Whatever had been the illusions of the Government, they were now
at an end. There was no denying that the war had entered a new
stage and that the odds were grimly against the South. Davis
recognized the gravity of the situation, and in his message to
Congress in December, 1863, he admitted that the
Trans-Mississippi was practically isolated. This was indeed a
great catastrophe, for hereafter neither men nor supplies could
be drawn from the far Southwest. Furthermore, the Confederacy had
now lost its former precious advantage of using Mexico as a means
of secret trade with Europe.

These distressing events of the four months between Vicksburg and
Chattanooga established also the semi-isolation of the middle
region of the lower South. The two States of Mississippi and
Alabama entered upon the most desperate chapter of their history.
Neither in nor out of the Confederacy, neither protected by the
Confederate lines nor policed by the enemy, they were subject at
once to the full rigor of the financial and military demands of
the Administration of Richmond and to the full ruthlessness of
plundering raids from the North. Nowhere can the contrast between
the warfare of that day and the best methods of our own time be
observed more clearly than in this unhappy region. At the opening
of 1864 the effective Confederate lines drew an irregular zigzag
across the map from a point in northern Georgia not far below
Chattanooga to Mobile. Though small Confederate commands still
operated bravely west of this line, the whole of Mississippi and
a large part of Alabama were beyond aid from Richmond. But the
average man did not grasp the situation. When a region is
dominated by mobile armies the appearance of things to the