Army of the Tennessee
The Army of the Tennessee took its name from a river, and even that name took months to settle on. A 2005 study calls this Union force present at "most of the great battles that became turning points of the war, Fort Donelson, Vicksburg, and Atlanta." The same study credits it with winning "the decisive battles in the decisive theater of the war." It fought under two of the Union's most celebrated generals, Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, from a river port in Illinois to the streets of Washington, D.C. So why is it so hard to say exactly when this army began? And how did a force built from scattered garrisons in Missouri and Kentucky become, in Sherman's own telling, the sharpest weapon in his arsenal?
One history calls the army's earliest troops a "nucleus around which was to gather" the Army of the Tennessee. That nucleus first took shape in 1861 and 1862, while Grant was headquartered at Cairo, Illinois. Those troops later served under Grant's next command, the District of West Tennessee, where they were sometimes called the "Army of West Tennessee." Army correspondence began using the term "Army of the Tennessee" in March 1862, and the name outlasted every later reorganization.
In September 1861, Brigadier General Grant, then serving under Major General John Fremont in the Western Department, took command of the District of Southeast Missouri. He set up headquarters at Cairo, Illinois, on the border of southeastern Missouri and northern Kentucky. His aide John A. Rawlins later said that from this point "commenced the growth and organization of the Army of the Tennessee."
Confederate troops had just occupied Columbus, Kentucky, on the Mississippi River. Grant responded by seizing Paducah, Kentucky, where the Tennessee River meets the Ohio. Paducah became its own Union command under Brigadier General Charles F. Smith, who went on to occupy Smithland, Kentucky, at the junction of the Cumberland and the Ohio.
Rawlins called the fight at Fredericktown, Missouri, the "first affair dignified by the name of a battle" for any of Grant's men. There, Grant's troops helped defeat Confederate forces under M. Jeff Thompson. Grant's own first battle came on the 7th of November, at Belmont, Missouri, a landing on the Mississippi across from Columbus. With Brigadier General John A. McClernand at his side, Grant moved about 3,000 men in by water, cut into the Confederate camp, and fought his way back out. His casualties totaled around 500, and Confederate losses were similar.
Grant had been driven off at Belmont, yet the fight still won him favorable press coverage. Rawlins wrote that it "confirmed General Grant in his views" that he should give battle whenever he judged he had enough men. That same November, John Fremont lost his own command at St. Louis. Major General Henry W. Halleck replaced him, heading a new Department of the Missouri.
On the 20th of December 1861, Grant's command was reorganized to include Charles F. Smith's troops and renamed the District of Cairo. Two months later, he used that base to launch a campaign against Fort Henry, on the Tennessee River, and Fort Donelson, on the Cumberland. His force eventually numbered about 27,000 men in three divisions, led by John McClernand, Charles F. Smith, and Brigadier General Lewis Wallace.
Grant first moved up the Tennessee River with only two divisions, McClernand's and Smith's. On the 6th of February, before he had even organized an attack, Fort Henry surrendered to United States Navy Flag Officer Andrew H. Foote. Grant's men then marched overland through winter conditions toward Fort Donelson, only 12 miles away. Fresh regiments arriving by water formed a new third division under Lew Wallace.
The Battle of Fort Donelson opened on the 13th of February and closed on the 16th. Roughly 15,000 Confederate troops surrendered unconditionally. One historian calls the campaign the "first significant Union triumph in the war." It broke the Confederacy's western defensive line, secured Kentucky, and opened Tennessee to invasion. Another writes that Grant's men "had performed prodigies of valor and endurance" and had learned that hard fighting would bring success.
Grant, McClernand, Smith, and Wallace were all promoted to major general of volunteers after the victory. Grant became a national celebrity, nicknamed "Unconditional Surrender" Grant for refusing the besieged garrison any other terms. It would still be a month before anyone used the name Army of the Tennessee. But the three divisions that fought at Henry and Donelson had already become its nucleus.
