No president, just a Confederate GeneralBefore I finished scrolling down all the way, I thought it was going to say US President Jefferson Davis
Mostly cause I think the last spoiler box had president Bonaparte
NEW BIRTH OF FREEDOM: The Wilmot Proviso Passes
- Thread starter TheHedgehog
- Start date
ACT TWO, PART VII
Torch and Sword
From “Soldiers of Freedom” by Gregory H. Lambert
Published 1973
“With the Mississippi River under total Union control, Richard Taylor was directed east, to Nashville. The city lay on the frontline between the Union and Confederate controlled halves of Tennessee. Pressure had increased on President Fremont, and by extension the army, to liberate the Appalachian counties with lobbying from William G. Brownlow (who had been promised the military governorship of the region by Fremont). Disappointed at the lack of focus on Tennessee, and the lack of any formal action to separate the eastern reaches from Andrew Johnson’s government, Brownlow repeatedly called upon the Administration to honor its end of the bargain. With the twin victories at Richmond and Vicksburg, Fremont felt confident enough to order Richard Taylor west to assume command of the 50,000 troops located in Tennessee, as well as over 40,000 in recently recruited reinforcements. Fremont promised Brownlow that, once the rest of Tennessee was taken, the land would be formed into a new state. As Fremont said in a letter to Brownlow: “Victory is assured, with the army in the hands of General Taylor, and once victory is had, Franklin will be created.”
… The Union army in Tennessee had languished in garrison duties after the fall of Nashville, as resources were reallocated to the fronts in Virginia and the Mississippi. However, with breakthroughs elsewhere, President Fremont believed it was time to strike into the very heart of the Confederacy. As he told Vice-President Lincoln, “we will strike into the very heart of the rebels, where their industries, railroads, and merchants are concentrated. I have no doubt that the secessionists will not last much longer in this war.” Taylor was directed to take Knoxville and Chattanooga, the last two major Tennessee cities still in Confederate hands. Chattanooga was an especially important target, given its close proximity to the rail-hub of Atlanta and its status as the site of Tennessee’s state government. Further, Chattanooga served as a transportation nexus in its own right, connecting the arsenals of Georgia to the rest of the Confederacy and facilitating the transport of raw materials vital to munitions production.
Taylor planned to focus his efforts on Chattanooga, though he detached the IV Corps (which had about 20,000 men), under George Meade, to move against, and hopefully capture, Knoxville, another important railroad hub. Taylor also routed a further 30,000 reinforcements, commanded by Daniel Sickles [1], to aid Meade at Knoxville [2]. The bulk of the Army of Tennessee, however, was directed at Chattanooga, which Taylor hoped to capture without a siege.
Chattanooga sits across a bend in the Tennessee River, between two ridges (Walden on the north bank, four miles north of the city, and Missionary, four miles south-east, on the south bank). The Nashville & Chattanooga, Western & Atlantic, and Trenton Railroads all converge in the downtown, north-east of Moccasin Point on the south bank of the Tennessee. The Confederate troops had constructed several earthwork fortifications along the waterfront, complete with redoubts and artillery batteries.
Taylor hoped to draw out Braxton Bragg and his 50,000 men from their camps in Chattanooga, and do battle north of the city, with the goal of crushing the Confederate Army of the Tennessee, which would leave the city totally undefended. As Taylor and his 70,000 men approached the Tennessee River, Braxton Bragg ordered his army north to face the Union. This was partially motivated by Bragg’s preference for constant offensive action, and partially by the fear that inaction would spell doom for the Confederate war effort. Taylor marched south from Murfreesboro, capturing several towns south of that city with little opposition. Meanwhile, Bragg had, upon learning of the Union offensive south, left his camp at Tullahoma and headed north-west to halt Taylor. The two armies met near the town of Shelbyville, though by nature of the town’s proximity to Murfreesboro, Taylor had succeeded in occupying it prior to meeting Bragg along the north bank of the Duck River on September 23rd, 1859.
Bragg, coming from the south, had crossed the river to face Taylor, and so entered the Battle of Shelbyville with his back to it. He had three corps under his command, the I Corps under Leonidas Polk, which covered the right flank, the II Corps under Alexander P. Stewart in the center, and the II Corps under Stephen D. Lee on the left. Taylor had been caught somewhat by surprise by the reports of Bragg’s march north, as he had expected his foe to intercept Taylor on the south bank of the Duck River, where it would by the Union with its back to the river. As Taylor himself wrote in his acclaimed memoirs: “Even knowing General Bragg’s preference for aggressive action in the field, I still found myself surprised at his decision to meet my army on the north bank of the Duck River. If I had been in his shoes, I would have forced the enemy to cross south, and trap them against the river. Instead, he came to me and I trapped him on the north shore.” For his part, Taylor placed his I Corps, commanded by Joseph Hooker, on the right. The II Corps, under John A. Logan, took up the center of Taylor’s lines, while the III Corps, commanded by Henry Price [3] occupied the left flank.
The battle began in earnest when Bragg advanced and his left flank exchanged fire with Taylor’s right. After about fifteen minutes of rifle volleys, Leonidas Polk attacked, moving his entire army to exploit the right side of Price’s Corps, near the Union center. The division in this section of the Union lines was a composition of equal numbers US Colored Brigades and new recruits. Polk both assumed the Colored Brigades would crumble under pressure and thought that fresh troops would do the same. Thus, he ordered the First and Second Divisions to launch a mass assault. Initially, Polk held the upper hand as the Confederate charges surprised the Union men and they fell back. However, the Confederates were halted as the Union soldiers were able to stop and hold their ground, while General Price changed his plans. He sent word to Taylor and John Logan, the commander of the center, to inform them of the situation between the left and the center. Price and Logan both shifted their corps to prevent Polk from piercing their lines, with the left and center pivoting to form a V-shape. Polk, seeing the Union flank pivoting towards his own, gave the order to fall back. This was too late, however, to prevent Price from encircling half of the Confederate divisions that charged after the Colored Troops, or to prevent him from attacking Polk’s flank. Having suffered nearly 7,000 dead and many more wounded, Polk pulled back, but remained on the field.
Furious at his subordinate’s disrespect, Bragg sent direct orders to each of Polk’s three divisional commanders to hold the line. It was too late to salvage a victory, however, for Polk’s actions had left a gap in the Confederate lines, which Henry Price exploited with ferocity. Facing the potential destruction of his army, Bragg ordered a retreat and the Confederate army withdrew from the field, bloodied and battered.
Taylor gave pursuit, chasing Bragg all the way back to his headquarters at Tullahoma. There, they did battle once more. While there were no dramatic charges, rallies, flanking maneuvers or insubordination (perhaps why the Battle of Shelbyville was turned into a blockbuster war drama, but Tullahoma was not), the Battle of Tullahoma was a resounding Confederate defeat, with Bragg suffering 11,000 casualties, on top of the 9,000 sustained at Shelbyville. Now, with his army at just 39,000 men, Bragg fled back to Chattanooga to try and defend the city. A third battle between Taylor and Bragg was fought on October 15th, at the junction of the Tennessee and Sequatchie Rivers south of Jasper, TN. The Battle of Jasper began when Taylor caught up to Bragg along the road to Chattanooga, forcing Bragg to engage him. Despite suffering heavy casualties from Union attacks, which nearly outflanked Stephen D. Lee’s Corps, Bragg was able to escape from the battle, though he left behind the bodies of 4,000 dead and 6,000 wounded.
Taylor followed Bragg all the way to Chattanooga after Shelbyville, Tullahoma, and Jasper. While Bragg’s men rushed to man the earthworks and redoubts built in and around the city, Taylor began constructing siege equipment on the high ground to the north of the city. In the Confederate army camp, Bragg convened a war council with his Generals (minus Polk, who had been quietly relieved and replaced with John Bell Hood at his headquarters, a townhouse near the train station. Bragg began the meeting by laying out his plans for the coming siege. “Taylor will besiege us, that is for certain,” the Confederate said, as recorded by Hood. “We must stand and fight and bleed the damnyankees as dry as we possibly can. I have no doubt we can repel their attacks with our earthworks and with soldiers of great caliber.” Hood eagerly supported Bragg’s plan, but the other Corps commanders were far more skeptical. Alexander P. Stewart opposed remaining in Chattanooga, instead proposing that “we burn the armories, rip up the train tracks, and destroy the docks, before withdrawing to Dalton. There, we can regroup and conserve our strength. Our defeats to the west make holding here untenable. The best we can hope for is to prevent Atlanta from suffering the same fate as Chattanooga and Knoxville.” Though Bragg initially denounced this as “defeatism of the worst sort”, he was eventually persuaded to abandon Chattanooga. That night, tents were broken down, whatever cannon couldn’t be transported spiked, whatever guns and ammunition that couldn’t be moved burned the rail depot and wharves put to the torch, and the rail tracks leading south ripped up and left in twisted piles. Once anything of military value was destroyed, Bragg and his army withdrew south to Dalton, Georgia, where he arrived on October 23rd. Chattanooga was captured by the Union shortly after, and Taylor put the engineers to work rebuilding the city’s rail infrastructure. In the meantime, there was little Taylor could do to take Atlanta without putting his supply lines in jeopardy.”
From “The Wild Wild West” by William Smith-Warburton
Published 1998
“Nathan Bedford Forrest was a brilliant raider. After making his fortune in slave trading and cotton planting, he enlisted in the cavalry as a private when the war began. He quickly rose through the ranks to become a General, all by 1858. The next year, Braxton Bragg, worried about Forrest’s ambition and rising stature within both the Army and the Confederate government, gave Forrest command of his own cavalry corps and ordered him to “raise hell in Kansas”. Forrest eagerly accepted, despite understanding that Bragg simply wanted him gone from Tennessee, and began preparing his campaign.
