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.
