December 16, 1864---The Battle of Nashville (Day Two)

DECEMBER 16, 1864:    

The Battle of Nashville    (Day Two):        

General John Bell Hood C.S.A. has contracted his lines at Nashville so that one is anchored on Overton’s Hill (Peach Orchard Hill) and the other on Shy’s Hill (Compton’s Hill). As day breaks, General George H. Thomas U.S.A.’s men assault Overton’s Hill. For some unknown reason, Thomas decides to launch the attack on Overton’s Hill with the same troops that had taken Montgomery’s Hill the day before, a force that had fought gallantly but with much loss of blood in hand-to-hand combat. Exactly why Thomas decides to use the same troops when he has 60,000 men on hand is never clear.

 

The assault on Overton’s Hill stalls as the Confederates fight for their very lives. Unfortunately for the Graybacks, they have made two mistakes. The first is that the entrenchments they have dug are shallow, and the second is that they have entrenched not on the military crest of the hill, where they can fire down on the Union line but on the geographical crest, where the assaulting troops are hidden from the Confederate line until the men are atop each other. The bloody stalemate is finally broken when the 13th Regiment U.S.C.T. joins the battle. Although 40% of the men fall, the Confederates are defeated on Overton’s Hill.

The engagement on Shy’s Hill gets off to a slow start. Although the outnumbered Confederates are dashing to Overton’s Hill to buck up the defenses, from afar off General Schofield can only see moving troops. Fearful that he is going to be badly outnumbered on Shy’s Hill, he requests three brigades of reinforcements. This body of troops is not ready to go off until 4:00 P.M. Before he launches the attack he softens up Shy’s Hill with artillery; the Union men who have taken Overton’s Hill also begin bombarding Shy’s Hill. When the assault finally steps off, it is almost 5:00 and the shadows are beginning to lengthen. The Union command is concerned that Hood may reinforce overnight or retreat, but Schofield’s men go up Shy’s Hill in an enveloping blue wave against minimal and demoralized resistance. 

Seeing his line broken on the flanks, Hood calls for a general retreat. Blue forces chase the fleeing Grays back through Franklin and Columbia. Hood does not make camp until he reaches Tupelo, Mississippi. 

The Army of Tennessee is destroyed “in detail”. Federal casualties in the battle are 387 killed, 2,562 wounded, and 112 missing. 

Confederate casualties are harder to ascertain. Since most of its units were shattered, no one really troubled to count heads, and desertions became endemic as the Confederates trudged south toward Tupelo.   

Although Hood claimed to have 19,000 men at the end of the battle, less partisan sources put the number of men who left the field at anywhere between 18,000 and 13,000. It may have been even lower. The best estimates for Confederate losses are 6,000 (1,500 killed, the rest captured, missing, or deserted in the midst of battle). If Hood came to Nashville with 17,000 men and lost 6,000 he may have had as few as 11,000 during the retreat, and of these, thousands deserted on the march south.  One source claims that the once-great Army of Tennessee had less than 5,000 men when Hood finally resigned his commission in disgrace on January 13, 1865.  

The Battle of Nashville is one of the least-understood battles of the Civil War. Far less studied than Antietam or especially Gettysburg, Nashville was the one battle of the Civil War where a major army of the Confederacy was utterly destroyed. While not the turning point that some historians claim, it certainly deserves more attention than it has gotten, as does the whole Franklin-Nashville Campaign. 

That Campaign was essentially delineated by a railroad track, Sherman’s main supply line between Nashville and Atlanta. In the Spring, Sherman had successfully pushed Joseph Johnston along the length of that line. Johnston had garrisoned Atlanta, and then, just as he was about to strike what could have been a punishing blow at Sherman, he was replaced by John Bell Hood. 

What Johnston implicitly understood and Hood only imperfectly grasped was that Atlanta was the plum. Johnston had allowed himself to be pushed southward because he realized that the line between Nashville and Atlanta meant nothing in and of itself. It was merely a connector. Holding Atlanta, with its rail lines, its factories, its banks, and its munitions plants was the crux of the matter. 

No one will ever know what the outcome of a Johnston-Sherman Battle of Atlanta would have been. It is fairly clear though that even if Johnston would have been forced from the city --- and that is no means certain --- Johnston would have stayed in the area as long as possible, anchoring Sherman to Atlanta and rendering his army an oversized garrison force that he could have, and would have, engaged repeatedly. Johnston, in short, understood  theatres of war.

John Bell Hood, brave as he was and tough as he was, simply did not. Instead of parking his forces near Atlanta and jabbing at Sherman repeatedly, Hood retreated up the rail line trying to get Sherman to follow him. And in fact, at first Sherman did. But then he tired of the game. Sherman understood that Union forces in Nashville could just as easily handle Hood as he could himself. So Sherman, free to do so, plucked the plum, and moved on.

Hood for his part was like a smaller boy chased from a treehouse by bigger boys who then retaliates by stealing the ladder and making faces at them.

When provocation failed to gain Sherman’s full attention, Hood moved back up the line, covering the same ground that Johnston had, but with no clear idea of what he was going to do. At Spring Hill, his troops bivouacked overnight, and while everyone was asleep an entire Union army under John Schofield marched through town. Bizarrely, Hood remained completely unaware of Schofield’s movements, something that no one to this day understands. 

At Franklin, Hood threw his men against the Union lines with gusto but with no planning, and gutted his army. He repeated the same mistake at Nashville.   As a combatant, Hood was a formidable enemy, but as a tactical commander he failed to use his resources to familiarize himself with the ground, his opponents’ plans, or his own battlefield options. As a strategic commander, he was worse, seeming to have no grasp of the larger issues or the larger environment in which he moved. He was aggressive, where Johnston had been cautious, and that was all that recommended him. 

But dash proved not to be enough. Jefferson Davis, who often played favorites among his generals and who thought he knew the science of war better than any of them, could have done much for the Confederacy he served by relieving Hood when Hood lost Atlanta. Davis chose not to, and an end game of no benefit and much harm was played out against the Confederacy. Atlanta was the moment when the Confederacy was psychologically defeated; but Nashville was the moment when the Confederacy was forced to confront an ugly truth --- that indeed, the Yankees had become a superior fighting force.