Part 8

(adapted from material previously posted at Othertimelines.com)

Summary: In the first seven episodes of this series we looked at the causes of the Southern Rebellion War: the early battles of the war itself; the Union’s introduction of ironclad naval vessels in an attempt to get the upper hand over the Confederacy; how Gen. Ethan Allen Hitchcock’s death led to a shakeup in the Fillmore presidential cabinet; the Confederate invasion of Kentucky in the summer of 1852; the Union counteroffensive that drove out the invaders; the Confederates’ stunning victory at the Battle of Knoxville; the ill-fated attempt by Confederate spies to start an uprising in Indiana; the rise of Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln to national political prominence; the Confederate capture of the the Kentucky towns of Monticello and Williamstown in April, 1853; the 47^th New Hampshire Infantry’s introduction as the first all- black combat regiment in U.S. military history; and the serious downturn in the Confederate Republic’s fortunes after Union forces retook Williamstown and Monticello. In this chapter, we’ll look back on the Second Battle of Knoxville and the political crisis which confronted the Confederate Republic in the battle’s aftermath.

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The only colder than the Virginia weather in October of 1853 was the fear gripping the hearts of President Toombs’ general staff down in Charleston. The news of Union troops entering Tennessee and Virginia in force had chilled them to the bone; it was one of the  nightmare scenarios they’d been contemplating, and trying to avert, for months. But in spite of all their best efforts it was coming to pass anyway. And they weren’t the only ones unnerved by the news: as word spread of the Union invasion, civilians by the hundreds fled towards the perceived safety of Georgia and the Carolinas rather than risk getting trapped in the crossfire.

The feeling of panic was especially intense in Knoxville, a city which after successfully fending off the Union Army the first time around now faced the prospect that a second Union assault might result in the city’s capture by Northern troops. One Knoxville city councilman was so distraught by the idea of living under Union rule that he committed suicide while Union advance columns were still at  least 45 miles away from Knoxville’s outskirts. Knoxville’s churches were packed to the tops of their steeples with parishioners seeking spiritual relief from the overwhelming terror which they felt at the knowledge Union soldiers were coming their way.

Meanwhile, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia was beginning to lose its final critical struggle with Union forces for control of the Appalachians. The losses the ANV had sustained in  previous engagements with the Union Army were finally catching up with General Lee and his regiments, much to the dismay of Virginians who’d hoped their most celebrated field commander would pull one more rabbit out of his hat and turn back the growing blue tide. Lee’s cavalrymen  were having a particularly bad time of it, being short on everything from ammunition to horseshoes; among one cavalry detachment things had deteriorated to the point where some of the men were actually eating grass and dandelions for lack of anything more substantial to put in their stomachs. At one point, Lee himself confided to Jeb Stuart his growing fears that if things kept up like this much longer the Union Army could be marching into Richmond by the first day of spring.¹

Lee’s gloom was not entirely unjustified: the same week that Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin learned once and for  all that Great Britain would not be granting the Confederacy full recognition as a sovereign state, Union infantry detachments swept into Salem and began encircling Roanoke. A few days later, Union Navy riverboats sailed up the Chesapeake and started bombarding Confederate supply depots near the town of Montross. By October 18^th, only seven days after Benjamin received the fateful dispatch from London, Roanoke was in union hands; on October 21^st the last pocket of Confederate resistance near Montross surrendered to Union troops.² By October 22^nd Union Army cavalry advance detachments had reached the outskirts of Arlington, General Lee’s longtime hometown.

At his field headquarters, Army of the Tennessee commander-in-chief General Alexander Doniphan was reviewing the Confederate Army’s long-term prospects with even great pessimism than Lee felt. His men’s best efforts to stem the Union advance towards Knoxville were proving grossly inadequate; along some sections of the front lines troops were choosing to desert to the Union said rather than keep shedding blood for what was increasingly viewed on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line as a doomed cause.

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By the beginning of November the last pockets of Confederate resistance in Roanoke had surrendered to the Union Army and Union advance troops stood on the shores of Tennessee’s Melton Hill Lake. The stream of civilian refugees pouring out of Knoxville had by now become a veritable tsunami, causing General Doniphan to question if anything could be done to reverse it. Further west, Memphis was under siege by Union cavalry and the Arkansas state capital of Little Rock had become the scene of a no-holds-barred firefight between units of Confederate grenadiers and anti-slavery volunteer militias that had swept down from neighboring Missouri to take advantage of Doniphan’s plight.³

On November 8^th Union artillery came within shelling range of Knoxville. At 12:37 PM that afternoon, a volley of cannon fire smashed  into Confederate bulwarks on the southwestern edge of the city and signaled the beginning of the Second Battle of Knoxville. Confederate artillery crews immediately returned fire with a thunderous salvo  aimed at the heart of the Union lines; by 2:15 Union and Confederate infantry detachments were exchanging rifle fire along the northwestern perimeter of the local Confederate battle lines. The telegraph desk at General Doniphan’s field headquarters could barely keep up with the flood of messages coming in from Knoxville pleading for reinforcements to be dispatched to stem the Union push on the city.

