The War Between the States
*The students will remember their field trip to Cherokee, North
Carolina, and we will look at the end of the Cherokee Nation in
Tennessee, because that is really the end of Tennessee as a frontier
state, and the very start of the modern era in Tennessee.
*Indian Wars had defined much of Tennessee’s history, and, indeed, much
of America’s history up to the 1830s (and beyond—the US Army would
fight wars with the Indians into the early 1890s). By the 1820s,
though, Tennessee had largely come to live peacefully with her Indian
population.
*The Cherokee were the main Indian group still in Tennessee after the
Chickasaw Purchase of 1818, and they were confined to a reservation in
the southeast corner of the state, that was part of a larger
reservation covering parts of North Carolina and Georgia.
*The Cherokee, most of all the Five Civilized Tribes, had lived up to
that name. About 1809 a Cherokee named Sequoyah began working on
a writing system for the Cherokee people. This took him 12 years
to finish, but is an amazing accomplishment because he had never known
how to read or write in any language. He created a syllabary, in
which each character (there were 85) stood for one sound. By 1825
his syllabary was the official language of the Cherokee nation.
*With a language of their own, the Cherokee created a written
constitution, published their own newspaper (the Cherokee Phoenix),
and, more and more, tried to live as their white neighbours did, partly
to prosper and partly to survive, as they hoped that ‘taking the white
man’s path’ would cause the white man to leave them alone.
*The Cherokee began to farm as white men did, to own slaves, to take up
any number of trades, and to do fairly well for themselves by any
standards (except perhaps those of the Cherokee women, who found their
role in the tribe, formally more or less equal to that of men, and in
some ways superior, being supplanted by a traditional European
male-dominated world).
*Still, white settlers wanted the Indian lands, and in 1829 gold was
discovered on Cherokee land in Georgia. This created the first
gold rush in American history.
*As pressure from white settlers increased against the southern
Indians, most tried armed resistance, but the Cherokee went to
court. Suing Georgia before the Supreme Court, they received a
positive ruling from Chief Justice John Marshall. However, Andrew
Jackson supposedly declared that “John Marshall has made his decision,
now let him enforce it.”
*In 1830 the Indian Removal Act gave Jackson the authority to negotiate
treaties with the Indians, exchanging their lands in the East for other
land beyond the Mississippi River. During the 1830s he and his
successors would put pressure on the Indians to do this, and, one by
one, all the eastern tribes gave in, except for some of the Seminole,
who retreated so far into the Everglades that no-one ever got them out.
*In 1835 many prominent Cherokee signed the Treaty of New Echota,
although none of them were actually officials of the tribe at the
tine. The treaty was ratified by Congress the next year, and some
Cherokee began to move west. Most, though, refused to go, and in
1838, General Winfield Scott arrived to round up the Cherokee, place
them temporarily in fortified camps, and eventually march them from the
Appalachian Mountains to Oklahoma.
*Although a few escaped, and made deals which let them maintain a small
reservation in Western North Carolina, 17,000 Cherokee (and about 2,000
of their black slaves) were marched across the country, covering 1,200
miles, much of it on foot.
*Of the 19,000 Indians and slaves who went, between 2,000 and 8,000
died (although at the time the official government estimate was 424
deaths), so that this is remembered as the Trail of Tears.
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*Returning to the glorious presidency of James K. Polk returns us to
another issue about how to deal with different races in America.
*The problem with the Mexican War and the Oregon cession was that they
opened up new land to settlement, which revived the old argument over
whether new territories ought to be slave states or free states, which
mattered most in terms of the US Senate, where the states were
traditionally supposed to be balanced.
*In 1850, Congress held a join session in which its greatest
orators addressed the problem. Shortly afterwards, the Compromise
of 1850 was created.
*California entered the Union as a free state, making it 62 to 60 in
the Senate. In return, both the New Mexico and Utah territories,
such as they were, were opened to popular sovereignty—their inhabitants
could decide if they were to be slave or free states when the time
came.
*Texas gave up its large area of disputed land, almost a third of the
total area it claimed, and in return got a $10 million credit towards
its debts to the Union.
