The Chattanooga Civil War Round Table will hold its regular monthly meeting on Tuesday (Dec. 15). The meeting is at 7 p.m. and will be held in the Millis-Evans Room of Caldwell Hall on the campus of the McCallie School on Historic Missionary Ridge (enter off Dodds Avenue and follow the signs to the Academic Quadrangle).
Stones River National Battlefield Park Ranger Jim Lewis will be the speaker. He will speak on the December, 1864 fighting at Murfreesboro dubbed the "Battle of the Cedars" that involved Confederate General Nathan B. Forrest and Union General Robert Milroy.
The meeting is free and open to the public.
It was certainly a bold plan...........then and since it can be called a desperate gamble..........in retrospect, it can be called a forlorn hope............or even foolish...........this thrust by John Bell Hood with the Army of Tennessee into the middle region of the Army's namesake state in late fall of 1864. But, the strategic situation at the time called for some bold measure. A major Union army sat in one of the cities that had become one of the most important if the Southern states were going to be successful in their bid for independence. Perhaps a strike well to the enemy's rear, against one of the key waypoints on that army's line of supply with possibly a threat to points beyond would cause that army that had made inroads into the Confederacy's military-industrial heartland to withdraw, to move back northward to keep its lifeline from being permanently cut. And there would possibly be the effect on Northern public opinion even in the aftermath of the election on the first Tuesday of November. Bold? Yes! But, "desperate times call for desperate measures." And so Hood struck north. Decatur. Florence. Columbia. Franklin. The outskirts of Nashville. And as part of this, to disrupt William T. Sherman's line of communications as much as possible, to isolate Nashville and other Union garrisons in Tennessee as much as possible, there would be a strike against the Union garrison at Murfreesboro and the Nashville & Chattanooga Railroad features in that area guarded by that garrison. This is what brought Union and Confederate forces to clash yet again at the one-time capital of the Volunteer State.
In his talk, "Forrest, Milroy, & the Battle of the Cedars, December, 1864," Park Ranger Jim Lewis will relate the events that unfolded along the Nashville & Chattanooga Railroad in Rutherford County and at Murfreesboro when John Bell Hood sent forces to destroy that vital rail line and isolate or destroy Murfreesboro's Union garrison and those on down Sherman's line of communication. It was actions that pitted several unlikely characters against (or with) one another, forced some men into new roles, and that were certainly reflective of the nature of the war it moved toward the close of another year. Overshadowed by the bloodier and more spectacular fights that occurred before and after it, the fighting, however, around Murfreesboro of William B. Bate, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and Robert Milroy provides insight into the larger vision that had driven John Bell Hood northward in the fall of 1864.