But neither time nor luck was on the side of Knoxville’s defenders. Like lumberjacks chopping away at a tall tree, Union forces relentlessly hammered at the Confederates until the city’s defenses began to crack just before 6:00 PM that evening. The 47^th New Hampshire Infantry, having distinguished themselves under fire at Williamstown and Monticello just over two months earlier, added further laurels to their record by forcing open a gap in the Confederates’ eastern flank to allow Union cavalry to stage a diversionary assault which drew men away from the weakening southern and western defensive positions.

By 1:00 PM on November 9^th most of Knoxville was in Union hands while the rest was under round-the-clock artillery bombardment; in the  southeast corner of the city, squads of rangers from the 15^th Maryland Infantry were choking the Confederate auxiliary supply lines that were one of the Knoxville defenders’ few remaining links to the rest of the CRA. Late in the afternoon, a cavalry squadron dispatched from nearby Morristown to relieve the besieged Knoxville garrison was decimated by successive barrages of Union rifle fire. When word of the squadron’s annihilation reached the mayor of Knoxville, whose nerves were already stretched paper-thin by the disaster unfolding right in front of him, it proved to be the last straw for his weakened psyche: he committed suicide just before midnight.

Around 10:30 AM on the morning of November 11^th the last remnants of the Confederate garrison at Knoxville surrendered to the Union Army, sealing the most important Union land victory since Winfield Scott assumed command of the late Ethan Allen Hitchcock’s troops. Scott saw to it those men who’d survived the Second Battle of Knoxville were duly rewarded for their valor and the fallen were laid to rest with fitting honors.

And there were still further triumphs ahead of him: on November 19^th Harrisonburg, the Virginia town Union forces had tried and failed to capture back in August of 1851, was overrun by Union  cavalry units. Three days later the siege of Memphis ended with that city’s capitulation to Union infantry regiments. By the end of the month Union forces in northern Virginia had captured Fredericksburg and Manassas and Nashville, Tennessee was encircled by regiments of Union infantry and cavalry; in early December, Union Navy warships started bombarding Norfolk.

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More than just a city was lost when the Union Army captured Knoxville; its fall also sheared Confederate president Robert Toombs of much of the political consensus which had so far enabled him to prosecute the Confederate Republic’s rebellion against the federal  government in Washington. The same day Harrisonburg finally fell to the Union Army, the Confederate Congress began debate on a resolution which sharply criticized Toombs’ conduct of the war. The resolution’s author was a Georgia senator who up until the Union’s victory in the Second Battle of Knoxville had been a staunch supporter of Toombs but had radically changed his stance and was now starting to call for the Confederate president’s resignation.

Toombs took both the senator’s change of heart and the resolution as unspeakable personal betrayals; in a three-hour tirade before the Confederate Congress on November 23^rd he attacked his former ally like a rabid dog, denouncing the offending senator in terms so condemnatory they surpassed even Toombs’ harshest broadsides against Jefferson Davis. Only the presence of heavily armed bodyguards on the podium beside the Confederate president kept his foes in Congress from trying to assault him in a fit of rage as he lambasted their colleague without letup or remorse. In the days immediately following President Toombs’ speech, as the CRA’s already horrendous military situation was continuing to further deteriorate, the bitter quarreling between the pro-Toombs and anti-Toombs factions in the Confederate Congress made it exceedingly difficult-- if not impossible --for the machinery of the Charleston government to function properly. There was considerable speculation on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line that the political leaders of the Confederate Republic might soon find themselves having to put down a revolt against their own government at the exact same moment they were trying to prosecute an insurgency against the Federal administration in Washington.

It was left to Toombs’ vice-president, Alexander H. Stephens, to defuse this political time bomb before it went off. Reminding the lawmakers of the pledge they had all taken to support the Confederacy, Stephens warned that changing horses mid-stream where the offices of the Confederate presidency were concerned could only mean disaster for the Southern cause; when one Alabama senator cynically observed that the South was facing disaster anyway, Stephens said "the darkest hour is the one just before sunrise"⁴ and assured the war-weary Alabama man  the Confederate Army would soon turn its fortunes around and drive its Union foes into retreat. His rhetoric heartened President Toombs’ allies in the Confederate Congress, gave his critics second thoughts, and swayed enough of the fence-sitters to cause the resolution to be withdrawn from the Confederate Senate on December 8^th.

But for all of Stephens’ apparent optimism that better days were ahead for the Confederate Republic, the blunt truth was that the CRA was essentially living on borrowed time. Little Rock had by now fallen to pro-Union volunteer militias, and on December 12^th the last remnants of the Confederate Army garrison at Nashville would surrender to Union troops. On December 23^rd Union forces, having already seized Virginia Beach a few days earlier in an amphibious assault, captured a badly damaged Norfolk after only token resistance by local Confederate infantry units. New Year’s Eve would see Union Army advance platoons  march to within nine miles of Richmond and overrun the Tennessee town of Murfeesboro.

New Year’s Day 1854 would mark the beginning of a six-month-long death watch for a crumbling Confederate Republic, and General Winfield Scott vowed to do everything within his power to hasten the Confederacy’s last steps toward the grave....