*Slavery remained legal in the District of Columbia, but the slave
trade was outlawed, an apparently reasonable concession that cleaned up
the city, as even Southerners considered actual slave auctions a bit
uncouth, but it was another step towards the ending of slavery.
*The great concession to the South, which got the short end of the
stick on most of the Compromise, was the Fugitive Slave Act, although
that too hurt the South in the end. The Act not only jailed
suspected runaways and tried them without a jury, it paid the judge
more to find against the slave than for him, and could force local law
enforcement officials in the North to help Southern slave catchers.
*Northerners were offended and disgusted. Many moderates turned
against the South and towards abolitionism. Northerners, even
officers of the law, often refused to assist, and even obstructed
Southern slave catchers when they could, and support for the
Underground Railroad grew. Massachusetts even made it illegal to
help the slave catchers or the Federal government in the enforcement of
this Act.
*The Fugitive Slave Act embittered both North and South against one
another. Northerners hated it, and Southerners hated the North
for failing to co-operate in good faith. The Compromise only
delayed the Civil War for ten years—long enough for the North to grow
strong enough to win it.
*In the 1850s, the issues surrounding slavery became so intense that
the Whig party collapsed. Without Jackson around to hate any more
(he died in 1845), they didn’t entirely know what to do with one
another, as some supported slavery and some opposed it, some liked
tariffs and others didn’t, some liked government spending and others
didn’t. They had never been as well-organised as the Democrats,
and at last they couldn’t stand the strain. In 1856 they ran
their last Presidential candidate, who lost, and in 1857 they ran their
last candidate for the governorship of Tennessee, who also lost.
*Overall, the collapse of the Whig party was bad for East Tennessee,
where it had been the most popular party, but it affected people across
the state, as Tennessee had often voted Whig in presidential elections.
*Tennessee began the 1850s with a Whig governor, but soon Andrew
Johnson and Isham Harris took over. Johnson served as governor
from 1853-1857, when he went to the US Senate, and Harris won the next
governor’s race.
*The Whigs were replaced nationally by the Know-Nothing Party, an
anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic group, and the Republicans, who ran John
C Fremont for president in that year.
*The Know-Nothings (who ran a Tennessean (Andrew Donelson) for the
Vice-Presidency with Millard Fillmore in 1856) picked up a great deal
of the former Whig vote in Tennessee, especially East Tennessee, but
the Republican Party, seen as a Northern party, did not.
*Overall, the great political issues of the 1850s surrounded
slavery--how it ought to expand (or if it should), if it could be
ended, and, more and more, just how many differences between the
culture and society of the North and South there really were, thanks to
slavery.
*Although most Tennesseans hoped that slavery, as a national issue,
could be smoothed over, several things went wrong. In 1859, an
abolitionist named John Brown tried to lead a slave uprising in
Harper’s Ferry [West] Virginia. He was put down, and hanged, but
this raised the possibility of other slave revolts, and the fact that a
Northerner had tried to start one infuriated Southerners.
*Worse, in 1860, the Republicans were still around, and were
increasingly strong in the North, where anti-slavery feelings were
growing more pronounced (although outright abolitionists were still in
the minority, and viewed as dangerous and obnoxious).
*In 1860 the Democrats were split. Northern Democrats, hoping to
preserve the Union by serving as a national party opposed to the
sectional Republicans, supported Stephen Douglas. Southern
fire-eaters, however, despised him, feeling that he was too moderate on
the issue of slavery.
*At the Democratic Convention in Charleston, southern delegates walked
out, effectively ending the convention before a candidate could be
chosen. Northern Democrats then met in Baltimore and
nominated Stephen Douglas. Feeling that their fellow Democrats
had gone behind their back, Southern Democrats convened a rival
convention in the same city, and nominated John C. Breckinridge of
Kentucky, a future Confederate general.
*Another group, composed mostly of Southerners who wanted to save the
Union, primarily old Whigs and Know-Nothings whose old parties were
gone and who did not fit into the northern Republican Party, created
the Constitutional Union Party hoping to elect a compromise
candidate. Also meeting in Baltimore, they chose John Bell of
Tennessee, formerly Speaker of the House and one of many Tennesseans
who had turned against Jackson.
*Supporters of John Bell went through the country ringing bells and
campaigning for Bell and for ‘the Union, the Constitution, and the
Enforcement of the Laws,’ meaning the Fugitive Slave Law.
