December 31, 1864---New Year's Eve: The Last Full Measure For The Confederacy

DECEMBER 31, 1864:       

Carrie Berry, again living in Atlanta, is mastering her multiplication tables: “I learned the eight line today, and I learned it very well.” She fears for her father, who was “called to Macon” (the temporary Confederate State capital) to explain why he stayed in Atlanta during the Yankee occupation. 

Elsewhere in America, the brutally cold weather has limited the Blue and the Gray to nothing more than a few skirmishes. Confederate holdouts in Kentucky and Tennessee are being run to ground.

On this New Year’s Eve 1864, it has become obvious to all but a handful of Confederates that the Union will win the war. 

Every major Confederate port is in Northern hands except for Wilmington, which is inevitably next. Food stocks are low, and the hard winter is taking a terrible toll. Although many Southerners managed to scrounge together a Christmas dinner of sorts, for many of them it is the only extravagance they will see for a long time coming. 

Historian Jay Winik has written that at its best the Confederacy looks “like an abandoned fairground.” At its worst, it looks like what it is, a war-torn region where shattered tree trunks blasted bare stand like haunting sentinels over lands pockmarked with craters large and small. The falling shells, the cannon shot, the mortars, all the vomit of war, has scarred the land perhaps beyond healing.  

The winter weather has bestowed one dark blessing, that the stench of putrefaction is not daily in the nostrils of the people, many of whom wander like stunted ragpickers over the empty landscape, looking for what --- food? Loved ones? Scraps of their old lives? 

When the weather warms kites and turkey vultures will circle in long, slow gyres, smelling corruption from miles away, gathering like hideous monks at a refectory board to squabble over and gobble the torn rotting flesh of horses and men. Starving hogs will root up bodies buried in shallow graves to gnaw at bones and crack eyeless skulls so that they can feast on the dessicated brains within. The scarecrow corpses will have shreds of blue cloth or gray cloth dangling from them, and will it matter?

Only to those still living. Bullets zip and zing and make a sound like tearing calico as they fly past living men’s ears, or sound a dull smack as they pierce bodies, the sound obscured by the gasp or scream or immense silence of shock as the men struck realize that the vultures will soon be turning for them.  

On bare ground, odd shaped clumps of verdant green will grow this April as they have for the last four, taking vague shapes of men where blood and urine and vomit and entrails have fed the soil and made it nutrient-rich.

Many men have given up to go home and rebuild their lives. As they wander across the country many will die for lack of food or shelter in this deathly winter. Others will be cut down by men gone rogue who will kill them for a better overcoat, a pair of socks, a hat or buttons to keep the wind out of their ragged jackets. Others will be killed by frightened women, driven to desperation for their children’s sake and terrified of being raped --- perhaps again --- for trusting the wrong wanderers. 

Still other wandering men will band together, pool their shot and powder, and rob the near-bare shelves of crossroads-towns general stores. Some will go up into the hills where rumor has it a band of men is fighting on for the Cause. Some will find those bands, and the killing --- which has become their way of living --- will go on.  Some will swear never to lay down their arms and will be the scourges of any man whose paths they cross. As time passes, they will find their way to the frontier where the law of men is weak and the law of survival trumps all, to become darkly legendary.

Madness has gripped some men of the South, who, though they know the war is lost, intend to slay before the end as many of the enemy as they can with “infernal devices” that will kill indiscriminately. For, after all, aren’t they all the enemy? Southerners whose faith is flagging, Sherman’s bummers, little boys in blue playing soldier with wooden swords, the mothers that bore them, the little women who will someday bear more, and the old folks who taught them to love the cursed Union?  

Other men will plot to kill --- anyone, even the Northern President whose mad insistence on preserving the Union has brought them to this place.  Some already tried and failed. On Christmas Eve in the lobby of the National Hotel in Washington D.C., a handsome young man famed as Brutus hatched yet another conspiracy that will soon enough be of terrible effect.

In the meanwhile, the Union Army, grown to gargantuan proportions, is destroying the South region by region.  The Florida Panhandle, once a bucolic land of small villages and large plantations, then as now sometimes called South Alabama, is a smoking ruin. Crops have been pulled up, animals slaughtered, towns burned, people made homeless. In Georgia, a more famous less destructive March has rendered the crops-growing, goods-processing, and industrial heart of Georgia prostrate, phalanxes of men in blue having moved over the land like one of the Ten Plagues of old. Those in the South pray that the master of all this destruction will move his men away by sea, but this hope will be proven futile.

There are those who simply refuse to see that the end is near --- civilians, generals, and politicians. The President of the Confederacy is among them, though he is not their leader. If, at the end of 1864, the Confederacy has a leader it is Robert E. Lee. 

1864 has been the year when the South’s mettle has been tested. Beginning in gloom, the Confederacy nearly won the war in mid-July, only to find that the bottom has dropped out of the bucket in December. 

