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The Tullahoma
Campaign is often overlooked by historians because of
the more politically significant engagements at
Gettysburg and Vicksburg in the summer of 1863. In
late June and early July,
however, the Union’s Army of the Cumberland, based in
the area of Murfreesboro, Tennessee maneuvered the
Confederate Army of Tennessee out of its
positions just to the south, near Shelbyville and
Wartrace, driving the Southern troops out of middle
Tennessee completely and into a fortified garrison in
Chattanooga.
In all, the American Civil War
was a long and bitter struggle. The advantage swung
back and forth between the sides during the fight over
the Confederate independence movement from 1861 to 1865,
and then in the Reconstruction phase of the war between
1865 and the middle of the 1870s. Neither North nor
South won a clear victory, nor did either side really
lose. In the end, the only thing that one could say for
sure is that over 620,000 people were dead, thousands of
others maimed for life, and that America was a very
different place from what it had been in 1860.
The fight was born in
the country’s long-standing debate over slavery, or,
more properly, the sectionalizing of that debate after
1820. White Americans everywhere chose to define the
so-called “peculiar institution” through the institution
of the plantation, and thus ignored the fact that the
system was actually embedded into every element of the
national culture. They imagined the large estates in
South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi and the like to
form the base of a “peculiar” South, and out of this,
Northerners and Southerners came to see themselves as
radically different peoples. Fundamental conflict was
the result. In part, this conflict took the form
of the Confederate independence movement, and the formal
war between the Union and the Confederate states.
The Tullahoma Campaign was a critical part of that war.
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