As Wilson’s raiders moved through Alabama in early April, Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was struggling to survive in the East. On April 2, 1865, General Lee had to abandon Richmond, Virginia, forcing the Confederate government to evacuate. Meanwhile, the Confederates moved westward through Virginia, intermittently tangling with Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s pursuing Army of the Potomac. One soldier serving in the Ninth Alabama, William Cowan McClellan of Athens, Alabama, wrote to his brother on March 24, 1865, that “Grant has had to contend with the greatest gen. the world ever produced.” Despite confidence in Lee, however, McClellan confided to his brother that he was “low down” and could “see but little hope for these confederate states in these times.” McClellan was captured by northern soldiers before the war ended a few weeks later, when Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865.
On December 23, 1864, Malinda Taylor penned a letter to her husband, Pvt. Grant Taylor, who was serving in the Confederate Army in southern Alabama. “[A]nother Cristmas [sic] is nearly here and you are still absent,” wrote Malinda. “I was so in hopes you would spende [sic] this Cristmas [sic] at home but it seemes [sic] that I will have to spend it again without you. I pray before another Cristmas [sic] shall role around that you may bee [sic] permitted to get home safe and sound.” As Grant and Malinda Taylor longed to be reunited, conditions continued to deteriorate throughout the Confederacy and in Alabama. Sherman’s March to the Sea was successful, and in the early months of 1865, he moved his army northward to meet Grant’s Army of the Potomac in Virginia. Meanwhile, Grant decided to send a final raid through the Deep South in order to destroy the arsenal in Selma, Alabama. By the end of March 1865, Union cavalrymen under the leadership of Gen. James H. Wilson had crossed the Tennessee River and were heading south through Alabama.
As the weather cooled in Alabama in the fall of 1864, the Confederacy continued to crumble. Union Gen. William T. Sherman captured Atlanta, Georgia, and marched through the Deep South as Grant and Lee faced off in what would turn out to be a months-long siege at Petersburg, Virginia. Meanwhile, in Alabama, white women continued to fill the voids left by their husbands and fathers. Since the men had left home in 1861, many women had been both caring for their children and tending crops of their family farms. Over the course of the war, the blockade not only made food scarce but sent inflation skyward. But despite starvation, many Alabama women remained on their land and supported the Confederacy.
In the summer of 1864, the fighting once again came to Alabama. Since the early years of the war, Alabamians had been preoccupied with protecting the port of Mobile. After New Orleans fell, the Alabama Legislature determined that “the City of Mobile shall never be surrendered; that it should be defended from street to street, from house to house, and inch by inch, until if taken, the victors’ spoils shall be alone a heap of ashes.” Attempting to protect the city and its port against Union attack, the Confederate military had braced the existing Forts—Morgan and Gaines—while building an additional stronghold, Fort Powell.
In April 1864 tragedy befell Union soldiers defending Fort Pillow along the Mississippi River in Tennessee. After capturing the garrison, Confederate cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest and his troops murdered more than two hundred black and white Union soldiers as they tried to surrender. Though Forrest’s men took some prisoners, northerners decried the massacre as a brutal response to the Union army’s decision to arm black soldiers.
On February 17, 1864, the H. L. Hunley, a Confederate submarine, sank the USS Housatonic in the Charleston Harbor. It was a mixed victory for the Confederate navy. The Mobile Daily Tribune reported that an “object, just on the edge of the water, was discovered astern of the ship. In an instant the cable was slipped, the alarm sounded, and all hands sent…to quarters, but before the ship had made any headway the torpedo exploded under her starboard quarter.”
In mid-September 1863, the fighting moved close to Alabama when Union and Confederate forces met south of Chattanooga, Tennessee, on Chickamauga Creek. Led by Braxton Bragg, Confederate troops attempted to push Union Gen. William S. Rosecrans and his Army of the Cumberland back toward Chattanooga. On September 19, the two armies clashed in a battle that surpassed Shiloh as the bloodiest in the west. During the battle, confusion in the Union ranks allowed the Confederate army to carry the day, and the Rebels drove the Northern soldiers back to Chattanooga. Despite the Rebels’ victory, however, by November, the northern Army of the Cumberland, reinforced by Gen. William T. Sherman and his army, had occupied Chattanooga and was preparing to move through the heart of the Deep South.
Despite military victories in Virginia during the winter and spring, the Confederacy’s luck was beginning to run out by the summer of 1863. In early July, decisive Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg shifted momentum to the United States. The Confederate armies were never able to recover.
The spring of 1863 brought Yankees into Alabama once again, but this time, rather than occupying towns, the federal troops were bent on raiding the state and destroying Confederate supply lines. Union troops, led by Gen. Abel D. Streight, began their journey in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in April, where they separated from Gen. William Rosecrans’s army. From there, Streight and his men headed along the Tennessee River toward Alabama. They aimed to cut through northern Alabama on the way to Rome, Georgia, and there blow up the railroads that carried Confederate supplies to Chattanooga.
High morale suffused the Confederacy in the fall and winter months of 1862. But while southerners rejoiced in their recent military successes, Abraham Lincoln prepared to free southern slaves, a decision that would change the purpose and course of the war.