USA > Tennessee > The military annals of Tennessee. Confederate. First series: embracing a review of military operations, with regimental histories and memorial rolls, V.1 > Part 4
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TENNESSEE FOR FOUR YEARS THE THEATER OF WAR.
Department of the West, in which Hood was to operate-his plan of a campaign against Sherman, which, so far as it was after- ward tried, was successful, but which was changed when Hood arrived at Gadsden, Alabama.
IV.
After some heavy skirmishes and two serious affairs (at De- catur and Jonesboro) with Sherman's army in the vicinity of Atlanta, General Hood, who had taken command of the Army of Tennessee on the 18th of July, determined on a movement into Tennessee in opposition to the instructions of President Davis, who preferred that the army should destroy the enemy's basis of supply and communication, hang upon Sherman, har- ass him, prevent him from preying upon the country, and when and where possible, with the aid of home-guards and militia. deliver battle.# From Gadsden, to which place he moved to
to General Joseph E. Johnston in a department where he had achieved engineer- ing successes that defied the power of the Federal army and navy in persistent effort- to break their uniformity. A professional soldier, his place among the most distin- guished of the war cannot be questioned. Thoroughly trained, he was full of the theories and was always prompt with the aphorisms of military leaders and writers. and he devoted his talents with undeviating devotion to the advancement of the cause of the Confederate Government. He wasan unselfish patriot, always ready to follow or to lead. His campaign in front of Petersburg, as second to Lee, will bear close scrutiny as among the finest work of the war; and it is just to him to say that had Hood adopted his suggestions the Army of Tennessee, even if defeated, might have crossed the Tennessee River intaet and in a condition such as would have enabled it, after a little rest, to enter the last and final campaign as something like the superb organization it was when Johnston turned it over to Hood in front of Atlanta. But General Beauregard's greatest and crowning achievement during the civil war was his defense of the North Atlantic coast. Considering its great length, its numberless weak points, because accessible, his weakness in men and guns, contrasted with the superiority of the Federal army and navy, with their heavier and more modern armament, his successes in defending the Carolinas an.t Georgia are little less than marvelous. In this case, science in him was a su- preme power dominating physical disadvantages and overcoming the poverty in men, money, and materials of the Government he served with a fidelity that challenges universal admiration.
* Mr. Davis, in his "Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government." says: " To make the movement into Tennessee a success, even so far as to recover that country, it was necessary that it should be executed so promptly as to anticipate the concentration of the enemy's forces; but unforeseen and unavoidable delays occurred, which gave full time for preparation. Most unwilling to criticise the conduct of that very gallant and faithful soldier, who, battle-scarred and muti-
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make preparations for the expedition, and where he found abun- dant supplies, he moved to Florence, Alabama,# to await the ar- rival of Forrest's cavalry, which did not join him until the 21st of November, owing to the miscarriage of orders. General For- rest, who had been doing some severe fighting in North Missis- sippi, to the command of which, with West Tennessee, he had been assigned, made a second expedition into that part of the State, and, sweeping every thing before him-his troops perform- ing prodigies of valor, as they everywhere encountered greatly lated, survived the war, and whose recent death our country has so much deplored, I must say after the event, as I did before it, that I consider this movement into Tennessee ill-advised."
* From Judge Romain's " Military Operations of General Beauregard " we learn Hood's plan of operations to have been that he " was on his march to flank General Sherman, then at Atlanta, and cut his line of communication with Mid- dle Tennessee. He was also to destroy the railroad and bridges from Atlanta to - Chattanooga in as many places as possible, giving battle only when the chances siould be favorable to him." General Beauregard readily approved of this movement, "which was perfectly feasible, and was according to the principles of war." . .
