Who won the Battle of Nashville?
The Union won. On 15 and 16 December 1864 Major General George H. Thomas attacked John Bell Hood's Confederate Army of Tennessee south of Nashville, turned its left on the first day and broke it at Shy's Hill on the second. Hood's army fled south, lost about 6,000 men and never recovered.1
Two weeks after the slaughter at Franklin, the Confederate Army of Tennessee sat in the cold hills south of Nashville, facing an enemy more than twice its size inside one of the most heavily fortified cities in North America. On 15 and 16 December 1864 George H. Thomas came out of those fortifications and attacked. In two days he drove John Bell Hood's army from two lines of works, took thousands of prisoners and sent the survivors streaming south toward Alabama.2
The American Battlefield Trust says the victory shattered the Army of Tennessee and effectively ended the war in Tennessee, and the Tennessee Encyclopedia describes it as the continuation of the destruction that Franklin had begun.3
This page follows both commanders: Hood, who led a broken army to Nashville and dug in to wait; Thomas, who nearly lost his command for waiting too; and the soldiers who fought it out, among them the regiments of United States Colored Troops who stormed Overton's Hill. For the wider war see our guides to the Western Theater of the Civil War and the American Civil War.4
Why did Hood march on Nashville?
After Atlanta fell in September 1864, Hood led the Army of Tennessee north into Tennessee in November, hoping to force Sherman's armies out of Georgia. In his memoir he described the larger plan: beat the Union forces before they could concentrate at Nashville, take the city and its supplies, recruit in Tennessee and Kentucky, threaten Cincinnati, and then either fight Sherman or march east to help Robert E. Lee in Virginia. The American Battlefield Trust sums up the same scheme and calls it grasping at straws.5
The campaign went wrong at once. Schofield's Union force slipped past Hood at Spring Hill on 29 November, and the next day Hood threw his army against Schofield's entrenchments at Franklin. The Trust estimates that nearly a third of his force was lost there. Schofield marched on to Nashville, where Thomas was gathering every unit he could find, including Andrew J. Smith's three divisions and Steedman's provisional command.6
Hood still followed. He arrived in front of the city on 2 December, put Stephen D. Lee's corps in the center across the Franklin pike, Cheatham on the right and Stewart on the left, and dug in on a line of hills facing the Union works. His reasoning, in his own words, was that his army was too weak to storm Nashville or to cross into Kentucky, but that a retreat would wreck it. So he would entrench, wait for reinforcements he had been promised from Texas, and hope that Thomas would attack, be beaten and let the Confederates follow him into his works.7
Few observers then or later thought much of the plan. Cox, a Union general who fought at Nashville and later wrote its history, called the hope of help from Texas a forlorn one, since no organized Confederate force had crossed the Mississippi in a long time, and the Trust notes that Edmund Kirby Smith declined to send any. Cox also quotes P. G. T. Beauregard, Hood's superior, who reported that after Franklin the army was no longer fit to attack Nashville. Cox thought Hood stayed partly to show confidence, to gather supplies and to enforce conscription in Tennessee. Hood made his weak army weaker by sending Nathan Bedford Forrest with most of the cavalry and Bate's division against the Union garrison at Murfreesboro, where Bate's infantry was routed on 7 December.8
Why did Grant almost relieve Thomas before the battle?
Nashville had been fortified since 1862 under the engineer James St. Clair Morton and others, and Union gunboats patrolled the Cumberland River. Thomas could defend it with ease. Washington wanted more. From the first days of December Lincoln, the War Department and Grant urged Thomas to attack at once, and Grant advised him to leave the city's defenses to its armed quartermaster employees and go after Hood.9
Thomas wanted a few more days, above all to find horses for James H. Wilson's cavalry, much of which was dismounted. Then, around 8 December, the weather turned. Freezing rain, sleet and snow covered the hills with ice, and Grant himself later wrote that the rain froze as it fell. Thomas and his corps commanders agreed that troops could not advance up icy slopes in line of battle. Grant did not see it that way. He feared Hood would slip around Nashville and cross the Cumberland into Kentucky, and he wrote that Thomas's movements were always deliberate and slow, though effective in defense.10
According to Hood, who cites Thomas Van Horne's history of the Army of the Cumberland, an order relieving Thomas was issued on 9 December and then suspended. On 13 December Grant sent John A. Logan west with an order relieving Thomas, to be used only if Thomas had still not moved, and then set out for Nashville himself. Hood later printed Grant's telegram of 11 December warning that, if Thomas waited longer, the country would see the mortifying spectacle of a rebel army moving for the Ohio. The ice began to melt on 13 and 14 December, and on the evening of the 14th Thomas wired Washington that he would attack in the morning. The attack went in, and the order relieving him was never delivered.11
What happened on the first day, 15 December?
