December 31, 1862: The Battle of Stones River

In the winter of 1862...

Union General Ulysses S. Grant spent most of November and December trying to get at the Mississippi River stronghold of Vicksburg. He was finally forced to give up the attempt after cavalry raids by forces under Nathan Bedford Forrest and Earl Van Dorn tore up his supply lines.

On December 13, at Fredericksburg, Virginia, Union forces suffered one of their worst defeats of the war when wave after wave of Yankee attackers were cut down in front of the stone wall at the base of Marye's Heights.

And in Tennessee, on December 26, William Rosecran's Union Army of the Cumberland left their base at Nashville to confront Confederate Braxton Bragg's Army of Tennessee near the town of Murfreesboro. The ultimate goal of this Federal campaign was to drive the Rebel army out of Tennessee, and, in the process, capture Chattanooga, a key strategic position where the railroad lines of the eastern and western sections of the Confederacy converged.

Rosecrans's campaign also had important political ramifications. The mountains and valleys of east Tennessee were filled with pro-Unionist yeoman farmers who detested the slaveholding secessionist aristocrats. On June 21, 1861, Tennesseans had voted by a 2-to-1 margin for secession, but east Tennesseans had voted against it by a 3-to-1 margin. President Abraham Lincoln had made liberating these Unionists a priority early in the war, but distance, logistics, and the forbidding terrain had hampered military operations. Now Rosecrans and his 42,000-man army were on the offensive.

Braxton Bragg's army was lined up in an arc just north of Murfreesboro. The Stones River, the Nashville Turnpike, and the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad all sliced perpendicularly through his position. Bragg had about 8000 fewer men than Rosecrans, but a much more effective cavalry. On December 29, he sent Joseph Wheeler's cavalry off on a ride completely around the Union army to wreak havoc on Rosecrans's supply trains. Rosecrans kept coming, and by the next day had his army in line of battle confronting Bragg.

In keeping with their habit on naming battles after nearby towns, the Confederates would call it the Battle of Murfreesboro. The Federals preferred to name battles after nearby bodies of water; they called it the Battle of Stones River. (This naming preference would also apply to the names of armies. Confederates named their armies after the sections to be defended: the Army of Tennessee. Federals named their armies after rivers: the Army of the Cumberland.)

Both commanders planned similar attacks: attack the enemy's right flank and knock it back, and get into his rear, cutting him off from his base. If they had attacked simultaneously, the two armies might have spun around in a great circle, but Bragg beat Rosecrans to the punch.

The Battle of Stones River (Murfreesboro)

At dawn on December 31, 1862, 13,000 men massed on the Confederate left flank attacked, catching the Yankees at breakfast. Alexander McDowell McCook's corps took the brunt of the attack - two of his divisions were scattered.

Philip Sheridan, commanding McCook's third division, saved the Union army from disaster. Sheridan had his division awake and ready by 4:00 a.m. When the attack came, they were overwhelmed, but gave ground grudgingly and at great cost to the enemy - and themselves. More than one-third of his men were killed, wounded, or missing after four hours of fighting and all three of Sheridan's brigade commanders were killed.

Despite Sheridan's efforts, the Union right flank was driven back nearly three miles. During the crisis, Rosecrans was constantly on the move, riding from one danger zone to another to rally his men, barely pausing even when his chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Julius P. Garesche, was beheaded by a cannon ball while riding right beside him.

By noon, the Union line was bent back at almost a right angle. Bragg focused his attention on the angle at a patch of woods called the Round Forest. John Bowers, author of Chickamauga and Chattanooga - The Battles that Doomed the Confederacy, said of the ground that "if Bragg had studied the map for a year, he could not have picked a worse spot." Troops were sent across an open field, already littered with their comrades' bodies, to strike at an enemy dug into tree-lined fortifications.

A Mississippi brigade charged and fell, followed by a brigade of Tennesseans, who also fell. Finally, four brigades commanded by John C. Breckinridge, James Buchanan's vice president and a presidential candidate in 1860, went forward, attacking the position until nightfall. The Union army held.