On the 9th of October General Beauregard had an interview with General Hood at Cave Spring. Ala., which resulted in his reaching the conclusion that the move- ment into Tennessee had been rather hastily undertaken and without proper pro- vision first being made for a change of base. It was " evident to him that the matter had not been sufficiently concluded in its details, and that a great deal had been left to future determination, and even to luck. It was easy to discover in the de- tails of the plan evidences of the fact that General Hood . . . . [was] not trained to command armies in the field." In a communication to General Cooper, Ad- jutant and Inspector General of the army, General Beauregard again reiterated his suggestion that "a battle should not be fought unless with positive adiuntage on our side of numbers and position, or unless the safety of the army required it." On pages 287, 288, Vol. II., of the " Military Operations of General Beauregard," Judge Ro- main also says: "General Hood had already evidenced want of experience as a commander, though he had ever been a gallant and resolute subordinate officer." General Hood subsequently modified his plan of operations, and General Beaure- gard, not without misgivings, yieldled, because it had the approval of General Bragg, then President Davis's military adviser. Still other modifications were made, and General Beauregard " began to fear the army would never reach Mid- dle Tennessee, and so informed General Hood, who could no longer conceal the fact that he himself looked at his enterprise rather despondingly. . . . It was too late to change Hood's plan, and the wisest policy was to make the best of it. He [ Beauregard] proposed crossing the river [Tennessee] with the troops, and then leaving Hood in sole command, recalling Napoleon's words that 'one bad head in command of an army in the field is always better than two good ones' General Hood's preparations for the offensive were so slow and hesitating as to jeopardize the object of the campaign."
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superior forces-captured among other places Fort Pillow, on the Mississippi River, very heavily garrisoned by white and negro troops. He for a time established his head-quarters at Jackson, and collected immense quantities of supplies and in- creased his force by volunteer recruits and enforced conscriptions. He afterward moved into North Mississippi, and was there en- gaged with the enemy in an effort to prevent reinforcements going to the relief of the Federal forces then besieging Mobile. He also made a raid into Memphis, which was fruitful of pris- oners and some horses, and subsequently made an expedition into Middle Tennessee for the purpose of breaking up General Sher- man's communications; and in twenty-three days recruited one thousand eight hundred men, captured one hundred wagons, eight pieces of artillery, nine hundred horses and mules, three thousand stand of small arms and accouterments, with immense quantities of medical, commissary, and ordnance stores, destroy- ing one hundred miles of railroad, sixteen bridges, many block- houses, and killing, capturing, or wounding three thousand five hundred of the enemy at a loss of only three hundred killed, wound- ed, and prisoners. This was followed by an attack upon and the destruction of an immense accumulation of stores at Johnson- ville, and the capture of one gun-boat and three transports on the Tennessee River. Returning from this singular field of ad- venture, General Forrest was met with orders from General Beauregard to join the army under General Hood at Florence, Alabama, where it was encamped awaiting his arrival to proceed to the fatal campaign, which, in the "Campaigns of General Forrest," is described as a movement which "looked like the des- perate venture of a desperate man." The same work, however, describes the troops as in fine spirits, but the regiments alter- nated to an unpromising degree, and that there was no faint- heartedness, but on the contrary an evident desire to go forward and fight it out. Arrived at Florence, General Forrest took com- mand of all the cavalry of the army-numbering over five thou- sand effectives-and operated with great success in the advance and at all subsequent battles. After Forrest's preparations had been completed, Hood took up his line of march and moved rap- idly to Pulaski and Lawrenceburg in the hope of capturing their garrisons; but a cavalry attack on the latter place gave the Fed- erals notice of the movement, and they retreated from both
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places to Columbia, where Schofield was with the main body, which was in turn evacuated, and a line of retreat taken up by way of Spring Hill and Franklin to Nashville, where Thomas had taken command. At Spring Hill there was a serious brush between Cheatham's corps and the Federals under General Stan- ton, who commanded the advance of Schofield's army. This affair, as were all the engagements of the army under Hood, was attended with great loss of life-a loss out of all proportion to the purpose had in view. It was a repetition of the tactics which in Kentucky, at the outset of the war, cost Bragg so much of loss of men and time in his race with Buell for Louisville ;* and there was about as much to be gained by the one as the other. It was an ill-starred and ill-advised movement, and re- sulted badly from the first, despite the superhuman efforts of the oficers in command and the splendid courage and bravery of the men, who were eager to meet the demands of a desperate fighter, whose misfortune it was to be out of humor with the troops from the start, and to be questioning their morale every day, notwithstanding the undeniable proof they gave as often as they encountered the enemy that their morale was equal to their bravery and celerity; and neither of these was ever questioned by other commanders. The escape of the enemy from Law- renceburg, Pulaski, and Columbia was not calculated to reassure General Hood as to the good disposition either of officers or soldiers, and the result was the battle of Franklin, into which pique and pride entered as larger quantities than discretion or judgment, though once in the fight these qualities were not wanting. This battle of Franklin is considered by many to have been the greatest mistake of a useless campaign -- the blun- der of a great blunder. It followed upon the very stubborn, though brief, contest at Spring Hill the day before, and resulted
*General Richard Taylor, in his " Destruction and Restoration," says of Bragg's campaign in Kentucky: " Weakened by detachments, as well as by the necessity of a retrograde movement, Bragg should have brought him [ Buell] to action before he reached Louisville. Defeated, the Federals would have been driven north of the Ohio to reorganize, and Bragg could have wintered his army in the fertile and powerful State of Kentucky, isolating the garrisons in his rear; or, if this was impossible, which does not appear, he should have concentrated against Buell when the latter, heavily reenforced, marched south from Louisville to regain Nashville. But he fought a severe action at Perryville with a fraction of his army, and retired to Central Tennessee.'
