Battle of Nashville
The Battle of Nashville began, in a sense, with a scene about death rather than fighting. In the bitter cold of December 1864, Confederate soldiers outside Nashville, Tennessee dug shallow pits in the ground, just large enough for two or three men to sleep beside a small fire. Alabama soldier Edgar Jones wrote that the warmth felt good, but that the shelters gave him "a sort of graveyard feeling," since they so closely resembled graves. Days later, that impression proved close to prophetic. Outside the city, Confederate Lieutenant General John Bell Hood's Army of Tennessee faced the Union Army of the Cumberland, commanded by Major General George H. Thomas. Fought over two days, the battle became one of the largest Union victories of the entire Civil War. Thomas did not just win. He routed Hood's army and left it barely able to function as a fighting force. What led an army to dig graves for itself outside a fortified city it could not hope to storm? And what happened in those two days that broke it so completely? The answer begins hundreds of miles to the south, after Hood's defeat in the Atlanta campaign.
After his defeat in the Atlanta campaign, Hood moved northwest to disrupt the supply lines of Major General William T. Sherman running back to Chattanooga. He hoped to draw Sherman into a fight on Hood's own terms. Sherman considered pursuing Hood, then chose a different course. He predicted that defending hundreds of miles of track against constant raids would cost him "a thousand men monthly and gain no result." Rather than accept that trade, Sherman cut his main army loose from its supply lines and turned east, beginning his March to the Sea from Atlanta to Savannah. He left the problem of Hood's army, and the defense of Tennessee, to Thomas. Hood, in turn, devised a plan to strike into Tennessee and defeat Thomas's forces while they were still spread out. He pursued Major General John M. Schofield's army from Pulaski to Columbia, aiming to trap it at Spring Hill. Schofield had been ordered by Thomas to delay Hood without losing his army outright, buying time for Thomas to concentrate his forces at Nashville. The Battle of Spring Hill took place on the 29th of November, 1864. A string of Confederate command miscommunications let Schofield's army slip past Hood's largely unscathed. Furious at the failure, Hood pursued Schofield north and caught up with him at a town called Franklin.
On the 30th of November, 1864, Hood ordered nearly 31,000 of his men to storm the Union fortifications at Franklin. He wanted to strike before Schofield could cross the Harpeth River and reach Nashville. Schofield and his troops were focused only on getting across the river; they had not expected an attack of such intensity. The ferocity of Hood's assault made the Union troops realize their delaying action had turned into a fight for survival. Union defenders repulsed assault after assault. They inflicted more than 6,000 casualties on the Confederates, a toll that included a striking number of the army's own generals. The damage to the Army of Tennessee's leadership was severe. Schofield withdrew during the night, marching his army toward the safety of Nashville's defenses.
By the 1st of December, Schofield's army had reached Nashville and come under Thomas's command. Together they formed about 55,000 men, most of them veterans. The IV Corps and Schofield's own XXIII Corps had fought through the Atlanta campaign. Andrew J. Smith's detachment had fought at Vicksburg, in the Red River campaign, at Tupelo, and against Sterling Price in Missouri. Only James B. Steedman's division had never fought together as a single unit. It was made up of garrison troops, railroad guards, and eight regiments of United States Colored Troops.
Union forces had been building defenses around Nashville since occupying the city in February 1862. By 1864 a seven-mile semicircular line of forts guarded the south and west sides. The largest was Fort Negley. The Cumberland River guarded the north and east.
Hood's Army of Tennessee, roughly 30,000 strong, arrived south of the city on the 2nd of December. This time he chose to dig in rather than repeat his costly frontal assault at Franklin. He hoped Thomas would attack his entrenchments first, opening a chance for Hood to counterattack and seize the city.
On the 2nd of December, in a serious strategic mistake, Hood sent three brigades under William B. Bate to strike the railroad toward Murfreesboro. Three days later he added two more infantry brigades and Nathan Bedford Forrest's cavalry to the effort. He hoped the diversion would draw Thomas out of his fortifications, or let him seize a weakened Nashville by what he called a coup de main. The Murfreesboro garrison drove off the Confederates in the Third Battle of Murfreesboro on the 7th of December, and Thomas was not fooled. Bate's division returned, but Hood had weakened his own outnumbered army for nothing. Forrest's cavalry, tied down at Murfreesboro, would not be present for the battle to come.