During the night, Braxton Bragg wired news to Richmond of his army's great victory and the enemy's retreat. He was more than a little astonished when he woke on New Year's Day, 1863, and found Rosecrans's army still in his front. But the two armies were all fought out. All was quiet along Stones River expect for some desultory skirmishes. The most noteworthy action of the day was the occupation of a hill on the east side of the river by a Union division.

On January 2, Bragg ordered Breckinridge to clear the Yankees off the hill. Breckinridge vehemently protested the order. His men would have to cross open ground exposed to enfilading artillery fire from the west side of the river. When Bragg insisted, Breckinridge had no choice but to follow orders.

The attack went just as Breckinridge thought it would. His men swept forward and reached the Union line, only to be cut down by fifty-eight Union guns. The survivors were driven back to their original position by a Union counterattack. Breckinridge lost 1500 men in an hour.

Bragg mulled over his options. His army was exhausted, and more than a third of his men were killed, wounded, or missing. Recent rains were causing Stones River to rise. He feared being trapped where he stood. When he awoke on January 3 to find the Union army still in place, receiving reinforcements from Nashville, he ordered a retreat. He pulled his army back behind the Stones and Duck Rivers. The Union army was in no condition to pursue Bragg's army. They had suffered a casualty rate of 31 percent. Stones River was the most deadly battle of the war in proportion to the number of men involved.

Rosecrans went into winter quarters at Murfreesboro. After the failures at Vicksburg and Fredericksburg, the North was rejuvenated by the news from Stones River. Lincoln wired Rosecrans to congratulate him on his "hard earned victory which, had there been a defeat instead, the nation could hardly have lived over."

Maps:

Dec. 30, 1862 above
Dec. 31:  8 a.m., 9:45 a.m., 11 a.m., 4 p.m.
Jan. 2, 1863:  4 p.m., 4:45 p.m.

150 Years Ago -- Robert Anderson and the Department of the Cumberland

Image of Robert Anderson via Wikipedia

On Thursday, August 15, 1861, Union Brigadier General Robert Anderson, the hero of Fort Sumter, was appointed to command of the newly-formed Department of the Cumberland, comprising most of the states of Kentucky and Tennessee.

Anderson would relinquish command of the department to Brigadier General William Tecumseh Sherman in October.  Ill health is often cited as the reason for the change in command, but Anderson, who was reluctant to distribute arms to Kentucky Unionists, might have fallen out of favor with Lincoln.

The Department of the Cumberland would cease to exist in October, becoming a part of the Department of the Ohio, but would be resurrected in October 1862, with General William Rosecrans commanding.

150 Years Ago -- A Lull

Events moved swiftly after the war began at Fort Sumter, but there was a lull in the aftermath of the Battle of Bull Run as both sides paused to reassess the situation.  An update:

As the dog days of August 1861 began the war was starting to take shape along the border or what historian Bruce Catton called "that cross section of nineteenth-century America that ran for a thousand miles from Virginia tidewater to the plains of Kansas, reaching from the place of the nation's oldest traditions to the rude frontier where no tradition ran back farther than the day before yesterday."


In eastern Virginia, between the two capitols of Washington and Richmond, the two armies, both called the Army of the Potomac, were licking their wounds after Bull Run.  The "Forward to Richmond" sentiment and the belief in a short war were over.  Both commanders, George McClellan and Joe Johnston, were working hard now, organizing, drilling and equipping their men.  It would be many months before they would face off again.


After resigning his commission in the U.S. Army and going south, Robert E. Lee had been put in charge of Virginia's state troops.  He was briefly unemployed when those troops were put under Confederate control, but he became the top military adviser to Virginia Governor John Letcher, then to Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

Lee was sent to western Virginia to try to salvage the situation there after the Union victory at Rich Mountain.  Lee arrived on August 1, charged with "combining all our forces in western Virginia on one plan of operations."  Lee would soon find that it was impossible to get everyone on the same page.

