would die in the line of duty less than 72 hours after he penned those words.

Things were hardly much better for the captain’s comrades in arms in Tennessee, where a superbly timed Union Army southward thrust was breaching Confederate defenses north of Chattanooga and putting Union forces closer to capturing that city than they’d been at any other time since the Union victory at the Second Battle of Knoxville the previous November. Chattanooga was one of the last major cities in Tennessee still under Confederate control; its fall would act as a kick in the teeth to the Confederate Army’s already flagging morale. The same day Union regiments in Virginia reached the outskirts of Roanoke, their brethren in Tennessee overran the town of McMinnville in a swift and relentless three-column attack that overwhelmed the town’s defenders within a matter of minutes and left the town itself completely in Union hands before nightfall. The neighboring towns of Spencer and Smithville both fell two days later.

The Union push to seize Chattanooga and crush what was left of the Confederate Army in Tennessee was part of a larger campaign aimed at reaching the North Carolina border by the coming of spring and from there chipping away at Confederate troop strength in North Carolina until the state fell like a ripe cherry into federal hands and forces could be marshaled for a later push into South Carolina. One of the main things which helped make the thrust toward the Carolinas possible was the fact that a substantial number of Confederate units that might otherwise have interfered with this operation were tied up trying to drive other Union forces out of Georgia and Mississippi, where a grim struggle for control of those two states had been underway for over a year....

 
******

Mississippi’s greatest strategic asset to the Confederate Republic, even more vital than its rich farmland or its vast pool of manpower, was the waterway with which the state shared its name. The Mississippi River was a critical cog in the engine of Confederate commerce, acting as a natural highway for exporting Confederate goods overseas and importing foreign ones to the CRA; it also functioned as a highly efficient elivery system for distributing domestic goods within the CRA’s own borders. Furthermore, it served the Confederate Army well as an alternative supply route for ferrying food, munitions, and fuel to those sectors of the battlefront which were difficult or impossible to reach by means of ground transportation.

The river even provided a kind of built-in fishery for Confederate soldiers, who often took advantage of the Mississippi’s abundant inventory of freshwater fish to supplement their field ration packs. If wood couldn’t be obtained to make a fishing pole, a man could just as easily pluck the fish out of the water with his bare hands if he had the right grip and fast enough reflexes. One Georgia cavalry officer noted in a letter home to his wife: “If it were half as easy for us to turn back Yankee attacks as it seems to be for some of the men in our army to grasp fish from out of the waters of the Mississippi, I am quite convinced this war would be ended in a very short time.”

While that comment may have been meant as a joke, the defense of the Mississippi and its ports was a deadly serious matter to field commanders in the Confederate Army’s western theater-- which was why they were so often frustrated that the attention of men like Robert E.
Lee was so narrowly focused on Virginia. The Union Army’s top generals had a considerably broader vision: they considered it a high priority
to close the river to outside traffic and capture its major ports; in spite of the ongoing Union Navy blockade of the Confederate coastline, the Union forces hadn’t been completely successful in shutting off the flow of Confederate maritime commerce, and by late 1852 the conclusion had been reached among the top military advisors in Fillmore’s cabinet that it would sooner or later be necessary to land troops in Alabama and Mississippi in order to permanently stop import or export activity at the river’s mouth. In order to prevent Confederate ground forces from interfering with that landing, it was suggested, the Union Army would probably also need to send troops into Georgia en masse.

Then there was Louisiana. The state’s entire coastline was fair game as far as the Union general staff was concerned, but the grand prize was the historic city of New Orleans; its capture would constitute a dramatic triumph for the Union cause and a serious, possibly even crippling blow to Confederate maritime commerce. The ultimate responsibility for protecting New Orleans and other Gulf Coast ports against Union invasion fell on the shoulders of General Albert Sidney “A.S.” Johnson, commander-in-chief for what was then designated by the Confederate Army as the Trans-Mississippi Region of Operations. From the moment he first assumed his command in May of 1852, Johnson had known the success or failure of resisting any Union attempts to force a landing on the Gulf Coast would hinge to a considerable degree on whether New Orleans could be held against the Union Army.

