Civil War

Every leader needs a trusted confidant. For Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the Civil War's greatest military minds, that man was David Campbell Kelley. Kelley began adulthood in the clergy, serving for two years as a missionary in China and returning home just a year before the Civil War. He then raised a company of cavalry from his family's large congregation that became part of Forrest's original regiment. Kelley quickly became Forrest's second in command, assisting in some of his most daring engagements, offering support in key decisions and serving as his unofficial chaplain. Following the war, Kelley returned to preaching, helped establish Vanderbilt University and launched a campaign for governor of Tennessee. Now, for the first time, author Michael R. Bradley brings Kelley's dynamic life to the fore.

Tennessee's Thirteenth Union Cavalry was a unit composed mostly of amateur soldiers that eventually turned undisciplined boys into seasoned fighters. At the outbreak of the Civil War, East Tennessee was torn between its Unionist tendencies and the surrounding Confederacy. The result was the persecution of the home Yankees" by Confederate sympathizers. Rather than quelling Unionist fervor, this oppression helped East Tennessee contribute an estimated thirty thousand troops to the North. Some of those troops joined the "Loyal Thirteenth" in Stoneman's raid and in pursuit of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Join author Melanie Storie as she recounts the harrowing narrative of an often-overlooked piece of Civil War history."

Tennessee's Cumberland Plateau played host to some of the most dramatic military maneuvering of the Civil War. Straddling the entire state of Tennessee, the formidable tableland proved to be a maze of topographical pitfalls and a morass of divided loyalties. As Federal forces sought to capitalize on the capture of Nashville, they moved into a region split by the most vicious guerrilla warfare outside Missouri, including the colorful and intensely violent rivalry between Confederate Champ Ferguson and Unionist "Tinker" Dave Beaty. The bitter conflict affected thousands of ordinary men and women struggling to survive in the face of a remorseless war of attrition, and its legacy continues to be felt today.

With firsthand accounts, letters and diary entries from the Carter House Archives, local historian James R. Knight paints a vivid picture of the gruesome Battle of Franklin.

In late November 1864, the last Southern army east of the Mississippi that was still free to maneuver started out from northern Alabama on the Confederacy's last offensive. John Bell Hood and his Army of Tennessee had dreams of capturing Nashville and marching on to the Ohio River, but a small Union force under Hood's old West Point roommate stood between him and the state capital. In a desperate attempt to smash John Schofield's line at Franklin, Hood threw most of his men against the Union works, centered on the house of a family named Carter, and lost 30 percent of his attacking force in one afternoon, crippling his army and setting it up for a knockout blow at Nashville two weeks later.

Go inside the story of the battles for Midle Tennessee in late 1862-63 through letters, reports and memoirs.

After the Battle of Perryville in October 1862, the focus of the Civil War in the West shifted back to Tennessee. The Union Army of the Cumberland regrouped in Nashville, while the Confederate Army of Tennessee camped 30 miles away in Murfreesboro. On December 26 the Federals marched southward and fought a three-day brawl at Stones River with their Confederate counterparts. The Confederates withdrew, and both armies spent the winter and spring harassing each other and regrouping for the next round. In the Confederate camp, dissention corroded the army's high command. The critical engagement at Stones River (by percentage of loss the Civil War's bloodiest battle) and the masterful Tullahoma operation will receive detailed attention in this journey through the historic moment in time.

The Tennessee Campaign of November and December 1864 was the Southern Confederacy's last significant offensive operation of the Civil War.

General John Bell Hood of the Confederate Army of Tennessee attempted to capture Nashville, the final realistic chance for a battlefield victory against the Northern juggernaut. Hood's former West Point instructor, Major General George Henry Thomas, led the Union force, fighting those who doubted him in his own army as well as Hood's Confederates. Through the bloody, horrific battles at Spring Hill, Franklin and Nashville and a freezing retreat to the Tennessee River, Hood ultimately failed. Civil War historian James R. Knight chronicles the Confederacy's last real hope at victory and its bitter disappointment.

In February 1862, after defeats at Bull Run and at Wilson's Creek in Missouri, the Union army was desperate for victory on the eve of its first offensive of the Civil War. The strategy was to penetrate the Southern heartland with support from a new Brown Water� navy. In a two-week campaign plagued by rising floodwaters and brutal winter weather, two armies collided in rural Tennessee to fight over two forts that controlled the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers. Those intense days set the course of the war in the Western Theater for eighteen months and determined the fates of Ulysses S. Grant, Andrew H. Foote and Albert Sidney Johnston. Historian James R. Knight paints a picture of this crucial but often neglected and misunderstood turning point.

Striking out from Knoxville, Tennessee in late March of 1865, Major General George Stoneman unleashed his cavalry division upon Southern Appalachia intent on leaving nothing for the Rebellion to stand upon. The raiders wreaked havoc on government stores, civilian property and indispensable infrastructure, dashing all hope for the dying Confederacy's stand on the rugged peaks of the Blue Ridge. They eventually trampled through five southern states, reduced to ashes one of the last major prisons in the south and helped pursue the renegade president. But much more than wanton destruction, their story is one of hardship, redemption and retribution. Taking into account the local folklore of the Raid, this volume traces the column's course as it departed Tennessee, penetrated Southwestern Virginia and stormed the North Carolina Piedmont.

Confederate brigadier general John Adams refused to leave his men despite his own critical injuries and died at the Battle of Franklin. Until recently, his service was rarely acknowledged. During his remarkable military career, he traversed the country from Tennessee to New York, Mexico to Maryland and then to California. Adams trained and rode alongside some of the most celebrated commanders of the Confederate army, but his greatest feat remains his unwavering devotion to his men and the Confederate cause in his home state of Tennessee. Bryan W. Lane follows Adams's rise in the military ranks until his inevitable fall at one of the most important battles of the Civil War.