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Tuesday, June 16, 2020

Did the Battle of Nashville Seal the Confederacy's Doomed Fate?

“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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5 comments:

  1. Yes, probably so. The losses at Franklin and Nashville were too much to overcome in men and material at that stage in the war. The ending of this song says a lot.

    https://youtu.be/ZLUG25ccunc

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  2. If you get the American history channel they are running different Civil war battles on a show called brothers divided and the battle of Nashville is one of them and it is on now. The funny thing is they have the commanding generals reversed According to the Synopsis Gen Hood commands the Union forces and General Thomas the Confederate. Don't bother to call and complain. I did in February and it is still screwed up. Apparently they out sourced that job as well.

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  3. The entire history of the confederate battle history is one of extending too far, too fast. I will always believe that Lee lost it at Gettysburg, where he stubbornly and idiotically refused his general's warnings, attacked in the afternoon, and lost too many men. He should have sent his soldiers in in the middle of the night, crawling to within gunshot range by dawn. Rather, he put them out there in a killing field to be slaughtered. If we had only stayed within proper boundaries it could have been different.

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  4. I, in general, support the Confederacy... except for the whole chattel slavery part. Truly, I could not have fought in that war. I totally agreed with the Confederacy's right to leave a union they did not feel represented their best interest. But as long as they supported chattel slavery, that is to great an evil for me to overlook. That said, I think the sad fact is, the Confederacy lost the Civil War when they fired on Fort Sumter. The union, until Grant was put in charge, the Union never brought it's full force to bear. That shit McClellan was trying to carry out slightly loosing war of attrition, to put such disdain for the fight into the union so that he could defeat Lincoln in the '64 vote. I don't think Lincolin was ever going to let the Confederacy win. That's why he eventually threw McClellan out and got someone who would actually use the army in. The war as completely decided once Grant took over.
    -Just A Chemist

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  5. The answer to the question above is - NO!

    By the time of the battle of Nashville, the Confederacy was already doomed. And I tend to agree with Anonymous above at 1:27, that the fate of the Confederacy was sealed at Ft. Sumter.

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