Even with the larger force, Thomas refused to rush. His cavalry corps, led by the young Brigadier General James H. Wilson, was poorly armed and mounted. Thomas would not advance without protecting his flanks, especially with Wilson facing the formidable Nathan Bedford Forrest. Refitting the cavalry took time, and Washington grew impatient. When Sherman first proposed marching to the sea, Ulysses S. Grant and Henry Halleck had objected. They feared Hood would use the chance to invade Tennessee. Sherman shrugged off the worry, saying that if Hood "continues to march North, all the way to Ohio, I will supply him with rations." Once Sherman disappeared into Georgia, though, Grant grew uneasy again. He later said, "If I had been Hood, I would have gone to Louisville and on north until I came to Chicago." Abraham Lincoln shared the concern. He remarked that the delay "seems like the McClellan and Rosecrans strategy of do nothing and let the rebels raid the country."
A bitter ice storm struck Nashville on the 8th of December, and sub-freezing weather held through the 12th, ruling out any attack. When Thomas still had not moved by the 13th, Grant ordered Major General John A. Logan to Nashville. Logan was to take command if Thomas had not acted by the time he arrived. Logan reached only as far as Louisville by the 15th of December, the day the Battle of Nashville finally began. Grant himself left Petersburg on the 14th of December to take personal command, but the fighting had already started by the time he reached Washington. He went no further.
Confederate batteries at Bell's Bend on the Cumberland River opened a separate fight on the water on the 2nd of December. That same day they captured two Union transports carrying horses, mules, and fodder. The Union squadron struck back the following night, and two ships, the ironclad Carondelet and the tinclad Fairplay, recaptured both transports at a lower battery. On the 7th of December the squadron commander, Lieutenant Commander LeRoy Fitch, took his two heaviest vessels downstream to challenge the batteries directly. They were the Carondelet and the river monitor Neosho. The fight was inconclusive, though the Neosho took considerable damage. Two of its sailors earned the Medal of Honor for going onto the shell-swept deck to raise the ship's flag after it had been shot down. The Confederate batteries kept the river closed to Union supply traffic for two weeks. Union cavalry finally drove them off on the 15th of December, the very day the land battle began.
Thomas opened the 15th of December with a feint against the Confederate right. He sent two brigades from James Steedman's Provisional Division: the First Colored Brigade of United States Colored Troops, and a brigade its own commander called "new conscripts, convalescents, and bounty jumpers." The Confederate right was anchored west of a railroad cut, defended by a skirmish line and a four-gun lunette built by Granbury's Texas Brigade, well hidden by trees and brush. The Union brigades overran the skirmish line, then were struck by heavy fire near the lunette. Both retreated in disorder, but reformed and kept firing on the Confederate works for the rest of the day. The feint did not fool Hood, who pulled brigades from both Lee's and Cheatham's corps to reinforce his threatened left. Even so, Steedman's men had seized enough ground to make Hood's position there untenable by nightfall.
Wilson's Cavalry Corps delivered the real blow on the Confederate left, moving west along Charlotte Pike and fighting a skirmish of three to four hundred troopers near the Belle Meade Plantation. Once the morning fog lifted, the cavalry drove off Confederate patrols guarding the gap to the Cumberland River. Andrew J. Smith's corps turned south toward the Confederate flank, and Schofield's XXIII Corps filled the gap that opened between Smith and Wilson. At about 2:30 in the afternoon, Union troops struck the five redoubts guarding Hood's left. Four brigades overran Redoubt No. 4 and then Redoubt No. 5, despite fierce resistance. Another of Smith's brigades took Redoubt No. 3, but its commander, Colonel Sylvester G. Hill, was killed by artillery fire from Redoubt No. 2. He was the highest-ranking Union officer killed in the entire battle. Smith's men pushed on and quickly captured Redoubt No. 2 as well.
Meanwhile the IV Corps advanced on Montgomery Hill, expecting to find the main Confederate line there. Instead they found only a thin skirmish line. The Confederates had quietly withdrawn to stronger ground south of Brown's Creek. Once Smith's troops began rolling up the redoubts, the IV Corps pressed toward the main Confederate position. Redoubt No. 1, the last strongpoint on Hood's left, fell to troops converging from the north, south, and west at once. Alexander P. Stewart's corps, wrecked by the day's fighting, pulled back a mile or two to a new line. Rearguard brigades from Stephen D. Lee's corps kept the retreat from turning into a rout. By nightfall, Cheatham's and Lee's corps had joined Stewart there, with less than a day to fortify it.
