Just how much Hood knew of Thomas’s intentions is not clear, but apparently there wasn’t much early warning. Undoubtedly, Hood was receiving information from spies in Nashville, but even on December 10—five days back—he had issued a circular to his corps commanders saying, “[It is] highly probable that we will fight a battle before the close of the present year.” Two days later it still seemed that Hood expected to stay at Nashville unmolested for a while, because he telegraphed the War Department that Wheeler’s cavalry should be sent back to him “when Sherman completes his raid.” On the afternoon of the 13th, Hood informed Stewart that Thomas’s cavalry had been crossing the Cumberland all day and going into Nashville and told Stewart to send one of his infantry brigades to cover the Harding Pike on the far left. Around midnight on the 14th, Hood got some kind of information that provoked him into sending a warning that Chalmers’s position was going to be attacked by cavalry next day. But as late as the morning of Thomas’s main assault, Hood was still cranking out telegrams to various authorities in the rear, trying to reclaim detached troops and other things for his army. He even sent an order to his inspector general back at Corinth, Mississippi, saying, “The officers of the military courts must come forward at once.”
BATTLE OF NASHVILLE
December 15, 1864
One of Hood’s problems that day—and he had many—was that a pea-soup fog had blanketed the whole area, easily masking Thomas’s movements. In fact, the fog was so thick that Thomas was unable to get his corps in place for the anticipated dawn attack, and it was past 8 A.M. when Steedman, on the federal left, was finally able to open the battle with his “feint” against Cheatham’s entrenched divisions.
Steedman’s corps was truly a grab-bag arrangement. It wasn’t exactly a corps that Steedman commanded but something called the Provisional Detachment of the District of the Etowah. This was a collection of garrison soldiers, stragglers, invalids, deserters, quartermaster troops, detached and unattached units, and eight regiments of U.S. Colored Troops. It also contained a brigade commander by the name of Benjamin Harrison, who would one day become the twenty-third president of the United States. Steedman himself was a character of some controversy. He was a forty-seven-year-old failed politician who, with no formal education, had managed to become a newspaper owner back in Ohio before the war. When the Fourth Army Corps under David Stanley returned from Georgia to Chattanooga before Hood launched his campaign, Stanley encountered Steedman as the commander there, in the company of Prince Felix Salm Salm, a thirty-year-old soldier of fortune cavalry officer who had served in the Prussian army, spoke no English, and wore a monocle. Stanley gave the following description:
[Steedman] was the most thorough specimen of a political general I met during the war. He always managed to hold commands where there were emoluments. At this time he was living in very high style, holding a gay court. The Princess Salm Salm was his guest, and occasionally the Prince, who was the colonel of a New York regiment stationed twenty miles from headquarters, dropped in. The Princess was a very beautiful woman, afterwards mixed up with the tragedy of Maximilian. Steedman was dead in love with the woman, and such an idiot that I could not get any work out of him. In fact, he was so taken up with making love to the Princess and drinking champagne that it was difficult to see this great potentate of Chattanooga.
It was the Colored Troops under Steedman who bore the brunt of battle on that section of the line. Steedman’s regiments, black and white, seventy-five hundred strong, came marching out of the mist “as if on dress parade” where Cheatham’s men were waiting for them. The federal force consisted of two brigades of the Colored Troops under Colonels Thomas J. Morgan and Charles R. Thompson and one brigade of white “convalescents, conscripts and bounty-jumpers” under Colonel Charles H. Grosvenor.
Grosvenor’s men were to support the main attack by Morgan, but in this they failed miserably. The Confederates of Granbury’s old brigade had formed in a little lunette near the main line, and when Grosvenor’s men got within good range, Cheatham’s artillery opened up on them in full force, causing the line to hesitate, then waver. At that point, Granbury’s men and others rose and delivered a devastating volley into the already shaken ranks, which, Grosvenor reported, “stampeded the whole line,” and his brigade of blue coats fled from the field in five minutes. Next, Thompson’s Colored Troops came up, only to receive the same treatment, and no further assault was attempted by them, either.
