Letters from the Army of the Cumberland
The soldiers who wrote the letters in the regiments listed below were part of the war that first took place in the valleys of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers and concluded when General Sherman led his troops out of Chattanooga toward Atlanta and beyond in May 1864. There were major battles in western Tennessee in early 1862 (Shiloh and Fort Donaldson), but the occupation of central and eastern Tennessee commenced when the 6th Ohio Infantry marched unopposed into Nashville in February of 1862. Heavy fighting, however, would follow at the Battle of Murfreesboro (also called the Battle of Stone's River) and Tullahoma, both Union victories. The same armies would again meet in September of 1863 at Chickamauga, which is just across the border in Georgia. This time the Confederates would win and Union forces would withdraw to Chattanooga. Generals Ulysses Grant and William Sherman were among the officers who took control of defending Chattanooga and they eventually broke out of the stranglehold of the surrounding Confederate troops. At this point Grant left to assume control of the army in Virginia and it was Sherman who led his troops out of Chattanooga and on to Atlanta. After Atlanta was captured, Sherman selected the regiments who would accompany him on his March to the Sea. Upon reaching Savannah, they turned north and marched through the Carolinas and were in North Carolina when the war ended. The Confederate General Hood, after being defeated in Sherman's Atlanta Campaign, brought his troops north again into Tennessee and met devastating defeats, first at Franklin, Tennessee and then in December 1864 at the Battle of Nashville. That would conclude the war in Tennessee.