“I’ve long considered Michael and Jeff Shaara’s Civil War trilogy to be one of the benchmarks for Civil War historical fiction. Knoxville 1863 came very close to that mark.” –Jim Chambers for Red Adept Reviews
The eBook version of Knoxville 1863—professionally edited, proofread to eliminate errors, and formatted with a linked table of contents and a map—is now available for the Kindle at Amazon for just 99 cents.
Literary critic and writing professor David Madden’s 1996 novel Sharpshooter is the only other fiction I’m aware of about the Siege of Knoxville and, very briefly, the Battle of Fort Sanders.
It’s a good story, worth your money (as little as one penny plus shipping used at Amazon) and time (at 160 pages it’s a short read), though it’s more about the broader war and a veteran’s confused memory than the siege, more about the East Tennessee region than Knoxville or the battle.
Madden’s main character, Willis Carr, is a young, Confederate sniper (sharpshooter in the parlance of the day) who may (or may not) have been the one who potshotted Union General William P. Sanders from the tower at Bleak House. Carr just can’t remember for sure.
Site of the Morgan Hill archeological dig in the summer of 2009, where artifacts such as belt buckles and friction primers convinced University of Tennessee scientists they had found the 1863 emplacements of the Ninth Georgia Artillery Battalion.
The Ninth was one of several Confederate artillery units, under command of Colonel Edward Porter Alexander, which opened the Sunday, November 29, 1863 attack on Fort Sanders.
One of the Ninth’s batteries is the subject of a new painting on display at Knoxville’s McClung Museum. The museum website’s assertion that “the Union fortifications were pounded by artillery from Confederate positions to the west and north of town announcing the deadly assault” is dramatic but inaccurate.
There was also Confederate artillery fire from the south, by the “Boy Battery” of the Virginia Light Artillery. It was specially positioned by Alexander and Gen. Longstreet on Cherokee Heights across the Holston River to the south of the fort.
But Longstreet had decided at the last minute to restrict the artillery to minor practice, ordering just three shots (from the west, north and south) at dawn to signal the Rebel infantry to move out.
It’s true, however, that Alexander exceeded his orders and had his batteries throw a few extra shells over the heads of the infantry into the rear of Fort Sanders to impede the arrival of any Union reinforcements. But there was no “pounding” of the fortifications.
Dayton, Ohio, August 7, 1865
To My Old Master, Colonel P. H. Anderson,
Big Spring, Tennessee
Sir: I got your letter and was glad to find you had not forgotten Jourdan, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Col. Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable.
Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville hospital, but one of the neighbors told me Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.
In 1861, a group of forty Unionists of East Tennessee, some of them from Knoxville, set out to put their actions where their politics were.
They plotted to burn regional railroad bridges to stop or at least slow Confederate soldiers and supplies bound for the Virginia battle front. Some were captured and hung, though President Jefferson Davis reprieved a few before the trapdoor was sprung. Now there’s a web site to tell their story.
The Rebs fatally sharpshot Fort Sanders’ namesake Union Gen. William P. Sanders, with a thirteen-pound English Whitworth rifle like this one. It was fired more than a mile away, from the tower of the Bleak House mansion, Gen. Longstreet’s headquarters.
The muzzle-loading, percussion rifle fired a one-inch projectile powered by a three-inch powder charge. It usually mounted a 14.5-inch sighting telescope. In the 1860s, the Whitworth cost about $1,200. Now you can own one (sans telescope) for around $10,000.
Cavalry played no part at all in the attack on Fort Sanders and little enough in the whole Siege of Knoxville. But General Joseph Wheeler’s rebel cavalry had an early role, and that’s my excuse for including this good video of a cavalry reenactor’s lecture.
Now I’ve been none too kind to reenactors here, mainly because so many of them are seriously overweight (several porky examples are in the background of the video) and therefore hardly represent the true, lean-and-often-hungry appearance of a Civil War soldier, North and South.
The cavalry reenactor of the video, however, is properly trim. He’s portraying a Union cavalry officer with a curiously Southern accent, though there were Southern Unionists, to be sure, and some of them, indeed, were from Eastern Tennessee.
The lecture contains some surprises. I had no idea, for instance, that the cavalry saber was not an edge weapon but had another use entirely. Watch the video and find out for yourself.
Two of the Mississippi Brigade’s regiments, the 18th and the 21st, were charged with driving in the Union pickets the night before the dawn assault on Fort Sanders by the 17th and 13th regiments.
After the war, 18th regiment Captain Wiley Gart Johnson, who had commanded the Confederate Guards, Company C, of Madison County, Mississippi, recalled their work for Confederate Veteran Magazine:
“Our orders were for each captain to select a man to carry the picks and spades of the company with which to hide ourselves in the ground when we got near enough to the fort….
“The stars shone brightly and the ground was freezing rapidly. My only lieutenant was sick in camp, but I walked along the line and told the boys to meet me on the other side of those yankee picket lines under that fort, and it would be all right. I am thus particular, because it was the only real night charge we ever made.
“At the command we moved forward through brush, briers, and thorns, in the face of the picket firing, capturing or driving all the pickets into the fort, and getting pretty close to the fort itself….
“Then you ought to have seen the fire fly out of those rocks. The enemy in the fort, only a few rods off, tried to depress their guns so as to shell us, but every shell went over our heads, and served only to add increased zest to the work. We had to get into that ground before day, and we did….
“…being so close to the fort,” Johnson concluded, “we could aid our assaulting friends from the rear, till they passed over us, by picking off the gunners in the fort…”
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