Battle of Stones River
On the last night of 1862, two armies camped within 700 yards of each other in Middle Tennessee, separated by little more than a field's width and the darkness. Their bands played across the silence. Northern musicians struck up "Yankee Doodle" and "Hail, Columbia"; the Confederate musicians answered with "Dixie" and "The Bonnie Blue Flag". Then, one band started playing "Home! Sweet Home!" and the others joined in, one by one, until thousands of men on both sides sang together in the dark. Hours later, before breakfast was finished, they would try to destroy each other.
The Battle of Stones River, fought from the 31st of December 1862 to the 2nd of January 1863, produced the highest percentage of casualties of any major engagement in the Civil War. More men were killed, wounded, or captured as a share of those present than at Shiloh or Antietam. Yet the battle is less remembered than either of those. The questions worth asking are: how did a Union army on the verge of collapse manage to hold? What decisions by Confederate General Braxton Bragg turned apparent victory into retreat? And why did President Abraham Lincoln say that a defeat at Stones River might have ended the Union's ability to fight on at all?
Abraham Lincoln had run out of patience with Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell. After the Battle of Perryville in Kentucky on the 8th of October 1862, Buell declined to press a beaten Confederate army, and Lincoln replaced him with Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans, the victor at the recent battles of Iuka and Corinth. Rosecrans moved his force to Nashville, Tennessee, redesignating it the Army of the Cumberland. Washington warned him that he, too, would be replaced if he failed to move aggressively and occupy eastern Tennessee.
Rosecrans refused to be rushed. He spent weeks reorganizing his cavalry and resupplying his army before marching southeast on the 26th of December 1862. His army numbered 81,729 effectives in Nashville, though barely more than half that number could march, since protecting his supply lines from Confederate cavalry raids required substantial forces to stay behind. The three columns that moved toward Murfreesboro were effectively harassed the whole way by Brig. Gen. Joseph Wheeler's Confederate horsemen.
Braxton Bragg, commanding the Confederate Army of Tennessee, had his own problems. A near-revolt among his senior generals, who petitioned Confederate President Jefferson Davis to replace him with Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, simmered throughout the campaign. Davis refused to remove either Bragg or the generals who had turned against him. Bragg had also been ordered on the 16th of December to send Maj. Gen. Carter L. Stevenson's infantry division of 7,500 men to Mississippi to help defend Vicksburg. That loss would be felt keenly in the fighting to come.
By the night of the 30th of December, both armies occupied parallel lines about four miles long and oriented from southwest to northeast, roughly two miles northwest of Murfreesboro. In a striking coincidence, each commander devised an almost identical plan: attack the enemy's right flank, get into his rear, and cut him off from his supply base. As the source noted, the victory would go to whichever side attacked first. Rosecrans ordered his men to be ready to move after breakfast. Bragg ordered an attack at dawn.
At about 6:00 a.m. on the 31st of December, Confederate Maj. Gen. John P. McCown's division struck the Union right before many soldiers in Brig. Gen. Richard W. Johnson's division had finished eating. It was the third time in the war, after Fort Donelson and Shiloh, that an early morning assault caught a Union army unprepared. Ten thousand Confederate troops attacked in a single massive wave.
McCook's deceptive campfires the previous night, meant to hide the vulnerability of his flank, ironically contributed to the problem: they caused McCown's division to drift left, opening a gap in the attacking line. The gap was filled seamlessly by Maj. Gen. Patrick R. Cleburne's division advancing from the rear. Together, the two divisions swept resistance aside. Several Union artillery batteries were captured before they could fire a single shot. Johnson's division suffered over 50% casualties in the opening assault.
Brig. Gen. Philip Sheridan had anticipated the attack. He had his division up and ready in the center of the right half of the line by 4:00 a.m. When Maj. Gen. Jones M. Withers hit Sheridan's right flank, Sheridan repulsed him three separate times. Then Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Cheatham's reserve division struck Sheridan's front while Cleburne hit his flank simultaneously. Observers claimed Cheatham had been drinking heavily and was unable to command his units effectively. Sheridan's men slowed the Confederate advance but at catastrophic cost. All three of Sheridan's brigade commanders were killed that day. More than one third of his men became casualties in four hours of fighting in a cedar forest surrounded on three sides. The soldiers called it "The Slaughter Pen".
