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Florida; and the fate of this extensive military territory depended upon an army whose effective force was less than twenty thousand men. Gen. Johnston's statement of the force at his command in the vicinity of Raleigh, was 18,578 total, infantry and artillery present for duty, of which not more than 14,179 were effective, with a cavalry force little over five thousand. Florida was destitute of troops, and South Carolina was pretty much in the condition of a conquered province, there being no known Confederate force in it beyond a division of cavalry less than one thousand. Gen. Johnston found himself by the disaster in Virginia, opposed to a combined force of alarming magnitude; there was great difficulty in supplying his troops; the enemy had already captured all workshops within the Confederacy for the preparation of ammunition and repairing of arms; and thus embarrassed, crippled and disheartened, what was accounted in point of importance the second.
army of the Confederacy, numbering on its rolls more than seventy thousand men, and yet reduced to less than one-third of this number by desertions and “absenteeism,” abandoned the hope of successful war, and prepared to surrender.
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