As Vicksburg had not yet been besieged when Forrest launched his expedition, he was able to slip across just north of the city and marched north through Arkansas. The general strategy was to gather recruits as they traveled through southern Kansas, then cut a swath through northern Kansas, looting and pillaging, then cross into northern Missouri, recruit more soldiers, and burn, loot, and pillage as Forrest went south and returned to Arkansas. It was a daring, almost dangerously bold plan, but Bragg hurriedly approved it, if only to get rid of Forrest. Forrest’s Corps, named the Army of Kansas, was more of a division and consisted of 5,000 cavalrymen. Forrest rode off west with little supplies beyond ammunition, with his goal being to feed the men and horses from the generosity of Southerners and from looting Yankee settlements.
Forrest stopped off in Little Rock to rest and feed his men and horses, before sallying forth once more and crossing into Kansas proper. He established his headquarters in Lecompton, while dispatching his men in groups of 1-200 north. While General Sherman pondered how best to deal with what was essentially an enormous, government-sanctioned bushwhacker army, Forrest arrived at the first of many ill-fated homesteads and settlements. Willistown had been founded in 1853 by a group of 32 settlers from New Hampshire, and named after their leader, a farmer named John Willis, though it was now a town of 300. On August 16th, Forrest and 400 of his horsemen rode into the settlement and, after slaughtering the livestock and stealing weapons, they killed 23 men and women and burned down the entire settlement, houses, barns, stores, the church, and fields, before riding off north to wreak even more havoc. One settler recalled that, “they rode in on their fearsome horses, and went from house to house. They came to my house and seized us. They took our pigs and chickens and set fire to our barn. They torched the fields, the house, everything. By the time they left to rampage elsewhere, there was nothing but embers and ash.”
Next, Forrest sacked and burned first Freetown and then Topeka (which was widely covered in Northern newspapers, given Topeka’s status as a major Kansan municipality), killing over sixty between the two, making off with valuables and destroying anything they couldn’t carry. As Forrest continued to press north, leaving a trail of destruction behind him, General Sherman worked to counter him. An initial attempt to defeat Forrest by conventional means failed in the Battle of Manhattan, where 1,000 Union troops succeeded in killing 200 raiders, but failed to prevent their raid or their escape. Sherman changed tactics, telling his trusted subordinate General Crandell, “If we can’t destroy them, we can deny them the ability to destroy us.” And so, General Order No. 66 was born. Built upon Sherman’s operating theory, that “we must make them feel the hard hand of war. We must drive them to disease and starvation,” Order No. 66 called for the Union to burn fields and slaughter livestock, to deny the enemy the advantage. Union troops were to requisition foodstuffs, animals, and weapons from homesteads (with compensation, as the Order mandated), and destroy anything they couldn’t use. The order was extended to not just the north, where Forrest was storming through, but the areas near Missouri where Forrest’s raiders had made their base. There were 15,000 Union soldiers in Kansas and Missouri, of which Sherman could use 8,000 to counter Forrest’s raids, while 7,000 were tied up in garrisoning forts and key settlements.
The first use of Order No. 66 was at the settlement of Pottawatomie Creek, where Union soldiers “requisitioned” livestock and weapons, before leaving. The next Union raid was conducted by Kansas Territorial militia, who lacked the restraint of the Union soldiers and instead of simply taking foodstuffs, burned the town of Brooks to the ground and killing ten men accused of being bushwhackers. In retaliation, Forrest began cooperating closely with the bushwhackers of Red Bill Quantrill in attacking Free-Stater settlements. After Kansas militia razed Osage City to the ground, Forrest’s Raiders sacked Osawatomie. However, despite escalating brutality, with Sherman authorizing Union soldiers to burn the homes of “those Settlers who resist the requisitioning of supplies for the Army” and the destruction of fields in September, the Union counter-insurgency tactics began to take their toll on Forrest’s Raiders. By mid-October, Lecompton was one of the few Vagabonder settlements that hadn’t been burnt, making it increasingly difficult to raid north in secrecy. Faced with the real possibility that the Raiders would be forced to concentrate in Lecompton, where Sherman could easily destroy them, Forrest decided to set out for greener pastures and join the guerillas in Missouri to fight the Union garrisons there. By November 4th, 1859, the last of Forrest’s Raiders had abandoned Lecompton and slipped across the border into southern Missouri. The Harrowing had left Kansas, but Missouri was about to bleed…”
“From “The Rise and Fall of the Confederate States of America” by Ralph Cairns
Published 2001
“If you were to sit in a meeting of the Confederate Cabinet in its Charlotte exile, you would see wild stacks of paper, piles of rumpled maps, and the red faces of the Cabinet members. With President John Quitman in a coma, Vice-President Howell Cobb was declared Acting President. Cobb was not, however, able to keep the cabinet from infighting like Quitman had. Of course, a some of that had been due to Quitman’s fiery speeches and monologues to his Cabinet, but Cobb was well-liked and viewed as a capable mediator. The real reason for the increasing factionalism, tensions with the Confederate Congress and Governors, and infighting was the increasingly dire situation the Confederate States of America found itself in. Virginia had fallen, the Mississippi had been wrested away, and Union armies were poised to strike through Georgia, all the way to the Atlantic.
The loss of Virginia was the worst of these three disasters by far. The loss of manpower and tax income was viewed as critical to the survival of the Confederacy, and so War Secretary Davis proposed two new policies: one, the passage of a National Conscription Act like the one passed by the Union Congress in 1858 after the James River Campaign, and two, the imposition of new taxes that would fall most heavily on yeoman farmers and that could be paid either in cash or in kind (i.e. in goods rather than Confederate Dollars). While, prior to the Battle of Seven Pines [4] in Richmond, the army had been kept up to proper strength by a steady stream of volunteers, the collapse of the Confederate position in Virginia and the fall of Vicksburg caused not only a sudden fall in the number of volunteers as Southerners succumbed to defeatism and war exhaustion, but also a flood of desertions as soldiers fled to their homes to defend their families and farms. The now-optimistically named Army of Virginia [5], rudderless with a despondent Longstreet and four commanders in three years, had shrunk from its Seven Pines size of 25,000 to 17,000 as a result of both casualties sustained in the battle and the wave of desertions that followed. The Conscription Act implemented a draft of five years on all men between the ages of 17 and 40, though with a few noticeable exceptions that helped make the Act as unpopular as it did. First, any draftee could hire a substitute, allowing wealthy planters’ sons to escape service. Second, and more overtly favoring the landed class, was the Twenty Negro Provision. The Twenty Negro Provision exempted one white man from service for every twenty slaves on a plantation. Intended to assuage mounting fears that, with the Union army’s recruitment of colored troops and the implementation of Fremont’s Emancipation Declaration, there would be mass slave uprisings in the home front.
The Conscription Act was, even before its arrival in the Confederate Congress, faced with stiff opposition within the Cabinet. Attorney General Alexander Stephens was the most vocal in criticizing Davis’s proposal, calling it “in opposition to the very ideals this nation is built upon.” Despite fierce resistance from Stephens and his allies in Congress, the Conscription Act was passed by first the House, and then the Senate, and was finally signed into law on October 24th by Acting President Cobb. The proposed tax hike was enacted three days later.
Bragg’s burning of and retreat from Chattanooga and food shortages resultant from supply problems only exacerbated the unrest brought on by the Conscription Act and new taxes. While 40,000 troops were conscripted in Mississippi and Alabama for the Army of Georgia, one-tenth of that number later deserted. 47,000 were drafted in North and South Carolina for the defense of those states, but 6,000 deserted their posts. As a warning to conscripts, Army officials were instructed to “burn the farms and homes of those who desert, to make an example of them and dissuade others from following down the path of desertion.” Rather than decrease the desertion rate, like Davis and his (increasingly few) allies had intended, it simply led to open, if minor, rebellions against the government. In Jones County, Mississippi, a deserter from the Siege of Vicksburg named Newton Knight led a rebellion of deserters that fought both army officials and tax collectors, distributing seized food among the people of the county. Knight even went so far as to declare the county’s secession from the Confederacy, resulting in the Free State of Jones becoming national news in not just the Confederacy, but across the north. Several newspapers hailed him as “the Southron Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to feed the poor”. Several other counties declared secession from the Confederacy (some led by deserters, others by Southern Unionist politicians), including the Free State of Winston in Winston County, the Republic of Nickajack in northern Alabama, and the Free Republic of Watauga in north-western North Carolina. These rebellions never posed serious threats to the Confederate government, but nevertheless served to illustrate the increasingly precarious position of the Confederate government.
… Though, before the fall of Chattanooga, Cobb had delegated increasing power to the Cabinet, especially to Attorney General Stephens and Secretary of War Davis, now he found he was sidelined by more dominant personalities. In particular, Alexander Stephens and Jefferson Davis began to feud over the new conscription laws, tax increases, and military strategy. It began when Stephens rose during a Cabinet meeting discussing the spreading Deserter’s Rebellions in the lower South and declared “we cannot hope to maintain the Confederacy, we cannot hope to maintain the support of our fellow Southerners, with these tyrannical conscription laws and taxes. They alienate those who would support us and drive them into the arms of the Negros and Yankees. These measures make us no different than our enemy.” Davis angrily countered that the laws were absolutely vital for the war effort, saying “how could you, or any of us here, jeopardize the survival of the Confederacy with such talk? In war, we must make sacrifices. Sacrifices of not just lives, but of ideals. We are in a war, a war to the death. If we are to win, we must make such sacrifices as these. Surely, Attorney General Stephens, you would not want us to lose?”
Davis’s vicious response did nothing to calm tensions in the Cabinet, despite Acting President Cobb’s support for the “emergency wartime measures”. Stephens called Davis a “traitor to the ideals of the nation” in response. He assembled an alliance of several state governors, as well as prominent Senators, to attack Davis and his reputation. Under increasing scrutiny for his handling of the increasingly moribund war effort, Jefferson Davis resigned his position on November 27th, 1859, and was promptly replaced with Judah. P. Benjamin, a Senator from Louisiana and one of Davis’s few remaining supporters. Cobb, at Secretary Benjamin’s urging and Davis’s request, gave Davis command over the re-named Army of Georgia (taking over from a sacked Bragg) and bestowed upon him the rank of General. With Richard Taylor wielding a Sword of Damocles over Atlanta, it was up to Davis to try and save the South.”