On the 14th of February 1862, in the middle of the Donelson campaign, Grant took command of the newly formed District of West Tennessee. His troops soon became better known as the Army of the Tennessee. Over the following months, Grant twice came close to losing that command entirely. In early March, his superior Henry Halleck ordered him to hand field command of a new expedition to Charles F. Smith, a decision later blamed on jealousy or on doubts about Grant's administration.
Halleck soon restored Grant to the field. Grant rejoined his troops on the 17th of March, near Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River. By early April, his army had grown to about 50,000 men in six divisions. New commanders included Stephen A. Hurlbut, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Benjamin M. Prentiss, while W.H.L. Wallace took over a division from the injured Smith.
On the 6th and the 7th of April, Confederate troops marched almost undetected from Corinth, Mississippi. They struck Grant's five staged divisions in the Battle of Shiloh, the bloodiest battle of the war to that date. The surprised army suffered heavy losses on the first day. Reinforcements from Buell's Army of the Ohio arrived that evening, and Grant's own delayed third division, under Lew Wallace, joined as well. Grant counterattacked on the 7th and drove the Confederates back toward Corinth. One historian wrote that the victory, "bloody and bitter though it was, doomed the Confederate cause in the Mississippi valley."
Shiloh brought Grant heavy public criticism. Sherman won promotion to major general, Prentiss was captured, and W.H.L. Wallace was mortally wounded. Charles F. Smith died later that April from complications of his leg injury. Halleck then arrived to take personal command of a combined force topping 100,000 men, folding in Buell's and John Pope's armies. On the 30th of April, he handed most of Grant's own troops to George Thomas as a wing commander. He also made Grant second-in-command of the whole force. Grant called the arrangement a "sensure," comparable to arrest.
It took Halleck's combined army the entire month of May to creep 20 miles to Corinth, Mississippi. The Confederates finally abandoned the town on the night of the 29th-the 30th of May. Sherman later credited the slow, entrenching campaign with training the men. Grant nearly resigned out of frustration until Sherman talked him out of it. On the 10th of June, Halleck restored Grant to direct command of the Army of the Tennessee. Grant then set up headquarters at newly occupied Memphis, Tennessee.
Lincoln called Halleck to Washington in July 1862. Grant's district was enlarged to include William S. Rosecrans's Army of the Mississippi, only to lose four divisions to Buell soon after. His force shrank from about 80,000 men to fewer than 50,000. Grant called this his "most anxious period of the war." Rosecrans ended it, winning the September Battle of Iuka and the October Battle of Corinth. The Corinth fight included troops from the Army of the Tennessee.
On the 16th of October 1862, Grant's command was elevated to departmental status as the Department of the Tennessee. This finally made the army's name official. An order dated the 18th of December organized the army into four corps. The XIII went to John McClernand, the XV to Sherman, the XVI to Hurlbut, and the XVII to James B. McPherson. By the 30th of April 1863, the army numbered roughly 150,000 men, according to the Official Records. It stood on the eve of its next campaign, against a Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River.
In the fall of 1862, Grant began planning operations against Vicksburg, Mississippi, a Confederate stronghold commanded by Lieutenant General John C. Pemberton. His first attempt collapsed in December. Confederate raids on his supply lines, especially the depot at Holly Springs, Mississippi, forced him to abandon an overland approach from the east. Sherman was separately repulsed at the Battle of Chickasaw Bayou.
Unknown to Grant at first, his subordinate John McClernand had used political influence with Lincoln to win authority for his own expedition. One historian calls it "one of the more bizarre episodes of the Civil War." In January 1863, McClernand took control of 30,000 men under Sherman and renamed them the Army of the Mississippi. That force captured Fort Hindman on the Arkansas River. Grant, who considered the whole operation "a wild-goose chase," soon regained authority over all Vicksburg operations. McClernand's troops then rejoined the Army of the Tennessee, with McClernand left commanding only the XIII Corps.