Like the Union after Cold Harbor, Dixie is suffering from combat exhaustion. The losses of “The Forty Days” of Grant’s Overland Campaign were greater in numbers and more damaging in morale for the Union, but the hard truth is that the Confederacy sustained losses in those merciless slaughters that it could never afford. Though Lee was not defeated, he has been penned in to a small area centered on Petersburg and Richmond while elsewhere the Union armies have run riot. Grant has not outmatched Lee in battle, but he has forced Lee into a corner and it will be difficult to fight his way out. Lee still waits for the Confederate Congress, the only place in Richmond where the air is decidedly hot this winter, to approve the arming of the slaves.  

The rail lines and the roads and the telegraph wires of the South have all but ceased to exist. The southern nation is no longer contiguous, making communication and movement all the more difficult. The Confederate war machine, smaller but more intensely focused than the Union’s, had reached a peak of productivity in the summer that it will never see again. Shells of buildings stand where factories once hummed. Oats and grain, and foodstuffs and cotton --- oh, King Cotton! --- rot untouched on sidings for want of rolling stock, for want of locomotives, for want of unbroken rail connections. Things have not reached their nadir, not quite yet, but sooner than later the starving men of The Army of Northern Virginia will be sifting through warm horse manure for undigested kernels of corn and cereal grains. 

Still, the Army of Northern Virginia hangs on. There have been mass desertions, and there have been unexpected self-instituted holiday furloughs, but the men --- the toughest and stringiest, and most ornery of them, men with blazing eyes and indomitable spirits --- have returned to the lines. Some men from other, shattered, commands --- John Bell Hood’s, Sterling Price’s, and Jubal Early’s to name a few --- will wander into the Confederate lines near Richmond as the winter eases, making up in some part for the men who have given up. The best of Confederate combat troops will make their stand with Lee.   

Precisely how many men the Confederacy has as 1865 begins is unclear, except that it is not enough. Historians estimate between 150,000 and 200,000 combat troops still remain to fight the Union’s 600,000. 

The Confederacy as of December 31, 1864

Part of the difficulty in estimating Confederate strength is that men deserted and returned, often re-enlisting under different names to avoid punishment. Also, historians disagree on what constitutes an available Civil War soldier. In the Confederacy (as in the Union), there was a core of “regular” officers and men, supplemented and outnumbered by State-raised regiments. There were also State Militias. In the Confederacy, with its broader interpretation of States’ Rights, the State Militias often stayed intrastate, ordered by the various State Governors (or electing not to) cross State lines to fight in “alien” territory. 

Additionally, there were any number of county and local militiamen, too old or out of shape to fight in the big armies, men who protected their communities with shotguns and squirrel rifles, men whose sons and grandsons were in the big fights, but men who did not go to war themselves until the Union reached their little towns, places like Saltville, Virginia or Marianna, Florida. 

Besides these, there were “irregulars” --- “Partisan Rangers,” guerrillas, bushwackers, leaderless bands of men numbering from 2 to 200, and individual wandering soldiers who just might come back if they could sense a victory --- any victory --- in the offing.

Too, the raw numbers do not tell the entire story. As 1865 dawned, the Army of Northern Virginia had between 25,000-35,000 men in the ranks. The Army of Tennessee had ceased to exist as such.  Perhaps 25,000-30,000 men served in divided commands held the Carolinas. An equal number of men under General Richard Taylor (the son of former U.S. President Zachary Taylor, and a one-time resident of the White House) held Mississippi, Alabama and southwestern Georgia.  Nathan Bedford Forrest had 2500 superb men. John Singleton Mosby had 1,900.

The Army of the Trans Mississippi had perhaps 30,000-40,000 men scattered over a vast area reaching from El Paso to Shreveport, but it was poorly armed, poorly provisioned, and geographically isolated from the rest of the Confederacy. It also faced certain unique challenges. In the far western Texas Panhandle, the troops were far more involved in fighting Kiowas and Comanches than in fighting the occasional Federal incursion.  Along the Rio Grande, the Confederates (and the Federals who controlled enclaves there) were faced with Mexican insurgents who were fighting the forces of Emperor Maximilian I, and who frequently sought refuge over the river in what had been, until a generation ago, familiar Mexican territory. The Blue and Gray troops in the area struggled to keep that civil war from spilling over into their own Civil War. 

Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan all fear the splintering of the Confederate armies into smaller and smaller independent units. They know that fighting an insurgent war may take generations and will retard the healing and growth of the United States possibly forever. 

In the South, Jefferson Davis is considering just such a move and is more and more encouraging random acts of terror against Union military installations, towns, villages, and people. He has issued orders to field commands that are unable to comply or that no longer exist. 

Isolated in his bubble within the Confederate White House, imperiously disdaining his advisors, the President of the Confederacy is hastening the end of the war he wishes to win. Traveling back and forth between the city and the lines, Robert E. Lee has time to reflect on his Commander-in-Chief’s ruminations. His reflections will alter the course of the war in early 1865.