Nov. 29, 1863: The Battle of Fort Sanders Stalemate ends with brutal confrontation, Union victory

Nov. 23--The first ray of sunlight brought the first shot.

The cannon boom from the south cut through the chill of the Sunday morning twilight, shook the dirt walls of the fort and jarred every soldier alert. Next came a shower of bursting artillery shells. Then the charge.

"The first thing our folks (knew) of them, they were within 20 yards of the picket line and less than 300 from the point of the fort," Cpl. John Watkins of the 19th Ohio Battery wrote in a letter home. "And on they came with a yell, three columns deep and one in reserve, a brigade in each column, and as soon as they began the charge they began to fire. ... I believe that I shall remember that day a long while, for of all the sights I have yet seen I saw the worst that day."

Less than half an hour later, the fight was over. Gray-clad men lay dead and wounded, piled three and four bodies deep in the icy mud as their comrades retreated in disgrace. Atop the fort wall, men in blue peered down through the morning fog and gunpowder smoke and listened to the groans of the dying.

The would-be invaders barely looked back.

"It was a dreadful struggle for a few moments, but the tide had turned; we had lost our opportunity," wrote Robert Bunting, a chaplain in the 8th Texas Cavalry. "We were defeated; and with that defeat perished the ardently cherished hopes of capturing the enemy and his stronghold. ... All is now quiet again."

Fort Sanders had held. Knoxville remained under Union control -- and would until the war's close.

A century and a half later, almost nothing remains of Knoxville's most crucial Civil War battle. Concrete and asphalt cover the ground where so many men died that morning of Nov. 29, 1863, with here and there a marker to commemorate the battle. Most of the University of Tennessee students who tramp the hill every day don't even stop to look.

Only a handful of Knoxville's newspapers published during the 1863 siege survived. Jacob Austin Sperry, the staunchly Confederate editor of The Knoxville Register, had already fled to Georgia to escape the Union invasion of East Tennessee. Parson William Gannaway Brownlow, the acid-tongued Unionist editor of the Knoxville Whig, had just returned to set up shop again and crow in triumph over the capture of the city.

But the men who fought left their own record in diaries, memoirs and letters home -- a record nearly as vivid as the one they wrote that November morning in blood.

WAITING FOR THE CLASH

The city had fallen into Union hands without a shot fired. Union troops arriving on Sept. 1, 1863, marched down Gay Street to cheers from residents who'd waited more than two years to be freed from Confederate control.

By mid-November, the same soldiers found themselves penned inside the city, outnumbered by a Confederate force sent north from Chattanooga to retake Knoxville and its railroad.

Union Gen. Ambrose Burnside knew reinforcements, occupied in the battles for control of Chattanooga, would be slow to arrive -- if they arrived at all. Confederate Gen. James Longstreet and his 15,000 troops, mostly battle-hardened veterans of such bloodbaths as Gettysburg and Chickamauga, had nearly cut off the Union retreat from Loudon to Knoxville on Nov. 16 and showed no signs of giving up.

"We could not hope for help ... and on that theory our fate was sealed," Capt. Robert Armour of the 79th New York later recalled in a speech. "Each side seemed now to realize that the situation was too serious for anything but hard knocks."

That fate came to rest on the 16 earthen forts and batteries that ringed the city. Soldiers and civilians -- some volunteers, others pressed into service -- worked day and night building up the city's defenses as bullets and artillery shells whistled over their heads.

Trees along the city outskirts fell to the ax to offer the defenders an uninterrupted line of sight. Houses that could shelter the enemy went up in flames.

Civilians caught in the middle sought shelter and prayed for an end.

"The firing has not ceased for a week directly over my house," Elizabeth Baker Crozier, a Confederate sympathizer, wrote in her diary. "They have my house ready prepared for the torch. ... Oh, the anxiety of a people in the midst of a battle. The cannon roars day and night."

