Battle of Stones River

Background

In the autumn of 1862 Braxton Bragg's invasion of Kentucky had ended in retreat after Perryville. Rather than fall back further, Bragg chose to hold Middle Tennessee, and by late November his army was in winter quarters around Murfreesboro, a prosperous town astride the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad and the key to the rich Stones River valley. There he merged his command with Kirby Smith's into the Army of Tennessee. His senior lieutenants, Polk and Hardee, had already urged Jefferson Davis to remove him; Davis kept him.

On the Union side Lincoln replaced the cautious Don Carlos Buell with William S. Rosecrans, who reached the army in late October, moved it to Nashville, and set about rebuilding its morale, its cavalry and its supply line. Washington wanted results. With Burnside repulsed at Fredericksburg and Grant's drive on Vicksburg stalling, the administration needed a victory before the new year and before the Emancipation Proclamation took effect on 1 January; Halleck warned Rosecrans that if he could not act, someone else would be tried.

The Confederates, meanwhile, weakened themselves. Visiting Murfreesboro in mid-December, Davis was told Rosecrans would not move before spring and ordered Carter Stevenson's division of about 7,500 men to Mississippi, a sixth of Bragg's infantry. Bragg also sent Forrest and Morgan off on long cavalry raids against Grant's and Rosecrans's communications. Rosecrans saw his chance. On 26 December, in driving rain, the Army of the Cumberland marched out of Nashville in three columns on Murfreesboro, thirty miles away. By the evening of 30 December the two armies lay facing each other astride Stones River, in places only a few hundred yards apart.

The armies

CDB90, following Livermore, gives Rosecrans 41,400 effectives and Bragg 34,732; other counts run to about 44,800 Union and 37,712 Confederate present for duty. Union losses were about 13,000, Confederate between about 9,900 and 11,700.

Rosecrans's army was still officially the Fourteenth Army Corps; it took the name Army of the Cumberland a week after the battle. It fought in three wings that approximated corps: Alexander McCook's right (Davis, Johnson and Sheridan), George H. Thomas's centre (Rousseau and Negley on the field) and Thomas Crittenden's left (Wood, Palmer and Van Cleve). Thomas was the best of them; McCook and Crittenden were political or professional disappointments whom Rosecrans had inherited. St. Clair Morton's Pioneer Brigade and the Chicago Board of Trade Battery formed a small reserve. David Stanley's cavalry, rebuilt since Nashville, was still the army's weak point.

Bragg had two infantry corps: Leonidas Polk's (Cheatham's and Withers's divisions) and William J. Hardee's (Breckinridge's, Cleburne's and McCown's), with Joseph Wheeler's cavalry brigades under Wheeler, John Wharton and John Pegram. Cleburne, a former British soldier, was already among the best division commanders in either army; Breckinridge, once vice-president of the United States, was on bad terms with Bragg. The ground favoured the defender: open cotton and corn fields broken by dense cedar brakes and limestone outcrops that hid troops, broke up formations and stopped artillery. Stones River itself was ankle-deep at the fords but rising with the rain.

The battle

CDB90 treats the battle as a single engagement, number 195 (MURFREESBORO (STONE'S RIVER)), from 07:00 on 31 December to 22:00 on 2 January. Times are approximate.

29–30 December: two plans. On the night of the 29th Harker's brigade waded the river and nearly took Wayne's Hill, the height that commanded Polk's line, before being thrown back. McCook came into line on the 30th facing south-east, his right hanging in the air near the Franklin road,. Both commanders resolved to attack the other's right next morning. Bragg massed McCown and Cleburne under Hardee on his left to wheel the Federals back against the river and cut the Nashville Pike; Rosecrans would send Van Cleve and Wood across McFadden's Ford against Breckinridge while McCook held for three hours.

31 December, dawn: the right wing collapses. At about 06:22 McCown's 4,400 men emerged from the fog, with Cleburne 500 yards behind. Johnson's division was cooking breakfast. Kirk's and Willich's brigades broke within minutes, losing eight guns and about 1,000 prisoners; Cleburne then struck Davis, and within an hour five Union brigades were in retreat. Van Cleve had begun crossing at 07:00; Rosecrans called him back and sent every reserve to the right.

07:00–10:45: Sheridan's stand. Cheatham's brigades came on one at a time against Sheridan, whose men had been under arms since 04:00. Each was repulsed; Sill was killed and Roberts led a bayonet counter-attack. For about ninety minutes Sheridan's three brigades and their batteries held seven Confederate brigades in the cedars of the Slaughter Pen. Stewart's whole-brigade assault and empty cartridge boxes ended it: Roberts was killed, Houghtalling's battery lost, and by 10:45 Sheridan was out.

