Chapter 18: More From Before -- Nashville

As I had overheard the Reb sharpshooters on Reynoldsburg Island suggest, General Forrest did indeed withdraw his forces from their positions opposite Johnsonville the next day -- but not before his massed artillery had devastated the Johnsonville port. Nearly thirty vessels, virtually every river boat and barge tied up at the wharves, were either sunk or heavily damaged, and that included the three tinclad gunboats.

All of the waterfront warehouses were likewise severely damaged by the shelling. However, the conflagration that followed was touched off at the order of the Union port commander, who feared a Rebel cross-river assault would capture the Union stores. But Forrest made no such attack. Instead, with the warehouses ablaze, the fleet of vessels incapacitated, and the port unusable, he withdrew.

Fortunately, Forrest’s artillery had not had sufficient range to reach the rail yards behind the port. Our box car bivouacs had been untouched and, three days later, on November seventh, they transported us back to Nashville.

Well, not all of us. The Fourteenth’s scouts had lost four men at Johnsonville, including Corporal Patrick “Leprechaun” O’Kelly. The Forty-fourth had lost three: Charlie Muldoon, Ammon Williams, and Sergeant Michael Jones.

Colonel Johnson remained in eastern Tennessee, recruiting new men to rebuild the Forty-fourth U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment, still an active regiment of white officers and some non-commissioned ranks, even though it had surrendered nearly all of its rank-and-file complement -- the six hundred colored infantrymen -- at Dalton, Georgia. As such, the Forty-fourth remained under the auspices of General George Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland, while our colored scout platoon continued to operate as a detached unit under the temporary command of the Ohio Fourteenth Infantry Regiment, also part of the Army of the Cumberland.

That army now occupied Nashville and its environs, anticipating the arrival of Union General John Schofield and his Army of the Ohio.

After John Bell Hood and the Rebel army retreated from Atlanta, they had moved into northwestern Georgia and thence into northern Alabama. At first, General Sherman had taken the bulk of the three Union armies in pursuit, but he soon returned to Atlanta with the Army of the Tennessee and units from the Army of the Cumberland, to advance on Savannah, on Georgia’s Atlantic coast. At the same time, he tasked John Schofield and the Army of the Ohio to pursue Hood and destroy Hood’s supply lines in the process. Then he dispatched General Thomas and what was left of the Army of the Cumberland to protect the Union supply lines in Tennessee and northern Georgia. Sherman made Thomas the senior commander of all Union forces in Tennessee and in northern Alabama and northern Georgia.

The only real threat to the Union supply lines in the entire western theater was Hood’s Army of Tennessee (Not to be confused with Sherman’s Army of the Tennessee. Keep in mind that the Union tended to name its armies after rivers, while the Confederates used the names of states).

Hood’s ultimate goal was to cut the Union supply lines through Tennessee, invade Kentucky, then take his army east to unite with Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia, which was then contending with Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant and the Union’s Army of the Potomac. In turn, it became Thomas’s and Schofield’s goal to destroy destroy Hood’s army.

Schofield and Hood fought a number of battles in Alabama with neither side delivering a knockout blow. Hood then moved toward Tennessee, to join Nathan Bedford Forrest’s mixed cavalry, infantry, and artillery brigade which had been raiding in western Tennessee. As described, those raiders had dealt a significant setback to the Union supply chain when they temporarily blockaded the Tennessee River and then destroyed the river port of Johnsonville, the critical transfer point for supplies intended for Union forces in Tennessee and northern Georgia and Alabama.

At that point, Hood committed his army to attacking the Union supply lines in Tennessee while cutting off Schofield from joining forces with Thomas. At the same time, General Thomas’s purpose was to combine the two Union armies and to then prosecute the destruction of Hood’s Confederate force.

Hood, however, had planned to prevent that consolidation and take on each army separately, to defeat in detail, as that strategy is known. Sometimes called divide and conquer, a commander will bring his entire force against smaller units of the opposition, thus defeating even a larger force in piecemeal fashion. In this instance, though, Schofield had a substantial force.

Even so, on November twenty-ninth, Hood nearly succeeded.

At Columbia, some fifty miles southwest of Nashville, Hood used his artillery to maintain a barrage of Schofield’s position, typical of a prelude to an infantry assault, and he held several infantry regiments in view of the Union side for the same purpose. However, he had sent much of his force in flanking maneuvers and a cavalry division under Forrest in a circling maneuver to cut the Union force’s line of withdrawal.