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in a loss so dreadful as to amount to a massacre. Over six thou- sand Confederate soldiers were killed, wounded, or missing; and the number of general officers killed was greater than at any battle of the war on either side, including Pat. Cleburne,* John Adams, Granbury, Gist, Strahl, and Carter. The Federals fought behind three lines of breastworks, and with the spirit of desperation. The chagrin and mortification of the Confed- erate corps and division commanders at the escape of the Fed- erals under Stanton at Spring Hill, and the fact that Schofield stole past the wearied and worn troops and got into Franklin in time to unite with that officer and make disposition for the coming contest, inspired them and their troops with something of the same spirit, and the result was a fight -a hand-to- hand fight-unparalleled by any thing in the war annals of America. General John C. Brown's division captured and held part of the intrenchments on the right of the Federals, but the attempt by the other divisions to follow his example resulted in the slaughter of the brave men who pressed to the attack with a dauntless courage that must have challenged the admiration
# Major-general Patrick Ronayne Cleburne, one of the bravest soldiers the war produced on either side, was also one of the most dashing and yet most prudent officers in the Confederate army. He was born within a few miles of the city of Cork, Ireland. His father -- a practicing physician-a native of the county of Tip- perary, was doctor in charge of the dispensary of the districts of Owens and Bal- lincollig. His mother was a Miss Ronayne, of Queenstown. He was partly edu- cated for the medical profession, but preferring a soldier's life enlisted in the Forty-first Regiment of British Infantry, with which he served three years, when his discharge was purchased by friends, and he emigrated to this country, settling in IIelena, Arkansas. There he studied law and practiced in the courts of Ar- kansas until the breaking out of the civil war. His standing as a lawyer was high, and as a partner of General J. C. Hindman he was in the enjoyment of an enviable practice. This he readily gave up, and enlisted as a private, but was soon made Captain of his company, then Colonel of his regiment, Brigadier-gen- eral, and finally Major-general commanding a division, at the head of which he fell at Franklin on that memorably bloody day-November 30, 1864-when so many of Tennessee's sons gave up their lives for her freedom. He ws one of thirteen general officers killed or wounded at that battle; and Lieutenant-general Hardee, the commander of his corps, declared that "his fall was a greater loss to the cause than that of any other Confederate leader after Stonewall Jackson. . . . Two continents now claim his name, eight millions of people revere his memory, tiro great communities raise monuments to his virtues, and history will take up his fame and hand it down to time for exampling wherever a courage without stain, a manhond withont blemish, an integrity that knew no compromise, and a patriotism that withheld no sacrifice, are honored of mankind."
