While the North remains polarized, Fremont does manage to raise some new, highly- motivated armies, marching to battle under the new song "Old Abe's Body...". Also, thousands of enthusiastic European revolutionaries of all kinds are taking ship to to the United staters to participate in what they regard as a War of Liberation, among them Garibaldi at the head a of a large contingent of his Red Shirts fresh from the fight for the Unification of Italy.
Initially, Fremont's call for a slave revolt is answered only by the blacks in the areas near Union-held territory, and fails to significantly change the strategic situation. However, at the John Brown Academy in the Union-held Sea Islands, off the South Carolina coast, the most talented of the escaped slaves from all over the South come together with veteran Abolitionists from the North, to train and make meticulous plans for a more widespread insurrection.
After routes for smuggling arms into the South are prepared, simultaneous slave revolts break out at more than twenty locations in February 1864, on the anniversary of Lincoln's Assassination - forcing the Confederacy to abruptly recall Lee from his continuing attacks into the North and place him in charge of putting down the revolts. In May 1864, Lee is killed in a chance ambush at the back country of North Carolina, by a band of blacks who had no idea at whom they were shooting. Despite savage retaliations taken by the furious Southerners, Lee's death is a big morale blow to them and a correspondingly big boost to the North.
With the Union Armies going on the offensive, the Confederate Command attempts to shift the bulk of its armies back to the Northern Front - but with the Southern papers emphasizing and greatly exaggerating the "Slave Atrocities," many Confederate soldiers desert to join the militias fighting the rebellious slaves in their home states. Fremont now feels confident enough of public support to lift martial law in the North and remove the restrictions over the Democratic Party, which prepares forlornly to elections which it is bound to lose. In January 1865 the Union Army recaptures Washington nearly bloodlessly, in time for President Fremont to have his inauguration there. In any case, in the last months of its Washington sojourn Jefferson Davis' government had been in only very partial control of the Southern territory.
Though it was the Union which instigated the slave revolts and supplied the weapons for them, it also has little control over their development - particularly since many of the original cadres trained at the Sea Islands were killed in the initial stages. The revolts take many divergent courses according to local conditions. Some plantations are seized with the land divided among the former slaves and used for subsistance agriculture; in some places where idealistic and literate black leaders are in control, attempts are made to set up farmers' cooperatives, keep plantations a single unit and keep cotton production going with the black workers hoping to share in the profit; but in other places, this idea is perverted by ruthless blacks leaders seizing mansions and proceeding to exploit their brethren... In some of the areas left under white control, blacks are massacred or altogether driven out; in others, planters free their slaves and offer them tempting conditions in return for for staying on; in some places, these diverging policies cause fighting among different white factions, bringing out the latent hostility between the planter aristocracy and the poor whites.