On the 16th of December, the Confederates held a stronger, more compact line. It was anchored on the east at Peach Orchard Hill. The western flank ran along hills from what had been Compton's Hill, soon renamed Shy's Hill after Colonel William M. Shy, who died defending it. Stephen D. Lee's Corps held the right flank, largely fresh troops who had seen little action at Franklin or the day before. Alexander P. Stewart's battered corps held the center. Benjamin F. Cheatham's badly hurt corps held the left, including Shy's Hill itself, with Rucker's cavalry patrolling to its south.
Shy's Hill looked formidable but was not. Its trenches had been dug overnight by exhausted troops, with no head logs or obstacles in front. Worse, they sat on the hill's geographic crest rather than the military crest that would have commanded the slopes. Attackers could climb almost unseen.
Thomas repeated the previous day's tactics: a diversion on the right, then a decisive blow on the left. At about 3 p.m., two brigades from Beatty's division and two from Steedman's Provisional Division attacked Peach Orchard Hill. Entrenched Confederate fire broke up the assault quickly. The 13th United States Colored Troops pressed on alone and reached the Confederate parapet, but lost one of its flags and 220 officers and men, close to 40 percent of the regiment. The attack drew two of Cheatham's brigades away to reinforce Lee, thinning the Shy's Hill line even further.
Wilson's cavalry pushed past Granny White Pike into the Confederate rear, forcing Cheatham to stretch his corps thinner still. Thomas ordered Schofield to strike the western face of Shy's Hill, but Schofield hesitated, believing himself outnumbered, and asked for more troops. Smith sent a division. Schofield still did not attack, and sunset was approaching. Brigadier General John McArthur watched the Confederate line take a battering from Union artillery on nearly every side, and decided to act on his own. At about 3:30 p.m. he warned Smith and Thomas that his division would attack within five minutes unless ordered otherwise. His three brigades went in on that timetable. One swept over Shy's Hill itself. A second struck the Confederates while they were distracted defending it. A third, east of Granny White Pike, scooped up a body of Confederate skirmishers along with the line.
The Confederate left came apart from west to east along Shy's Hill within minutes. Granny White Pike was already blocked by Wilson's cavalry, so the retreat funneled south on Franklin Pike and through a gap in the Overton Hills. Part of Lee's Corps held its order and covered the Franklin Pike retreat. Rucker's Confederate cavalry fought a nighttime melee in the rain to hold Granny White Pike.
Hood's army fled south that night on the two roads, with Union cavalry pursuing hardest along Franklin Pike while Lee's rearguard held them off. The chase then slowed. Thomas had sent his pontoon bridge train toward Murfreesboro rather than Franklin, stranding his artillery and supply wagons at the Harpeth River. Wilson's cavalry pressed on regardless, badly damaging Carter L. Stevenson's rearguard division on the 17th and the 18th of December, until a lack of supplies forced a halt. Forrest, released from Murfreesboro, reached Columbia with two cavalry divisions on the 18th of December and took over the Confederate rearguard, adding an improvised infantry division under Edward C. Walthall. On the 19th of December the remaining Confederate infantry and artillery crossed the Duck River at Columbia and burned the bridges behind them. Thomas, still waiting on his misdirected pontoons, could not cross the Duck River until the 23rd of December. Wilson pushed on but was checked by Forrest in three hard fights, at Richland Creek, Anthony's Hill, and Sugar Creek. Hood finally got his army across the Tennessee River on a pontoon bridge near Bainbridge, Alabama, by the 28th of December. Low water and Confederate artillery kept Union gunboats from breaking the crossing, despite Thomas asking Rear Admiral S. P. Lee to destroy the bridge. Steedman's division, rushed by rail and riverboat toward Decatur, Alabama, to cut off the retreat, arrived too late to stop the crossing. His cavalry, under Colonel William Jackson Palmer, did capture the Confederate pontoon train and a large number of supply wagons on the 30th of December. That action finally ended the Union pursuit.