It also depended on having the right generals in command of the eight brigades defending the approaches to Lake Pontchatrain and Lake Borgne, the two main inland bodies of water which had to be crossed in order to reach New Orleans proper. Joe Johnston, a Virginia native and alumnus of West Point with a fairly distinguished record of service in the Mexican War, was entrusted with one such brigade. While some modern military historians have criticized “Pontchatrain Joe”, as he came to be known by his troops, for being insufficiently bold in certain situations where boldness was called for, Johnston’s defenders regard him as a master strategist and shrewd tactician who helped give the Confederate Republic’s a second lease on life it might not otherwise have had. Indeed, with better luck he might have been able to extend the Southern Rebellion War well into 1855; as it was, he made the Union Army pay dearly for every acre of ground that it managed to capture in the early phases of its Gulf Coast campaign. Even the Union generals who opposed “Pontchatrain Joe” came to admire him as a first-rate field commander.

Artillery was regarded by both sides as being the crucial factor in the struggle for control of Georgia and the Gulf Coast states; the Georgia state border in particular was the scene of one of the biggest artillery buildups to happen in any theater of operations during the Southern Rebellion War. Modern military historians believe that by the time the Union Army’s Georgia campaign started in earnest in January of 1853 one out of every four Union soldiers serving in that campaign and one out of every three Confederate soldiers was an artilleryman.

******

If a lesser Union general had been A.S. Johnson’s main opponent during the Gulf Coast campaign, the Confederates might well have been successful in ending the campaign as soon as it began; certainly they would have made the cost of the Union’s eventual victory higher than it actually was(and it was pretty high indeed). But unfortunately for Johnson and the beleaguered nation he defended, he would be taking on a commander every bit as aggressive and skilled as he was: Lt. General A.V. Dunbar, a mustached Indiana native who drank hard and fought even harder. Though his first initials actually stood for Antony Vespasian, they would come in the public eye to be more closely associated with the nickname given to him by his comrades-in-arms-- Absolute Victory. Popular legend has it that he first acquired this moniker when, in his reply to a fellow officer’s question about what he thought the Union’s chief war aim should be, Dunbar said the Union forces could settle for
nothing less than “absolute victory” over the Confederacy.

Dunbar was not the type to suffer fools gladly, as two Union regimental commanders found out to their dismay when he sacked both of them on charges of gross incompetence. The two officers in question had been chosen for their posts more on account of their political connections than their leadership capability, so Dunbar was largely in the right when he dismissed them, but just the same their firings were a source of immense controversy back in Washington. Union Secretary of War Philip Kearny had to personally intervene with the Union Army’s chief of staff to head off an attempt by Dunbar’s civilian critics to get him relieved of his own command.

And Dunbar’s legendary propensity for carrying a bottle of his favorite whiskey with him everywhere he went hardly did much to help his reputation in the eyes of those who disliked him. One Pennsylvania regimental commander who’d served under Dunbar just before he was sent
to take charge of the Gulf Coast campaign famously remarked in a letter home to a friend in Philadelphia: “The general’s singular misfortune, and ours, is that he has alcohol in his veins where one would expect to find blood in most other men.” For Dunbar’s admirers, on the other hand, that same inclination to tote a whiskey into even the heat of battle was a symbol of the kind of utter fearlessness that would be needed to vanquish the Confederate Republic.

On January 3rd, 1853 General Dunbar received word via telegram that Union troops under the command of William T. Sherman were ready to begin their long-awaited assault on Georgia. Dunbar in return sent a telegraph message informing Sherman his own forces would commence
their invasion of the Gulf Coast as soon as his command headquarters received confirmation Sherman’s men had made contact with the enemy.
Such confirmation was not long in coming; within hours after General Sherman’s first cable reached Dunbar’s headquarters, a second telegram
arrived reporting Sherman’s advance units were engaging Confederate infantry forces along the left and center wings of the Union battle lines.

That was all the prompting Dunbar needed to get his offensive going. Once he’d gotten finished reading General Sherman’s second dispatch, he fired off several telegrams of his own to his field commanders in the invasion force instructing them to start landing on the Gulf Coast without further delay. All along the beaches of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana the air would soon be filled with the smell of gunpowder and the sound of rifle and cannon fire as the battle for control of the Confederate Republic’s southern maritime lifeline kicked into full gear.