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of their opponents. When they first entered the fight in the afternoon of the 30th of November, 1861, it was with all the seeming of the pomp and parade of a gala day. They were formed on the plane at the foot of Winston's Hill, and took up their positions with the deliberation of a well-ordered parade, and when they were ready moved with the steadiness of veter- ans, the alignment being such as to excite old martinets to some- thing like enthusiasm. Their march has been well described as a pageant, such were their precision and steadiness, on one of the most beautiful and exhilarating days of the year. The air was thin and the atmosphere unusually clear, so that every regiment and battery was easily distinguished. Not a shot was fired until the troops were upon the enemy, who, quickly recovering from a panic precipitated by the well-directed attack of the Confederates and from the well-timed effort of General G. W. Gordon to take advantage of a break in their lines on the pike, held their posi- tions in spite of the repeated and desperate efforts to dislodge and capture them. The bloody contest-waged for hours-was prolonged far into the night, and firing only ceased toward mid- night, when the survivors, utterly worn out, threw themselves upon the ground, and slept in the positions in which the battle left them. The Federals, taking advantage of the cover of night, "silently stole away." They crossed the Harpeth, and moved rapidly into Nashville. The Confederates held the field. They had achieved a victory at an awful sacrifice of life; and thus ended the most dreadful of the bloody battles fought during the civil war-the dearest purchased in point of numbers lost that there is any record of." The next morning, after burying the dead and providing for the wounded of both armies, Hood moved
* General "Joe" Johnston, defending the Army of Tennessee from the asper- sions of General Hood, "who ascribed his invariable defeats to their demoraliza- tion," says: "Their courage and discipline were unsubdued by the slaughter to which they were recklessly offered in the four attacks on the Federal army near Atlanta, as they proved in the USELESS BUTCHERY AT FRANKLIN." General Beauregard says of the battle of Franklin that ' it was a hard-fought battle, but withal a barren Confederate victory." Generel " Dick" Taylor says of Franklin: "This mistake may be ascribed to Hool's want of physical activity, occasioned by severe wounds and amputations, which might have been considered before he was assigned to command. . . . It is painful to criticise Hood's conduct of this cam- paign. Like Ney-' the bravest of the brave'-he was a splendid leader in battle, and a brigade or division commander unsurpassed." In the "Campaigns of Gen-
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forward to Nashville, Forrest with his cavalry being in the ad- vance and close upon the heels of the enemy. Hood took posi- tion about two miles from the city, and commenced the construc- tion of defensive works to protect his flanks, the enemy being in possession of Murfreesboro, Chattanooga, and Knoxville. Gen- eral Hood, unmindful of the illimitable resources of the North, "supposed that General Thomas would soon have to take the offensive to relieve his garrisons at those points, or cause them to be evacuated, in which latter case he hoped to capture the forces at Murfreesboro, and thus open communication with Georgia aud Virginia; and he thought if attacked in position that he could defeat Thomas, gain possession of Nashville with its abundant supplies, and thus get control of Tennessee." ** Acting on this view, he ordered General Forrest, with his cav- alry and Bate's division of infantry, to move against Murfrees- boro, and afterward reinforced them with Sear's and Palmer's brigades. This expedition resulted in the capture of a supply- train with two hundred thousand rations and many prisoners; but Forrest was unable to dislodge the enemy, who, in turn, was unable to prevent him, with never more than three thousand five hundred men, from capturing and destroying sixteen block- houses, twenty railroad bridges, thirty miles of railroad, four locomotives, one hundred cars, one hundred wagons, and captur-
eral Forrest" it is said that "General Hood was of the belief that the main Fed- eral force was already in rapid retreat, and that the apparent defensive prepara- tions were merely counterfeit, with the view of gaining time to secure their retreat. This conviction he expressed to General Forrest when that officer reported the formidable military resources with which the position bristled. His determina- tion, therefore, was to defeat it by immediately storming the place rather than to turn it. . . . At this day it is scarcely necessary to point out how General Hoor! could have manifestly gained his purpose better than by storming the position by a very short detour." Mr. Jefferson Davis, in his " Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government," says that "Hood reports that ' the nature of the position was such as to render it inexpedient to attempt any other flank movement, and I therefore determined to attack him in front and without delay.'" Mr. Davis, commenting on this, says: "It is not quite easy to determine what my gallant friend Hood meant by the expression, 'The nature of the position.' . . . Franklin had to us, as a mere military question, no other rolue than that the road to Nashville led through it. . . If he [ Hood] hal, by an impetuous attack, crashed Schofield's army without too great a loss to his own, and Forrest could have executed his orders to capture the trains when Schofield's army was crushed, we should never have heard complaint because Hood attacked Franklin; and these were the hopes with which he made the assault." * Jefferson Davis's " Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government."
