Chalmers’s outmanned cavalry was gradually cut off and pushed back more or less out of the battle picture, with Chalmers losing all his wagon train, records, and personal belongings. When redoubt number 5 collapsed and the bluecoats of McArthur’s division began swarming across the Hillsboro Pike, Ector’s men were effectively cut off from the rest of Walthall’s men and had to beat a hasty retreat south and east to keep from being annihilated. As darkness fell on the short December day, these forlorn men were making their way back to whatever now constituted the Confederate line, when they encountered General Hood, who had come forward in the afternoon to get a better look at things. Hood had ridden to the top of an eminence that would presently become known as Shy’s Hill, near the Granny White Pike, about a mile east and two miles south of his original line of battle. When Ector’s men came dragging along, Hood stopped them and led them personally to the top of Shy’s Hill. “Texans,” he said, “I want you to hold this hill regardless of what transpires around you.” Already twice overwhelmed and routed that day, the bedraggled Texans replied, “We’ll do it, General.”
So far, Thomas’s plan was moving along pretty much on schedule. He had not quite succeeded in hooking all the way around Hood and clamping him in a hopeless vice, but he had managed to pry the Confederates out of their strong fortifications on the left and shove the west wing back more than two miles to the south. This precipitated a total realignment by Hood of all his forces and the abandonment of his original positions.
As darkness ended the fighting, Thomas sent a telegram to Halleck in Washington:
Nashville Term., December 15, 1864—9 P.M.
Maj. Gen. H. W. Halleck, Washington, D.C.:
I attacked the enemy’s left this morning and drove it from the river, below the city, very nearly to the Franklin Pike, a distance about eight miles. Have captured General Chalmers’ headquarters and train, and a second train of about 20 wagons, with between 800 and 1000 prisoners and 16 pieces of artillery. The troops behaved splendidly, all taking their share in assaulting and carrying the enemy’s breast-works. I shall attack the enemy again to-morrow, if he stands to fight, and, if he retreats during the night, will pursue him, throwing a heavy cavalry force in his rear, to destroy his trains, if possible.
GEO. H. THOMAS
Major-general, U.S. Volunteers, Commanding.
This good news at last from Nashville aroused fierce rejoicing in the capital. Secretary of War Stanton immediately telegraphed Thomas a congratulatory message and told him they would fire a hundred-gun salute to him in Washington next morning. Grant, however, was more reserved. In fact Grant had actually been en route to Nashville to see about the situation and take personal command when the news of Thomas’s attack reached him. Wiring Thomas just before midnight, he said, “I will go no farther. Push the enemy now, and give him no rest until he is entirely destroyed.” Then, from hundreds of miles away, he went on to gratuitously lecture Thomas on how he should conduct the next attack on Hood, closing with the admonition, “Much is now expected.” Fifteen minutes after he sent that telegram, however, he apparently realized that he had not even congratulated Thomas and rectified the omission in a new wire, lauding Thomas and his army.
For his part, Thomas simply remarked to one of his staff, “I think we have done pretty well today” and set about making plans to undo Hood entirely next morning. Steedman would renew the attack against Hood’s right, Wood would continue to hold the center in place, while Smith and Schofield and Wilson would hammer away at the left and rear. Before he went to bed, Thomas sent a brief telegram to his wife in New York: “We have whipped the enemy, taken many prisoners and considerable artillery.”
17
Didn’t I Tell You We Could Lick ‘Em?
The next morning, December 16, dawned gray and somber, and before long it began to rain. Back around Nashville, the hills were dotted black with civilian spectators who had come—as they had the previous day—to watch the impending battle. This was a dour and sullen crowd, occupying rooftops, balconies, upper-floor windows, and practically every rise of ground where a vantage point might be had. Being for the most part in sympathy with the South, it was not a happy occasion for these Nashvilleans, who were fully aware of the federal successes the day before. To some it was as though they were witnessing firsthand the demise of the Confederacy, and in this they were all too correct.
During the night, Hood had drawn his army into a contracted line shaped like a shallow U, in the Brentwood Hills, about two miles south of his previous position. He had moved Cheatham’s corps from the far right of the line to the far left, so that now Lee, who had held the center, was on the far right, and Stewart, who had been on the left, was holding the center. The commanding position on the left, where Thomas again intended to make his strike, was Shy’s Hill, occupied now only by Ector’s depleted little brigade. Here Hood ordered that Cheatham should place Bate’s division, and in the darkness Cheatham personally led Bate to his assigned lines on the hill. Not satisfied with his position, Bate complained to Cheatham, but the corps commander replied that he was “not authorized to change it,” so all through the dark of night Bate’s men worked feverishly to fortify themselves against the onslaught they knew would come next day. Because of the wet and marshy ground, Bate had been unable to bring up any of his artillery, but at dawn he discovered a road that allowed him to field a section of howitzers on a small plateau from which they could sweep the approaches to the field. These guns were under the direction of Captain R. T. Beauregard, son of the former commanding general of the Army of Tennessee.
As the sky lightened and the chilling drizzle continued to pester the men in both armies, Hood had a prescient thought. At 8 A.M. he issued contingency orders to his corps commanders giving their routes of retreat “should any disaster happen to us to-day.”