The Federals had about 11,000 soldiers in the region.  Brigadier General Jacob Cox commanded a force of 2700 in the Kanawha Valley.  There were some small detachments in the north guarding key points along the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, the only direct link between Washington and the West.  Brigadier General William Rosecrans commanded the rest near Cheat Mountain.

Brigadier General W. W. Loring commanded the principal Confederate force, some 10,000 men, at Huntersville.  Lee joined up with this contingent that was facing Rosecrans's army.  Farther south, two politicians, former Virginia Governor Henry Wise and former U.S. Secretary of War John Floyd, commanded separate forces facing Cox.  Wise and Floyd would spend more time competing against each other for authority than they ever would against Cox.


Farther west, the war was not being fought at all in Kentucky as both sides endeavored for a time to respect the state's proclaimed neutrality.  Both sides badly needed Kentucky.  Lincoln would soon remark, "I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game."  The state served as a big shield separating the two powers.  A Confederate Kentucky would move the border all the way up to the Ohio River, depriving the Federals of a base from which to launch an offensive in the Mississippi Valley.  If the Union took the state, Tennessee and the Mississippi River would be threatened.  Neither side could afford to antagonize the state and push it to the other side, but both sides had camps either in the state or just outside its borders, rallying Kentuckians to their respective causes.


The next major conflagration of the war would take place on the far west end of the border in Missouri.  Union Major General John Frémont arrived on July 25 to take command of the Department of the West.

Frémont was a career U.S. Army officer, but he had come up through the Topographical Corps, where he had become famous as "The Pathfinder," charting trails to the West.  In 1856, he had become the first presidential nominee of the new Republican Party.  Now he was in over his head.  As Catton put it in Terrible Swift Sword, "Now he was in Missouri, a bewildering jungle where a trail could be blazed only by a man gifted with a profound understanding of the American character, the talents of a canny politician, and enormous skill as an administrator.  Of these gifts General Frémont had hardly a trace."

Frémont had a big job to do, but little to do it with.  He was expected to secure the state and also to organize an army and lead it down the Mississippi toward New Orleans, reopening the river to commerce and isolating the western part of the Confederacy.

He had about 23,000 troops, but about a third of those were three-month volunteers whose terms were about to expire.  He was receiving new recruits, but had few arms, uniforms or other equipment, few rations and no money.  Guerrilla warfare was becoming rampant in the state, and like many other commanders he was exaggerating the number of enemy troops he was facing.  He thought he faced about 25,000 state militia with another 50,000 Confederate soldiers in Arkansas and Tennessee ready to invade.  In actuality, he faced about half that number of both.

Nathaniel Lyon had done much to keep Missouri in the Union, but he had been blunt about it, forcing almost everyone in the state to choose sides.  He had moved quickly and thwarted a plot by Governor Claiborne Jackson to capture the arsenal at St. Louis.  In May, he had surrounded and captured some state militia legally encamped near St. Louis, then when he marched them through the town, it touched off a riot that left some two dozen civilians dead.  One of the Missourians who had chosen a side was Sterling Price, now in charge of most of the remaining state militia.  Price was fighting not so much for the Confederacy but to try to keep the war from engulfing the state.

Lyon had gone on to declare war on Price and Jackson, and had driven them away from the capital of Jefferson City.  Then he had routed the militia at Boonsville and pursued them to the southwest corner of the state.  His actions had allowed the Union men of the state to declare state offices vacant and to set up a new pro-Union government with Hamilton Gamble as governor.  But Lyon was now in a bad predicament.  He had advanced too far and was at the end of a long, precarious supply line.  He wrote to Frémont, asking for reinforcements and confessing that he now could not attack, stay where he was, or even conduct an orderly retreat.