[1] TTL, Sickles is given a commission by Fremont at the urging of War Democrats, who partly want to get rid of him and partly to get a Democrat into a position of command in the army. He’s still an incompetent, arrogant moron, though.
[2] While not mentioned here, Knoxville falls to the Union, virtually without a shot. Also not mentioned, Franklin is ceded by the Tennessee Military Government to the US Federal Government, and then admitted as the State of Franklin, under Gov. Brownlow. I didn’t include these in the update itself because there wasn’t a great place to stick them.
[3] Fictional, born 1826 in Altoona PA, promoted to Corps command in June of 1859.
[4] While the North refers to the fall of Richmond as the Battle of Richmond, it is known in the South as the Battle of Seven Pines.
[5] The Union has not made any moves south of Petersburg, as Thomas is instead working to consolidate Union control of northern Virginia and the Shenandoah. Come spring, the war in the east will resume.
From “Soldiers of Freedom” by Gregory H. Lambert
Published 1973
“With the Mississippi River under total Union control, Richard Taylor was directed east, to Nashville. The city lay on the frontline between the Union and Confederate controlled halves of Tennessee. Pressure had increased on President Fremont, and by extension the army, to liberate the Appalachian counties with lobbying from William G. Brownlow (who had been promised the military governorship of the region by Fremont). Disappointed at the lack of focus on Tennessee, and the lack of any formal action to separate the eastern reaches from Andrew Johnson’s government, Brownlow repeatedly called upon the Administration to honor its end of the bargain. With the twin victories at Richmond and Vicksburg, Fremont felt confident enough to order Richard Taylor west to assume command of the 50,000 troops located in Tennessee, as well as over 40,000 in recently recruited reinforcements. Fremont promised Brownlow that, once the rest of Tennessee was taken, the land would be formed into a new state. As Fremont said in a letter to Brownlow: “Victory is assured, with the army in the hands of General Taylor, and once victory is had, Franklin will be created.”
… The Union army in Tennessee had languished in garrison duties after the fall of Nashville, as resources were reallocated to the fronts in Virginia and the Mississippi. However, with breakthroughs elsewhere, President Fremont believed it was time to strike into the very heart of the Confederacy. As he told Vice-President Lincoln, “we will strike into the very heart of the rebels, where their industries, railroads, and merchants are concentrated. I have no doubt that the secessionists will not last much longer in this war.” Taylor was directed to take Knoxville and Chattanooga, the last two major Tennessee cities still in Confederate hands. Chattanooga was an especially important target, given its close proximity to the rail-hub of Atlanta and its status as the site of Tennessee’s state government. Further, Chattanooga served as a transportation nexus in its own right, connecting the arsenals of Georgia to the rest of the Confederacy and facilitating the transport of raw materials vital to munitions production.
Taylor planned to focus his efforts on Chattanooga, though he detached the IV Corps (which had about 20,000 men), under George Meade, to move against, and hopefully capture, Knoxville, another important railroad hub. Taylor also routed a further 30,000 reinforcements, commanded by Daniel Sickles [1], to aid Meade at Knoxville [2]. The bulk of the Army of Tennessee, however, was directed at Chattanooga, which Taylor hoped to capture without a siege.
Chattanooga sits across a bend in the Tennessee River, between two ridges (Walden on the north bank, four miles north of the city, and Missionary, four miles south-east, on the south bank). The Nashville & Chattanooga, Western & Atlantic, and Trenton Railroads all converge in the downtown, north-east of Moccasin Point on the south bank of the Tennessee. The Confederate troops had constructed several earthwork fortifications along the waterfront, complete with redoubts and artillery batteries.
Taylor hoped to draw out Braxton Bragg and his 50,000 men from their camps in Chattanooga, and do battle north of the city, with the goal of crushing the Confederate Army of the Tennessee, which would leave the city totally undefended. As Taylor and his 70,000 men approached the Tennessee River, Braxton Bragg ordered his army north to face the Union. This was partially motivated by Bragg’s preference for constant offensive action, and partially by the fear that inaction would spell doom for the Confederate war effort. Taylor marched south from Murfreesboro, capturing several towns south of that city with little opposition. Meanwhile, Bragg had, upon learning of the Union offensive south, left his camp at Tullahoma and headed north-west to halt Taylor. The two armies met near the town of Shelbyville, though by nature of the town’s proximity to Murfreesboro, Taylor had succeeded in occupying it prior to meeting Bragg along the north bank of the Duck River on September 23rd, 1859.
Bragg, coming from the south, had crossed the river to face Taylor, and so entered the Battle of Shelbyville with his back to it. He had three corps under his command, the I Corps under Leonidas Polk, which covered the right flank, the II Corps under Alexander P. Stewart in the center, and the II Corps under Stephen D. Lee on the left. Taylor had been caught somewhat by surprise by the reports of Bragg’s march north, as he had expected his foe to intercept Taylor on the south bank of the Duck River, where it would by the Union with its back to the river. As Taylor himself wrote in his acclaimed memoirs: “Even knowing General Bragg’s preference for aggressive action in the field, I still found myself surprised at his decision to meet my army on the north bank of the Duck River. If I had been in his shoes, I would have forced the enemy to cross south, and trap them against the river. Instead, he came to me and I trapped him on the north shore.” For his part, Taylor placed his I Corps, commanded by Joseph Hooker, on the right. The II Corps, under John A. Logan, took up the center of Taylor’s lines, while the III Corps, commanded by Henry Price [3] occupied the left flank.
The battle began in earnest when Bragg advanced and his left flank exchanged fire with Taylor’s right. After about fifteen minutes of rifle volleys, Leonidas Polk attacked, moving his entire army to exploit the right side of Price’s Corps, near the Union center. The division in this section of the Union lines was a composition of equal numbers US Colored Brigades and new recruits. Polk both assumed the Colored Brigades would crumble under pressure and thought that fresh troops would do the same. Thus, he ordered the First and Second Divisions to launch a mass assault. Initially, Polk held the upper hand as the Confederate charges surprised the Union men and they fell back. However, the Confederates were halted as the Union soldiers were able to stop and hold their ground, while General Price changed his plans. He sent word to Taylor and John Logan, the commander of the center, to inform them of the situation between the left and the center. Price and Logan both shifted their corps to prevent Polk from piercing their lines, with the left and center pivoting to form a V-shape. Polk, seeing the Union flank pivoting towards his own, gave the order to fall back. This was too late, however, to prevent Price from encircling half of the Confederate divisions that charged after the Colored Troops, or to prevent him from attacking Polk’s flank. Having suffered nearly 7,000 dead and many more wounded, Polk pulled back, but remained on the field.
Furious at his subordinate’s disrespect, Bragg sent direct orders to each of Polk’s three divisional commanders to hold the line. It was too late to salvage a victory, however, for Polk’s actions had left a gap in the Confederate lines, which Henry Price exploited with ferocity. Facing the potential destruction of his army, Bragg ordered a retreat and the Confederate army withdrew from the field, bloodied and battered.
Taylor gave pursuit, chasing Bragg all the way back to his headquarters at Tullahoma. There, they did battle once more. While there were no dramatic charges, rallies, flanking maneuvers or insubordination (perhaps why the Battle of Shelbyville was turned into a blockbuster war drama, but Tullahoma was not), the Battle of Tullahoma was a resounding Confederate defeat, with Bragg suffering 11,000 casualties, on top of the 9,000 sustained at Shelbyville. Now, with his army at just 39,000 men, Bragg fled back to Chattanooga to try and defend the city. A third battle between Taylor and Bragg was fought on October 15th, at the junction of the Tennessee and Sequatchie Rivers south of Jasper, TN. The Battle of Jasper began when Taylor caught up to Bragg along the road to Chattanooga, forcing Bragg to engage him. Despite suffering heavy casualties from Union attacks, which nearly outflanked Stephen D. Lee’s Corps, Bragg was able to escape from the battle, though he left behind the bodies of 4,000 dead and 6,000 wounded.
Taylor followed Bragg all the way to Chattanooga after Shelbyville, Tullahoma, and Jasper. While Bragg’s men rushed to man the earthworks and redoubts built in and around the city, Taylor began constructing siege equipment on the high ground to the north of the city. In the Confederate army camp, Bragg convened a war council with his Generals (minus Polk, who had been quietly relieved and replaced with John Bell Hood at his headquarters, a townhouse near the train station. Bragg began the meeting by laying out his plans for the coming siege. “Taylor will besiege us, that is for certain,” the Confederate said, as recorded by Hood. “We must stand and fight and bleed the damnyankees as dry as we possibly can. I have no doubt we can repel their attacks with our earthworks and with soldiers of great caliber.” Hood eagerly supported Bragg’s plan, but the other Corps commanders were far more skeptical. Alexander P. Stewart opposed remaining in Chattanooga, instead proposing that “we burn the armories, rip up the train tracks, and destroy the docks, before withdrawing to Dalton. There, we can regroup and conserve our strength. Our defeats to the west make holding here untenable. The best we can hope for is to prevent Atlanta from suffering the same fate as Chattanooga and Knoxville.” Though Bragg initially denounced this as “defeatism of the worst sort”, he was eventually persuaded to abandon Chattanooga. That night, tents were broken down, whatever cannon couldn’t be transported spiked, whatever guns and ammunition that couldn’t be moved burned the rail depot and wharves put to the torch, and the rail tracks leading south ripped up and left in twisted piles. Once anything of military value was destroyed, Bragg and his army withdrew south to Dalton, Georgia, where he arrived on October 23rd. Chattanooga was captured by the Union shortly after, and Taylor put the engineers to work rebuilding the city’s rail infrastructure. In the meantime, there was little Taylor could do to take Atlanta without putting his supply lines in jeopardy.”