*Although William Seward had felt that 1856 was not a Republican year,
many in his party felt that in 1860 their time had come. At the
Republican convention in Chicago, Seward, the most prominent member of
the party, expected to be nominated. However, his appeals to a
‘higher law’ had made him seem subversive, and his belief in abolition
as opposed to simply being a free-soiler made him dangerous and
excessively divisive, even for the Republicans. Lincoln was
definitely second choice, but he had few enemies in national politics,
and was chosen on the third ballot.
*The Republican platform was containment of slavery, a protective
tariff, protection of the rights of immigrants, a Pacific Railroad,
internal improvements, and free homesteads.
*Southerners feared that the original baboon would try to end slavery
immediately and without compensation. In fact, Lincoln, although
a free-soil man, was no abolitionist, and even near the end of the
Civil War considered creating a fund to reimburse formers slave-owners
for slaves when they were freed. However, Lincoln’s reputation
among Southerners was as a dangerous abolitionist who would steal their
property. Many threatened to leave the Union if Lincoln, a
candidate purely for the North, was elected. In fact, Lincoln was
not even on the ballot of most Southern states in 1860.
*Lincoln won the election, although with less than 40% of the popular vote.
Lincoln 1,865,593 180
Douglas 1,382,713 12
Breckinridge 848,356 72
Bell 592,906 39
*Bell carried Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia; Breckinridge carried
the rest of the South except for Missouri, which voted for Douglass (he
also got part of New Jersey’s votes). Lincoln carried all the
North.
*If Douglas, Lincoln’s closes competitor for the popular vote, and
either of the other two candidates’ totals were combined, they would
have beaten Lincoln in the popular vote. However, due to the
distribution of electoral districts, Lincoln would probably have won
most of the North and thus the majority of the electoral votes even if
all his opponents had combined their efforts and the success thereof
into one party. If they had really done so, things might have
gone differently, but as it is, Lincoln won with a minority of the
popular vote overall, only 39.8% per cent—the worst successful
presidential campaign since that of John Quincy Adams in 1824.
Furthermore, he did it entirely through Northern support. This
showed the South that the numerical superiority of the North was such
that the North would be able to bully the south whenever it wanted.
*Lincoln was elected in November 1860. On 20 December, at 1.15 in
the afternoon, South Carolina dissolved her bonds with the Union.
The rationale was that South Carolina had always been a free state and
sovereign state, only allied with the other United States as long as it
was mutually beneficial to do so. With the election of Lincoln,
it was obvious the North had turned against the South and, even if
Lincoln did not have evil designs on the South, the next Republican
president might. An anti-secession observer claimed that South
Carolina was too small to be a republic, but too large to be an insane
asylum.
*President Buchanan did nothing.
*In the long period between Lincoln’s election and his inauguration,
six more states seceded. In January, Mississippi, Florida,
Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana left the Union (in that order), and in
February, Texas did so as well.
*Meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, in February 1861, representatives of
these states created a provisional constitution and government for the
Confederate States of America. Jefferson Davis of Mississippi,
hero of Buena Vista, former Congressman, Senator, and Secretary of War,
was chosen as the provisional President and a provisional Constitution
was created based on that of the United States.
*President Buchanan did nothing. Although some opponents of
secession wished ‘oh, for one hour of Jackson,’ many Northerners did
not feel it was either morally correct, legally proper, or personally
appealing to keep the South in the Union by force. If nothing
else, invading the seceding states or threatening to do so might anger
other states enough that they might leave as well. Buchanan
himself, legalistic to the end, said that the Constitution as he
understood it was a permanent document and the states had no right to
leave. However, said he, the Presidency did not have the power to
stop the South by force of arms. Had Buchanan acted then, despite
this debate, there might not have been a war or, if there had been, it
might have been quick and relatively painless. On the other hand,
the US had a very small army, and might have been easy to hold off.
*For the moment, Tennessee remained neutral. The state was
governed by Isham Harris, a West Tennessee lawyer and planter, and he
strongly favoured secession. The rest of the state was not so
sure. In January, 1861, he called for a special session of the
legislature, and on 9 February, the state held a referendum on having a
secession convention to consider the matter, and chose delegates to
such a convention, just in case one was voted in.
