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.

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.

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.

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here; I get $25 a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy (the folks here call her Mrs. Anderson), and the children, Milly, Jane and Grundy, go to school and are learning well; the teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday-School, and Mandy and me attend church regularly.

We are kindly treated; sometimes we overhear others saying, “Them colored people were slaves” down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks, but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Col. Anderson. Many darkies would have been proud, as I used to was, to call you master. Now, if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free-papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department at Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you are sincerely disposed to treat us justly and kindly and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you.

This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years and Mandy twenty years. At $25 a month for me, and $2 a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to $11,680. Add to this the interest for the time our wages has been kept back and deduct what you paid for our clothing and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to.

Please send the money by Adams Express, in care of V. Winters, esq, Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night, but in Tennessee there was never any pay day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.

In answering this letter please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve and die if it comes to that than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood, the great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.

P.S.—Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

From your old servant,

Jourdan Anderson

Via Leon F. Litwack’s 1979 Been In The Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery.

(In case you’re wondering, adjusted for inflation, Anderson is asking his former master for $164,391.)

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.

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.

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…”

Today it’s called Confederate Memorial Hall, is run by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and hosts public tours and private weddings. Note the tower, recipient of Union artillery Lieutenant Benjamin’s “prettiest shot of the war,” from which a Rebel sharpshooter is said to have mortally wounded Union General William P. 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.