From “The Wild Wild West” by William Smith-Warburton
Published 1998
“Nathan Bedford Forrest was a brilliant raider. After making his fortune in slave trading and cotton planting, he enlisted in the cavalry as a private when the war began. He quickly rose through the ranks to become a General, all by 1858. The next year, Braxton Bragg, worried about Forrest’s ambition and rising stature within both the Army and the Confederate government, gave Forrest command of his own cavalry corps and ordered him to “raise hell in Kansas”. Forrest eagerly accepted, despite understanding that Bragg simply wanted him gone from Tennessee, and began preparing his campaign.
As Vicksburg had not yet been besieged when Forrest launched his expedition, he was able to slip across just north of the city and marched north through Arkansas. The general strategy was to gather recruits as they traveled through southern Kansas, then cut a swath through northern Kansas, looting and pillaging, then cross into northern Missouri, recruit more soldiers, and burn, loot, and pillage as Forrest went south and returned to Arkansas. It was a daring, almost dangerously bold plan, but Bragg hurriedly approved it, if only to get rid of Forrest. Forrest’s Corps, named the Army of Kansas, was more of a division and consisted of 5,000 cavalrymen. Forrest rode off west with little supplies beyond ammunition, with his goal being to feed the men and horses from the generosity of Southerners and from looting Yankee settlements.
Forrest stopped off in Little Rock to rest and feed his men and horses, before sallying forth once more and crossing into Kansas proper. He established his headquarters in Lecompton, while dispatching his men in groups of 1-200 north. While General Sherman pondered how best to deal with what was essentially an enormous, government-sanctioned bushwhacker army, Forrest arrived at the first of many ill-fated homesteads and settlements. Willistown had been founded in 1853 by a group of 32 settlers from New Hampshire, and named after their leader, a farmer named John Willis, though it was now a town of 300. On August 16th, Forrest and 400 of his horsemen rode into the settlement and, after slaughtering the livestock and stealing weapons, they killed 23 men and women and burned down the entire settlement, houses, barns, stores, the church, and fields, before riding off north to wreak even more havoc. One settler recalled that, “they rode in on their fearsome horses, and went from house to house. They came to my house and seized us. They took our pigs and chickens and set fire to our barn. They torched the fields, the house, everything. By the time they left to rampage elsewhere, there was nothing but embers and ash.”
Next, Forrest sacked and burned first Freetown and then Topeka (which was widely covered in Northern newspapers, given Topeka’s status as a major Kansan municipality), killing over sixty between the two, making off with valuables and destroying anything they couldn’t carry. As Forrest continued to press north, leaving a trail of destruction behind him, General Sherman worked to counter him. An initial attempt to defeat Forrest by conventional means failed in the Battle of Manhattan, where 1,000 Union troops succeeded in killing 200 raiders, but failed to prevent their raid or their escape. Sherman changed tactics, telling his trusted subordinate General Crandell, “If we can’t destroy them, we can deny them the ability to destroy us.” And so, General Order No. 66 was born. Built upon Sherman’s operating theory, that “we must make them feel the hard hand of war. We must drive them to disease and starvation,” Order No. 66 called for the Union to burn fields and slaughter livestock, to deny the enemy the advantage. Union troops were to requisition foodstuffs, animals, and weapons from homesteads (with compensation, as the Order mandated), and destroy anything they couldn’t use. The order was extended to not just the north, where Forrest was storming through, but the areas near Missouri where Forrest’s raiders had made their base. There were 15,000 Union soldiers in Kansas and Missouri, of which Sherman could use 8,000 to counter Forrest’s raids, while 7,000 were tied up in garrisoning forts and key settlements.
The first use of Order No. 66 was at the settlement of Pottawatomie Creek, where Union soldiers “requisitioned” livestock and weapons, before leaving. The next Union raid was conducted by Kansas Territorial militia, who lacked the restraint of the Union soldiers and instead of simply taking foodstuffs, burned the town of Brooks to the ground and killing ten men accused of being bushwhackers. In retaliation, Forrest began cooperating closely with the bushwhackers of Red Bill Quantrill in attacking Free-Stater settlements. After Kansas militia razed Osage City to the ground, Forrest’s Raiders sacked Osawatomie. However, despite escalating brutality, with Sherman authorizing Union soldiers to burn the homes of “those Settlers who resist the requisitioning of supplies for the Army” and the destruction of fields in September, the Union counter-insurgency tactics began to take their toll on Forrest’s Raiders. By mid-October, Lecompton was one of the few Vagabonder settlements that hadn’t been burnt, making it increasingly difficult to raid north in secrecy. Faced with the real possibility that the Raiders would be forced to concentrate in Lecompton, where Sherman could easily destroy them, Forrest decided to set out for greener pastures and join the guerillas in Missouri to fight the Union garrisons there. By November 4th, 1859, the last of Forrest’s Raiders had abandoned Lecompton and slipped across the border into southern Missouri. The Harrowing had left Kansas, but Missouri was about to bleed…”
“From “The Rise and Fall of the Confederate States of America” by Ralph Cairns
Published 2001
“If you were to sit in a meeting of the Confederate Cabinet in its Charlotte exile, you would see wild stacks of paper, piles of rumpled maps, and the red faces of the Cabinet members. With President John Quitman in a coma, Vice-President Howell Cobb was declared Acting President. Cobb was not, however, able to keep the cabinet from infighting like Quitman had. Of course, a some of that had been due to Quitman’s fiery speeches and monologues to his Cabinet, but Cobb was well-liked and viewed as a capable mediator. The real reason for the increasing factionalism, tensions with the Confederate Congress and Governors, and infighting was the increasingly dire situation the Confederate States of America found itself in. Virginia had fallen, the Mississippi had been wrested away, and Union armies were poised to strike through Georgia, all the way to the Atlantic.
The loss of Virginia was the worst of these three disasters by far. The loss of manpower and tax income was viewed as critical to the survival of the Confederacy, and so War Secretary Davis proposed two new policies: one, the passage of a National Conscription Act like the one passed by the Union Congress in 1858 after the James River Campaign, and two, the imposition of new taxes that would fall most heavily on yeoman farmers and that could be paid either in cash or in kind (i.e. in goods rather than Confederate Dollars). While, prior to the Battle of Seven Pines [4] in Richmond, the army had been kept up to proper strength by a steady stream of volunteers, the collapse of the Confederate position in Virginia and the fall of Vicksburg caused not only a sudden fall in the number of volunteers as Southerners succumbed to defeatism and war exhaustion, but also a flood of desertions as soldiers fled to their homes to defend their families and farms. The now-optimistically named Army of Virginia [5], rudderless with a despondent Longstreet and four commanders in three years, had shrunk from its Seven Pines size of 25,000 to 17,000 as a result of both casualties sustained in the battle and the wave of desertions that followed. The Conscription Act implemented a draft of five years on all men between the ages of 17 and 40, though with a few noticeable exceptions that helped make the Act as unpopular as it did. First, any draftee could hire a substitute, allowing wealthy planters’ sons to escape service. Second, and more overtly favoring the landed class, was the Twenty Negro Provision. The Twenty Negro Provision exempted one white man from service for every twenty slaves on a plantation. Intended to assuage mounting fears that, with the Union army’s recruitment of colored troops and the implementation of Fremont’s Emancipation Declaration, there would be mass slave uprisings in the home front.
The Conscription Act was, even before its arrival in the Confederate Congress, faced with stiff opposition within the Cabinet. Attorney General Alexander Stephens was the most vocal in criticizing Davis’s proposal, calling it “in opposition to the very ideals this nation is built upon.” Despite fierce resistance from Stephens and his allies in Congress, the Conscription Act was passed by first the House, and then the Senate, and was finally signed into law on October 24th by Acting President Cobb. The proposed tax hike was enacted three days later.
Bragg’s burning of and retreat from Chattanooga and food shortages resultant from supply problems only exacerbated the unrest brought on by the Conscription Act and new taxes. While 40,000 troops were conscripted in Mississippi and Alabama for the Army of Georgia, one-tenth of that number later deserted. 47,000 were drafted in North and South Carolina for the defense of those states, but 6,000 deserted their posts. As a warning to conscripts, Army officials were instructed to “burn the farms and homes of those who desert, to make an example of them and dissuade others from following down the path of desertion.” Rather than decrease the desertion rate, like Davis and his (increasingly few) allies had intended, it simply led to open, if minor, rebellions against the government. In Jones County, Mississippi, a deserter from the Siege of Vicksburg named Newton Knight led a rebellion of deserters that fought both army officials and tax collectors, distributing seized food among the people of the county. Knight even went so far as to declare the county’s secession from the Confederacy, resulting in the Free State of Jones becoming national news in not just the Confederacy, but across the north. Several newspapers hailed him as “the Southron Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to feed the poor”. Several other counties declared secession from the Confederacy (some led by deserters, others by Southern Unionist politicians), including the Free State of Winston in Winston County, the Republic of Nickajack in northern Alabama, and the Free Republic of Watauga in north-western North Carolina. These rebellions never posed serious threats to the Confederate government, but nevertheless served to illustrate the increasingly precarious position of the Confederate government.
… Though, before the fall of Chattanooga, Cobb had delegated increasing power to the Cabinet, especially to Attorney General Stephens and Secretary of War Davis, now he found he was sidelined by more dominant personalities. In particular, Alexander Stephens and Jefferson Davis began to feud over the new conscription laws, tax increases, and military strategy. It began when Stephens rose during a Cabinet meeting discussing the spreading Deserter’s Rebellions in the lower South and declared “we cannot hope to maintain the Confederacy, we cannot hope to maintain the support of our fellow Southerners, with these tyrannical conscription laws and taxes. They alienate those who would support us and drive them into the arms of the Negros and Yankees. These measures make us no different than our enemy.” Davis angrily countered that the laws were absolutely vital for the war effort, saying “how could you, or any of us here, jeopardize the survival of the Confederacy with such talk? In war, we must make sacrifices. Sacrifices of not just lives, but of ideals. We are in a war, a war to the death. If we are to win, we must make such sacrifices as these. Surely, Attorney General Stephens, you would not want us to lose?”
