Fort Sanders
Fort Loudon Tennessee

American Civil War
November 29, 1863

In attempting to take Knoxville, the Confederates decided that Fort Sanders was the only vulnerable place where they could penetrate Union Major General Ambrose E. Burnside's fortifications, which enclosed the city, and successfully conclude the siege, already a week long. The fort surmounted an eminence just northwest of Knoxville.

Northwest of the fort, the land dropped off abruptly. Confederate Lt. General James Longstreet believed he could assemble a storming party, undetected at night, below the fortifications and, before dawn, overwhelm Fort Sanders by a coup de main. Following a brief artillery barrage directed at the fort's interior, three Rebel brigades charged.

Union wire entanglements-–telegraph wire stretched from one tree stump to another to another-–delayed the attack, but the fort's outer ditch halted the Confederates. This ditch was twelve feet wide and from four to ten feet deep with vertical sides. The fort's exterior slope was almost vertical, also. Crossing the ditch was nearly impossible, especially under withering defensive fire from musketry and canister. 

Confederate officers did lead their men into the ditch, but, without scaling ladders, few emerged on the scarp side and a small number entered the fort to be wounded, killed, or captured. The attack lasted a short twenty minutes. Longstreet undertook his Knoxville expedition to divert Union troops from Chattanooga and to get away from General Braxton Bragg, with whom he was engaged in a bitter feud. His failure to take Knoxville scuttled his purpose.

This was the decisive battle of the Knoxville Campaign. This Confederate defeat, plus the loss of Chattanooga on November 25, put much of East Tennessee in the Union camp.

Result(s): Union victory

Location: Knox County

Campaign: Knoxville Campaign (1863)

Date(s): November 29, 1863

Principal Commanders: Major General Ambrose E. Burnside [US]; Lt. General James Longstreet [CS]

Forces Engaged: Department of the Ohio [US]; Confederate Forces in East Tennessee [CS]

Estimated Casualties: 880 total (US 100; CS 780)


The Shipwreck of Their Hopes: The Battles for Chattanooga
All the information you need to understand the flow of the battle at Chattanooga as well as the political intriguing that helped to shape the results is here



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From Manassas to Appomattox: General James Longstreet
According to some, he was partially to blame for the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg; according to others, if Lee had followed Longstreet's advice, they would have won that battle. He has been called stubborn and vain; and he has been lauded as one of the greatest tacticians of the Civil War

Shilol: A Novel by Shelby Foote
One of the best novels of the American Civil War. Foote is able to capture not only the sense of the battle, but the spirit of the soldiers who fought there. A study of the human condition and how it deals with the horrors of war

Burnside
Ambrose Burnside, the Union general, was a major player on the Civil War stage from the first clash at Bull Run until the final summer of the war. He led a corps or army during most of this time and played important roles in various theaters of the war.

The Confederacy's Last Hurrah: Spring Hill, Franklin, and Nashville
John Bell Hood rallied his demoralized troops and marched them off the Tennessee, desperately hoping to draw Sherman after him and forestall the Confederacy's defeat

Forts Henry and Donelson: The Key to the Confederate Heartland
The front in Virginia was relatively narrow (Chesapeake Bay to Blue Ridge Mountains) while in Tennessee the front stretched hundreds of miles from the Mississippi River to the Appalachian Mountains. To cover this extensive area the Confederates had a much smaller force than in Virginia

Where the South Lost the War: An Analysis of the Fort Henry-Fort Donelson Campaign
The war probably could have been over in 1862 had Lieutenant Phelps destroyed the bridge at Florence. Not doing so provided a retreat for A. S. Johnston to move his men to Corinth and then to Shiloh

Struggle for the Heartland: The Campaigns from Fort Henry to Corinth
The military campaign that began in early 1862 with the advance to Fort Henry and culminated in late May with the capture of Corinth, Mississippi. The first significant Northern penetration into the Confederate west

Six Armies in Tennessee: The Chickamauga and Chattanooga Campaigns
The Federal success along the river opened the way for advances into central and eastern Tennessee, which culminated in the bloody battle of Chickamauga and then a struggle for Chattanooga. Chickamauga is usually counted as a Confederate victory, albeit a costly one

War in Kentucky: From Shiloh to Perryville

by James Lee McDonough
By mid 1862, Union gains in the Mississippi Valley and in Tennessee and Kentucky had brought the Confederacy to a point of strategic crisis. This valuable addition to the growing literature on the Civil War in the West tells how the Union then failed to press home its advantage while the Confederacy failed to force Kentucky into the Confederacy. The climax of these events was the little-known Battle of Perryville, in which a greatly inferior Southern force under Braxton Bragg managed a draw against Don Carlos Buell's Union army but also effectively terminated the Confederate invasion of Kentucky. McDonough has researched thoroughly and written clearly, making this book informative and accessible to a wide range of Civil War students.
Cozzens follows up his magisterial account of the Battle of Chickamauga, This Terrible Sound (1992), with an equally authoritative study of the Chattanooga campaign that followed it. Braxton Bragg (who sometimes seems unfit to have been at large on the public streets, let alone commanding armies) failed to either destroy or starve out the Union Army of the Cumberland. In due course, superior Northern resources and strategy--not tactics; few generals on either side come out looking like good tacticians--progressively loosened the Confederate cordon around the city. Finally, the Union drove off Bragg's army entirely in the famous Battle of Missionary Ridge, which was a much more complex affair than previous, heroic accounts make it. Like its predecessor on Chickamauga, this is such a good book on Chattanooga that it's hard to believe any Civil War collection will need another book on the subject for at least a generation.
The Shipwreck of Their Hopes: The Battles for Chattanooga


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