Home of the brave
Honoring the sacrifice of Minnesota’s Civil War soldiers.
EDITOR’S NOTE: On the 160th anniversary of Minnesota’s contribution to the victory at the Battle of Nashville during the Civil War, Ken Fliés presented the following address on Dec. 16, 2024 during an American Experiment event at the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial in St. Paul’s Summit Park. His remarks have been lightly edited for space.
In 1942, in his book The Decisive Battles of the U.S.A., Gen. J.F.C. Fuller included Nashville with Saratoga, Yorktown, Chapultepec, Gettysburg, Santiago, and Missouri and the Meuse-Argonne as the battles that determined the course of American history.
Minnesota had the fewest troops of any state in the Civil War (some 20,000), but in the two Civil War battles on his list, they were significant performers in the battle’s outcomes.
During the Civil War, the 5th, 7th, 9th, and 10th Minnesota Infantry Regiments that changed the course of the Battle of Nashville possibly traveled farther and fought over more terrain than any other unit in any of the armies in the Civil War. In the annuals of the commands of these regiments, it is recorded that some of them traveled over 10,000 miles fighting in 10 states.
They would fight from the Red River in North Dakota and Minnesota down to the Red River in Louisiana. They would fight from the Missouri and Mississippi headwaters to the Gulf of Mexico. They would fight and travel upon some two dozen rivers. They would fight all the way to Mobile Bay to the last battles of the war. Just before Nashville, they would, as infantry on foot, chase a Confederate Cavalry Corps across the length of Arkansas (335 miles) and the width of Missouri (285 miles), ending activity in those states. They marched, including through snow and cold, back across Missouri (285 miles) to St. Louis to get on boats to head to Nashville.
The men of these regiments in the Right Wing of the XVI Corps would never taste defeat. They would fight in the Dakota Wars in Minnesota and the Dakotas, driving the Dakota beyond the Missouri River. They would be part of the only unit in the war to ever defeat the great Confederate Cavalry Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest — at the Battle of Tupelo in Mississippi. They would be the critical strike force at Nashville, fulfilling Lincoln’s prophecy that the war would end when armies were destroyed, not territory captured. The four Minnesota regiments at Nashville would be the lead strike force that destroyed the Confederate Army of Tennessee, even though Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana all had at least 30 regiments each at Nashville. The Confederate Army of Tennessee never fought as an army again after Nashville.
After service in Minnesota and the Dakotas in 1862-63 and provost duty guarding St. Louis in the winter of 1863-64, these four regiments, in June of 1864, became part of the Right Wing of the XVI Corps in the Union Army of the Tennessee. This unit would become famous in the war as possibly the Union Army’s most highly mobile infantry strike force, fighting under the leadership of their fiery commander, Gen. Andrew Jackson “Whiskey” Smith.
Attesting to his leadership, one of his men, when arriving in Nashville in December of 1864, was asked his thoughts on the forthcoming battle and the anticipated lead role they were expected to play; he was quoted as saying, “We have been to Vicksburg, Red River, Missouri and about everywhere else down South and out West and now we are going to Hell if old A.J. orders us!”
For most of the war, Smith’s men would fight as their own small army in the Mississippi Valley as a detachment of the Union Army of the Tennessee. They were constantly separated from the rest of the XVI Corps and Gen. Sherman’s main Army of Tennessee in the Chattanooga and Atlanta Campaigns and the March to the Sea. Their whereabouts were often unknown to most of the hierarchy in the Army. They would receive the sobriquet or appellation in Gen. Smith’s words of The Wandering Lost Tribes of Israel for their extensive and continuous travels. When they showed up in Nashville, their XVI Corps had been officially disbanded by the War Department and forgotten. They had no official designation and only then were they given the name “Smith’s Detachment Army of the Tennessee.”
As lean and hardened frontiersmen and Indian fighters, and for their exploits on the battlefields, soldiers in other Union and Confederate armies came to respect and fear them. At the Battle of Pleasant Hill in Louisiana, they alone would save Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks’s Army of the Gulf from destruction. It was here that they were given the moniker “Gorilla-Guerrillas.” A Confederate soldier in Banks’s army said, “They both looked like Gorillas and fought like Guerrillas.”
On the opening day of the Battle of Nashville, Dec. 15, the XVI Corps and the Minnesotans carried out the battle, as the lead strike force captured three forts and drove the Confederates back to Shy’s Hill in the Brentwood Hills. The following day at Nashville, Gen. John Schofield’s XXIII Corps (Union Army of Ohio), with 12,000 men who had not been previously engaged, were under orders from Gen. George H. Thomas on Dec. 16 to attack Shy’s Hill. Schofield refused to go without more men, anticipating the severity and impossibility of the mission. Smith then gave Schofield his 3rd Div. He now had 15,000 troops and still hesitated to attack.
Smith’s 1st Div. Commander, John McArthur, became impatient, realizing the day was waning, and if something did not happen, Hood could reinforce for battle the next day. He requested permission to attack the Hill from Gen. Smith, who agreed to ask Thomas. Smith told McArthur to go ahead if he did not hear back. Smith asked Thomas to attack. Thomas refused Smith’s offer, saying it was Schofield’s job. Of course, Smith did not bother to send a message to McArthur. So, at 4 p.m. on Dec. 16, 1864, the 10th Minnesota in the 1st Div. of Smith’s little army would charge up Shy’s Hill in a brigade of less than 1,000 men.