By Nov. 20, four days into the siege, Union soldiers manning Fort Sanders were down to living on a quarter of their normal rations. A few hundred yards away, Confederate soldiers shivered in their rifle pits.

"The atmosphere was damp and penetratingly cold," Lewellyn Shaver of the 60th Alabama Infantry later wrote. "The men were thinly clad, and numbers of them barefoot. ... (A general) while riding through his brigade the day before had pointed significantly toward Knoxville, and remarked, 'There are shoes over there, boys,' and visions of comfortable brogans were floating through the minds of those barefoot Confederates."

Sometimes the soldiers traded shots. Sometimes they shouted jeers across the lines.

For the fort's defenders, many of them veterans of the months-long siege of the Confederate stronghold at Vicksburg, Miss., the war had come full circle.

"How are you, Vicksburg?" came the occasional cry from the Confederate pickets.

"You haven't got us yet," a Union soldier would shout back.

On the 10th day of the siege, Union soldiers inside the fort listened to their Confederate counterparts outside cheer at news of the latest Confederate victory near Chattanooga.

Men on each side settled into the dreary routine of picket duty, almost looking forward to anything that might break the monotony.

SIGHTS ON FORT SANDERS

Each side knew a fight was coming. So when the sun rose on Nov. 29, the 12th day of the siege, the thunder of a single Confederate cannon to the south took no one by surprise.

"This seemed to be the signal," recalled Armour, the New York captain, "for immediately the whole line of guns opened and for a few minutes we witnessed as fine a display of skyrockets as we had ever seen. ... At length the fire ceased, and we soon realized that we had business on hand!"

Longstreet, upon the advice of his engineers, had settled on Fort Sanders atop its hill that overlooked the western edge of the city as his point of attack. Maj. Gen. Lafayette McLaws, chosen to lead the assault on the fort, asked the commander to reconsider, but Longstreet refused.

"There is neither safety nor honor in any other course than the one I have chosen and ordered," Longstreet wrote in an order. "The assault must be made at the time appointed, and must be made with a determination which will insure success."

Longstreet had watched the fort through field glasses for days and talked with the engineers who built it during Knoxville's days of Confederate occupation. He'd heard all about the ditch that surrounded the earthworks -- only 2 or 3 feet deep, he'd been assured -- even seen the sentries' heads bob up and down as they made their rounds.

The attack would be a simple matter of strength and speed: charge the fort, overrun the ditch, scale the walls and take the smaller Union force by surprise. His men wouldn't even need ladders.

The Confederates rose and formed for battle at 3 a.m., their hands quickly numb from gripping the cold barrels of their rifles. They moved forward quietly through the dark, splashed through the freezing waters of Second Creek and reached the foot of the hill as the artillery barrage opened.

"There was no noise, save the low hum of subdued voices, the rumbling of moving artillery and the steady tramp of different bodies of troops," wrote Shaver, the Alabama soldier. "At length the ominous silence was broken ... Thunder peals burst forth and answered each other in quick succession; and, like destroying angels, the huge missiles flew through the dense atmosphere with an unearthly shrieking. Under the exhilaration of this stirring martial serenade, and the animating words of the colonel ... the line was put in motion."

CONFUSION AND DEATH

Orders called for the men to rush the fort without firing a shot and with no shouts that might give the defenders warning. But the troops charging up the slope toward the trench soon broke into the familiar Rebel yell regardless -- a sound their opponents knew all too well.

"Volleys of musketry and the yells of the enemy broke upon our ears," Armour recalled. "The officer's cry, 'Now boys, look sharp!' and in the gray dawn the long line of brave fellows was seen pushing towards us."

The defenders held their fire until the charging troops came within 50 yards of the fort. The gunfire that erupted from rifles, mortars and cannons echoed for miles.

Soldiers stationed to the sides and to the rear listened to the din and squinted through the morning fog, feeling hopeful and helpless all at once.

