For the rebellious Confederate States of America, the fortunes of war had taken a nosedive. Savannah had fallen. So had Atlanta and Nashville. With the defeat at Fort Fisher on the North Carolina coast, the port of Wilmington was embattled. Petersburg was under siege. The Shenandoah Valley was in ruins. The Union controlled the Mississippi River. Rebel soldiers were deserting by the hundreds.
The entire article is in the February 19 edition.
As the steamy days of August, 1864 beset the weary and battered soldiers and citizens of the war-torn United States, Petersburg and Atlanta, two of the most vital cities in the rebellious Confederate States of America, were surrounded by Union forces and under almost constant shelling. A civil war which could have conceivably ended within months had now dragged on for more than three full years with a horrendous loss of life, grievous injuries and the costly destruction of property. Nearly every family, north and south, had been affected in some way. But the gritty rebels refused to give up. They endured the dangers, the hardships and the suffering with dogged determination.
Read the entire article in the August 21 issue of the Express.
The Union’s Army of the Potomac had suffered a terrible loss of men in May, 1864 in battles at The Wilderness and Spotsylvania Courthouse, but General Ulysses S. Grant was committed to bringing the bloody and costly War Between the States to an end before the year ended. The Confederates had suffered considerable losses as well. Grant’s plan to prevent Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia from being reinforced as Grant moved his troops toward Richmond was to have diversions in other places. Union General Franz Sigel had fought forces under Confederate General John Breckinridge at New Market in the Shenandoah Valley in mid-May. Greatly outnumbered, Breckinridge had called up cadets from the Virginia Military Institute, some of them boys as young as 15, and most of whom were killed or wounded. But they defeated Sigel.
Read the entire article in the June 19th issue of the Express.