December 5, 1864---War in the Little Ice Age

DECEMBER 5, 1864:        

In Washington D.C., President Lincoln halts the execution of Sergeant Oliver B. Wheeler, a member of the Army of The Cumberland now encamped in Nashville.

The Battle of Wilkinson Pike  (The Third Battle of Murfreesboro): 

General John Bell Hood C.S.A. decides to disrupt the Nashville & Chattanooga Railroad and attack the huge Union supply depot at Murfreesboro in a vain attempt to cut the Union forces in Nashville off from the Union forces marching through Georgia.

Hood is seemingly not aware or does not credit the idea that Sherman has cut loose from his supply lines. Fixated on Sherman, Hood all but ignores the two Union armies closer at hand. 

Unsurprisingly, he tasks Nathan Bedford Forrest with destroying the depot and the rail line in what becomes a somewhat desultory, hit-and-run assault against the Confederate objectives. Forrest, of course, is successful. Such has become his legend that he takes two Union blockhouses at LaVergne just by demanding their surrender. 

Forrest then moves on Murfreesboro, where fighting flares for a few short hours on December 6th. However, the cold and the weather (lowering clouds with intermittent heavy freezing rain) wets the men’s powder, leaving both sides simply glaring at each other in the rain. 

Union reinforcements arrive from Nashville on the morning of the seventh, turning the tide. Having had enough of guns that won’t fire, icy weather, and cold mud (and now badly outnumbered to boot) Forrest’s men begin to withdraw against orders. Uncharacteristically unable to rally his men and thoroughly disgusted, Forrest calls off the attack.  

Although Forrest has destroyed some miles of railroad track and entered Union lines, the battle ultimately nets the Confederacy nothing, and is put down as one of Forrest’s very rare defeats. The greatest consequence of the battle of Wilkinson Pike is that Forrest returns to his free-ranging raiding, and is not present when John Bell Hood attacks Nashville later in the month.

Difficult weather has been a hallmark of the Civil War. The Civil War took place toward the sputtering end of The Little Ice Age (c. 1300-1900), a lengthy period of climate change which generally had darker, colder, wetter seasons than before or later:

In 1776, the Delaware River froze solid on Christmas Eve, aiding General Washington’s famed crossing and subsequent raid on the Hessian encampment near Trenton. 

In 1810, “The Year Without A Summer” saw summer snowfalls in Europe and the Americas as far south as northern Italy and Missouri. 

Ambrose Burnside’s tragicomic “Mud March” of 1862 was caused by freak weather conditions. 

January 1, 1864 is still the coldest recorded New Year’s Day on American record (-24 in Toledo, Ohio). 

At various times the Hudson River had frozen as had Niagara Falls. 

Torrential rains made roads into quagmires and washed away topsoil. 

Bad winters alternated with bad, blazingly hot, drought-ridden summers which also made campaigning difficult. 

Although the Little Ice Age was just about over, what no one fighting on the Wilkinson Pike could know was that the winter of 1864-1865 was to become, tragically, the most sustained harshly cold winter in memory.