The Battle of Nashville occurred within the context of the Franklin–Nashville campaign as Union General William T. Sherman sought to deal with Confederate General John Bell Hood's threat to his supply lines. After the Atlanta campaign, Hood moved northwest to disrupt Sherman's communications from Chattanooga, hoping to force a battle on favorable terms. Rather than commit his main army to defend hundreds of miles of supply lines, Sherman decided to disengage and march east toward Savannah, leaving Major General George H. Thomas to address Hood's army and defend Tennessee. Hood devised a strategy to march into Tennessee and defeat Thomas's geographically divided force, pursuing Major General John M. Schofield's army from Pulaski through Columbia and attempting to intercept and destroy it at Spring Hill.
Schofield successfully withdrew past Hood at Spring Hill on November 29, 1864, due to Confederate command miscommunications and solid Union leadership. Hood pursued Schofield to Franklin, where on November 30 he ordered nearly 31,000 men to assault Union fortifications. The Union troops repulsed multiple assaults and inflicted over 6,000 Confederate casualties, including significant losses among key Confederate generals. Schofield withdrew during the night and marched into Nashville's defensive works on December 1, coming under Thomas's command. By this point, Thomas had concentrated approximately 55,000 men, including veteran IV and XXIII Corps from the Atlanta campaign, Major General Andrew J. Smith's Detachment of the Army of the Tennessee with experience at Vicksburg and the Red River Campaign, and cavalry forces under Major General James H. Wilson, though most had suffered defeats at the hands of Confederate cavalry leaders.
The Battle of Nashville itself was fought on December 15–16, 1864, representing one of the largest Union victories of the war. Thomas attacked and routed Hood's Army of Tennessee, an engagement that resulted in the end of large-scale fighting west of the coastal states and effectively destroyed Hood's army as a fighting force.
The American Civil War (1861–1865) was the deadliest conflict in American history, killing an estimated 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers and an unknown number of civilians. The Confederate States of America, formed by eleven seceding Southern states, faced the Union in four years of warfare across 23 states and territories. Major engagements included First and Second Bull Run, Antietam (the bloodiest single day in American history, September 17, 1862), Chancellorsville, Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863), Vicksburg (surrendered July 4, 1863), and Sherman's March through Georgia and the Carolinas (1864–1865). President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, transforming the war's stated purpose to include the abolition of slavery and enabling the enlistment of approximately 180,000 Black men in the United States Colored Troops. Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. The war resolved the question of secession and ended American slavery, though Reconstruction would face sustained resistance in its attempt to secure civil rights for formerly enslaved people.
Union: 3,061 casualties (387 killed, 2,558 wounded, 112 missing/captured); Confederate: approximately 6,000 casualties (1,500 killed/wounded, 4,500 missing/captured, several batteries captured by Union forces)
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