Davis’s vicious response did nothing to calm tensions in the Cabinet, despite Acting President Cobb’s support for the “emergency wartime measures”. Stephens called Davis a “traitor to the ideals of the nation” in response. He assembled an alliance of several state governors, as well as prominent Senators, to attack Davis and his reputation. Under increasing scrutiny for his handling of the increasingly moribund war effort, Jefferson Davis resigned his position on November 27th, 1859, and was promptly replaced with Judah. P. Benjamin, a Senator from Louisiana and one of Davis’s few remaining supporters. Cobb, at Secretary Benjamin’s urging and Davis’s request, gave Davis command over the re-named Army of Georgia (taking over from a sacked Bragg) and bestowed upon him the rank of General. With Richard Taylor wielding a Sword of Damocles over Atlanta, it was up to Davis to try and save the South.”
[1] TTL, Sickles is given a commission by Fremont at the urging of War Democrats, who partly want to get rid of him and partly to get a Democrat into a position of command in the army. He’s still an incompetent, arrogant moron, though.
[2] While not mentioned here, Knoxville falls to the Union, virtually without a shot. Also not mentioned, Franklin is ceded by the Tennessee Military Government to the US Federal Government, and then admitted as the State of Franklin, under Gov. Brownlow. I didn’t include these in the update itself because there wasn’t a great place to stick them.
[3] Fictional, born 1826 in Altoona PA, promoted to Corps command in June of 1859.
[4] While the North refers to the fall of Richmond as the Battle of Richmond, it is known in the South as the Battle of Seven Pines.
[5] The Union has not made any moves south of Petersburg, as Thomas is instead working to consolidate Union control of northern Virginia and the Shenandoah. Come spring, the war in the east will resume.
Comments, questions, predictions welcome. I love hearing from you all! Also, the next chapter is the final one on the civil war!
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Prince or Price? My guy is Henry Price. Anyhoo, 1811 makes this guy a bit old for what I have planned for General Price in the future.
Wikiboxes for the last two updates
Minor correction: the Army of the Potomac’s size should be 110,000, not 11,000
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Ficboy
Banned
Hey @TheHedgehog, I have a timeline about an early Civil War that takes place in the 1850s, has Fremont and Davis (albeit the former is an American War Secretary and the latter is Confederate President), a different beginning and end of the conflict and a Confederate-controlled Kentucky and Missouri. It's called Arrival of the Crisis and the POD is that Henry Clay dies of a stroke of tuberculosis two years early on January 21, 1850 at Daniel Webster's house before he could ever reveal the Compromise of 1850 and thus the North and the South are unable to resolve the issues pertaining to the Western territories, slavery in the District of Columbia, Fugitive slaves and the Texas-New Mexico boundary dispute. Texas meanwhile decides to send a 5,000 man militia led by Robert Simpson Neighbors to New Mexico and the United States beefs up the John Munroe and George A. McCall-led military garrison by sending 750 soldiers to the dwindling 1,382 military force which is suffering from cholera. The United States fires the first shots towards Texas as soon as they reach Santa Fe and the latter takes the town from the former on September 21, 1850 and eventually they are expelled by them on October 15, 1850. News of what became known as the Battle of Santa Fe and the Second Battle of Santa Fe reaches both the North and the South to widespread outrage. The South is angry that the United States or the North fired upon Texas whom they consider to be a sister state. As a result of the events in Santa Fe it triggers the South to secede and form the Confederate States on March 23, 1850 under the Southern Rights Party one year after the 1852 presidential election which was marred by political violence that became known as Bloody November in Baltimore, Maryland and St. Louis, Missouri as well as the Louisville Riots in Louisville, Kentucky. The War of the Southern Rebellion otherwise known as the War of Confederate Independence begins and it lasts from 1853 to 1855 ending in a Confederate victory.
I can send you my timeline via PMs if you're interested.
I can send you my timeline via PMs if you're interested.
I'd be interested in looking at this, just PM me the Google Doc link.
I had thought that, since Davis spent most of his OTL presidency focusing on the military, he would want his sort of “second act” to be in command of an army.
I read about Charles Joseph Bonaparte, who was Theodore Roosevelt's AG and Navy Secretary. He was a civil rights advocate, Baltimore lawyer, and and progressive Republican. I initially thought about making him President, but then I started thinking about alternate political families, and I had the idea to make the Bonapartes sort of like the Kennedy family. Given the family's background in Baltimore and Maryland business and politics, I thought it would be an interesting and fun thing to do that's also plausible.
ACT TWO, PART VIII
The Universal Yankee Nation
From “Soldiers of Freedom” by Gregory H. Lambert
Published 1973
“General Thomas spent the second half of 1859 securing the areas of Virginia the Army of the Potomac had not reached during the triumphant Peninsula Campaign. He was also busy meeting with President Fremont and being cajoled into granting interviews to the throngs of reporters that clogged the army camp in Petersburg. But Thomas also spent the time planning a sweeping campaign south, into the Carolinas.
The Army of Northern Virginia had been all but destroyed in the Battle of Williamsburg and the Battle of Richmond, and the careers of both Longstreet and Ewell were finished. The Confederates were forced to cobble together an ad-hoc defense of what had suddenly become undefended. However, with Gibraltar Taylor breathing down Georgia’s neck, the Confederate Cabinet was increasingly shifting their focus, and the focus of the army, from the doomed East to the threatened West. Previously, especially when Robert E. Lee was alive, the most attention was focused on Virginia, leaving Tennessee to the wolves. Now, as the Confederate states in the southeast became caught in the Union’s vast pincer, forces promised to the Army of Virginia were redirected to the Army of Georgia. This is not to say that the east became neglected by the government, but simply that Acting President Cobb and his Cabinet began paying equal attention to both fronts.
With Longstreet’s resignation and Ewell’s disgrace, a new commander had to be selected for the Army of Virginia, which was soon renamed to the Army of the Carolinas. After several names, including William J. Hardee and Jubal Early, were floated, it was eventually agreed that Joseph E. Johnston would return to the field, after his exile to recruitment duties after his wound in the James River Campaign. Johnston was given command of an army of 57,000, almost all of which was composed of raw, restless conscripts. Within weeks of Johnston’s assumption of command and the announcement that the Army of the Carolinas would soon enter combat, thousands deserted. Desertion became such a large problem for Johnston that he was forced to place more guards and scouts behind his lines to catch deserters than in front to search for the enemy’s army.
While the Confederacy rushed to establish a cohesive fighting force, George Thomas had put his grand plan into action. Thomas had his army head south from Petersburg and advance through central North Carolina, where the key objectives of Greensborough, Raleigh, and Charlotte lay. At Charlotte, the army was to split into two columns. One was to head west and take Greensborough and Charlotte lay. The other was to turn east and take Goldsborough, New Bern, and Wilmington. For his part, General Johnston wished to avoid a direct confrontation with Thomas, as any open battle would be nothing less than suicide for the Army of the Carolinas. Aside from the aforementioned desertion issue, Johnston’s army was chronically undersupplied, with many soldiers lacking proper shoes and coats, a full quarter of the army lacked their standard equipment, and there was a terrible shortage of rations that left most men hungry.
Johnston fled south from his headquarters in Halifax, his goal being to reinforce Raleigh or, failing that, Wilmington. At Raleigh, Johnston’s men aided Governor Thomas Bragg’s efforts to build fortifications and defend the relocated Confederate capital from Thomas’s southward advance. However, after receiving reports that only half of Thomas’s army was approaching, Johnston elected to march north and meet the Union army in the field. Johnston came to the conclusion that he could not hope to bleed the Union dry in Raleigh itself, as that would “bring much suffering upon the people, and utterly destroy our fighting chances”, as Johnston wrote in his memoirs. The only option that Johnston saw was to attack and try to destroy as much of the Union army as possible.
The Union and Confederate armies met in battle on June 14th, with Johnston engaging the II Corps of Philip Kearney as he arrived onto the field. Kearney, despite initial setbacks such as the routing of an entire division, held the line with determination, and allowed for Thomas to bring his army onto the field in an orderly fashion. Jubal Early recalled in a letter how “The change in the General’s mood was obvious to all once he received word that all four Corps of the Union army, a hundred thousand men in total, had entered the field.” Johnston sent word to the Confederate government that they should evacuate south, before returning to directing the battle. Thomas’s advantage in numbers allowed him to spread his corps out to threaten Johnston’s flanks, forcing the Confederates to pull back their flanks and adopt a U-shaped line. After over two hours of skirmishing, Winfield Hancock and John Sedgwick launched ferocious attacks on Johnston’s lines. Hancock directed two of his divisions to attack between Johnston’s center and left, while the other two mounted diversionary attacks on the center’s and left’s midpoints. Hancock’s attack was devastatingly successful, and he successfully encircled, with the aid of two divisions from James McPherson’s Corps, a third of Johnston’s left wing. Seeing the disaster on his left, Johnston called a retreat, and the Army of the Carolinas fled from the field, leaving a trail of abandoned equipment and deserting soldiers behind on the march back to Raleigh.
His defeat in the Battle of Durham came as no surprise to Johnston. As he wrote: “I had so few men and so few supplies that any outcome other than defeat was inconceivable.” After holding a council of war with his men in Raleigh, Johnston dispatched a messenger to the Union camp offering his unconditional surrender and requesting to hold surrender negotiations the following day. Thomas accepted, requesting to hold the negotiation in the North Carolina state capitol’s rotunda. Johnston accepted and so, at 12:00 noon on June 15th, George Thomas arrived with 300 guards at the North Carolina State House to meet with Johnston. Beneath the stately rotunda, Thomas laid out his terms: The Union army would receive duplicate rolls of all officers and soldiers in the Army of the Carolinas, all guns, ammunition, officer side-arms, and artillery were to be turned over to the Union army, and in order to receive parole, all members of the Army of the Carolinas had to swear not to take up arms against the United States “until properly exchanged [1]”. Johnston had no other options but to accept, and he signed the instrument of surrender, exactly as Thomas had offered it, on June 17th, 1860. For all intents and purposes, the Carolinas had fallen.”