Grant's early 1863 attempts to reach Vicksburg from the north went badly. One newspaper complained that his "army was being ruined in mud-turtle expeditions, under the leadership of a drunkard, whose confidential adviser was a lunatic." In April, Grant marched his troops south along the Mississippi's west bank. He crossed the river with help from Acting Rear Admiral David D. Porter's Western Flotilla. Roughly 40,000 men in the XIII, XV, and XVII Corps fought next. Their 180-mile campaign of maneuver pitted them against Pemberton and a Confederate relief force under General Joseph E. Johnston.
Grant's forces captured Jackson, Mississippi, on the 14th of May, and won the Battle of Champion Hill two days later. Direct assaults on Vicksburg's entrenchments failed on the 19th and the 22nd of May, so Grant turned to a siege instead. Reinforcements, including Hurlbut's XVI Corps and 8,000 men of the IX Corps under Major General John G. Parke, raised Grant's strength above 70,000 out of a departmental total near 175,000 that July. On the 18th of June, Grant replaced McClernand, again over insubordination, with Major General Edward O.C. Ord.
Vicksburg surrendered on the 4th of July 1863. Its garrison of 30,000 men was paroled rather than imprisoned. The victory opened the Mississippi River to Union traffic and split the Confederacy in two. Grant was promoted to major general in the regular army. At Halleck's suggestion, Sherman and McPherson each received a regular-army commission as brigadier general too.
Sherman later wrote that with Vicksburg's fall, "Grant's army had seemingly completed its share of the work of war." Far more fighting still lay ahead. Grant soon moved on to broader responsibilities, leaving the Army of the Tennessee under Sherman. Its long chapter of river campaigns along the Cumberland, the Tennessee, and the Mississippi was ending. A new chapter, fought mostly alongside the Army of the Cumberland, was about to begin.
After Vicksburg, the Army of the Tennessee "lay, as it were, idle for a time," waiting on a crisis further east. In late September 1863, Confederate General Braxton Bragg's Army of Tennessee defeated William Rosecrans's Army of the Cumberland at Chickamauga. Bragg then besieged the survivors at Chattanooga, Tennessee. Grant, newly given command of the Military Division of the Mississippi, was ordered there to break the siege. He chose George Thomas over Rosecrans to lead the Cumberland army.
Grant assembled three forces at Chattanooga. Thomas brought 35,000 men from the Army of the Cumberland. Joseph Hooker sent 20,000 men west from the Army of the Potomac, and Sherman's own contingent added 17,000 from the Army of the Tennessee. Sherman led that last force on a march up the Mississippi from Vicksburg and east from Memphis. He ended the march as Grant's replacement in command of the Department and Army of the Tennessee. He arrived with his old XV Corps, temporarily under Frank P. Blair Jr., and a division of the XVII Corps under John E. Smith.
Grant assigned Sherman to strike Bragg's right flank at the north end of Missionary Ridge. In the Battle of Missionary Ridge, on the 25th of November, Sherman's assault gained no ground. It was Thomas's Army of the Cumberland that broke the Confederate line, charging straight up the middle of the ridge. For once, Sherman's own army had played second fiddle.
Grant immediately sent Sherman to break a separate siege of Ambrose Burnside's command at Knoxville, Tennessee. Sherman's approach alone was enough to lift it. He later reckoned that his XV Corps had marched 330 miles from Memphis to Chattanooga, then another 230 miles round trip to Knoxville and back. Only about a third of the Army of the Tennessee, mostly that same XV Corps, had taken part in either fight. Most of the XVII Corps had stayed with McPherson at Vicksburg. Most of the XVI Corps had stayed with Hurlbut at Memphis.
Early in 1864, Sherman drew 20,000 men from those two idle corps. He led them himself on a raid into central Mississippi, aiming to wreck Confederate rail lines. The force marched roughly 330 miles round trip from Vicksburg to Meridian, Mississippi, in two columns under Hurlbut and McPherson. It destroyed the rail hub at Meridian in mid-February. One historian calls the raid a "dress rehearsal" for the destruction Sherman would later inflict on Georgia. The campaign also marked the end of Hurlbut's time with the army; he moved on to command the Department of the Gulf.
