Tennessee's Cumberland Plateau played host to some of the most dramatic military maneuvering of the Civil War. As Federal forces sought to capitalize on the capture of Nashville, they moved into a region split by the most vicious guerrilla warfare outside Missouri. The bitter conflict affected thousands of ordinary men and women struggling to survive in the face of a remorseless war of attrition, and its legacy continues to be felt today.
Rebels on the Border offers a remarkably compelling and significant study of the Civil War South's highly contested and bloodiest border states: Kentucky and Missouri. By far the most complex examination to date, the book sharply focuses on the "borderland" between the free North and the Confederate South. As a result, Rebels on the Border deepens and enhances understanding of the sectional conflict, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. After slaves in central Kentucky and Missouri gained their emancipation, author Aaron Astor contends, they transformed informal kin and social networks of resistance against slavery into more formalized processes of electoral participation and institution building. At the same time, white politics in Kentucky's Bluegrass and Missouri's Little Dixie underwent an electoral realignment in response to the racial and social revolution caused by the war and its aftermath. Black citizenship and voting rights provoked a violent white reaction and a cultural reinterpretation of white regional identity. After the war, the majority of wartime Unionists in the Bluegrass and Little Dixie joined former Confederate guerrillas in the Democratic Party in an effort to stifle the political ambitions of former slaves. Rebels on the Border is not simply a story of bitter political struggles, partisan guerrilla warfare, and racial violence. Like no other scholarly account of Kentucky and Missouri during the Civil War, it places these two crucial heartland states within the broad context of local, southern, and national politics.
Two aging Civil War veterans mourned the death of their sons at a joint funeral in Knoxville National Cemetery. One, a cavalry general, had fought for the Union. The other had served as surgeon/major of a Confederate cavalry regiment. They met for the first time at the graves of their sons--two army lieutenants and University of Tennessee graduates killed together in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. Newspaper accounts presented the encounter as an example of reconciliation between North and South. This book recounts the meeting of two families from opposing sides of the war--both rooted in East Tennessee, a region harshly divided by the conflict--placing their story in the context of America's reconciliation narrative at the end of the 19th century.
"In the Southern Appalachian Mountains, no character was more loved or despised than Union officer George W. Kirk. He led a group of deserters on numerous raids between Tennessee and North Carolina in 1863. At Camp Vance in Morganton, Kirk's mounted raiders showcased guerrilla warfare penetrating deep within Confederate territory. As Home Guards struggled to keep Western North Carolina communities safe, Kirk's men brought fear throughout the region for their ability to strike and create havoc without warning. Civil War historian Michael C. Hardy examines the infamous history of George W. Kirk and the Civil War along the Blue Ridge."--provided by publisher.
The Battle of Chickamauga was the third bloodiest of the American Civil War and the only major Confederate victory in the conflict's western theater. It pitted Braxton Bragg's Army of Tennessee against William S. Rosecrans's Army of the Cumberland and resulted in more than 34,500 casualties. In this first volume of an authoritative two-volume history of the Chickamauga Campaign, William Glenn Robertson provides a richly detailed narrative of military operations in southeastern and eastern Tennessee as two armies prepared to meet along the "River of Death." Robertson tracks the two opposing armies from July 1863 through Bragg's strategic decision to abandon Chattanooga on September 9. Drawing on all relevant primary and secondary sources, Robertson devotes special attention to the personalities and thinking of the opposing generals and their staffs. He also sheds new light on the role of railroads on operations in these landlocked battlegrounds, as well as the intelligence gathered and used by both sides. Delving deep into the strategic machinations, maneuvers, and smaller clashes that led to the bloody events of September 19@–20, 1863, Robertson reveals that the road to Chickamauga was as consequential as the unfolding of the battle itself.