******

An old proverb refers to infantry as “the queen of battle”, and the use of infantry troops in the Gulf Coast campaign certainly proved to be one of the decisive factors in the fight between the Union and Confederate armies for control of the region’s major seaports. If just one or two skirmishes at the tactical level had turned out differently it might have radically altered the strategic picture for both armies and we would now find ourselves living in a much different world from the one we know. Even the slightest change in direction of a single rifle shot could have sharply rewritten the historical record of the war in the Gulf.

One early example of the vital part played by infantry in the Union’s struggle for the Gulf Coast seaports took place in March of 1853 near the Louisiana town of Houma. Houma, located near what is today the Mandalay National Wildlife Refuge, was at the time sitting astride a Confederate Army supply route that Union forces were trying to cut; late on the evening of March 24th, Union infantry detachments launched a two-pronged attack on the town’s eastern edge. At the same time, Union cavalry staged a diversionary assault on the southern sections of Houma to keep Confederate forces off-balance. While the cavalry forces acquitted themselves admirably under fire, it would in the end be the ordinary foot soldier who would win the day for the Union Army; it’s worth noting that of the 18 Certificates of Merit which were awarded to Union troops during the Southern Rebellion War, three went to infantrymen who fought at Houma.

Houma fell to Union forces on the evening of March 28th; word of its capture reached Confederate commanders in New Orleans via telegram around 3:30 AM on the morning of March 29th. Houma’s loss was an alarming turn of events for the Confederate forces, who had hoped a successful defense of that town might disrupt the Union push into Louisiana long enough for the Confederate Army to organize a devastating counteroffensive that would halt the Gulf Coast campaign in its tracks. It was even more distressing for Confederate president Robert Toombs, who rightly worried that every military setback the Confederate Republic endured in the Gulf Coast region would diminish his political base further and further until eventually it would be in danger of collapsing altogether.

Easter Sunday of 1853 found every church in the Gulf Coast states packed to its bell tower-- and not simply for the purpose of observing Easter services. People were praying for a miracle to come that would turn around the Confederate Army’s plummeting fortunes. But in the halls of government in Charleston, there was a growing feeling of despair such a miracle would never come. By the time Union forces in Louisiana began their advance on Morgan City in the first week of May, at least one junior Confederate War Department official had committed suicide in his misery over the way Confederate fortunes had changed for the worse.

Even in hard-to-rattle New Orleans the citizens were getting anxious over the way the war was going. Some of the Crescent City’s wealthier residents had already fled to Mexico, the Caribbean, or even Europe in their desperation to get away from the advancing Union armies. The poor and middle class didn’t have as many options on that score, so they either hunkered down as best they could or went up to volunteer for service in the Confederate lines. The French Quarter turned into a virtual ghost town in the face of the impending Union assault on the city.

******

The already dire plight of the Confederate Army became that much worse on May 16th, 1853; that day, Union cavalry troops occupied the North Carolina town of Fontana Dam in the first successful incursion by Union ground forces into the Tarheel State. The units involved in capturing Fontana Dam had since mid-April been steadily working their way through the Great Smoky Mountains to reach the town-- which was a very unpleasant shock to Confederate strategists who had regarded the Smokies as an impenetrable natural obstacle to any Union attempts to enter North Carolina from the west. Within three weeks after Fontana Dam fell, Union advance troops were pushing towards Asheville and the town of Franklin had become the scene of firefights between Union and Confederate infantry. By June 5th Franklin would be entirely in Union hands and Union artillery would be within shelling range of Asheville. As Union armies penetrated further and further into North Carolina, a contagious sense of unease began to creep into the minds and hearts of the men who ran the state government of the capital city Raleigh. In Charlotte, state militias and Confederate regulars started to brace themselves for a potential future Union assault on that grand city.

The mood wasn’t much more optimistic in Georgia, where Sherman’s armies had been making steady gains from the moment the first Union advance troops had entered the state. Contemporary newspaper accounts of the march of Sherman’s forces described them as “a ravening horde of locusts” destroying everything in everything in their path. Part of this was a result of the Union troops’ simmering anger towards the
Confederate Republic, but this destruction was also the consequence of an intentional decision by General Sherman to deprive the enemy of everything they could possibly use to sustain themselves. It was what he himself described as a “scorched earth” policy....and before 1853 was over the city of Atlanta would come to get all too familiar with the basic tenets of that policy.