Late morning: the Nashville Pike. Rosecrans rode the line in person and built a new front along the turnpike and railroad. Rousseau, sent into the cedars at 09:30, fell back to high ground by the pike, where three batteries broke Rains's charge across the cotton field and killed Rains; Ector, attacking alone, fared no better against Morton's Pioneers and the Chicago Board of Trade Battery. Near the Round Forest a round shot beheaded his chief of staff, Julius Garesché, at his side. Around 15:00 Cleburne's last drive on the pike broke from sheer exhaustion. The Federals had been pushed back two and a half to three miles, losing 28 guns and over 3,000 prisoners, but the pike held.

31 December: the Round Forest. The hinge of the new Union line was a four-acre cedar copse between the pike and the railroad, held by William Hazen's brigade and soon called Hell's Half Acre. Chalmers attacked it at 09:00 and Donelson at 10:00; both were cut to pieces. Bragg, fixed on the copse, ordered Breckinridge across the river at 13:00; his brigades went in piecemeal, Adams (426 lost) about 14:00, then Jackson, then Palmer and Preston at dusk, and all failed.

1 January: the lull. Rosecrans decided at a midnight council to stay. Bragg, sure he would retreat, did nothing on New Year's Day while the Federals entrenched and sent Van Cleve's division, now under Samuel Beatty, across McFadden's Ford to high ground on the east bank.

2 January: Breckinridge's attack. Bragg ordered Breckinridge to take that hill at 16:00, an hour before dark; Breckinridge protested and was overruled. In sleet, about 5,000 men crossed half a mile of open ground and routed Price's and Fyffe's brigades; Hanson of the Kentucky 'Orphan' Brigade was mortally wounded. As they crested the rise above the ford, Crittenden's artillery chief, Captain John Mendenhall, opened with 45 guns massed hub to hub on the ridge west of the river and 12 more a mile to the south-west. The attack collapsed at once; Union brigades waded over in pursuit. In under an hour Breckinridge lost over 1,800 men.

3 January: withdrawal. Fearing the rain would flood the river behind his right, and wrongly believing Rosecrans reinforced, Bragg retreated that night towards Shelbyville and Tullahoma.

Aftermath

The Union lost about 12,700 to 13,900 men and the Confederates about 9,900 to 11,700, close to a third of the armies engaged; by one reckoning the highest proportion of any major battle of the war, by the Park Service's second only to Gettysburg. Breckinridge's charge cost over a third of the men who made it.

Tactically it was a draw: the Confederates had won most of the fighting and Rosecrans was too hurt to pursue, occupying Murfreesboro only on 5 January. But Bragg had left the field. Lincoln, after the disasters of December, made the most of it; months later he wrote to Rosecrans that 'you gave us a hard-earned victory, which, had there been a defeat instead, the nation could scarcely have lived over.' The news rallied war sentiment in the Old Northwest; Ohio and Indiana voted Rosecrans their thanks.

For the Army of Tennessee the retreat deepened the quarrel between Bragg and his generals; his soldiers wrote home that he had lost the army's confidence, and only Johnston's support and Davis's failure to find a replacement kept him in command. Rosecrans spent nearly six months building Fortress Rosecrans, a 200-acre depot of earthworks at Murfreesboro, before the Tullahoma campaign in June; the same two armies met again at Chickamauga that September. Hazen's men built a monument in the Round Forest in 1863, often called the oldest Civil War monument standing in its original place. Stones River National Battlefield was created in 1927.

Wargaming it

Stones River tests the defender's nerve and the attacker's timing. At brigade level, with turns of 30 minutes to an hour, 31 December fits a table about four miles by three: Stones River and the Round Forest on one edge, the Franklin road and Overall Creek on the other, the Nashville Pike and railroad running through the Union rear. The second scenario, Breckinridge's attack of 2 January, is small enough for regimental scale: a division of about 5,000 against two brigades and a hidden grand battery.

The terrain does the most work. Cedar brakes and limestone outcrops should block sight, halt artillery and disorder anyone who crosses them, while the cotton and corn fields beyond are killing grounds; this is what pulled Bragg's great wheel apart, as brigades lost touch in the trees. Ammunition supply matters too: Sheridan was beaten by empty cartridge boxes, and a game should let that happen.

The decisions are good ones. As Bragg, how quickly do you feed Cheatham and Withers in, and do you bring Breckinridge across in the morning rather than the afternoon? As Rosecrans, do you press Van Cleve's attack on Murfreesboro in the hope of winning the race, or abandon it as he did? What if Harker had held Wayne's Hill on 29 December, or McCook had heeded his pickets? The biggest what-if is Stevenson's 7,500 men, sent to Mississippi a fortnight before; give them back to Bragg and his tired divisions have a reserve for the last push on the pike.

Maps and pictures