“WI the Confederates conscripted Blacks into the Army?”, discussion on Counterfactual.net
Started June 2026
Gibraltar_Taylor said: After the disastrous defeat suffered by the Confederates in the Peninsular Campaign, a group, most prominently including General William Mahone, the commander of troops defending Jackson, Mississippi, from Ulysses Grant, emerged with a plan to bolster the failing recruitment efforts. Mahone put forth the idea that slaves be enlisted into the army, and then granted their freedom once their term of service was completed.
Despite the fact that the Mahone Plan would have brought in tens of thousands into the moribund Confederate armies, a coalition of rival Generals, planters, and politicians quickly squashed any discussion of emancipation-for-service, and Mahone was removed from command, replaced by Joseph Wheeler. If the plan had been implemented, what would its effects be? Even though the Union was undeniably winning at this point, could the Confederates have significantly prolonged the war? Could Longstreet and Johnston have turned the tide? If the tide had indeed turned, and Fremont loses in 1860 to a Peace Democrat, could the Confederacy have secured its independence?
TheVirginianSledgehammer said: Even if the Mahone Plan was implemented, which is itself unlikely (everyone, from Alexander Stephens and Howell Cobb to Braxton Bragg opposed it), I doubt it would have much of an effect on the course of the war. It even could have hastened the end of the Confederacy. What incentive do these Confederate Black soldiers have to fight for their former masters? I think that, had the Mahone Plan been used, there would have been mass defections of black troops to the Union. And then, of course, there is the effect such a decision would have on wealthy planters like Wade Hampton. If the government started recruiting slaves, then you could even see a civil war within the Confederacy, with states like Alabama, South Carolina, and Mississippi seceding to preserve slavery from the Confederacy, which itself seceded to preserve slavery.
TheOccidentalExpress [MOD] said: There’s no way this would ever happen. The Confederacy was built on white supremacy and the maintenance of slavery, and its political elite were hellbent on upholding such ideals.
TheImperial said: If the Mahone Plan was implemented, and it was accepted by the Confederate government and states, and if the soldiers didn’t immediately defect to the Union (a REALLY BIG if), then the Confederacy would definitely have held out for longer. I still don’t think they could have won, as the Union had such large advantages in manpower and industrial capacity that they would still roll over the Confederate armies.
“From “The Rise and Fall of the Confederate States of America” by Ralph Cairns
Published 2001
“Jefferson Davis had a monumental task ahead of him. Richard Taylor had taken Chattanooga, placing the mighty Union army a stone’s throw from the Confederate base of Dalton. Davis planned to simply stay put in Dalton to ward off a Union advance south, as he knew he could not hope to take offensive action given the fact that Davis had only 50,000 men, half the size of Taylor’s Army of Tennessee.
Taylor understood Davis’s position almost as well as Davis himself, and thus resolved to avoid a direct attack on Dalton [2], which Davis had fortified with earthworks and trenches. As Dalton was positioned along the road to Atlanta, Taylor decided upon a strategy that would avoid direct confrontation but would instead force Davis to fall back. If the Union army could march around Davis’s army and position itself along the road to Atlanta, Davis would either have to fall back or fight back. Departing Chattanooga in two columns of 60,000 each, Taylor sought to either encircle Dalton or force Davis to retreat.
As the Union pincer neared the road leading south from Dalton, threatening to encircle the Army of Georgia, Jefferson Davis held a war council with his Corps commanders – Leonidas Polk, who Davis had reinstated after Bragg had dismissed him post-Shelbyville, John Bell Hood, who replaced Alexander P. Stewart (who died of Pneumonia after a wound sustained at the Battle of Jasper), and Stephen D. Lee. Polk remained silent, except to agree with Davis, no matter what he said. Hood and Lee both urged a withdrawal, with Lee telling Davis, “if they surround us, it is all over. Atlanta will be left wide open for the Yankees to take. We must fall back if we want to survive.” Davis favored trying to attack the Union columns converging just south of Dalton, saying “If we can knock out one of those infernal columns, Taylor won’t be able to oppose us with such strength.”
Lee and Hood were quick to criticize this, with Lee pointing out that, “we do not want to be caught in between the twin hammers of the Union army. That would be a disaster from which there would be no coming back.” Davis ultimately relented after much deliberation, and on April 9th, he gave the order to withdraw south, to Resaca. However, Henry Price’s III Corps had, moving in advance of the rest of the army, occupied the road leading out of Dalton. Davis would have to fight his way out. The Battle of Dalton was not a real battle. There were no vicious charges or flanking maneuvers or vast fronts, but instead a series of skirmishes as Davis attempted to distract Price long enough to escape, while Price sought to inflict as many casualties as possible. Ultimately, it was a brief engagement. Price pulled back after inflicting over 2,000 casualties on the Confederates, while Davis fled south to Resaca.
While the Confederates holed up in Resaca, Taylor sought to destroy enemy forces in the surrounding towns of northern Georgia. And so, while he moved south, Joe Hooker went west to destroy Thomas Hindman’s garrison in Rome. The goal in taking Rome was not just to prevent Hindman from linking his 10,000 men with Davis’s army, but to hopefully draw the Confederates out from Resaca, as Rome lay well to the south. For his part, Davis lingered in Resaca until reports arrived that Hooker had successfully taken Rome, at which time he fled ahead of two advancing Union columns, burning any supplies his army could not take with them. Hooker brought his corps east, in the direction of Cass Station. After a brief delay to occupy Kingston, Hooker linked up with Taylor at Cassville, north of Cass Station. The army once again split into two columns, with John A. Logan commanding his Corps and Hooker’s Corps to proceed around the west side of Cass Station on April 29th, and threaten the bridge and railroad over the Etowah River, north of Allatoona. Logan’s maneuver successfully forced Davis to withdraw or be trapped above the river, and he retreated from Cass Station (after burning it). Davis left the Allatoona pass heavily guarded, while he established his headquarters within Allatoona itself. However, Taylor crossed the river at Euharlee and the bridge west of Allatoona, and the fall of Burnt Hickory threatened Davis’s supply lines once more. Davis retreated back to Acworth, but this position, too, became untenable when Taylor defeated a Confederate brigade at Pickett’s Mill and threatened the two roads leading to Atlanta. Davis had no choice but to withdraw all the way to Atlanta itself, even abandoning Marietta.
Holed up in Atlanta, Davis refused to contest the surrounding countryside with the Union army and kept all his troops holed up in Atlanta. This allowed Taylor to capture, one by one, the roads and railroads that ran in and out of Atlanta. One by one, Decatur, East Point, Jonesboro, Fairburn, and Sandtown were secured, completely isolating Atlanta and cutting off the flow of supplies.
Jefferson Davis and his army were now trapped in Atlanta. Atlanta was entirely surrounded, and all day and all night the siege guns and mortars that Taylor had brought down from the supply depots in Chattanooga roared, raining fire and shell down upon the city, leveling many buildings in the outskirts. Most Confederate soldiers spent their days clearing rubble and extinguishing the fires that sometimes began from the bombardment. With the bombardment and siege, Davis had assumed all day-to-day authority over all people in Atlanta, both soldier and civilian. On June 11th, faced with the prospect of mass starvation, Davis announced that all foodstuffs within the city would be “seized and stored in the warehouses and depots, to be distributed by the soldiers of the Army of Georgia to the people, so as to preserve our finite reserves. It is encouraged that the people of Atlanta cultivate gardens to increase our food reserves.” Despite his best efforts to maintain order, the announcement of rationing sparked a wave of unrest. Civilians, already exhausted after almost month of siege, refused to hand over food or stole from the warehouses. Soldiers, furious over the government’s failure to pay them for the last two months, began selling food to hungry Atlantans. Many officers even entered into business on the black market.
On the morning of June 27th, Richard Taylor was just finishing breakfast with the Corps commanders of his army when he was notified by a sentry that someone from the Confederates had arrived with an important letter. Soon after, a man in the grey uniform of a Confederate soldier arrived, escorted by Union guards. The out-of-breath messenger had just arrived from a meeting with three Confederate officers. The messenger had been dispatched by the officers with a letter from General Davis, and he left the Confederate camp for the Union one. The messenger had been stopped by guards on the road out of Atlanta, where a Union picket line had been set up to prevent Davis from sneaking out from Taylor’s grip. Taylor was notified of the messenger’s presence, while the man was disarmed and escorted on foot to the stately home where Taylor had established his staff’s offices.
Upon opening the letter, Taylor was shocked to read its contents – Jefferson Davis wanted to surrender, unconditionally. “I have recently come to the realization that I cannot win, and I cannot escape. My army is surrounded, and my men are beginning to starve. General Johnston has surrendered his army in Raleigh, and I cannot hope to resist alone. The only end that leaves my army with any honor, any dignity, is to humbly request you accept my offer of unconditional surrender. This war has gone on too long.” Taylor quickly dictated a response, which read in part: “General Davis – I was so very overjoyed to receive your offer. I will order a ceasefire to begin at noon, so that terms can be discussed later in the day.” Davis was excited and agreed to the proposed ceasefire. Precisely at 12:00 o’clock noon, the guns fell silent and the Union bombardment ceased at last. Two hours later, Taylor rode with fifty guards to the Trout House hotel in central Atlanta. While his men waited outside, Taylor arrived in his dress uniform to negotiate the terms of Davis’s surrender in the ballroom of the hotel, where a table had been set up in anticipation.