By 10:00 a.m., the Confederates had captured 28 guns and more than 3,000 Union soldiers. Hardee had driven the Union troops back three miles to the railroad and the Nashville Pike. Rosecrans, racing across the battlefield directing units, had blood from his chief of staff, Col. Julius Garesché, spattered across his uniform. Garesché had been beheaded by a cannonball while riding alongside him.
Col. William B. Hazen commanded a brigade in a rocky, four-acre wooded area called Round Forest by the local population. It sat on the left flank of the Union line and anchored the entire defensive position along the Nashville Pike. As the Union right crumbled across the field, Hazen's brigade became the only part of the original Union line that held its ground.
Brig. Gen. Milo S. Hascall sent the 3rd Kentucky to the Round Forest as reinforcements. When Hascall learned that the regiment's commander had been killed, he went to take personal command of the position himself. He declared that it had to be held, "even if it cost the last man we had". Repeated Confederate assaults against Round Forest were turned back. The men fighting there renamed it "Hell's Half-Acre".
Bragg's plan contained a fundamental structural flaw that his biographer Grady McWhiney identified clearly. By pushing the Union defenders back toward the Nashville Pike, Bragg was actually driving them into a tighter and stronger defensive position, while his own forces were becoming progressively disorganized and losing momentum as they advanced. The more the Confederates pushed, the stronger the Union concentration became.
Two blunders compounded Bragg's difficulties. Maj. Gen. John C. Breckinridge, posted east of the Stones River, refused to send two brigades across the river to aid the main attack. He had not realized that the Union threat on that bank had already been withdrawn. Then Bragg received a false report that a strong Union force was moving south along the Lebanon Turnpike, which caused him to cancel his own order for Breckinridge to reinforce the attack. By 4:30 p.m., after piecemeal assaults by Breckinridge's troops failed as well, the fighting was finished for the day.
Bragg telegraphed Richmond before going to sleep on the night of the 31st of December. His message read: "The enemy has yielded his strong position and is falling back. We occupy the whole field and shall follow him.... God has granted us a happy New Year." He was confident he had won. He had suffered roughly 9,000 casualties, but believed the large number of captured Union soldiers meant Rosecrans had lost far more.
Rosecrans called a council of war that same night. Some of his generals believed the army had been beaten and urged retreat before it was cut off entirely. Rosecrans rejected this view. Thomas and Crittenden backed him. Thomas has been quoted by different sources as saying either "This army does not retreat" or "There's no better place to die." The army chose to stand and fight. As the men settled into their lines, morale rose.
On New Year's Day, the two armies mostly rested and tended to their wounded. Wheeler's cavalry continued harassing the Union supply line running back to Nashville, and when Wheeler observed heavily escorted convoys of wounded leaving the battlefield, he reported to Bragg that Rosecrans was preparing to retreat. Bragg, already certain of victory, was content to wait. He was wrong about what he was seeing.
On the morning of the 3rd of January, a supply train accompanied by Brig. Gen. James G. Spears's reinforced infantry brigade reached Rosecrans. Wheeler's cavalry tried to capture the ammunition wagons that followed but was driven off. Bragg now understood that Rosecrans was not retreating and would keep receiving troops. Confederate intelligence suggested Rosecrans would soon field 70,000 men; Bragg had only about 20,000 ready to fight.
At 4:00 p.m. on the 2nd of January 1863, Bragg ordered Breckinridge to assault Col. Samuel Beatty's division, which held a hill on the east side of the Stones River. Breckinridge initially protested that the attack would be suicidal. He eventually agreed and advanced with determination, pushing the Union troops back across McFadden Ford.
Then his men ran into Capt. John Mendenhall's artillery. Mendenhall had positioned 45 guns hub-to-hub on the ridge above McFadden's Ford, with 12 more guns about a mile to the southwest positioned to provide enfilading fire across the opposite bank. The massed Confederate charge had no answer for that concentration of firepower. In less than an hour, Breckinridge suffered over 1,800 casualties. A Union counterattack under James S. Negley drove the survivors back.
Breckinridge was devastated. Among the dead and wounded were nearly one third of his Kentucky troops, Hanson's Brigade. The unit was known as the Orphan Brigade because it could not return to Union-occupied Kentucky. Riding among the survivors, Breckinridge cried out repeatedly, "My poor Orphans! My poor Orphans."