Federal casualties at Nashville totaled 387 killed, 2,562 wounded, and 112 missing. Confederate losses are harder to pin down, since few Confederate units filed reports. Thomas reported capturing 4,561 prisoners in the battle itself, with more taken during the retreat. One historian estimated roughly 2,500 Confederates killed or wounded in the fighting. The Army of Tennessee had entered the campaign with about 38,000 men, not counting Forrest's cavalry. Between Spring Hill, Franklin, and Nashville, combined with at least 2,000 desertions late in the campaign, the army was gutted. By the 20th of January, Hood reported an effective strength of only 18,742 men. On the 13th of January, General P. G. T. Beauregard, Hood's nominal superior, told the Confederate President the army now numbered fewer than 15,000.
Historian David Eicher summed up what the two battles had done to Hood's army: "If Hood mortally wounded his army at Franklin, he would kill it two weeks later at Nashville." Hood blamed his subordinates and his soldiers for the defeat, but his own career was finished. He withdrew to Tupelo, Mississippi, resigned his command on the 13th of January, 1865, and never received another field command.
The battlefield itself is enormous by Civil War standards, covering nearly all of south and west Nashville. Residents of Green Hills, Forest Hills, Oak Hill, Lipscomb, and Brentwood now live on top of it. An early twentieth century push for a National Battlefield Park failed, since Nashville's civic leaders had little interest in commemorating a battle that ended in such a lopsided Confederate defeat. Much of the ground was lost to development instead, though individual memorials survive.
In 1927, sculptor Giuseppe Moretti completed the Battle of Nashville monument for the Ladies' Battlefield Association, honoring soldiers of both sides. A tornado badly damaged it in 1974, and 1980s interstate construction left it stranded beside the interchange of I-65 and I-440, until it was moved to Nashville Battlefield Park in 1999. In 1920, the state of Minnesota raised its own monument in the Nashville National Cemetery. Minnesota lost more men at Nashville than in any other battle of the Civil War.
Fort Negley, the largest of the wartime forts and the site that fired the battle's first shots, was itself built in 1862 and 1863 by African Americans forcibly impressed by the Union military government. It still stands today, stabilized as a ruin open to visitors, on the same ground where those first shots were fired.
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Common questions
What was the Battle of Nashville?
The Battle of Nashville was a two-day battle fought at Nashville, Tennessee, on the 15th and the 16th of December, 1864, between the Confederate Army of Tennessee under Lieutenant General John Bell Hood and the Union Army of the Cumberland under Major General George H. Thomas. It ended in one of the largest Union victories of the Civil War and effectively destroyed Hood's army as a fighting force.
When did the Battle of Nashville take place?
The Battle of Nashville was fought on the 15th and the 16th of December, 1864. It followed the Battle of Franklin on the 30th of November, 1864, and the Battle of Spring Hill on the 29th of November, 1864.
Who commanded the armies at the Battle of Nashville?
The Confederate Army of Tennessee was commanded by Lieutenant General John Bell Hood, and the Union Army of the Cumberland was commanded by Major General George H. Thomas. Thomas led a combined force of about 55,000 men against Hood's roughly 30,000.
Why did Hood retreat after the Battle of Nashville?
Hood retreated because Thomas routed his army over the two days of fighting, breaking the Confederate left flank at Shy's Hill on the 16th of December. The Army of Tennessee fled south toward the Tennessee River, pursued by Union cavalry until Hood crossed near Bainbridge, Alabama, by the 28th of December.
What happened at Shy's Hill during the Battle of Nashville?
Shy's Hill was the western anchor of the Confederate line on the 16th of December, named after Colonel William M. Shy, who died defending it. Brigadier General John McArthur's division attacked it on his own initiative, and the collapse of the Confederate left there broke Hood's army.
How many casualties resulted from the Battle of Nashville?
Federal casualties totaled 387 killed, 2,562 wounded, and 112 missing. Confederate losses are harder to determine, but Thomas reported capturing 4,561 prisoners, and one historian estimated about 2,500 Confederates were killed or wounded.
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1 references cited across the entry
- 1Book1861 to 1865, by an Old Johnnie. Personal recollections and experiences in the Confederate armyJames Dinkins — The R. Clarke Co. — 1897