Over in the Union lines, the mood did not match the weather. Pap Thomas knew he had Hood on the run; the question now was whether or not he could catch him. He had just received another of those schizoid telegrams from Washington, this one from Lincoln himself, in which the president first extended the nation’s thanks to Thomas for his “good work of yesterday” and then snatched the bloom off the rose by tacking on this patronizing admonition: “A grand consummation is within your reach. Do not let it slip.”
If Thomas was rankled by this, he said nothing of it. So far, his battle plan had worked almost perfectly—possibly more than any other major battle plan of the Civil War. Not only had he hammered Hood out of his positions, but he had done so without running any substantial risk to himself. Even if he had been repulsed, Hood’s plan of “following the defeated enemy into Nashville” would never have succeeded because, with his superiority of numbers, Thomas was able to maneuver the bulk of his army—fifty-five thousand men—against Hood and at the same time leave the Nashville defenses thoroughly manned and fortified.
As he rode through the city that morning, a window from a nearby home slammed down in Thomas’s face, and when he looked up, he saw a young woman scowling down at him. He rode on “with an amused smile,” unaware that the lady in question would soon become the wife of one of his officers.
The first order of business that morning was to get Wilson’s cavalrymen moving again against Hood’s far left. That done, the next step was to figure out precisely where Hood’s new line was. This was accomplished by a general movement of skirmishers from each corps, who quickly developed Hood’s position, followed by the alignment of Union divisions and establishment of a horrific artillery bombardment against the thin gray line.
As it had the day before, Thomas’s initial assault fell on Hood’s right, in hopes of causing the Confederate commander to draw troops off from his left to reinforce it. Shortly before noon, the corps of Steedman and T. J. Wood assaulted a hill defended by the division of General Henry D. Clayton and were nearly cut to pieces. The Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana brigades poured a steady stream of lead into the advancing blue line, while Confede
rate artillery pounded it with shot and shell. A Union officer in this advance was hit by an artillery round that literally tore out his heart and left it dangling on his stomach, where it was said to have beat for fifteen minutes. By midafternoon, after several charges, the federals were no closer to dislodging Lee’s men than they were on the first try.
It was here that the U.S. Colored Troops gained their measure of glory but at a terrific cost. Clayton reported: “Five color-bearers with their colors were shot down in a few steps of the works, one of which, having inscribed on its folds, ‘Eighteenth Regiment, U.S. Colored Infantry; presented by the colored ladies of Murfreesborough,’ was brought in.” And General James T. Holtzclaw wrote: “At 12 P.M. the enemy made a most determined charge on my right. Placing a negro brigade in front they gallantly dashed up to the abatis, forty feet in front, and were killed by hundreds. Pressed on by their white brethren in the rear they continued to come up in masses to the abatis, but they came only to die. I have seen most of the battle-fields of the West, but never saw dead men thicker than in front of my two right regiments.”
Meantime, over on Hood’s far left, Wilson and his horsemen were having a rough time of it. The ground was slippery, the woods dense, and Wilson wasn’t making much progress getting in Hood’s rear. About 10 A.M. he sent a message to Thomas asking if it might not be better for him to take his cavalry around to the opposite side of Hood’s line and see what they could do from there. Thomas declined, telling Wilson to keep at it where he was. About noon, more than four thousand of Wilson’s dismounted men, with their fast-firing repeaters, finally managed to get around Cheatham’s flank and began moving in behind him. It was about then that some of Wilson’s troopers captured a courier Hood had sent to Chalmers, and on him they found this desperate message from the Confederate commander: “For God’s sake [drive] the Yankee cavalry from our left and rear or all is lost.”
BATTLE OF NASHVILLE
December 16, 1864
At this point, Wilson knew—or thought he did—that victory was at hand. The overall battle plan for that day called for him, once in position on Hood’s flank, to join with Schofield in launching the general attack, which would be the signal for the other corps to assault all down the Union line. Realizing that the time had come, Wilson forwarded Hood’s captured message directly to Thomas and then “sent three staff officers, one after the other, urging Schofield to attack the enemy in front and finish up the day’s work with victory.” Schofield, however, was unmoved by Wilson’s pleas. In fact, not only did he not think Hood was beaten, he actually was scared that Hood was going to attack him. During the night he had requested and received from Thomas a full division of reinforcements from the corps of A. J. Smith, and now, even more nervous, he was calling for additional fresh troops.
“Fearing that nothing would be done,” Wilson said, “I rode around the enemy’s left flank to Thomas’ headquarters, which I found on the turnpike, about two miles from my own.” By then, he recalled, it was nearly 4 P.M., and the short day was already growing dark from the clouds and rain. Arriving on the scene “with ill-concealed impatience,” he found Thomas and Schofield standing together on a hill from which the whole panorama of the battlefield was plainly visible in the dim, smoky light. They could see the entire Confederate left flank, marked by flashes of cannon and rifle fire, spread across the hills to the east, and also Wilson’s own dismounted men, who “were in plain sight, moving against the left and rear of the enemy’s line.”
