“Oh, the Lord, Henry but didn’t the Rebs get the devil sure enough,” Private Charles Grundy of the 10th Illinois Infantry Regiment wrote to a friend three days after the conclusion of the Battle of Nashville fought December 15-16, 1864. Grundy, an eyewitness to the battle, recorded his observations as he watched Union soldiers shatter the Confederate defenses. “The Rebs broke and fled in confusion, leaving everything they had[,] throwing away guns, knapsacks, and everything else, and our boys after them pelting shot and shell and bullets into their broken ranks, slaying them by the dozen[,] many of them wouldn’t run at all, but surrendered without moving from their works.” Grundy may have been a lowly Union private, but he did not need to be a general to realize that General John Bell Hood’s Army of Tennessee had ceased to pose any real danger to the Union Army in the western theater.
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