"The yells died away and then rose again," one soldier of the 36th Massachusetts Volunteers later wrote. "Now the roar of musketry and artillery was redoubled. It was a moment of the deepest anxiety. Our straining eyes were fixed on the fort. The Rebels had reached the ditch and were now endeavoring to scale the parapet. Whose will be the victory -- oh, whose?"

The defenders had been busier than Longstreet thought. The column of howling Confederates charged into a manmade thicket of brush, logs and tree limbs piled in their path, then into a tangle of barely visible telegraph wire stretched from stake to stake and stump to stump at ankle level.

"The wires trip many and break up their lines," Armour recalled. "Many fall to rise no more, but the living press forward. The assaulting party is now raining bullets (into the fort) ... But the fire from within is as lively as before, for there were as earnest hearts within the fort as without."

Those who made it through the brush and wire found themselves at the mouth of a pit -- not the shallow ditch that Longstreet's engineers remembered, but a yawning moat 7 feet wide and 6 to 8 feet deep, lined with mud, ice and standing water ankle-deep at the base of a sheer dirt wall as high as 20 feet in some spots. The sentries the general saw had stood on planks stretched across the trench.

The defenders had poured water down the fort's sides, turning the earthworks into a giant block of ice. Confederates at the bottom scrabbled for a foothold. Union soldiers behind the walls, rather than expose themselves to gunfire, began tossing lit artillery shells over the ramparts into the pit as makeshift hand grenades, to screams from the enemy below.

Decades later, veterans on both sides recalled the spray of blood, guts and meat.

"Shells were bursting in the ditch, literally tearing the poor fellows to pieces and scattering the fragments far and near," Armour recalled. "At length the enemy's fire slackened, and we could see many of them hurrying to the rear. A cheer went up from our throats which was answered by a chorus of yells from a fresh column of the enemy, who nothing daunted by the repulse of their first line, crowded up to the assault."

Two columns charged. Two columns failed to cross the trench. Men at the bottom, surrounded by dead comrades and exploding shells, climbed atop each other's shoulders to reach the top of the wall -- some to plant flags and others to make a last, suicidal stand.

"One of them got up to the (cannon) embrasures with some four or five behind him in front of a piece that has three charges," Watkins, the Ohio artilleryman, wrote. "He ha-hawed right out and says, 'Surrender, you Yankee sons of (expletive).' The words were hardly out of his mouth before the piece was pulled off, and away went Mr. Reb and his companions blown into ribbons."

The ramparts saw various duels to the death, including one made world-famous by a woodcut in Harper's Weekly. A Union sergeant, scrambling up to meet two approaching Confederates, realized he'd lost the ramrod to his now-useless rifle. He threw the rifle, missed and grabbed an ax.

"It hit and knocked one down, and the other fell at the same moment, pierced by a bullet," Armour recalled. "A few more spasmodic efforts, and the enemy's fire ceases."

RETREAT AND RETRIEVAL

Longstreet, finally realizing the attack had failed, ordered his men to retreat. The brigades fell back, some begging for one more chance to assault the works.

The ditch in places was almost full of them, piled one on top of the other, and such groaning I never heard.

Cpl. John Watkins of the 19th Ohio Battery

Decades later, the general mused how he could have captured the fort with a few more men, a few more engineers, a few more axes and ladders. None of that mattered now. The moment was lost, and with it the city.

Those soldiers waiting in reserve watched as their surviving comrades returned, some on foot and some on stretchers.

"No words were required to convey the sad tidings," wrote Shaver, the Alabama soldier. "The blood dripping from the litters and the occasional groans of their mangled occupants, who had led in the charge ... apprised us, more unmistakably than language could have done, of the woeful fact of the morning's disaster."

Back at the fort, the defenders slowly realized they had won. Three cheers echoed from one hill to the next.

Then came the long work of sorting through the captured, the wounded and the dead. Burnside, the Union commander, offered Longstreet a truce to collect the fallen and maimed.