Thomas at this point was not as happy with the progress of things as he had been the day before—and particularly not with Schofield’s performance. Here it was nearly dark and nothing much had been accomplished except the futile bloodshed during the abortive attacks on Hood’s right. A little while earlier, Thomas had received a request from A. J. Smith saying that General McArthur wanted to immediately attack the Confederate salient in his front, but Thomas demurred, proclaiming: “The prescribed order of attack gives the initiative to General Schofield.” But now Thomas was discovering that Schofield was reluctant to move. When he told the Twenty-third Corps commander to assault the positions to his front, Schofield complained that it would cause a great loss of life, prompting Thomas to respond disgustedly: “The battle must be fought, [even] if men are killed.”
Now, with Wilson at his side, Thomas calmly raised his field glasses to scan the area where Wilson earlier claimed his cavalry could be seen, and asked him again if he was sure those were his men. Just then a mass of bluecoats moved out from the trees on the left and started toward the Confederate line. It was McArthur, who, even more impatient than Wilson, was defying orders from both Thomas and Smith and launching his assault anyway. Thomas turned to Schofield: “General Smith [meaning McArthur’s division] is attacking without waiting for you,” he said. “Please advance your entire line.”
It had not been such a good afternoon over in the Confederate lines, but neither did the army exude the kind of gloom that hung over the misty Tennessee landscape. Hood had moved his headquarters to the Lea House near the Franklin Pike and was feeling more confident now that darkness was closing in and all federal assaults so far had been handsomely repulsed. By this point, he later recalled, he had “matured the movement for the next morning.” He postulated that Thomas’s left flank—which had suffered so much that day at the hands of Lee’s men—“stood in air some six miles from Nashville.” In what indeed would have been a bold move, he said he had now decided “to withdraw [his] entire force during the night and attack this exposed flank in rear [the next day],” adding that he could have done so safely because, “I still had open a line of retreat.” Earlier that day he had had the following order read to the troops: “The commanding General takes pleasure in announcing to his troops that victory and success are now within their grasp; and the commanding general feels proud and gratified that in every attack and assault the enemy have been repulsed; and the commanding general will further say to his noble and gallant troops, ‘Be of good cheer—all is well.’ ”
Hood was not alone in his confidence. Brigade and division commanders over in Lee’s corps reported that they actually had to restrain their men from counterattacking against the failed bluecoat assaults, and Hood himself reported that men were “waving their colors in defiance, crying out to the enemy, ‘come on, come on.’” Thus it must have come as a sour surprise for the Confederate commander when the unmistakable sounds of a major battle on his left began to waft back to him across the darkening hills.
For Cheatham’s corps—and for the men of Bate’s division in particular—things had not appeared so rosy. Atop Shy’s Hill, a node-like lump that constituted the left salient of Hood’s defenses, there was a crawling uneasiness over the positioning of the line that Bate had unsuccessfully tried to correct. Thomas’s attack on the Confederate right had caused Hood to withdraw vital units from his left to reinforce Lee, and this had spread Cheatham’s line to the snapping point. They had worked all night to throw up some kind of breastworks, but, as one man explained, “Tools were very scarce, about one to every ten men.” When morning came, “We had very poor works—at some places only old logs and rocks piled together and a few shovels of dirt thrown on them.” Hood’s own engineer had laid out this line, it seems, and no one—not even Cheatham—was authorized to change it. Problem was, the line was a defensive disaster waiting to happen. The position had been drawn so far back from the “military crest” of the hill that one officer complained, “A six foot man could not be seen twenty yards from the front, thus rendering it possible [for the federals] to mass an attacking party within a few yards of the position and be perfectly sheltered from our fire.”
This was precisely what the bluecoats did. In positioning their lines, they massed a full division under the shelter at the bottom of Shy’s Hill, perfectly impervious to any fire the Confederates could bring to bear, and when the time came, they were ready. The exposed Confederate positions came under fire in midmorning, but about 2 P.M.
the Union batteries began to open up on them in earnest. General Bate explained in his report, “[The federal artillery] threw shells directly in the back of my left brigade, and placed a battery on a hill diagonally to my left, which took my first brigade in reverse.”
So now Bate’s men were getting it front, sides, and rear. An officer in the line commented, “If a man raised his head over the slight works he was very apt to lose it.” Another staff officer noted later that “the men seemed utterly lethargic and without interest in battle.” Private Sam Watkins, who was on that line, wrote later, “[The army was] somewhat like a flock of geese that have lost their leader. I have never seen an army so confused and demoralized. I remember when passing by Hood, how feeble and decrepit he looked, with an arm in a sling, and a crutch in the other hand, and trying to guide and control his horse.”
Meantime, Chalmers’s cavalry was involved in a heroic but futile struggle against Wilson’s overbearing forces. Some twelve hundred men under command of Colonel D. C. Kelly were pitched against perhaps eight thousand of Wilson’s ferociously armed troopers who were moving up the Granny White Pike to gain Cheatham’s flank and rear. With Kelly riding up and down the lines crying, “Pour it into them boys, pour it into them,” the little band of cavalry held up Wilson’s advancing megalith much of the day but finally caved in to superior numbers about 4 P.M.