Frémont, with much to do and little to do it with, decided his best bet was to reinforce the key town of Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio River met the Mississippi.  He told Lyon to do the best he could and sent a few reinforcements, but Lyon would not see them.  He would die on August 10 at the Battle of Wilson's Creek.

150 Years Ago: Changes

On Thursday, July 25, 1861, several changes occurred in the wake of the Battle of Bull Run.

Union General George McClellan arrived in Washington to replace Irvin McDowell.  A general order was issued outlining the extent of his new command.  General William Rosecrans replaced McClellan as commander of the Department of the Ohio and the "Army of Occupation, Western Virginia."

Nathaniel Banks replaced Robert Patterson as commander of the Army of the Shenandoah.  Patterson, 69, had done a poor job of containing General Joseph E. Johnston's army in the Shenandoah Valley, allowing the Confederates to join with Beauregard at Bull Run.  Patterson was relieved of command and given an honorable discharge, ending his service in the Civil War.

General John Frémont finally arrived in St. Louis to take over the newly created Department of the West.  Frémont had been named to the command on July 3, and had spent much of the intervening time in New York trying to buy weapons and supplies.

Union General Jacob Cox, commanding the Kanawha Brigade of the Department of the Ohio, got behind Henry Wise's position at Tyler Mountain on July 24, forcing Wise to retreat to Charleston, Virginia (now West Virginia).  As Cox approached the town, Wise retreated again.  The Federals occupied the town on July 25.

The U.S. Senate passed the Crittenden-Johnson Resolution by a vote of 30-to-5.  The House had previously approved the measure on July 22.  The resolution stated that the war was being fought "to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution and to preserve the Union" and not for "overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of those States."  The measure was seen as necessary for keeping the slave states of Kentucky, Missouri and Maryland in the Union, but in a couple of weeks Lincoln would sign a confiscation act allowing for the seizure of property, including slaves, from rebellious citizens.

Robert M. T. Hunter replaced Robert Toombs as the Confederate Secretary of State.  Toombs, the only member of Jefferson Davis's cabinet to voice opposition to the attack on Fort Sumter, had resigned to join the Confederate army.  He received a commission as a brigadier general on July 19, and served as a brigade commander in Joe Johnston's Confederate Army of the Potomac.

At Mesilla, in New Mexico Territory, the Union garrison at Fort Fillmore attacked John Baylor's Confederates in a brief skirmish.  The Union assault was repulsed and they eventually retreated back to the fort.  When Baylor moved on the fort the following day, the Union troops abandoned it and retreated toward Fort Stanton.  Baylor pursued, capturing stragglers by the dozens before overtaking the Federals and forcing their surrender at San Augustine Springs on July 27.

150 Years Ago: Rich Mountain

Image of General William Rosecrans via Wikipedia

On Thursday, July 11, 1861, the battle of Rich Mountain took place in Randolph County, Virginia (now West Virginia).

Union Major General George McClellan, commanding the Department of the Ohio, had come to western Virginia in late May, occupying Grafton, a key junction on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.  He then sent a detachment to rout a small Confederate force at Philippi on June 3.  He then spent several weeks consolidating his forces and securing the portion of the railroad that ran through this mountainous country.

He was opposed by Brigadier General Robert Garnett who commanded some 5000 men at Beverly, a vital turnpike crossroads.  Garnett had been unable to get reinforcements or recruits from the pro-Union population, and was reduced to staging raids on Union supply lines.

When McClellan was finally ready, he moved forward to take on this force and capture Beverly.  He commanded an imposing force of 20,000, but some 5000 were were scattered throughout the countryside guarding the railroad, bridges and roads.

He found the Confederates entrenched on Rich Mountain and Laurel Mountain, protecting Beverly on the west and north respectively.  He split his force into two columns that marched on the positions in a coordinated advance.  From Philippi, Brigadier General Thomas Morris marched to confront the force at Laurel Mountain.  McClellan, with his principal lieutenant, Brigadier General William Rosecrans, moved from Buckhannon toward Rich Mountain.