As Taylor recalls in his memoir, “I entered the doors to the French-style ballroom at two o’clock in the afternoon, and found Davis, in his worn and oft-mended grey uniform, seated at the dining table, near the entrance. He rose to greet me and presented his ceremonial sword, in the manner of Generals in old Europe.” Taylor offered the same conditions he had offered to the commander of Port Hudson’s garrison, and the same terms that Thomas gave to Johnston – Taylor would receive a list of all officers and soldiers, all guns, ammunition, and artillery would be turned over to the Union, all soldiers had to swear not to take up arms against the United States again in order to receive parole, and all soldiers and officers would be allowed to take home their horses back to their farms. These terms were as generous as Davis could have hoped for, and he readily accepted. He signed the official document of surrender at 3:16 in the afternoon, delivering Atlanta into Union hands.
After three long years, the Civil War was over. With the surrender of both remaining field armies, the Confederate government voted to dissolve on August 6th and were arrested by the Union army in Columbia, South Carolina. The states that had seceded to form the Confederacy were divided into Military Districts, their governments dissolved and replaced with “Reconstructionist governments”, and, with no war to fight, the tens of thousands of boys in grey trudged home in defeat to their farms and homesteads across the south, while the victorious Union army remained to occupy the defeated rebel states.
On August 11th, President John C. Fremont stood before a joint session of Congress and said: “I make this pledge – to Congress, to the states, and to the people of this Union – north and south, east and west: We must strive to finish this work, with malice nor cruelty to anyone, and with good-graces and charity for all, to begin the work of re-uniting this divided House, of building a More Perfect Union, one forged from the fires of terrible war into a more just, more righteous one.” None could have laid out the task ahead better than President Fremont.”
[1] From Grant’s OTL surrender terms to Lee at Appomattox Court House.
[2] Modeled on Rosecran’s OTL Tullahoma Campaign strategy.
From “Soldiers of Freedom” by Gregory H. Lambert
Published 1973
“General Thomas spent the second half of 1859 securing the areas of Virginia the Army of the Potomac had not reached during the triumphant Peninsula Campaign. He was also busy meeting with President Fremont and being cajoled into granting interviews to the throngs of reporters that clogged the army camp in Petersburg. But Thomas also spent the time planning a sweeping campaign south, into the Carolinas.
The Army of Northern Virginia had been all but destroyed in the Battle of Williamsburg and the Battle of Richmond, and the careers of both Longstreet and Ewell were finished. The Confederates were forced to cobble together an ad-hoc defense of what had suddenly become undefended. However, with Gibraltar Taylor breathing down Georgia’s neck, the Confederate Cabinet was increasingly shifting their focus, and the focus of the army, from the doomed East to the threatened West. Previously, especially when Robert E. Lee was alive, the most attention was focused on Virginia, leaving Tennessee to the wolves. Now, as the Confederate states in the southeast became caught in the Union’s vast pincer, forces promised to the Army of Virginia were redirected to the Army of Georgia. This is not to say that the east became neglected by the government, but simply that Acting President Cobb and his Cabinet began paying equal attention to both fronts.
With Longstreet’s resignation and Ewell’s disgrace, a new commander had to be selected for the Army of Virginia, which was soon renamed to the Army of the Carolinas. After several names, including William J. Hardee and Jubal Early, were floated, it was eventually agreed that Joseph E. Johnston would return to the field, after his exile to recruitment duties after his wound in the James River Campaign. Johnston was given command of an army of 57,000, almost all of which was composed of raw, restless conscripts. Within weeks of Johnston’s assumption of command and the announcement that the Army of the Carolinas would soon enter combat, thousands deserted. Desertion became such a large problem for Johnston that he was forced to place more guards and scouts behind his lines to catch deserters than in front to search for the enemy’s army.
While the Confederacy rushed to establish a cohesive fighting force, George Thomas had put his grand plan into action. Thomas had his army head south from Petersburg and advance through central North Carolina, where the key objectives of Greensborough, Raleigh, and Charlotte lay. At Charlotte, the army was to split into two columns. One was to head west and take Greensborough and Charlotte lay. The other was to turn east and take Goldsborough, New Bern, and Wilmington. For his part, General Johnston wished to avoid a direct confrontation with Thomas, as any open battle would be nothing less than suicide for the Army of the Carolinas. Aside from the aforementioned desertion issue, Johnston’s army was chronically undersupplied, with many soldiers lacking proper shoes and coats, a full quarter of the army lacked their standard equipment, and there was a terrible shortage of rations that left most men hungry.
Johnston fled south from his headquarters in Halifax, his goal being to reinforce Raleigh or, failing that, Wilmington. At Raleigh, Johnston’s men aided Governor Thomas Bragg’s efforts to build fortifications and defend the relocated Confederate capital from Thomas’s southward advance. However, after receiving reports that only half of Thomas’s army was approaching, Johnston elected to march north and meet the Union army in the field. Johnston came to the conclusion that he could not hope to bleed the Union dry in Raleigh itself, as that would “bring much suffering upon the people, and utterly destroy our fighting chances”, as Johnston wrote in his memoirs. The only option that Johnston saw was to attack and try to destroy as much of the Union army as possible.
The Union and Confederate armies met in battle on June 14th, with Johnston engaging the II Corps of Philip Kearney as he arrived onto the field. Kearney, despite initial setbacks such as the routing of an entire division, held the line with determination, and allowed for Thomas to bring his army onto the field in an orderly fashion. Jubal Early recalled in a letter how “The change in the General’s mood was obvious to all once he received word that all four Corps of the Union army, a hundred thousand men in total, had entered the field.” Johnston sent word to the Confederate government that they should evacuate south, before returning to directing the battle. Thomas’s advantage in numbers allowed him to spread his corps out to threaten Johnston’s flanks, forcing the Confederates to pull back their flanks and adopt a U-shaped line. After over two hours of skirmishing, Winfield Hancock and John Sedgwick launched ferocious attacks on Johnston’s lines. Hancock directed two of his divisions to attack between Johnston’s center and left, while the other two mounted diversionary attacks on the center’s and left’s midpoints. Hancock’s attack was devastatingly successful, and he successfully encircled, with the aid of two divisions from James McPherson’s Corps, a third of Johnston’s left wing. Seeing the disaster on his left, Johnston called a retreat, and the Army of the Carolinas fled from the field, leaving a trail of abandoned equipment and deserting soldiers behind on the march back to Raleigh.
His defeat in the Battle of Durham came as no surprise to Johnston. As he wrote: “I had so few men and so few supplies that any outcome other than defeat was inconceivable.” After holding a council of war with his men in Raleigh, Johnston dispatched a messenger to the Union camp offering his unconditional surrender and requesting to hold surrender negotiations the following day. Thomas accepted, requesting to hold the negotiation in the North Carolina state capitol’s rotunda. Johnston accepted and so, at 12:00 noon on June 15th, George Thomas arrived with 300 guards at the North Carolina State House to meet with Johnston. Beneath the stately rotunda, Thomas laid out his terms: The Union army would receive duplicate rolls of all officers and soldiers in the Army of the Carolinas, all guns, ammunition, officer side-arms, and artillery were to be turned over to the Union army, and in order to receive parole, all members of the Army of the Carolinas had to swear not to take up arms against the United States “until properly exchanged [1]”. Johnston had no other options but to accept, and he signed the instrument of surrender, exactly as Thomas had offered it, on June 17th, 1860. For all intents and purposes, the Carolinas had fallen.”
“WI the Confederates conscripted Blacks into the Army?”, discussion on Counterfactual.net
Started June 2026
Gibraltar_Taylor said: After the disastrous defeat suffered by the Confederates in the Peninsular Campaign, a group, most prominently including General William Mahone, the commander of troops defending Jackson, Mississippi, from Ulysses Grant, emerged with a plan to bolster the failing recruitment efforts. Mahone put forth the idea that slaves be enlisted into the army, and then granted their freedom once their term of service was completed.
Despite the fact that the Mahone Plan would have brought in tens of thousands into the moribund Confederate armies, a coalition of rival Generals, planters, and politicians quickly squashed any discussion of emancipation-for-service, and Mahone was removed from command, replaced by Joseph Wheeler. If the plan had been implemented, what would its effects be? Even though the Union was undeniably winning at this point, could the Confederates have significantly prolonged the war? Could Longstreet and Johnston have turned the tide? If the tide had indeed turned, and Fremont loses in 1860 to a Peace Democrat, could the Confederacy have secured its independence?
TheVirginianSledgehammer said: Even if the Mahone Plan was implemented, which is itself unlikely (everyone, from Alexander Stephens and Howell Cobb to Braxton Bragg opposed it), I doubt it would have much of an effect on the course of the war. It even could have hastened the end of the Confederacy. What incentive do these Confederate Black soldiers have to fight for their former masters? I think that, had the Mahone Plan been used, there would have been mass defections of black troops to the Union. And then, of course, there is the effect such a decision would have on wealthy planters like Wade Hampton. If the government started recruiting slaves, then you could even see a civil war within the Confederacy, with states like Alabama, South Carolina, and Mississippi seceding to preserve slavery from the Confederacy, which itself seceded to preserve slavery.
TheOccidentalExpress [MOD] said: There’s no way this would ever happen. The Confederacy was built on white supremacy and the maintenance of slavery, and its political elite were hellbent on upholding such ideals.
TheImperial said: If the Mahone Plan was implemented, and it was accepted by the Confederate government and states, and if the soldiers didn’t immediately defect to the Union (a REALLY BIG if), then the Confederacy would definitely have held out for longer. I still don’t think they could have won, as the Union had such large advantages in manpower and industrial capacity that they would still roll over the Confederate armies.
“From “The Rise and Fall of the Confederate States of America” by Ralph Cairns
Published 2001
“Jefferson Davis had a monumental task ahead of him. Richard Taylor had taken Chattanooga, placing the mighty Union army a stone’s throw from the Confederate base of Dalton. Davis planned to simply stay put in Dalton to ward off a Union advance south, as he knew he could not hope to take offensive action given the fact that Davis had only 50,000 men, half the size of Taylor’s Army of Tennessee.