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ing one hundred thousand rounds of ammunition, two hundred thousand rations, and nine pieces of artillery.
Thomas, heavily reenforced, attacked Hood on the fifteenth of December, striking both flanks. On the right he was repulsed, but on the left he took and held some of the newly constructed redoubts. This compelled the shortening of Hood's lines and the transfer of Cheatham's corps to the left from the right of the army, where it had done such good work the day before. A. general attack was made by Thomas early the next day; but he was repulsed all along the line until about half-past three in the afternoon, when a portion of the army to the left of the center gave way, and the result, after some ineffectual but desperate at- tempts to rally, was a retreat of the whole army in great confu- sion until Brentwood was reached, where General Stephen D. Lee took command of the rear-guard and held the enemy in check; and thereafter the army moved with something like order to the Tennessee River, which it crossed at Bainbridge, Gen- eral Forrest covering its movements and hotly contesting every inch of the way with the enemy's much heavier force of better equipped cavalry, which was frequently reenforced with infan- try, in one instance to the number of twenty thousand men. The roads, usually in bad condition at this season, were fearfully cut up, and the horses were belly-deep in mud, which impeded the movements of the artillery and supply-trains and made every mile of the route a special horror for the infantry, who waded barefooted through this frosty and crystallizing slush, the cold rain beating upon their unprotected bodies intensifying the gloom that pervaded rank and file alike. On the twenty-seventh of December Stewart's corps was ordered to recross to the north bank of the river, relieve Forrest's cavalry, and hold the enemy in check. A few days after he recrossed to the south side; and the whole army was for the last time on the march southward, and later still literally disbanded, never to be reorganized: # and
#General Lee, in his telegram to General Joseph E. Johnston, dated February 23, 1865, directed that officer to at once assume command of the Army of Ten- nessee and all troops in the Department of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. This he did: and he says in his " Narrative of Military Operations" that he found "the available forces were about five thousand men of the Army of Tennessee and the troops of the department, amounting to about eleven thousand. . . . In re- turning from its disastrous expedition against Nashville, the Army of Tennessee had halted in North-eastern Mississippi. A large portion of these troops were
thus ended the last of the battles fought upon Tennessee's soil during the civil war. There was some guerrilla warfare, and a few skirmishes by small bodies of cavalry; but this was as the fitful moanings of the wind that succeeds to a cyclone or tor- nado. The great tragedy that for three years had held the soil of Tennessee as its stage, and drenched it with the blood of its best and bravest, had closed forever. Henceforth it belonged to history. The actors had disappeared, and only the wreck of the properties remained. The rash venture of a recklessly brave but patriotic General was ended." It began in defeat and re- sulted in final overthrow. It was a venture whose rashness, against the expressed opinions of the President, and in view of the crumbling resources and failing powers of the Confederacy, is inexplicable, certainly inexcusable. But from the fatalistic stand-point, which is so common a resource when reason fails,
then furloughed by General Hood ant went to their homes. When General Sherman's army invaded South Carolina, General Beauregard ordered those re- maining on duty to repair to that State. The first detachment, under Major-gen- eral Stevenson, arrived soon enough to oppose the Federal army in its passage of the Edlisto and at Columbia, and had been directed to march thence to Charlotte. The second, led by Lieutenant-general Stewart, had reached Newberry at this time, and the third following it, under Major-general Cheatham, was between the place last named and Augusta. The remaining troops of that army were coming through Georgia in little parties or individually, unaided by the Government. Most of them were united at Augusta afterward by Lieutenant-general Stephen D. Lee, and condneted by him to the army near Smithfield, North Carolina. . . . At least two-thirds of the arms of these troops had been lost in Tennessee. They had therefore depended on the work-shops of Alabama and Georgia for muskets, and had received but a partial supply. But this supply, and the additions that the Ordnance Department had the means of making to it, left almost one thousand three hundred of that veteran infantry unarmed; and they remained so until the war ended. These detachments were without artillery and baggage-wagons, and consequently were not in condition to operate far from railroads." General John- ston in his "Narrative," following this passage, speaks of the "troops of the Army of Tennessee," but he nowhere recognizes the existence of that army. It had no existence: it was dead.
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