Morris was in position on July 7 and engaged the Confederates in a series of small skirmishes over the next few days that convinced Garnett that he would be attacked from the north.  He concentrated most of his men on Laurel Mountain, leaving just 1300 under Colonel John Pegram on Rich Mountain.

Even with an overwhelming advantage, McClellan was hesitant to launch a frontal assault on Rich Mountain.  The Confederates had a strong position and a prisoner had convinced the general that he faced many more men than were actually there.

A young civilian, David Hart, appeared in the Union lines and told Rosecrans of a path that led around the left flank of the Confederate position.  Rosecrans took the young man to McClellan and, after deciding that Hart could be trusted, came up with a new plan.  Rosecrans would take his brigade of 1900 men -- the 8th, 10th and 13th Indiana, and the 19th Ohio Regiments -- south of the Confederate position and attack the Confederates from the rear.  McClellan would wait with the rest of the men and make a frontal assault when Rosecrans launched his assault.

At 5 a.m. on July 11, Rosecrans's force headed off with David Hart in the lead.  It was slow going, taking eight hours to get seven or eight miles through the mountain forest, but Rosecrans finally emerged a mile or two in the rear of the Confederate position.  After a sharp fight that lasted almost two hours, Rosecrans personally led a charge that overwhelmed the Confederates.  McClellan never made the planned frontal assault.

From McClellan's official report:

Headquarters, Department of the Ohio, Rich Mountain, Va., 9 a.m., July 12, 1861.
Col. E. D. Townsend: We are in possession of all the enemy's works up to a point in the right of Beverly. I have taken all his guns, a very large amount of wagons, tents, &c.--everything he had — a large number of prisoners, many of whom were wounded, and several officers prisoners. They lost many killed. We have lost, in all, perhaps twenty killed and fifty wounded, of whom all but two or three were in the column under Rosecrans, which turned the position. The mass of the enemy escaped through the woods, entirely disorganized. Among the prisoners is Dr. Taylor, formerly of the army. Col. Pegram was in command.

Colonel Rosecrans's column left camp yesterday morning, and marched some eight miles through the mountains, reaching the turnpike some two or three miles in rear of the enemy, defeating an advanced post, and taking a couple of guns. I had a position ready for twelve guns near the main camp, and as guns were moving up, I ascertained that the enemy had retreated. I am now pushing on to Beverly, a part of Colonel Rosecrans's troops being now within three miles of it.

McClellan submitted a second report a little later:

Beverly, July 12th, 1861.
Col. E. D. Townsend, Washington, D. C,:
The success of to-day is all that I could desire. We captured six brass cannons, of which one is rifled, all the enemy's camp equipage and transportation, even to his cups. The number of tents will probably reach two hundred, and more than sixty wagons. Their killed and wounded will amount to fully one hundred and fifty, with one hundred prisoners, and more coming in constantly. I know already of ten officers killed and prisoners. Their retreat is complete.

I occupied Beverly by a rapid march. Garnett abandoned his camp early in the morning, leaving much of his equipage. He came within a few miles of Beverly, but our rapid march turned him back in great confusion, and he is now retreating on the road to St. George. I have ordered Gen. Morris to follow him up closely.

I have telegraphed for the two Pennsylvania regiments at Cumberland to join Gen. Hill at Rowlesburg. The General is concentrating all his troops at Rowlesburg, and he will cut off Garnett's retreat near West Union, or, if possible, at St. George.

I may say that we have driven out some ten thousand troops, strongly intrenched, with the loss of 11 killed and 35 wounded. The provision returns here show Garnett's force to have been ten thousand men. They were Eastern Virginians, Tennesseans, Georgians, and, I think, Carolinians. To-morrow I can give full details, as to prisoners, &c.

Related articles

• 150 Years Ago: Grafton, Virginia (civilwarmeanderings.blogspot.com)
• 150 Years Ago: The Philippi Races (civilwarmeanderings.blogspot.com)