Battle of Nashville

Ask most Americans where the Civil War ended, and they’ll name Appomattox. But nearly four months earlier, on two winter days in December 1864, the Confederacy’s last real chance in the West died on the hills south of Nashville.At Nashville, George H. Thomas’s Union army shattered John Bell Hood’s Army of Tennessee, the Confederacy’s second-largest field army. It was one of the few truly decisive battles of the war. Yet for generations, the battle, and the city’s central role in the Union war, all but disappeared from public memory, buried beneath new neighborhoods and highways and beneath the Lost Cause mythology that Nashville itself helped build.Jim Stovall grew up in Nashville and was never taught this story. In Battle of Nashville: Seven Things You Should Know, he sets out to tell it.The seven things:The siege that ran backwards: a battered Confederate army, fresh from the slaughter at Franklin, dug in to besiege a stronger Union army behind some of the most formidable defenses in North America.The key to the West: how occupied Nashville became one of the Union’s indispensable hubs, sustaining the armies that fought from Shiloh to Atlanta, and how Black laborers, many of them impressed, built the forts that protected it.The general who was almost replaced: George Thomas, the Virginian who stayed with the Union, came within hours of being removed from command before he won one of the most complete victories of the war.The great wheel: Thomas’s sweeping turning movement that smashed Hood’s left on the first day.Peach Orchard Hill: the costly assault by United States Colored Troops, and what it meant for Black soldiers who knew what capture could bring.Shy’s Hill: the fifteen-minute breakthrough that sent a Confederate army fleeing the field in confusion.The army that ceased to exist: the brutal winter retreat, the end of the Army of Tennessee as an offensive force, and the long, contested memory of a battlefield that was paved over.Plus a bonus chapter: the strange story of a Confederate colonel whose grave was disturbed in 1977, a forensic mistake of 113 years, and the case that helped push forward the research behind the famous Body Farm.Every chapter was independently fact-checked before publication. Readable in about forty-five minutes. Includes an index and further reading.Bonus: the first three chapters of The Death of the Admiral, the first novel in Jim Stovall’s Nathan Tower espionage series, set in Washington in the years after the Civil War.Part of the I’m No Expert, But series. Curious, a little lost, and taking notes.