That was bad enough, but compared to what Cheatham’s men had in store for Morgan’s Colored Troops, it was child’s play. Cheatham’s right curved around to rest on a cut along the Alabama-Nashville railroad, and Morgan’s direction of march would apparently have taken him not only across the exposed cut but actually into Cheatham’s rear. As the amazed Confederates watched, Morgan’s men came steadily forward, and it was immediately determined “to make a trap for them”—just as the men of Stewart’s corps had been trapped and slaughtered in the railroad cut at Franklin.
The Confederates stealthily held their fire as Morgan’s men advanced unmolested up to the railroad cut; then, suddenly, two brigades made an about-face, with one wheeling left, and the trap was sprung. Morgan’s men walked straight into a slaughter. As the graycoats opened up on the surprised blacks along the exposed cut, many jumped into the cut itself and were shot down. Others jumped into a small pond that was made from the embankment of the cut and “were killed until the pond was black.” Morgan and what was left of his brigade quickly fled the scene. Some 630 blueclad bodies were later counted on the scene, the vast majority from the U.S. Colored Troops.
In their after-action reports, the three Union commanders had various things to say about their performances. Grosvenor admitted that his men, “with a few honorable exceptions, behaved in the most cowardly and disgraceful manner.” Thompson indicated that his brigade “took the works in [their] front”; however, since those were obviously not near the main Confederate battle line, they must have been old skirmishers’ outposts. Morgan forthrightly stated that he had walked into a trap but claimed he could not have known that Granbury’s men were in such strength in their lunette. Morgan also insisted that even though his men had retired from the field, they had nonetheless accomplished their main purpose of keeping Cheatham’s corps pinned in position on the right while the main attack was being launched against Hood’s left. In this the Union colonel was wrong, because Hood was not deceived—at least not for long—and just as soon as it became apparent that the heavy blow was going to fall four miles to the west, Hood ordered Cheatham to rush most of his men over to support Stewart’s flank.
First to feel the brunt of Thomas’s attack on Hood’s left was the emaciated brigade of General Matthew Ector, now commanded by Colonel David Coleman. These seven hundred survivors of the fight at Franklin had been posted about two miles to the northwest of Hood’s main battle line near the Harding Pike. What they felt as fog lifted to reveal twenty thousand bluecoats from Smith’s and Wilson’s corps bearing down on them must have been similar to what the men of Wagner’s unfortunate brigades experienced back at Franklin. Providentially, the Confederate’s instructions—unlike those of Wagner—were not to stand and fight the whole Union army but to “hold the line until forced to retire, then fall back over the ridge in order, and make a run of about two miles to the Hillsboro Pike.” Lieutenant J. J. Tunnell, a Texan, recorded that the federal lines moved slowly but steadily forward into “a warm reception,” but, he added, “When they got uncomfortably near, we hastily fell back.”
What Ector’s brigade fell back on was a fairly formidable line of defense that Hood had been fortifying for about a week. While Cheatham’s and Lee’s corps were positioned in a long crescent facing Nashville to the north, Stewart’s corps joined them facing westward for a mile on a series of hills along the Hillsboro Pike. Not only was Stewart dug in, but also for most of the length of his line a stone wall ran along the road, providing excellent protection. In addition, Hood h
ad ordered the hills in front of this line to be crowned with a series of redoubts, numbered 1 to 5, small, mutually supporting earth-and-timber forts, each containing a battery of artillery and manned by 150 infantry. These were supposed to represent an impregnable barrier to anything that attacked from the west, but construction on them was still unfinished when the full fury of Thomas’s assault came wheeling across the fields.
As Ector’s exhausted men came panting into the main Confederate positions, Stewart recorded that his line “was stretched to its utmost tension” but still could not reach far enough to support the number 4 and 5 redoubts at the southernmost end of it. Notified of this, Hood reinforced him with two brigades—Manigault’s and Deas’s—from Lee’s corps in the center, but it was too late. A flurry of increasingly nervous correspondence was dashed between brigade, division, and corps commands, commencing about 10 A.M., when Brigadier General Claudius W. Sears reported to General Loring, “A heavy column of infantry is moving to our left.” A few minutes later, Colonel Robert Lowry, now leading the late John Adams’s brigade of Mississippians, wrote Loring, “There seems to be a movement of some magnitude on our left.” Shortly afterward, Stewart received word from Sears’s adjutant, “Brigadier General Sears requests me to inform you that the demonstration of the enemy on the left is increasing.”
