Department of Environment & Conservation
Robert Martineau, Commissioner

Tennessee Historical Commission

East Tennessee’s Mountain War

General Grant on Lookout Mountain

 

The split between Unionists and Confederates was, if anything, more fractious and violent in eastern Tennessee than in the rest of the state. Politically and geographically, the mountainous East was distinctive. Although there were slaveowners, particularly in Chattanooga and Knoxville, most east Tennesseans lived apart from the cotton economy and strongly opposed secession. Most of the 42,000 white Tennesseans who joined the Union Army were from this section. The East Tennessee and Virginia Railroad, joined to the East Tennessee and Georgia Railroad, was the only railway that crossed the Appalachian Mountains and connected Virginia with the South’s interior. While rivers held the key to west and middle Tennessee, railroads supplied the crucial arteries in the east.

This made the region of vital importance to the Confederacy, whose troops occupied Knoxville and tried early in the war to secure the valley towns. An irony of the war in Tennessee was that Federals controlled mostly secessionist areas, while the Confederate Army held sway over a predominantly Unionist region. One of the first acts of east Tennessee Unionists was to burn railroad bridges in an attempt to sever the rail connections with the Confederacy. Confederate authorities reacted by harshly suppressing loyalists – they hung a number of the bridge burners and imprisoned many other Unionists.

Part of the Rebel effort in east Tennessee involved control of the famous thoroughfare at Cumberland Gap. The Gap proved to be difficult to defend (and not as strategically important as once thought), but the Confederates regarded it as a gateway to the region and seized it early in the war. The battle at nearby Fishing Creek, in which General Felix Zollicoffer was killed, was part of the general collapse of the Confederate line in spring, 1862. For the remainder of the war, major campaigns in east Tennessee bypassed the Cumberland Gap.

 

 

Wartime Chattanooga

 

 

True to his political convictions, President Lincoln sought a military effort to relieve the east Tennessee Unionists. His goal was partly achieved on September 1-3, 1863, when General Ambrose Burnside forced the Confederates to abandon Knoxville and marched his troops into the city. Having been pushed out of middle Tennessee back in the summer, Bragg’s Army of Tennessee occupied Chattanooga, to which the focus of the western theater now shifted. This crucial railroad junction truly was a gateway to Georgia and the deep South. It was a great blow to Rebel hopes when, on September 9, Rosecrans again got his columns behind the Confederate line and forced Bragg to evacuate Chattanooga.

The stage seemed set for the Federals to split the Confederacy by thrusting south from Chattanooga. Lulled into false confidence by the ease with which he had handled Bragg, however, Rosecrans over-reached himself at the Battle of Chickamauga on September 19-20, 1863. The resulting near rout of the Union army, halted only by Thomas’s stand on Snodgrass Hill, sent the rattled Rosecrans scurrying back to Chattanooga. Bragg then occupied the surrounding heights and half-heartedly lay siege to the city. Startled by this sudden reversal of fortune, Lincoln appointed Ulysses S. Grant to overall command in the West, and Grant replaced Rosecrans with General George S. Thomas. The Union commander’s first priority was to break Bragg’s blockade of Chattanooga, which he did by establishing a supply line – the "Cracker Line" – across pontoon bridges into the city. Having resupplied and reinforced his army, Grant moved to break the siege and drive Bragg off the heights above the city. On November 24, Union forces under General "Fighting Joe" Hooker, retook Lookout Mountain in the so-called "Battle above the Clouds." The next day, in a stunning reversal of the Chickamauga defeat, Thomas’s corps swept Bragg’s forces from Missionary Ridge and sent them retreating toward Atlanta. The "Gateway City" of Chattanooga was now firmly in Federal hands, and the path to Georgia lay open to invasion by Grant’s chief lieutenant, William T. Sherman.

 

 

Earthworks at Fort Sanders

 

Three weeks before Missionary Ridge, Bragg had ordered the 12,000 soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia, under General James Longstreet, and 5,000 cavalry led by Joseph Wheeler, to drive the Federals from Knoxville. Burnside and his Army of the Ohio withdrew into the city’s fortifications, which included Forts Dickerson and Sanders. On November 29, Longstreet launched a disastrous assault on Fort Sanders, resulting in heavy Confederate losses. Knoxville remained in Union hands, and Longstreet withdrew his battered divisions into winter quarters around Morristown.

The Chattanooga and Knoxville campaigns cemented Union control of the mountain region. Depredations by Confederate raiders continued, but Federal supremacy was never again seriously challenged. In September, 1864, General John Hunt Morgan, formerly a terror to Union troops, was ignominiously shot down in Greeneville. The political significance of east Tennessee Unionism became evident during the 1864 national election, when Lincoln drafted a Greeneville Democrat, Andrew Johnson, as his vice presidential running mate. The selection of a Southern loyalist symbolized the sort of compromise that Lincoln believed would be necessary to reunify the country after the war. East Tennessee Unionists such as Johnson and William G. "Parson" Brownlow would lead the process of restoring Tennessee to the nation – the first Confederate state to do so.

 

Re-enactment at Stone’s River