Of all the states in the Confederacy, Tennessee was the most sectionally divided. East Tennesseans opposed secession at the ballot box in 1861, petitioned unsuccessfully for separate statehood, resisted the Confederate government, enlisted in Union militias, elected U.S. congressmen, and fled as refugees into Kentucky. These refugees formed Tennessee's first Union cavalry regiments during early 1862, followed shortly thereafter by others organized in Union-occupied Middle and West Tennessee. In Homegrown Yankees, the first book-length study of Union cavalry from a Confederate state, James Alex Baggett tells the remarkable story of Tennessee's loyal mounted regiments. Fourteen mounted regiments that fought primarily within the boundaries of the state and eight local units made up Tennessee's Union cavalry. Young, nonslaveholding farmers who opposed secession, the Confederacy, and the war -- from isolated villages east of Knoxville, the Cumberland Mountains, or the Tennessee River counties in the west -- filled the ranks. Most Tennesseans denounced these local bluecoats as renegades, turncoats, and Tories; accused them of betraying their people, their section, and their race; and held them in greater contempt than soldiers from the North. Though these homegrown Yankees participated in many battles -- including those in the Stones River, Tullahoma, Chickamauga, East Tennessee, Nashville, and Atlanta campaigns -- their story provides rare insights into what occurred between the battles. For them, military action primarily meant almost endless skirmishing with partisans, guerrillas, and bushwackers, as well as with the Rebel raiders of John Hunt Morgan, Joseph Wheeler, and Nathan Bedford Forrest, who frequently recruited and supplied themselves from behind enemy lines. Tennessee's Union cavalry scouted and foraged the countryside, guarded outposts and railroads, acted as couriers, supported the flanks of infantry, and raided the enemy. On occasion, especially during the Nashville campaign, they provided rapid pursuit of Confederate forces. They also helped protect fellow unionists from an aggressive pro-Confederate insurgency after 1862. Baggett vividly describes the deprivation, sickness, and loneliness of cavalrymen living on the war's periphery and traces how circumstances beyond their control -- such as terrain, transport, equipage, weaponry, public sentiment, and military policy -- affected their lives. He also explores their well-earned reputation for plundering -- misdeeds motivated by revenge, resentment, a lack of discipline, and the hard-war policy of the Union army. In the never-before-told story of these cavalrymen, Homegrown Yankees offers new insights into an unexplored facet of southern Unionism and provides an exciting new perspective on the Civil War in Tennessee.
Grundy County, Tennessee and surrounding areas suffered under the occupation of the Confederate and Union forces for most of the Civil War. Though no major battles were fought here, the are was important for several strategic reasons. Nathan Bedford Forrest, along with Tennessee governor Isham Harris, planned Forrest's famous raid on Murfreesboro in Beersheba Springs. The Confederate raid on the Union garrison at Tracy City created a flurry of troop movement to protect the coal mines and Union supply depot. The bridge over the Elk River at Pelham was one of the most important strategic sites in the battle for Tennessee. Once Colonel John Wilder, equipped with repeating rifles, seized the bridge over the rain swollen Elk River at Pelham, Braxton Bragg knew he could not defend Tullahoma, and the Army of Tennessee retreated over the mountain to Chattanooga. Bushwhackers and deserters roamed the sparsely populated mountains and coves. Calvin Brixey, the most notorious of the bunch, caused much death and destruction. It would be years before the area would recover.
Seventeen original essays by prominent scholars uncover fascinating stories and personalities from the Upper Cumberland region of Kentucky and Tennessee, often regarded as isolated and out of pace with the rest of the country, but seen here as having a far richer history and culture than previously thought.
This collection uncovers the fascinating past of Tennessee’s legendary Music City from true tall tales to larger than life characters and much more. Perched on the banks of the Cumberland River, Nashville is best known for its role in the civil rights movement, world-class education and, of course, country music. In this unique collection of columns written for The Tennessean, journalist and longtime Tennessee native George Zepp illuminates a less familiar side of the city’s history. Here, readers will learn the secrets of Timothy Demonbreun, one of the city's first residents, who lived with his family in a cliff-top cave; Cortelia Clark, the blind bluesman who continued to perform on street corners after winning a Grammy award; and Nashville's own Cinderella story, which involved legendary radio personality Edgar Bergen and his ventriloquist protegee. Based on questions from readers across the nation, these little-known tales abound with Music City mystery and charm.