In March 1864, Lincoln promoted Grant to the new rank of lieutenant general, giving him command of all Union armies. Grant moved east to headquarter with the Army of the Potomac. Sherman took Grant's old post commanding the Military Division of the Mississippi, and command of the Army of the Tennessee passed to James B. McPherson, who had first joined the army as a lieutenant colonel and chief engineer under Grant. On the Confederate side, Braxton Bragg had already lost his command to Joseph E. Johnston, soon replaced by Lieutenant General John Bell Hood.
Sherman later described the Atlanta campaign, launched in early May 1864, as "a continuous battle of 120 days." It was fought over more than a hundred miles along the Western and Atlantic Railroad. The Army of the Tennessee began the campaign about 25,000 strong, with the XV Corps under John A. Logan and the left wing of the XVI Corps under Grenville M. Dodge. Two divisions of the old XVII Corps, under Frank Blair, joined later. Sherman, who trusted this army above the rest of his roughly 100,000 men, preferred to use it for flanking maneuvers, calling it his "whiplash."
One historian calls McPherson the "least aggressive" of the army's commanders. Another says he worried too much about what might be on the other side of the hill. That caution may explain why McPherson dug in defensively instead of cutting the Confederate railroad. He had been sent through the undefended Snake Creek Gap toward Johnston's rear near Resaca. The campaign's first major battle followed at Resaca, from the 13th to the 15th of May, and Johnston fell back again.
Sherman broke from his usual pattern with a failed direct assault at Kennesaw Mountain on the 27th of June. He then swung McPherson from his left flank to his right to keep moving south. On the 18th of July, the Army of the Tennessee completed a wide wheeling march to cut the Georgia Railroad near Decatur. That same day, Hood replaced Johnston as Confederate commander. Hood attacked at Peachtree Creek on the 20th of July, then struck McPherson's army directly on the 22nd, in the Battle of Atlanta.
McPherson was killed in that battle. John Logan took temporary command. In the words of one historian, those 27,000 men "defeated the attacks of nearly 40,000 Confederates who had the advantages of surprise and position." It was the campaign's decisive moment. Sherman then passed permanent command not to Logan but to Oliver O. Howard, brought in from Thomas's army. Howard's men repulsed Hood's third attack in nine days at Ezra Church on the 28th of July, "with ease."
In late August, after a month of stalled cavalry operations, Sherman abandoned his positions north of Atlanta. He swung the Army of the Tennessee south to cut Hood's last rail line. Howard's men repulsed a final Confederate assault on the 31st of August, the opening day of the Battle of Jonesborough. Hood evacuated Atlanta on the night of the 1st-the 2nd of September. The city's fall was called one of the war's "great epochs," on a level with Vicksburg, and it helped Lincoln win reelection that November.
After losing Atlanta, Hood tried to lure Sherman back north by threatening Tennessee. Sherman later estimated that his own return march toward Chattanooga, and back again, cost the Army of the Tennessee 270 miles of marching. He then split Grenville Dodge's XVI Corps between the XV and XVII, ending that corps' role in the army. He also won approval to cut loose from his supply lines entirely. With Thomas and Schofield detached to guard Tennessee, Sherman marched roughly 60,000 men toward the sea.
In November and December 1864, the Army of the Tennessee formed the right wing of a 280-mile march to the coast. Peter J. Osterhaus now led the XV Corps in Logan's old place, and Blair still commanded the XVII. Sherman called the march simply a "shift of base," moving an unopposed army from the interior to the coast. His troops lived off the land and destroyed property as they went. One soldier wrote on the eve of the march that Sherman meant "to use us to Christianize this country."
Near the march's end, Sherman sent his old Shiloh division, now part of the XV Corps under William B. Hazen, to subdue Fort McAllister outside Savannah, Georgia. Savannah fell on the 21st of December. Sherman presented the city to Lincoln as a "Christmas-gift," complete with one hundred and fifty heavy guns and about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton. The march showed that the Confederacy's "days were numbered" and shook the morale of Robert E. Lee's army in Virginia.