Later estimates placed the total number of casualties from the Battle of Fort Sanders at 826 men -- 13 Union and 813 Confederate. Nearly 130 men lay dead in the trench or along its outskirts. Hundreds more marched into the fort as prisoners, some smiling and joking with their captors.

"Gen. Longstreet told us we'd be in Knoxville by night," one Confederate said with a laugh. "He didn't think it'd be as prisoners of war."

Watkins, the Ohio artilleryman, left his gun emplacement and climbed to the wall's highest point for one last look at the battlefield.

"And such a sight I never saw before, nor do I care about seeing again," he wrote. "The ditch in places was almost full of them, piled one on top of the other, and such groaning I never heard. The dead were laying in all imaginable shapes, the wounded on top of them and dead on top of them again. And the ground was strewn with them all along their route up to the fort. ... The first thing it put me in mind of was a lot of maggots around a dead carcass. They were crawling all around, some of them all over blood.

"I pitied them. They were brave men. Most of them Georgians. I would give one of their wounded a drink as quick as anybody if I had it. ... But at the same time I wished the whole Southern Confederacy was in that ditch in the same predicament."

ANOTHER BATTLE LOST

The battle at Knoxville made headlines at the time but soon lost the spotlight to Union victories at Chattanooga and the slow, bloody march to Atlanta.

Two days after the battle at Fort Sanders, word reached Knoxville of the Union triumph at Missionary Ridge. Another four days, and Longstreet gave up the siege and moved east to winter his army in the East Tennessee countryside.

The soldiers who'd held him off tried not to get their hopes up.

"I can't tell, Mira, when or how this war will end," Edward Lynn, an assistant surgeon in the 65th Illinois Volunteer Infantry, wrote in a letter home to his sister. "Everything seems to indicate a speedy and satisfactory termination, but there are so many cursed politicians -- so many presidents to make."

The war hadn't been over long before suburban settlers in search of cheap property began spilling across the city limits to buy lots and build houses on the former battlefield, most of which lay on property owned by the Hugh White family.

Newspaper accounts over the decades show a city's awareness of its history slipping away -- along with a lack of action. Civic boosters never won the political support for a national park, and no donor ever stepped forward with an offer to buy the land and save it from development.

"There was a long-running discussion about preserving the fort that you see up into the 1880s," said Steve Cotham, Knox County historian. "Sometime along in there, the idea just sort of died. The effort mainly fell apart because the land was private property and nobody ever made it happen. The owners weren't going to just give it away."

Surviving veterans, Union and Confederate, gathered for occasional reunions over the years to visit the site and walk the trenches where they once fought. The first major gathering in 1890 came even as the battlefield, by then part of a buzzing suburb, had begun to disappear.

John Watkins, the young Ohio corporal so horrified by the carnage he saw at Fort Sanders, survived the war and returned to Knoxville in 1895 for a reunion of his old battery crew. He walked the hilltop again, traced the remains of the old earthworks and looked out over a horizon he knew would never look the same again.

"We gave the town a pretty good going over yesterday," he wrote in a letter to his wife, Sarah. "Went to Fort Sanders (and) looked the place over and talked with old soldiers and some other people about it. But it will soon be of the past (for) boys are helping to tear down the parapets to find bullets and they get lots of them. ... We can locate the place where our gun stood in the fort all right -- now there is a big house built within 100 feet of it and a road is graded right through the works ... The hills don't look as high as they used to."

The battle to save that horizon, he knew, was lost already.

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IN THIS SERIES

Union General Williams Sanders died to buy time for Knoxville fortifications

Battle remembered in McClung Museum exhibit

Strategic location, Confederate loyalties led to Bleak House's role in Siege of Knoxville

Siege of Knoxville left citizens hungry, city damaged

Battle of Campbell's Station advanced Union objectives

Nov. 29, 1863: The Battle of Fort Sanders Stalemate ends with brutal confrontation, Union victory

East Tennessee in the Civil War: Stories from our readers

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