Novel #2: Duty Accomplished - prologue

By December of 1864, over five hundred thousand military personnel had died in the Civil War. Begun in April of 1861, the American Civil War was a conflict that most believed would be settled after one or two battles.

But by December of 1864, the conflict had caused the death of over five hundred thousand military personnel; with no end in sight.

By the end of 1864 most people North and South longed for the war to end.

Despite this, Abraham Lincoln, the war candidate of the Republican Party defeated the peace candidate of the Democratic Party in the November elections; so the war continued.

The Federal Navy had blockaded Southern ports so that cotton and tobacco rotted in Southern warehouses and the Confederacy was cut off from Europe’s consumer goods and war material. The Southern railroad and river systems were controlled by the North’s forces, too antiquated to be efficient or destroyed. Thus, food and supplies needed in the Confederate war effort seldom reached those in need. By the end of 1864, the source of replacement soldiers for the Confederate armies were primarily old men and boys. But it wasn't’t until the spring of 1865 that the Confederate Congress authorized the recruitment of black men for their army; too late to even be implemented.

In the winter of 1865, a serious effort to begin formal talks for peace failed. Evan a meeting of representatives from the two sides failed to materialize because President Lincoln would not accept the demand of the Confederate President Davis that the independence of the Confederate States be recognized as a precondition to such talks.

So it remained for the opposing armies to continue the fight until one or the other was destroyed. It appeared that forces of the United States government would be the victor in that death struggle.

General Grant’s much larger Union army had trapped Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia at Petersburg, a rail center just south of the Confederate capital of Richmond. Atlanta, Georgia had fallen to General Sherman in the fall.

Then, his forces fought its way to the sea and captured Savannah, Georgia in December. By January he was ready to move his Union army into the Carolinas against a much smaller Confederate force.

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