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The Army of Tennessee was the
Confederacy’s main force in the western theater of operations. Formed
from troops that had fought under Albert Sidney Johnston at Shiloh, and
from portions of Edmund Kirby Smith’s units in East Tennessee, the army
was given its name following the Battle of Perryville (KY) in fall
1862. Soon after Perryville, the army commander, General Braxton
Bragg, established his base at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, threatening Union
occupied Nashville. For the next two and one half years, this
organization would be the Confederacy’s most controversial field
force.
There was certainly nothing wrong with
the men in the ranks, as Union veterans of several western battles would
readily testify. As well, the army had some of the most talented and
celebrated subordinate commanders, particularly of the cavalry arm.
Patrick Cleburne, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Joseph Wheeler and John Hunt
Morgan became storybook generals. However, Braxton Bragg was
continually entangled in
heated controversies with his major subordinates, particularly his two
corps commanders, Leonidas Polk and William J. Hardee. This squabbling,
born during the Perryville campaign, muted the army’s effectiveness at
the Battle of Stone’s River, led to near complete disaster during the
Tullahoma maneuvers, and squandered a golden opportunity to destroy the
Union Army of the Cumberland in detail before the Battle of Chickamauga.
Finally, after being routed at the siege of Chattanooga in November,
1863, Bragg was relieved. The following year, the army performed much
better during the Atlanta campaign under its new commander, Joseph E.
Johnston. Nonetheless, it could never drive its opponent away, or halt
for long the progress of Union invasion.
Ultimately, the Army of Tennessee’s
problems were less about generals than about the task at hand and the
tools it had available to use. Unlike Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern
Virginia, the Confederacy’s main western force had a huge geographic
area to cover, and lacked the important barrier system provided in the
east by the major rivers that crossed northern Virginia from piedmont to
the Atlantic. In addition, after the mediocre tenure of Don Carlos
Buell, Union forces in middle Tennessee and then Georgia were led by the
likes of William S. Rosecrans, George H. Thomas, Ulysses S. Grant and
William Tecumseh Sherman. Over the course of the war, these proved to
be the Union’s most creative and effective leaders. As a result, in
late 1864, the Army of Tennessee, under its last commander, John Bell
Hood, was reduced to making a desperate campaign to reverse the tide of
the war by invading Tennessee. He met complete disaster at the battles
of Franklin and Nashville, and lost his army in the process. |