*The convention was rejected by 55% to 45%, and even some of those who
voted for a convention still opposed secession, as about 75% of the
candidates chosen for such a convention were men known to oppose
leaving the Union.
*The results of the referendum are illustrative of Tennessee’s social
and economic situation in 1861: West Tennessee, the area most
dependent on slaves and on the plantation system of the Deep South
supported secession even in February of 1861, while Middle Tennessee
barely voted against if (51% to 49%), and East Tennessee, which usually
voted Whig when it could, and where slavery was less important (and
secession was seen as a conspiracy by the rich), it was rejected by 81%
of voters. The rest of the Upper South also declined to secede.
*This disappointed some Tennesseans; in fact, Franklin County, on the
Alabama border, was so enthusiastic about secession that they asked the
Tennessee legislature to redrawn the state lines so that they could
become the northernmost part of Alabama (they were ignored).
*Things really went wrong on 12 April 1861. Fort Sumter, a US
Army fort in Charleston Harbour, had not surrendered to Confederate
authorities, and on that date, they opened fire, forcing the fort to
surrender. Lincoln immediately called for 75,000 volunteers to
put down the Southern rebellion.
*Most Tennesseans had not wanted to leave the Union, but they respected
the right of other states to do so, and they did not want to attack
their neighbours to force them back into a Union they no longer wanted
any part of.
*All of the Upper South reconsidered secession. Kentucky and
Maryland were divided on the issue, and remained so long enough for
Lincoln to occupy them with enough troops and to arrest enough members
of their governments that they could not vote for secession.
Chief Justice Roger Taney (a Jackson appointee) said this was illegal,
so Lincoln threatened to arrest him, too.
*Delaware considered secession, but militia from the pro-Union counties
surrounded the militia of the one pro-Southern county and forced them
to surrender. Missouri simply collapsed into its own civil war.
*Governor Harris told Lincoln that Tennessee would not provide any
troops to fight the other Southern states. He then asked the
legislature to draft a declaration of independence, and it was passed
on 6 May, 1861. Harris declared Tennessee a neutral state, but
signed a military alliance with the Confederacy, and began raising a
Provisional Army, which ended up being well-trained but not always
well-equipped, as Tennessee did not have the kinds of armouries and
factories that an army required, and we never built all the
fortifications Harris wanted.
*A state-wide referendum about the declaration of independence was held
on 8 June, and it was supported by 69% of the state overall, and over
80% in both West and Middle Tennessee, but only by 31% in East
Tennessee, which still opposed it, and would end up sending thousands
of troops North to fight for the Union.
*Most Tennesseans welcomed the chance to fight, and again the state
lived up to its name, supplying about 10% of all Confederate forces
during the War, as well as thousands of Union troops from East
Tennessee—Gay Street, in Knoxville, had a Union recruiting office at
one end of the street and a Confederate one on the other end.
*In East Tennessee, the Unionist movement would be particularly led by
Parson Browlow of Knoxville, a newspaper editor (of the Knoxville Whig)
and Methodist minister, and by Andrew Johnson, the only Senator from a
Confederate state to continue to serve in Washington (although partly
because he received death threats from pro-Confederate Tennesseans
whenever he went home).
*Harris tried to play nice with East Tennessee. He appointed as
local military commander Felix Zollicoffer, a Whig newspaper editor and
Congressman from Nashville who had opposed secession, but went along
with his state when the rest of it wanted to go. William Brownlow
and other Unionist newspapermen were allowed to keep publishing, and he
allowed elections held there when the time came.
*Unfortunately for Harris (and, in some ways, East Tennessee), East
Tennessee took the opportunity of the elections to elect
representatives to the US Congress, along with they Confederate
votes.
*Shortly afterwards, an East Tennesseean, William Carter, conspired
with the Union Army to lead a raid on East Tennessee, planning to burn
nine important railroad bridges that linked Virginia with the Deep
South through the Great Valley. This would be co-ordinated with
US forces in Kentucky, who would sweep in and take over the
disorganised area once Confederate troops could not be sent in by rail.