Stewart knew too well what that meant; any large federal movement against his left meant he was being outflanked. Stewart’s line, from right to left, was composed of Loring, French, and Walthall, except that French had gone on sick leave that morning, and his men were put under Walthall’s command. Stewart again applied to Hood for reinforcements, and he was told that two of Cheatham’s divisions would be coming up, but they were nearly five miles away on the other end of the line.
Slowly and deliberately, the blue juggernaught advanced on the little redoubts in Stewart’s front. Number 5, at the far south end of the line, was the first to be struck. A Union brigade from General John McArthur’s division of A. J. Smith’s corps advanced on it from the west, while a brigade of cavalry under Colonel Datus E. Coon had sidled around southeast and was now approaching from the flank. Coon’s men, dismounted, were equipped with the new Spencer repeating rifle, an intimidating weapon that gave a single soldier more than five times the firepower of his enemy. Also, Union artillery had been pounding redoubt 5 for about an hour. When the combined cavalry and infantry finally charged the isolated little outpost, it was quickly overwhelmed with the loss of its four guns.
Redoubt 4 was next. Smith had massed four batteries half a mile across the way and had been blasting at the wood and dirt fort all the time Coon and McArthur were wrapping around number 5. Now the Confederate guns they had captured there were also turned on number 4. It seemed as though number 4 would come to a quick end, but this was not the case, for it was commanded by Virginia Military Institute graduate Charles L. Lumsden, who had no intention of giving up without a fight. For three hours, beginning at 11 A.M., Lumsden and his gunners gave as good as they got, while overhead flew what one man remembered as a veritable “network of shrieking shells.” At one point the federals sneaked a battery into some haystacks behind number 4 and opened up on the exposed rear of the fort, but the Confederates hauled their guns out of their embrasures and turned them on the bluecoat artillery, which “soon got away from that position and troubled [them] no more.”
Meantime, the dismounted cavalry and second brigade of McArthur’s division had begun creeping nearer, and shortly after 2 P.M. it rose and made a charge. Lumsden and his cannoneers loaded up with double cannister and blew many of the bluecoats to kingdom come, but they were only a hundred or so against thousands. As the federals raced to and past number 4, Sergeant James Maxwell heard someone shout, “Look out, Jim!” He dropped to his hands and knees just in time to escape being decapitated by a double-shot cannister blast that sailed over his head from one of the other guns and tore into the advancing enemy. Maxwell, Lumsden, and some of the other gunners still stayed at their posts, firing as fast as they could, until Lumsden gave the order “Fire” and nothing happened—the man holding the friction primers had run away. Maxwell shouted, “Captain, he’s gone with the friction primers,” whereupon a federal soldier leaped over the fort wall and landed almost in Maxwell’s lap. Lumsden cried out, “Take care of yourselves, boys,” and that, finally, was the end of number 4.
The remnants of number 4 raced back as best they could to the stone wall, behind which was the main Confederate battle line. A little later, after Lumsden had received personal congratulations from Stewart for holding the fort so long, Lumsden and Maxwell were still trying to catch their breath and clean up, and Lumsden kept picking at something in his beard. During the battle one of their gunners had gotten part of his head blown off, and finally Lumsden said in disgust, “Maxwell, that is part of Rosser’s brains.”
The fall of number 4 signified far more than the loss of its guns and garrison. With that obstacle out of the way, the massed federal batteries now turned their attention to the Confederate line behind the stone wall, now occupied by the two brigades from Lee’s corps—Manigault’s and Deas’s—that had been rushed over as reinforcements in the early afternoon. Under cover of the bombardment, McArthur’s men steadily advanced on the stone wall, finally charging with a cheer that broke the line. Later, in his report, Stewart unhappily described how the two brigades, “making but feeble resistance, fled, and the enemy crossed the pike, passing Walthall’s left.” Meantime, Stewart had ordered a battery of artillery brought from a redoubt in Loring’s front, which was not yet under attack, and put east of the pike, telling Deas’s and Manigault’s men to reform there. “They again fled, however,” Stewart wrote, “on the approach of the enemy, abandoning the battery, which was captured.” By now, two additional brigades from Lee’s corps had been rushed to the scene, but even they, Stewart recalled, “were unable to check the progress of the enemy, who had passed the Hillsborough pike a full half mile, completely turning our flank, and gaining the rear of both Walthall and Loring, whose situation was becoming perilous in the extreme.”
