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Part Forty-Six: The End of the Confederacy

End of the National War: The last gasp of the Confederacy in the National War came as Buell continued marching southwest toward the Confederate capital. While the message was being rushed to President Benjamin, McClellan continued blockading and shelling Charleston and Atlanta fell to Hooker. The message reached Augusta and Benjamin on January 27th and Benjamin called for an emergency meeting of the present members of the Confederate legislature. The legislature members held a heated debate over the next two days while Buell inched closer to Augusta and Forrest did as much as he could to delay the final attack on the capital. On the last day of January, the legislature finally voted after much urging from Benjamin to send a plea for an armistice to Fremont and Buell. After pushing the Army of Georgia back to the Savannah River just across the bridge from Augusta, Buell agreed to a ceasefire while the letter reached Fremont.

The letter reached the end of the Union telegraph lines in Columbia and was telegraphed to Washington, DC where Fremont received the message. After deliberation with his cabinet and both houses of Congress, an armistice was arranged between the United States and the Confederacy. Two weeks later om February 18th, 1866, Fremont and Benjamin met in Augusta and Benjamin officially signed the surrender of the Confederate States of America. A meeting later that day with the Confederate legislature officially dissolved the country and surrendered all territories within to the United States[1]. All the Confederate armies that had not yet submitted to the Union did so in the next few weeks.


Old States and New States: After the final surrender of the Confederacy, the states that had been part of the former Confederacy were turned into Union military districts until a plan for reincorporating them as states could be determined by Congress. Each district was given one observing member in Congress but what not allowed to vote on any bills. The discussion of how to handle the former Confederate states dominated much of Congress's proceedings in 1866. The more radical members of the Republican party including President Fremont wanted a strict policy to ensure the loyalty of the states and to punish them for seceding in the first place. Democrats and more moderate Republicans, taking a pragmatic approach, desired more leniency in order to readmit the states into the Union as soon as possible.

One thing that both sides could agree on was that the abolition of slavery was required for a state to be readmitted into the United States. For these former Confederate states, this meant drafting new state constitutions. The method of having Congress approve a new state constitution for each military district was eventually adopted by the United States government as the official policy for the Reconstruction era in mid-1866. In this way, the former states were treated like territories but with expedited rules for admission. New state constitutions were drafted in a few states as early as that year, with the states of Jackson, Cuba, and Calhoun being readmitted later in 1866.

Two exceptions to the territorial rule were the Confederate states of Chickasaw and Virginia. The area of the state of Chickasaw was assigned as military districts of Kentucky and Tennessee, the states that Chickasaw had seceded from when it joined the Confederacy. The two states attempted to police the area and destroy any lingering rebel groups in the rural areas, but the local support for these groups was just too strong for Kentucky and Tennessee to want to deal with. While most of the guerrilla organizations were based in the hills in central Chickasaw, rebel sentiment was especially strong in cities on the Mississippi River such as Paducah and Memphis which had a large presence of the state militias. The groups and rebel sympathizers raided towns and wreaked havoc in the larger cities with guerrilla tactics. The occupation of Chickasaw took a big drain on the post-war economies of Kentucky and Tennessee, and with the Great Fire of Memphis breaking out in 1868 the two states finally petitioned Congress to take control over the area. Congress passed the Chickasaw District Act in early 1869 and the area became the state of Chickasaw in the spring of 1870.

The events that occurred in the Virginia military district were very much different from what happened in Chickasaw following the National War. Robert E. Lee, the man behind the secession of Vandalia during the war, encouraged ardent freesoilers to move into the area of Virginia to expedite the state's readmission to the Union[2]. Meanwhile, Thaddeus Stevens, a Pennsylvania Representative and one of the more radical members of the Republican party at the time, called for the punishment of the former Confederate states and proposed that the state of Virginia be divided into two states upon admission. Stevens was successful in attaining support for his bill in Congress and within northern Virginia where most settlers in Virginia from New England and the Mid-Atlantic states ended up. In 1868, a majority of citizens in the region voted on a constitution separate from that which was established in the southern part of the state. Later that year, the state of Winfield was carved out of northern Virginia and admitted to the United States while the rest of Virginia took until 1869 to be readmitted.

[1] The Confederate Constitution and the official surrender now form the principal documents of the Confederate History Museum in Augusta, Georgia.
[2] Lee later becomes a representative for Winfield. Lee went along with the division because he was bitter about not being selected as Virginia's territorial observer in Congress.