Thomas's plan was to hold Hood's right with a demonstration and throw most of his army against the Confederate left. Under a heavy morning fog Steedman's provisional command, which included regiments of United States Colored Troops, attacked Hood's right between the Murfreesboro road and the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad. It made little ground, and the Trust thinks it held Hood's attention only briefly, but the National Park Service and the Tennessee Encyclopedia credit it with pinning a whole Confederate corps in place for the day.12
The main blow was a great wheel to the left. Smith's corps and Wood's IV Corps swung out of the western works, with Wilson's cavalry riding around the far flank and Schofield's XXIII Corps following in support. Hood had covered his left with five detached redoubts, some of them unfinished because of the frozen ground. Union infantry and dismounted cavalry took them one after another. In the afternoon Post's brigade of Wood's corps stormed the outpost on Montgomery Hill, and by dusk Stewart's badly outnumbered corps on the Confederate left had been driven back.13
Cox counted sixteen guns and 1,200 prisoners taken that day; the Trust's narrative says Hood lost 19 guns. Union losses had been light. Darkness ended the fighting, and Hood's broken left fell back about two miles to a new line.14
How did Hood try to hold on with a second line?
Hood did not retreat. During the night he formed a shorter line along a range of hills two miles south, anchored on two heights: Overton's Hill, also called Peach Orchard Hill, on the right, held by Lee's corps, and Compton's Hill on the left. He shifted Cheatham's corps from his right to his left, where the danger lay, and kept his headquarters at Travellers Rest, the Overton house, where it had been throughout the stand before Nashville. The tired troops spent the night digging.15
The new position was stronger in some ways, because it was shorter. But the left was badly placed. Bate's division held the hill at the angle where the line turned south, its works had been dug at night too far back from the crest to command the slope, and Union guns could fire into it from front, flank and rear. Bate complained; Cox says Hood's engineers had laid out the line and Cheatham did not feel free to change it. Hood, for his part, insisted his engineers had staked the line with great care.16
What happened at Overton's Hill (Peach Orchard Hill)?
On 16 December the Union line closed up in front of the new Confederate position. On the Union left, Wood decided to try Overton's Hill. At about three in the afternoon Post's brigade, with Streight's in support, advanced up the slope from the north, while Colonel Charles R. Thompson's brigade of Colored Troops, the 12th, 13th and 100th USCT, attacked from the east, with Grosvenor's brigade in support.17
The defenders met them with a storm of fire at close range. Some men reached the parapet, but the assault broke on the abatis and the earthworks. Post was struck down and later received the Medal of Honor. The 13th USCT kept going after the units around it fell back: five of its color bearers were shot down, and the American Battlefield Trust counts 221 casualties, about 40 percent of the regiment; the Battle of Nashville Trust likewise puts the loss at almost 40 percent of its 556 men.18
Estimates of what the failed assault on Overton's Hill cost differ: Cox judged it perhaps half of all Union casualties in the battle, Biggs's narrative for the American Battlefield Trust about a third, and the Battle of Nashville Trust cites battle reports of as many as 1,500 to 2,000 dead and wounded. Cox adds that Thompson's brigade lost more heavily than any other brigade on the field. Confederate Brigadier General James Holtzclaw, whose men did much of the killing, wrote in his report that the Black soldiers came on gallantly but came only to die. The American Battlefield Trust and the Battle of Nashville Trust both record Thomas, riding over the ground afterward, telling his staff that the question was settled: Black soldiers would fight.19
How did the Confederate line break at Shy's Hill?
