The Chattanooga Civil War Round Table will focus on the Tullahoma Campaign at its regular monthly meeting on Tuesday, June 17.

The meeting is at 7 p.m. at the Millis-Evans Room of Caldwell Hall on the campus of the McCallie School on Missionary Ridge. Enter the McCallie Campus off Dodds Avenue opposite the end of Bailey Avenue and follow the signs to the Academic Quadrangle.

Historian and author Dr. Michael Bradley is the speaker. Dr. Bradley will address the Tullahoma Campaign of 1863, the subject of one of his several books.

The meeting is free and open to the public.

There was not a major battle, but, for the units engaged in several fights that did occur, they were as badly bloodied as they had been in some of the larger battles. There was not the decisive blow one commander had hoped for, but, in the end, he still gained much. There was a whole lot more maneauvering, on a broad front, in several columns, than was typical in most Civil War campaigns. In the end, the whole operation took place over an area nearly as large as another entire theater of the war. It is the Tullahoma or Middle Tennessee Campaign of 1863, a campaign that began to unfold in the last days of June 140 years ago signaling the initiation of the REAL Campaign for Chattanooga. Tullahoma is one of the most overlooked campaigns, or more accurately phases of a larger campaign, in the war. The lack of a major battle and the fact that it occurred at the same time that the two contending armies in the East encountered one another and clashed at that small south central Pennsylvania college town of Gettysburg and at the same time that the Union Army’s eventual grand hero U. S. Grant was about to gain the fruits of strangling the Confederate garrison of Vicksburg on the banks of the "fathers of waters," the Mississippi.

But, the events of the Tullahoma Campaign in the last days of June and the first days of July, 1863, greatly shaped the events that follow later and include the Battle of Chickamauga and the eventual Union control of the "Gateway to the Deep South," Chattanooga. The clash of the generals, the scope of the campaign, the thinking of the commanders, and others, things that shape the events of August to December, 1863, can be seen in practice and growing during two weeks of hard marching over terrible terrain in rainy Middle Tennessee.

Dr. Bradley is a professor of History at Motlow State Community College in Lynchburg, Tn. He is the author of several books including one on the subject of his talk entitled Tullahoma: The 1863 Campaign for the Control of Middle Tennessee.

His most recent work is With Blood and Fire: Life Behind Union Lines in Middle Tennessee, 1863-1865, a look at the Civil War in southeast Middle Tennessee in the last two years of the war.