Longstreet's Great Failure: The East Tennessee Campaign of 1863 (part 2 of 2)

 The Fortified City

The Federals reached the lines in and around Knoxville on the 17^th, but they could not be considered safe yet. The Confederates approached on the 18^th. Captain Orlando Poe, the engineer in charge of the defenses, had already set to work building upon the unfinished Rebel entrenchments. The exhausted soldiers found themselves having to hurriedly work on their own entrenchments before the Confederates arrived and hit them. Poe believed that he needed only a few hours before the army could have effective defenses. He and Burnside decided that General William Sanders and his cavalry would have to hold off the Confederates for the duration of that time. It was a large thing to ask of Sanders and his men. Dismounted cavalry could buy time for the infantry to come up, as General John Buford did at Gettysburg, but did not fare as well when expected to play defense on their own. Sanders took up the challenge with determination.

General William Sanders, the
martyr of the Knoxville Campaign

McLaws’ division was the first to reach Sanders’ line. Sanders’ men used piles of rails, intended for an unfinished railroad, as their breastworks. For hours they managed to hold off the Confederates. Poe wrote years later that their stand “excited the wonder of the rest of our army.” Whenever the line began to falter, “Sanders would walk up to the rail piles and stand there erect, with fully half his height exposed to a terrific fire at short range, until every retreating man, as if ashamed of himself, would return to his proper place.” Sanders also worked with the artillery. He directed its fire to a house full of sharpshooters, and Federal shells struck the building and drove them out. Sanders’ bravery cost him. One bullet found him and mortally wounded him. However, he had bought the necessary time for the rest of Burnside’s army. The grateful commanding general sat by his bedside as he passed away. In honor of the cavalry general Fort Loudon, one of the most prominent fortifications at Knoxville, was renamed Fort Sanders.[1] The armies now settled into a siege.

Longstreet's Great Failure: The East Tennessee Campaign of 1863 (part 1 of 2)

General James Longstreet is popularly portrayed as a voice of modern warfare in the Civil War. He has also become the voice of reason at the Battle of Gettysburg. If his superior General Robert E. Lee had listened to him and avoided frontal assaults than the Confederacy would have had a much better summer of 1863. One would think that, given independent command, Longstreet would excel. He did in fact have a good shot at independent command at the end of 1863. But rather than excelling, he performed poorly. Casual and even some avid Civil War buffs might be surprised to learn that he was defeated by Union General Ambrose Burnside, a man often regarded as just another incompetent general to lose to Lee in Virginia. So why did one of the most highly regarded Confederate generals do so poorly and to what extent should credit be given to Burnside? Here is a short look at the Knoxville Campaign, which was waged in November and December of 1863.

Longstreet Goes West

Georgia-born James Longstreet was working as an army paymaster in New Mexico Territory when the war broke out. Resigning from the army, he soon led a brigade at the First Battle of Bull Run. In 1862 he rose to become one of the South’s greatest generals and Lee’s most reliable subordinate. Commanding the First Corps, he did exemplary service up to the Battle of Gettysburg. While his criticisms of Lee’s risky offensive tactics were valid, his execution of these tactics were themselves mishandled. After the disaster at Gettysburg he looked west for both practical and personal reasons.