The decisive blow fell at the other end of the line. Through the afternoon Union batteries of Smith's and Schofield's corps pounded the angle on Compton's Hill, and Wilson's dismounted troopers worked around the Confederate left and into its rear. To meet them and to support Overton's Hill, Hood pulled brigades out of Cheatham's line, leaving Bate's division stretched thin.20
Brigadier General John McArthur, commanding a division of Smith's corps, saw that the hill could be taken. The accounts differ on how he got leave: the American Battlefield Trust says he attacked on his own initiative, without orders, while Cox says he proposed the attack and Thomas approved it. At about four o'clock, as rain began to fall, McArthur's first brigade under Colonel William McMillen charged up the slope under cover of the artillery and went over the works. Cox's division of Schofield's corps joined in, and Wilson's cavalry pressed in from the south.21
Bate's line gave way, and the collapse spread along the whole Confederate front. William M. Shy, commanding the 20th Tennessee (a colonel on the city markers, a lieutenant colonel in Biggs's account), was killed defending the hill, which has carried his name ever since; Brigadier General Thomas Benton Smith was captured. Even Overton's Hill, which had held all afternoon, was abandoned as Wood's men came on again. In Cox's phrase, the Confederate left was crushed in like an egg-shell.22
How did Hood retreat from Nashville?
Night and heavy rain saved what was left of the army. The fugitives streamed through the Brentwood Hills to the Franklin pike, while Confederate rear guards behind barricades on the Granny White pike held up Wilson's cavalry long enough to keep it from cutting them off. Lee's corps formed a rear guard, and the Tennessee Encyclopedia credits his skill with keeping Thomas from encircling the army. On the road north of Franklin, a Confederate rear guard was overrun at Hollow Tree Gap.23
Swollen rivers, a misdirected pontoon train and a rear guard under Edward C. Walthall and Forrest slowed the pursuit. Hood crossed the Tennessee River at Bainbridge on 26 and 27 December and went into winter camp at Tupelo, Mississippi. On 13 January 1865 he asked to be relieved of command.24
How many soldiers died in the Battle of Nashville?
Union losses are well documented: 3,061 killed, wounded and missing in the National Park Service and Trust figures, 3,057 in Cox's count from Thomas's returns, fewer than 400 of them killed.25
Confederate losses can only be estimated, because the army dissolved before returns were made. The Trust and the Tennessee Encyclopedia give about 6,000 and the Park Service 6,500, many of them prisoners rather than killed or wounded. Cox counts about 4,500 prisoners and 53 guns taken in the two days; Hood admitted losing 54 guns but said his casualties in killed and wounded were comparatively small, since his men fought behind breastworks.26
Hood later claimed he brought about 18,500 effectives back to Tupelo. Cox called such figures nearly worthless and noted that Thomas's returns showed more than 13,000 prisoners and deserters taken in November and December. In the Trust's estimate, the Army of Tennessee lost nearly three quarters of its fighting strength in the six months from Atlanta to Nashville.27
Who won the Battle of Nashville, and why did it matter?
Thomas won outright. The Army of Tennessee, the main Confederate army in the West, was wrecked as a fighting force: some of its men went on to fight in the Carolinas in 1865, but never again as a serious threat. The American Battlefield Trust concludes that after Nashville the fall of the Confederacy was only a matter of time, and the Trust's battle narrative adds that the Deep South now lay more open to Union armies than before.28
Why did it go so badly for Hood? Cox blamed his tactics on 15 December, letting Thomas deploy right across his left flank, and the despair that Franklin had left in his men. The Tennessee Encyclopedia makes the same point: Franklin had decimated Hood's best units and demoralized many of his men. Hood never accepted that verdict. He wrote that the army had repulsed every attack until the break, that he had planned to strike Thomas's exposed flank the next morning, and that the rout was the first time he had ever seen a Confederate army abandon the field.29
For Thomas the battle was vindication. Grant, who had been ready to remove him, called off the order when the news came and wrote in his memoirs that Thomas was successful from the start. For the US Colored Troops, the dead in front of Overton's Hill became proof, acknowledged by both sides, of what Black soldiers would do.30
Where was the Battle of Nashville fought?
On the hills and farms south and southwest of downtown Nashville, Tennessee, between the Charlotte and Murfreesboro roads, in what are now city neighborhoods. Most of the field has been built over, but Shy's Hill, Fort Negley and the Peace Monument survive, and a series of historical markers traces the lines.31
The Battle of Nashville Monument, by the Italian sculptor Giuseppe Moretti, honors the soldiers of both sides and the Americans who served in World War I. It was dedicated in 1927, wrecked by a tornado in 1974, and rebuilt in a park on battlefield ground at Granny White Pike, where it was rededicated in 1999.32
For the battles that led here, read the Battle of Atlanta, Spring Hill and Franklin; for the other half of the story, Sherman's March to the Sea. See also our list of the greatest battles of the Civil War and the military history of the United States.33