The 10th was on the extreme left of the brigade that made this charge on Shy’s Hill — considered the honored position in the attack line. They would charge up the exposed salient angle, taking enfilade fire from both their front and left — what one Confederate soldier said “was like iron rain.” Both leaders in the charge, Maj. Michael Cook and Capt. George White, were mortally wounded. The result of this charge and the subsequent charge across the muddy cornfield that broke the Confederate line was determined mainly by the efforts of the four battle-engaged Minnesota regiments.
Maj. Gen. McArthur, the fiery 1st Div. commander who ordered the charge against the instruction of his superiors Gen. Thomas and Gen. Smith, said of the 10th’s actions, “We received a volley which on our right went over our heads but, on the left, punished the 10th Minnesota severely, but nothing daunted this gallant regiment, and together with the others composing the front line, they cleared the enemy works.”
Commanding Gen. Thomas, known as the Rock of Chickamauga, said of the Guerrilla’s charge, “It was the finest feat of arms I have ever witnessed.”
Confederate Gen. Henry Jackson, captured by the Minnesotans on Shy Hill, said of the charge, “The Guerrillas marched up and over my works as cool as fate; it was astonishing such fighting…It was splendid.”
Gen. Thomas had to fight on the offensive against solid entrenchment. The only other major offensive frontal assault by Union armies after 1863 was Grant’s disastrous defeat at Cold Harbor in the Overland Campaign and Sherman’s repulse at Kennesaw Mountain in June 1864 in the Atlanta Campaign. Union forces at Nashville had to defend and attack across the war’s largest battlefront and fight on possibly the war’s most varied and rugged terrain in a rare December spell of cold, ice, and mud in Nashville.
In the two days of battle, McArthur’s 1st Div. captured two generals, 24 artillery pieces, 4,300 prisoners, and 2,500 small arms. The Union, in total, would capture 53 artillery pieces, eclipsing Gen. Robert E. Lee’s 52 at Malvern Hill. The War Department was so elated that they ordered Gen. Grant to give a 200-gun salute at Petersburg, and Sheridan gave a 100-gun salute in Shenandoah Valley, the first time this had happened after any battle in the war.
Gen. Thomas’s strategic offensive plan at Nashville is not forgotten by those who understand warfare. It is considered the finest strategic battle plan of the Civil War. Well into the 20th century, the Battle of Nashville and Thomas’s masterful battle strategy with infantry, cavalry, artillery, and large siege guns was the only Civil War battle studied in European war colleges.
In Minnesota, historians have forgotten the Battle of Nashville and the exploits of the men who fought there, even though more Minnesotans perished in this battle than in any battle in the Civil War. Today, if you ask most Minnesotans about the Civil War, the Battle of Gettysburg and the 1st Minnesota Regiment’s actions there are all they know. Most have no idea there was a battle in Nashville or the participation of Minnesotans in it.
In the immediate aftermath of the war, however, the glorious deeds of the Minnesotans in Nashville were not forgotten by the citizens of Minnesota. Only four counties in Minnesota are named for Minnesota Civil War soldiers: Wilkin, Hubbard, Marshall, and Cook — all XVI Corps men from the Nashville regiments. Likewise, the only Civil War soldiers from Minnesota elected governors in the post-Civil War period were all XVI Corps men: James Lind, Archie McGill, William Marshall, and Lucius Hubbard.
When the paintings of the war for the state Capitol were commissioned, it was the Battle of Nashville for which they sought America’s most renowned landscape artist. Howard Pyle painted the Battle of Nashville, regarded as priceless and the finest Civil War painting in history.
Restoring the glories of what transpired in Nashville has changed through the great effort of the Battle of Nashville Preservation Society and the Tennessee Land Trust, which have been slowly reclaiming portions of the battlefield. On the crown of Shy’s Hill, they placed three flags: the Union flag, the Confederate flag, and the Minnesota state flag.
I want to end by reading the closing paragraphs from The Final Charge at Nashville written by a lowly private in Company C of the 10th Minnesota Infantry Regiment. Today, many historians have read the complete document and say it is one of the finest pieces of Civil War prose ever written. The passage appears on the Minnesota markers in Nashville, Tenn., and Plainview, Minn.:
…Yet with the joy of triumph comes many a thought of sadness. Comrades who have marched by our side month after month, sharing with us danger and privation, comrades who have grown as dear to us as brothers lie dotting the steep hillside, their battles ended, their warfare over. Never more will they press with us shoulder to shoulder as the bristling steel points sweep resistlessly on, never more in our hours of glee will their voices join in the merry jest or fill the air with laughter — they are gone.
We buried them where they fell upon the field of honor. Rough but kind hands scooped out their narrow beds, and with all of women’s tenderness laid them to rest in a soldier’s sepulcher.
And the everlasting mountains in the shadow of which they lie shall be their eternal monument; year after year the forest trees will shed their crowns of glory over them, and day by day the winds, as they sigh through the Brentwood Hills, will chant a low, sad requiem to their memory.
Ken Fliés is a past president of the Twin Cities Civil War Roundtable and member of the Battle of Nashville Preservation Society. He was also part of Gov. Mark Dayton’s Civil War Sesquicentennial Task Force from 2011-2015.