*Carter’s men managed to burn five of the bridges, but the Untion
soldiers he was promised never came, and he and most of his men were
caught and hanged. After this, the Confederate government placed
much of East Tennessee under martial law. There were mass
arrests, Brownlow was forced to stop his newspaper and was eventually
arrested (but then released to go North), and in the chaos, many local
people took the opportunity to carry out vendettas against their old
enemies, under the cover of shooting Yankees or Rebels.
*Oddly enough, although East Tennessee most wanted to be taken over by
the US Army (and Lincoln firmly supported the notion, hoping to create
another West Virginia in East Tennessee), it was actually the last part
of Tennessee to be really occupied by the US Army. Until then,
10,000 Confederate troops were tied down as an occupying force in the
heartland of the Confederacy.
*Tennessee saw more Civil War battles than any other state except
Virginia. Partly this was simply because Tennessee did lie on the
border between the USA and CSA, but Tennessee also had vital rail lines
(such as those in East Tennessee), and although Nashville and Memphis
never turned out as much material as the Confederate government hoped,
they were still important centres of manufacturing for the South.
Tennessee also supplied lead, copper, horses, cattle, wheat, and other
valuable products to whichever side controlled it. The Union also
wanted to take the Mississippi in order to cut the Confederacy in half.
*In September 1861, General Leonidas Polk (a resident of Middle
Tennessee, a cousin to James K Polk, a founder of Sewanee College, and
the Episcopal Bishop of Louisiana) sent troops into neutral Kentucky,
so that Lincoln invaded immediately afterwards. For a time, Polk
and Braxton Bragg (and other generals) won victories in Kentucky.
*In late 1861, Albert Sidney Johnston was placed in overall command of
the western Confederate armies, and he tried to defend all of
Tennessee’s border. In early 1862, Confederate forces were driven
back out of Kentucky, and Felix Zollicoffer was killed at the Battle of
Fishing Creek on 19 January.
*Ulysses S. Grant was in command of some US forces in Kentucky, and he
saw that the key to controlling the state was her river system (see
page 143). Along the Mississippi, Tennessee was guarded by forts
at Island Number 10 and at Fort Pillow, while the Tennessee was
protected by Fort Henry and the Cumberland by Fort Donelson.
*As part of the plan to take the Mississippi River (and the Upper South
in general), U.S. Grant attacks Fort Henry on the Tennessee River on 6
February, 1862, and ten days later takes Fort Donelson on the
Cumberland with the help of Union gunboats sailing off the Ohio River
onto its Confederate tributaries. The Confederate commander had
once lent money to Grant when he resigned from the Army for getting in
trouble for being a drunk, and he expected some mercy now. Grant,
however, demands unconditional surrender and gets it from everyone but
Forrest’s cavalry at Ft. Donelson.
*Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Memphis slave-trader and planter, went on to
fight until the end of the war, perhaps as one of the most brilliant
officers on either side, and certainly the one who rose farthest—from a
private recruit to a Lieutenant General.
*The fall of Forts Henry and Donelson not only protected the Ohio
River, but it let the Union (under General Don Carols Buell) take
Nashville. Lincoln appointed as military governor the most
prominent Southern member of Congress to remain loyal to the Union,
Senator Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, a former governor, congressman,
state legislator, and mayor of Greeneville.
*At this point, both Lincoln and Johnson believed that secession was
simply a political and economic ploy by the rich Southern planters to
maintain their power and their financial system. They did not
think the average Southerner cared that much for the Southern
Confederacy. Furthermore, neither really wanted radical change in
the South, just a restoration of the way things were before the
war. Therefore, Johnson tried to take things easy (sort of how
Isham Harris had tried to do).
*Unfortunately, Johnson was not good at taking things easy—he was, by
nature, unyielding and undiplomatic, and did not get along well with
people who disagreed with him. If nothing else, when he first
became military governor, he only really governed Middle and West
Tennessee, and many people there hated the Union more than did
Johnson’s own East Tennesseans—they saw Johnson as a traitor to his own
state.
*Although Johnson meant to be easy on his home state, he did blame its
problems on a handful of elite planters and other southern
‘fire-eaters.’ So, as soon as he got to Nashville, he arrested a
number of prominent secessionists, or anyone who would not swear an
oath of allegiance to the Union. The mayor of Nashville, for
example, spent six months in prison for refusing to swear an oath of
allegiance, and Johnson also locked up preachers and newspaper editors
who spoke out against the US government. Johnson was sure that,
with their influence gone, the average citizens would start to do the
right thing again.