Meantime, General Wood, commanding the wounded Stanley’s Fourth Army Corps, had been massing in front of Loring’s section of the line, exchanging heavy fire with the Confederates. About 4 P.M., an order was given to charge redoubt number 3—in conjunction with a brigade from McArthur’s division—which they did, clomping across a muddy corn field and capturing the fort and its guns. But once inside the fort they suddenly came under a galling crossfire from the Confederate guns in numbers 1 and 2. Realizing the peril, the federal brigade commander gave the order to storm number 2, but he “was shot through the head the next moment.” The executive officer, who had heard the order, repeated it, and the men leaped out of number 3 toward number 2, which, like number 1, was being hastily abandoned by the Confederates. Seeing the collapse of their flanks, the rest of Walthall’s men began to run, and Stewart quickly issued an order for both Loring and Walthall to immediately retreat eastward and reform on the Granny White Pike about a mile away. But this was not before Brigadier General Claudius Sears, a forty-seven-year-old West Point graduate and former mathematics instructor at Tulane, had his leg blown off by a cannon shot and was ultimately made a prisoner.
Just how perilous Stewart’s position was at that point is illustrated in a letter written by his adjutant, W. D. Gale, to his wife, shortly after the battle. Gale had set up a headquarters office and signal station in a house near the Hillsboro Pike and was sending and receiving dispatches to and from Hood and the other corps commanders until late in the afternoon when the lines broke. “I remained in my office until the Yankees advanced to within three hundred yards,” he wrote. “I then mounted and made my escape through the back yard, with my clerks. As our men fell back before the advancing Yankees, Mary Bradford [a neighborhood girl] ran out under heavy fire and did all she could to induce the men to stop and fight, appealing to them and begging them, but in vain. General Hood told me yester
day that he intended to mention her courageous conduct in his report, which will immortalize her. I never witnessed such want of enthusiasm and began to fear for to-morrow.”
Meantime, Wilson’s cavalry had been doing yeoman’s duty for Thomas. Assigned to protect the federal right and sweep wide to get into Hood’s flank and rear, Wilson and his twelve thousand men had opened the battle that morning with a spirited attack on Chalmers’s thin line of twelve hundred. These outnumbered graycoats put up a stubborn but futile resistance. Time and again they either dismounted and tried to check Wilson’s advance from behind such fortifications as they found, or pitched directly into him on horseback. Chalmers himself, along with his personal escort, led several of these charges, one of them accompanied by a cripple-armed seventy-five-year-old civilian resident named Cockrill, who charged along with the rest, holding the reins in his teeth and waving his hat with his one good arm.
Late in the afternoon, just as the main Confederate lines were crumbling under Thomas’s assault, Chalmers’s escort, much depleted and now under command of Lieutenant James Dinkins, reached the Belle Meade mansion, a Nashville landmark even then, with orders to secure Chalmers’s wagon train. Finding the train burned and the lawn of Belle Meade swarming with hundreds of federal soldiers, Dinkins sneaked his little entourage behind a barn and formed up for a charge. The Confederates swooped down, hollering and firing, but no sooner had Dinkins’s mad dash cut through the totally surprised bluecoats, when they encountered a line of Union infantry and were forced to withdraw. As they returned to Belle Meade, where “bullets were clipping the shrubbery and striking the house,” an astonishing apparition appeared on the mansion’s front steps. This turned out to be Miss Selene Harding, who, oblivious to the danger around her, was waving her handkerchief and exhorting the Southerners to fight. “She looked like a goddess,” Dinkins said, adding, “She was the gamest little human being in all the crowd.”