Taylor understood Davis’s position almost as well as Davis himself, and thus resolved to avoid a direct attack on Dalton [2], which Davis had fortified with earthworks and trenches. As Dalton was positioned along the road to Atlanta, Taylor decided upon a strategy that would avoid direct confrontation but would instead force Davis to fall back. If the Union army could march around Davis’s army and position itself along the road to Atlanta, Davis would either have to fall back or fight back. Departing Chattanooga in two columns of 60,000 each, Taylor sought to either encircle Dalton or force Davis to retreat.
As the Union pincer neared the road leading south from Dalton, threatening to encircle the Army of Georgia, Jefferson Davis held a war council with his Corps commanders – Leonidas Polk, who Davis had reinstated after Bragg had dismissed him post-Shelbyville, John Bell Hood, who replaced Alexander P. Stewart (who died of Pneumonia after a wound sustained at the Battle of Jasper), and Stephen D. Lee. Polk remained silent, except to agree with Davis, no matter what he said. Hood and Lee both urged a withdrawal, with Lee telling Davis, “if they surround us, it is all over. Atlanta will be left wide open for the Yankees to take. We must fall back if we want to survive.” Davis favored trying to attack the Union columns converging just south of Dalton, saying “If we can knock out one of those infernal columns, Taylor won’t be able to oppose us with such strength.”
Lee and Hood were quick to criticize this, with Lee pointing out that, “we do not want to be caught in between the twin hammers of the Union army. That would be a disaster from which there would be no coming back.” Davis ultimately relented after much deliberation, and on April 9th, he gave the order to withdraw south, to Resaca. However, Henry Price’s III Corps had, moving in advance of the rest of the army, occupied the road leading out of Dalton. Davis would have to fight his way out. The Battle of Dalton was not a real battle. There were no vicious charges or flanking maneuvers or vast fronts, but instead a series of skirmishes as Davis attempted to distract Price long enough to escape, while Price sought to inflict as many casualties as possible. Ultimately, it was a brief engagement. Price pulled back after inflicting over 2,000 casualties on the Confederates, while Davis fled south to Resaca.
While the Confederates holed up in Resaca, Taylor sought to destroy enemy forces in the surrounding towns of northern Georgia. And so, while he moved south, Joe Hooker went west to destroy Thomas Hindman’s garrison in Rome. The goal in taking Rome was not just to prevent Hindman from linking his 10,000 men with Davis’s army, but to hopefully draw the Confederates out from Resaca, as Rome lay well to the south. For his part, Davis lingered in Resaca until reports arrived that Hooker had successfully taken Rome, at which time he fled ahead of two advancing Union columns, burning any supplies his army could not take with them. Hooker brought his corps east, in the direction of Cass Station. After a brief delay to occupy Kingston, Hooker linked up with Taylor at Cassville, north of Cass Station. The army once again split into two columns, with John A. Logan commanding his Corps and Hooker’s Corps to proceed around the west side of Cass Station on April 29th, and threaten the bridge and railroad over the Etowah River, north of Allatoona. Logan’s maneuver successfully forced Davis to withdraw or be trapped above the river, and he retreated from Cass Station (after burning it). Davis left the Allatoona pass heavily guarded, while he established his headquarters within Allatoona itself. However, Taylor crossed the river at Euharlee and the bridge west of Allatoona, and the fall of Burnt Hickory threatened Davis’s supply lines once more. Davis retreated back to Acworth, but this position, too, became untenable when Taylor defeated a Confederate brigade at Pickett’s Mill and threatened the two roads leading to Atlanta. Davis had no choice but to withdraw all the way to Atlanta itself, even abandoning Marietta.
Holed up in Atlanta, Davis refused to contest the surrounding countryside with the Union army and kept all his troops holed up in Atlanta. This allowed Taylor to capture, one by one, the roads and railroads that ran in and out of Atlanta. One by one, Decatur, East Point, Jonesboro, Fairburn, and Sandtown were secured, completely isolating Atlanta and cutting off the flow of supplies.
Jefferson Davis and his army were now trapped in Atlanta. Atlanta was entirely surrounded, and all day and all night the siege guns and mortars that Taylor had brought down from the supply depots in Chattanooga roared, raining fire and shell down upon the city, leveling many buildings in the outskirts. Most Confederate soldiers spent their days clearing rubble and extinguishing the fires that sometimes began from the bombardment. With the bombardment and siege, Davis had assumed all day-to-day authority over all people in Atlanta, both soldier and civilian. On June 11th, faced with the prospect of mass starvation, Davis announced that all foodstuffs within the city would be “seized and stored in the warehouses and depots, to be distributed by the soldiers of the Army of Georgia to the people, so as to preserve our finite reserves. It is encouraged that the people of Atlanta cultivate gardens to increase our food reserves.” Despite his best efforts to maintain order, the announcement of rationing sparked a wave of unrest. Civilians, already exhausted after almost month of siege, refused to hand over food or stole from the warehouses. Soldiers, furious over the government’s failure to pay them for the last two months, began selling food to hungry Atlantans. Many officers even entered into business on the black market.
On the morning of June 27th, Richard Taylor was just finishing breakfast with the Corps commanders of his army when he was notified by a sentry that someone from the Confederates had arrived with an important letter. Soon after, a man in the grey uniform of a Confederate soldier arrived, escorted by Union guards. The out-of-breath messenger had just arrived from a meeting with three Confederate officers. The messenger had been dispatched by the officers with a letter from General Davis, and he left the Confederate camp for the Union one. The messenger had been stopped by guards on the road out of Atlanta, where a Union picket line had been set up to prevent Davis from sneaking out from Taylor’s grip. Taylor was notified of the messenger’s presence, while the man was disarmed and escorted on foot to the stately home where Taylor had established his staff’s offices.
Upon opening the letter, Taylor was shocked to read its contents – Jefferson Davis wanted to surrender, unconditionally. “I have recently come to the realization that I cannot win, and I cannot escape. My army is surrounded, and my men are beginning to starve. General Johnston has surrendered his army in Raleigh, and I cannot hope to resist alone. The only end that leaves my army with any honor, any dignity, is to humbly request you accept my offer of unconditional surrender. This war has gone on too long.” Taylor quickly dictated a response, which read in part: “General Davis – I was so very overjoyed to receive your offer. I will order a ceasefire to begin at noon, so that terms can be discussed later in the day.” Davis was excited and agreed to the proposed ceasefire. Precisely at 12:00 o’clock noon, the guns fell silent and the Union bombardment ceased at last. Two hours later, Taylor rode with fifty guards to the Trout House hotel in central Atlanta. While his men waited outside, Taylor arrived in his dress uniform to negotiate the terms of Davis’s surrender in the ballroom of the hotel, where a table had been set up in anticipation.
As Taylor recalls in his memoir, “I entered the doors to the French-style ballroom at two o’clock in the afternoon, and found Davis, in his worn and oft-mended grey uniform, seated at the dining table, near the entrance. He rose to greet me and presented his ceremonial sword, in the manner of Generals in old Europe.” Taylor offered the same conditions he had offered to the commander of Port Hudson’s garrison, and the same terms that Thomas gave to Johnston – Taylor would receive a list of all officers and soldiers, all guns, ammunition, and artillery would be turned over to the Union, all soldiers had to swear not to take up arms against the United States again in order to receive parole, and all soldiers and officers would be allowed to take home their horses back to their farms. These terms were as generous as Davis could have hoped for, and he readily accepted. He signed the official document of surrender at 3:16 in the afternoon, delivering Atlanta into Union hands.
After three long years, the Civil War was over. With the surrender of both remaining field armies, the Confederate government voted to dissolve on August 6th and were arrested by the Union army in Columbia, South Carolina. The states that had seceded to form the Confederacy were divided into Military Districts, their governments dissolved and replaced with “Reconstructionist governments”, and, with no war to fight, the tens of thousands of boys in grey trudged home in defeat to their farms and homesteads across the south, while the victorious Union army remained to occupy the defeated rebel states.
On August 11th, President John C. Fremont stood before a joint session of Congress and said: “I make this pledge – to Congress, to the states, and to the people of this Union – north and south, east and west: We must strive to finish this work, with malice nor cruelty to anyone, and with good-graces and charity for all, to begin the work of re-uniting this divided House, of building a More Perfect Union, one forged from the fires of terrible war into a more just, more righteous one.” None could have laid out the task ahead better than President Fremont.”
[1] From Grant’s OTL surrender terms to Lee at Appomattox Court House.
[2] Modeled on Rosecran’s OTL Tullahoma Campaign strategy.
END OF ACT TWO
Comments, questions, predictions welcome. I love hearing from you all!
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I’m interested to see where things will go from here. I seem to remember an update in which Tennessee was split in two (though I don’t remember where it split).
I’m wondering which others of the rebellious states will be forcibly split apart. I’m also curious whether any of the rebel leadership will be executed.
I’m wondering which others of the rebellious states will be forcibly split apart. I’m also curious whether any of the rebel leadership will be executed.
I don't have plans to divide any other states, because I think the OTL "state suicide" plan was far too radical, even for most radical Republicans. Besides, the only reason Franklin and Vandalia split off are because there were long-standing secessionist proposals regarding those states. In terms of executions, there are going to be trials of those in the Confederate government, but I have yet to decide whether or not any will actually hang for treason. In all likelyhood, Howell Cobb will be hanged, and the rest imprisoned for life.
I don't want to give too much away, but Fremont's second term is going to be ... interesting.
Ficboy
Banned
So will John C. Fremont avoid an assassination attempt. Also, no matter how radical the Republican or Freedomite administration is there will still be Confederate monuments and memorials especially given the fact this is before World War II where views on race are drastically different and the need to reconciliation and reunion.