*At the same time, Johnson made speeches about the value of the Union,
and secured the release of a number of Tennesseans held in northern
prison camps, hoping this would show his love for Tennessee.
*In May 1862, Johnson held elections for a circuit court judge in
Middle Tennessee. His own chosen candidate lost to a well-known
advocate of secession, so Johnson let the winner take his job, then
arrested him for disloyalty and appointed his own chosen man to the
seat. Johnson did not hold any more elections until East
Tennessee was joined with the rest of the state under Union control.
*Seeing that treating people nicely did not work, Johnson decided to
get tough. While he had previously supported slavery tacitly, he
now came to see that it was at the root of all the unrest between North
and South, and he eventually became an abolitionist, even though
Tennessee (as Union territory) did not fall under the Emancipation
Proclamation when it went into effect on 1 January 1863. Sadly
for Johnson, this split his support even among East Tennesseans, the
one group he had thought he could count on.
*In December 1863, Lincoln announced his ten-percent plan, under which
any state in which 10% of the 1860 voter lists swore allegiance to the
Union and voted to restore their state government to the Union would be
recognised by the Federal government as an equal member in the United
States.
*Johnson thought this was too lenient, so he made the oath of
allegiance much stronger, so that many Southerners did not feel they
could swear it. Therefore, so many people boycotted the March
1864 elections that Johnson was embarrassed.
*In November, though, he went even further, refusing the right to vote
to anyone who did not ‘sincerely rejoice in the triumphs of the armies
and navies of the United States’ and who opposed ‘all armistices or
negotiations of peace,’ which was exactly what the Democrats offered
that year. Many Tennesseans claimed that Johnson had given them
the right to vote only to take away any choice for which to vote.
In the end, Lincoln and Johnson won the state’s vote, but Congress
threw out the results. Johnson would have to wait for the war to
end to remake Tennessee.
*After capturing Fort Donelson in February 1862, Grant marched toward
the Mississippi leading the Army of the Tennessee. Along the way,
he ran into a major Confederate Army, the Army of the Mississippi (soon
renamed the Army of Tennessee), commanded by Albert Sidney Johnston,
near a small church called Shiloh. On 6 April, 1862, Johnston’s
army surprised Grant’s men, in some cases overrunning camps where men
were cooking breakfast—the hungry Confederates stopped to eat their
bacon.
*Forces Engaged: Army of the Tennessee and Army of the Ohio (65,085) [US]; Army of the Mississippi (44,968) [CS]
*Most of the Yankees ran, but Prentiss’s division held out valiantly
for most of the day in a sunken road that came to be called the
Hornet’s Nest, for the buzzing of bullets overhead. Eventually,
after being pounded by artillery, they were all killed or captured.
*Grant’s men were pushed all the way to the edge of the Tennessee
River. However, during the fighting, Johnston was killed,
bleeding to death from a wound in the leg. His surgeon could have
saved him if he had not been sent off to tend to Yankee
prisoners. Johnston was (for the moment) replaced by Beauregard,
who did not win the battle.
*During the night, Grant was reinforced by General Don Carlos Buell’s
Army of the Ohio. They fought back the next day, and the fighting
was intense and bloody. By the end of the 7th, more men had died
in this single battle than in all previous American wars put together.
Estimated Casualties: 23,746 total (US 13,047; CS 10,699)
*Despite winning the battle, some of Lincoln’s advisors wanted Grant
relieved of command because of the shock at the terrible death
toll. Lincoln refused, saying he needed a man who would fight.
*From this difficult victory, the Union Army captured Memphis and all
of West Tennessee, and then went to attack Vicksburg. This was an
important fortified city on the Mississippi. Until the Union
controlled the city, they could not control the Mississippi
River. Grant would try to attack Vicksburg from several angles,
repeatedly without success. This would occupy him for the next 14
months.
*Beauregard had health problems, and also did not get along with Davis,
so he was replaced by Davis’s friend, Braxton Bragg, who had served
with him (and performed brilliantly) at Buena Vista.
