...Richmond by the end of 1864, but…

...Richmond by the end of 1864, but Southern railroads have broken down or been destroyed, owing mostly to mismanagement and inefficiency.

The Confederate troops are thus ill-fed to the point of physical exhaustion and nearly immobilized by the lack of draft animals and cavalry mounts.

Hunger, exposure, and the apparent hopelessness of further resistance lead to increasing desertion, especially among recent conscripts.

Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin has privately persuaded Lee and other generals that the South's best chance is to emancipate any slave who volunteers to fight for the Confederacy.

When Benjamin repeated this proposal to an audience of ten thousand in Richmond earlier in the year, his idea had been fiercely rejected as politically impossible.

However, as the South runs out of manpower the issue of arming the slaves has become paramount.

By late 1864, the army so dominates the Confederacy that civilian leaders are unable to block the military's proposal, strongly endorsed by Lee, to arm and train slaves in Confederate uniform for combat.

In return for this service, slave soldiers and their families will be emancipated.

Lee explains, "We should employ them without delay ... [along with] gradual and general emancipation."

The first units will be in training as the war ends. (Nolan, Alan T. (1991). Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History. p. 21-22)

Georgian Howell Cobb had fruitlessly opposed Lee's eleventh hour proposal.

Fearing this move would completely discredit the fundamental justification of slavery, that blacks are inferior people, he said, "You cannot make soldiers of slaves, or slaves of soldiers. The day you make a soldier of them is the beginning of the end of the Revolution. And if slaves seem good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong."

During Sherman's March to the Sea, the army had camped one night near Cobb's plantation.

When Sherman discovered that the house he planned to stay in for the night belonged to Cobb, whom Sherman described in his Memoirs as "one of the leading rebels of the South, then a general in the Southern army," he had confiscated Cobb's property and leveled the plantation, instructing his subordinates to "spare nothing."