On the 1st of February 1865, after a month resting in Savannah, Sherman turned his columns north into the Carolinas. Howard's Army of the Tennessee again formed the right wing, with Logan back in charge of the XV Corps. Resistance was light in South Carolina, where one soldier remarked as Sherman's men left the state that it "has her rights now." Confederate resistance stiffened in North Carolina under Joseph E. Johnston, and the campaign's last major battle came at Bentonville in mid-March, fought mostly by Sherman's other column under Henry W. Slocum.
The Army of the Tennessee marched roughly 450 miles in 50 days, from Savannah to Goldsboro. There, Sherman met up with Schofield's forces sent from Tennessee. Sherman later called the march "one of the longest and most important marches ever made by an organized army in a civilized country." Johnston himself said he knew of no comparable army since the days of Julius Caesar.
The day after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, was the 10th of April 1865. Sherman used it to resume his advance toward Raleigh, North Carolina, with close to 90,000 men. Johnston surrendered all Confederate forces in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida to Sherman at Durham Station on the 26th of April. The Army of the Tennessee then marched about 250 miles to Washington, D.C., taking part in the Grand Review on the 24th of May.
Sherman gave John Logan command of the Army of the Tennessee for the Grand Review. It was a gesture meant to make up for having passed him over for Howard after McPherson's death. On the 13th of July, Logan issued a farewell address recalling "four years" of struggle. In it, the men had "struggled in the bloodiest and most destructive war that ever drenched the earth with human gore." Taps sounded for the Army of the Tennessee on the 1st of August 1865.
Veterans met on the 14th of April 1865, in the senate chamber of the state capitol at Raleigh, North Carolina. There they planned the Society of the Army of the Tennessee, open only to officers who had served in its ranks. The Society later spent $50,000 on a bronze statue of Major General John A. Rawlins in Washington, D.C., and $23,000 on a memorial over the grave of James B. McPherson at Clyde, Ohio. Washington also gained an equestrian statue of McPherson and a monument to John Logan. They were the last tributes to an army that had marched from Cairo to Raleigh in under four years.
Up Next
Continue browsing
Common questions
When did the Army of the Tennessee get its name?
Army correspondence began using the term "Army of the Tennessee" in March 1862, describing troops under Ulysses S. Grant in the District of West Tennessee. The name became official in October 1862, when Grant's command was elevated to departmental status as the Department of the Tennessee.
Who commanded the Army of the Tennessee during the Civil War?
Ulysses S. Grant commanded the army from its formation until after his Vicksburg victory on the 4th of July 1863. William Tecumseh Sherman succeeded him, followed by James B. McPherson, John A. Logan, Oliver O. Howard, and finally Logan again from May 1865.
What battles did the Army of the Tennessee fight in?
The army fought at Belmont, Fort Henry, Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Corinth, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga. It also fought throughout the Atlanta campaign, including the Battle of Atlanta and Ezra Church. It later marched in the March to the Sea and the Carolinas campaign, fighting at Bentonville.
Why was the Army of the Tennessee called Sherman's whiplash?
William Tecumseh Sherman said in 1867 that the army was always victorious and so rapid in motion that it deserved the name Whip-lash. He described it as being swung from one flank to the other, wherever danger called, during the Atlanta campaign.
When was the Army of the Tennessee disbanded?
Taps sounded for the Army of the Tennessee on the 1st of August 1865. This followed the Grand Review in Washington, D.C., on the 24th of May 1865. Its veterans later formed the Society of the Army of the Tennessee, organized on the 14th of April 1865.
Where was James B. McPherson killed while leading the Army of the Tennessee?
McPherson was killed on the 22nd of July 1864 during the Battle of Atlanta. Confederate General John Bell Hood had launched a strong assault against his army on Sherman's left flank. McPherson was later buried at Clyde, Ohio, where the Society of the Army of the Tennessee placed a memorial.
All sources
16 references cited across the entry