*Bragg had many detractors. A significant number of his officers
(especially his second-in-command, General Leonidas K. Polk, Episcopal
Bishop of Louisiana) thought him incompetent, a tyrannical martinet,
and possibly insane, and sometimes would not follow orders. His
men did not, on the whole, love him, and he has been largely regarded
as a poor general, and occasionally blamed for the South’s entire loss
of the War. This may not be entirely fair—some of his men and
officers (and interested civilians) felt that he did the best he could
with what he had, for attention, and more importantly, men and
materiel, were mostly concentrated in the Eastern theatre. He
was, by all accounts, good at administration and at organising his
army, but he was not good at getting along with other people,
especially those he disliked, and as the 5th highest ranking general in
the entire CSA, he had to be able to deal with a lot of people, nor was
he typically a good leader in the field.
*While Grant was busy trying to get into Vicksburg, Bragg and Edmund
Kirby Smith linked up their forces and invaded Kentucky, hoping to cut
of the US supply lines to Nashville and free that city. They ran
into Buell in Perryville, Kentucky, where both armies were managed very
poorly (Buell didn’t even realise his men were engaged at first, and
never used all his troops), but Bragg eventually withdrew through the
Cumberland Gap (in part because reinforcements he expected never came),
retreating to Knoxville, to Chattanooga, and then to
Murfreesboro. Buell never quite realised he’d won, and retreated
to Nashville, after which his military career was pretty much over.
*Buell was replaced by William Rosecrans, who had been told that if he
valued his job, he would need to be more aggressive than Buell.
In December, he marched towards Murfreesboro, being harassed by cavalry
under Forrest, John Hunt Morgan, and Joseph Wheeler. On 31
December 1862, Rosecrans arrived with 43,400 troops to attack 37,712
under Bragg. The battle of Murfreesboro (also known as Stones
River) lasted until 3 January when Bragg retreated, and Rosecrans did
not chase him, and, in fact, sat in Murfreesboro for half a year.
Despite this, the battle gave the Union control of central
Tennessee. Total casualties in the battle were 23,515: 13,249 on
the Union side and 10,266 for the Confederates. This was the
highest percentage of casualties of any battle in the Civil War.
*Lee sent Longstreet west to help Bragg, but, like many generals,
Longstreet did not get along with his new commander. Nonetheless,
they worked well together at first.
*After five months of waiting, while Bragg fortified southern
Tennessee, Rosecrans’s superiors finally ordered him to move out.
In a brilliant campaign, he pushed through Bragg’s lines and chased him
all the way to Chattanooga, and beyond, to the Chickamauga Creek.
*On 18 September, Bragg attacked. Rosecrans held at first, but on
19 September, he was told there was a gap in his line. He sent
men to fill it, but in doing so opened up a new gap in his line.
Longstreet’s division commander Hood rushed into the breech, disrupting
the Federal Army so that most fled, although Hood was shot in the right
leg and it was amputated. A few soldiers under General Thomas
(the Rock of Chickamauga) held on to defend their fleeing comrades, and
finally pulled out (and back to Chattanooga) on 20 September, partly
under the direction of James Garfield, Rosecrans’ chief of staff
(Rosecrans had already left the field). It claimed an estimated
34,624 casualties (16,170 for the Union; 18,454 for the
Confederates). Bragg’s army eventually pursued the Union back to
Chattanooga and surrounded the town, but, had they moved more swiftly
and decisively, they might have taken the town and captured the army,
or even destroyed the army as it retreated. Instead, Bragg did
not pursue his enemies until they were safe in Chattanooga and it was
too late. Longstreet, Forrest, Polk, Hardee, and other generals
called for Bragg’s removal, but Davis would not assent to that.
*In August 1863, Ambrose Burnside invaded East Tennessee out of
Kentucky. A portion of General Burnside's Union army passed
through Johnson City, and engaged a detachment of the enemy near
Watauga, five miles east of the city--then known as "Carter's
Depot." It is said that firing of the cannon could be heard all
the way to Henry Johnson's Depot. He took Jonesborough in
September to seize the supply of salt, for which Lincoln cursed the
entire town. Eventually he took Knoxville.