Faced with the failure of January 2nd, the intelligence reports suggesting massive Union reinforcements, and the risk that freezing rain could raise the Stones River enough to split his army in two, Bragg began his withdrawal at 10:00 p.m. on the 3rd of January. He retreated through Murfreesboro to Tullahoma, Tennessee, 36 miles to the south. Rosecrans occupied Murfreesboro on the 5th of January but made no attempt to pursue him.
Total casualties at Stones River reached 25,645: 13,906 on the Union side and 11,739 for the Confederates. That represented 32.7% of all troops engaged. Of the roughly 78,400 men who fought, 3.8% were killed, 19.8% wounded, and 7.9% missing or captured. No major battle in the Civil War produced a higher percentage of casualties on both sides combined, surpassing even Shiloh and Antietam in absolute numbers for battles earlier that same year.
Four brigadier generals were killed or mortally wounded: Confederate James E. Rains and Roger W. Hanson, and Union generals Edward N. Kirk and Joshua W. Sill. Frances Elizabeth Quinn was among the Union wounded, one of many women who served as soldiers in the war.
For the Confederacy, the battle accelerated the collapse of confidence in Bragg. He had the support of only Gen. Joseph E. Johnston and the political protection of President Jefferson Davis, who could find no suitable replacement. His senior generals' hostility had become a persistent liability.
For the Union, Abraham Lincoln wrote to Rosecrans directly about the significance of what had been saved: "You gave us a hard-earned victory, which had there been a defeat instead, the nation could scarcely have lived over." The battle came at a moment when Union morale had been badly shaken by the defeat at Fredericksburg. It also reinforced Lincoln's political foundation for issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, which discouraged European powers from intervening on the Confederacy's behalf.
Rosecrans spent five and a half months fortifying Murfreesboro, constructing the massive earthwork known as Fort Rosecrans that served as a Union supply depot for the rest of the war. The Hazen Brigade Monument, erected in May 1863 at Hell's Half-Acre by the survivors of William Hazen's brigade, still stands today as the oldest intact Civil War monument in the nation.
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Common questions
When was the Battle of Stones River fought?
The Battle of Stones River was fought from the 31st of December 1862 to the 2nd of January 1863, in Middle Tennessee. The Confederate army withdrew on the 3rd of January, and Union forces occupied Murfreesboro on the 5th of January.
What were the casualties at the Battle of Stones River?
Total casualties at Stones River were 25,645: 13,906 Union and 11,739 Confederate, representing 32.7% of all troops engaged. Of roughly 78,400 men who fought, 3.8% were killed, 19.8% wounded, and 7.9% missing or captured, giving Stones River the highest percentage of casualties of any major battle in the Civil War.
Who won the Battle of Stones River?
The Union Army of the Cumberland, commanded by Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans, won the battle after the Confederate Army of Tennessee under Gen. Braxton Bragg withdrew to Tullahoma, Tennessee on the 3rd of January 1863. The victory was costly but strategically significant, securing Nashville as a Union supply base and boosting Northern morale after the defeat at Fredericksburg.
Why was the Battle of Stones River important to the Union?
President Abraham Lincoln wrote to Rosecrans that a defeat at Stones River would have been one "the nation could scarcely have lived over." The victory provided a critical morale boost after the Union's defeat at Fredericksburg and reinforced Lincoln's political foundation for issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, which discouraged European powers from intervening on the Confederacy's behalf.
What was Hell's Half-Acre at the Battle of Stones River?
Hell's Half-Acre was the soldiers' nickname for Round Forest, a rocky four-acre wooded area where Col. William B. Hazen's brigade held its position against repeated Confederate assaults on the 31st of December 1862. It was the only part of the original Union line that did not break. The Hazen Brigade Monument, erected there in May 1863, is the oldest intact Civil War monument in the United States.
Why did Braxton Bragg withdraw at the Battle of Stones River?
Bragg withdrew beginning at 10:00 p.m. on the 3rd of January 1863 because he learned Rosecrans was receiving reinforcements rather than retreating, Confederate intelligence suggested Union forces would soon number 70,000 against his 20,000 available troops, and freezing rain risked raising the Stones River high enough to split his army. He retreated 36 miles south to Tullahoma, Tennessee.
All sources
10 references cited across the entry
- 1Stones River Battle Facts and SummaryAmerican Battlefield Trust
- 2The Battle of Stones River: A Hard-Earned VictoryNational Park Service — National Park Service