Wofford’s Brigade cooperated with the Mississippi Brigade in the attack on Fort Sanders, as it had on the second day at Gettysburg five months earlier.

But brigade commander William Tatum Wofford was absent, home in Georgia attending the unexpected funeral of a beloved daughter who had died of diphtheria.

Originally the colonel of what would become the Eighteenth Georgia Infantry Regiment, Wofford had the dubious distinction of surrendering the last unit of southern troops east of the Mississippi, on May 12, 1865, in Resaca, Georgia.