*To get rid of Longstreet, who was plotting against him, and to divert
Federal troops from the relief of Chattanooga, Bragg sent Longstreet to
attack Knoxville, presently held by Ambrose Burnside. In the
battle of Fort Sanders (29 November), Longstreet’s men, trying to sneak
up to the fort in the night, tripped on telegraph wire strung for that
purpose, fell in a moat around the fort, and eventually retreated in
shame.
*Grant had finally taken Vicksburg in July, and in October, he was
given overall command of the Western armies, and he went to
Chattanooga. He replaced Rosecrans with Thomas, and began to
attack the Confederates on 23 November. On 24 November the Union
took Lookout Mountain, and on the 25th, Missionary Ridge. The
Confederates would retreat from the Chatannooga area into
Georgia. Combined with Longstreet’s loss at Fort Sanders, this
gave Tennessee to the Union.
*On 27 December 1863, Bragg would be (reluctantly) replaced by Joseph
Johnston. His job would be to prevent Grant from pushing into
Georgia. Grant would be promoted to Lieutenant-General and
overall commander of the US Armies and brought back East in March,
1864, and Sherman would replace him in the West.
*Johnston made the most of a bad situation, and managed a slow holding
action against Sherman as he invaded Georgia in 1964. Johnston
was helped by Forrest and Wheeler, who attacked Sherman’s supply lines,
but this only encouraged Sherman to live off the land, burning as he
went.
*Because 1864 was an election year, Lincoln was vulnerable to charges
that the war was too bloody and had been going on too long, although he
tried to co-opt the Democratic party’s power by choosing a Democrat for
his Vice-President, Andrew Johnson—in fact, they technically ran as the
Union Party, not as Republicans.
*Had Johnston been able to hold Sherman off long enough, and prevented
him winning any major victories, Lincoln might have lost the election
and the Democrats might have tried to make peace with the South.
However, no-one will ever know, because the Confederate government,
impatient with Johnston’s defensive campaign, replaced him with the
more aggressive John Bell Hood.
*Hood was not able to stop Sherman from taking Atlanta (which probably
won Lincoln the election), so he decided to distract him by invading
Tennessee again. He marched through Northern Alabama into Middle
Tennessee, where he met George Thomas at Franklin on 30 November 1864.
*Although most of his generals told him not to, Hood ordered his forces
into a full-out frontal assault on the Union lines, using almost twice
as many men as Pickett’s Charge had at Gettysburg the year
before.
*They were massacred. The Confederates suffered 6,252 casualties,
including 1,750 killed and 3,800 wounded. Their military leadership in
the West was decimated, including the loss of such skilled generals as
Patrick Cleburne. Fifteen Confederate generals were casualties (6
killed, the rest wounded and/or captured), and 65 field grade officers
were lost. Union casualties were only 189 killed, 1,033 wounded, 1,104
missing.
*The US Army did withdraw, but Hood’s accomplishment can hardly be
called a victory. More men of the Confederate Army of Tennessee
were killed in five hours at Franklin than in two days at the Battle of
Shiloh. He had destroyed his own army, and gained nothing of
significance for it.
*Hood marched on Nashville next, with what little remained of his army,
but he made the mistake of sending his cavalry (under Forrest, his best
surviving general) to raid Murfreesboro. With an army already
decimated by Franklin, this weakened it further, so that when Thomas
finally attacked him on 15 December, he only had 31,000 men, compared
to Thomas’s 49,000 US soldiers.
*Hood was slightly out-numbered, but consistently out-generaled by
Thomas, and he was defeated badly. About a third of his army was
killed, wounded, or captured, and much of the rest scattered.
Although he managed to link up with Forrest and combine their forces
again before resigning from the Army, for all practical purposes, the
Army of Tennessee was destroyed, and Tennessee was completely in the
hands of the Union, although the war would not officially end until
April 1865 when Lee surrendered at Appomattox, and occupation by US
troops would continue until that point (and to some degree beyond it),
as some Confederate cavalry and guerilla fighters still operated in the
state despite Hood’s defeat.
*In the same month, President Lincoln was assassinated, and
Vice-President Andrew Johnson or Tennessee became the 17th president of
the United States, while Isham Harris, who led Tennessee into the war,
fled to Mexico and then to Europe.