Description: |
In attempting to take Knoxville, the Confederates decided that Fort Sanders was the only vulnerable
place where they could penetrate Union Maj. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside’s fortifications, which enclosed the city,
and successfully conclude the siege, already a week long. The fort surmounted an eminence just northwest of
Knoxville. Northwest of the fort, the land dropped off abruptly. Confederate Lt. Gen. James Longstreet believed
he could assemble a storming party, undetected at night, below the fortifications and, before dawn, overwhelm
Fort Sanders by a coup de main. Following a brief artillery barrage directed at the fort’s interior, three Rebel
brigades charged. Union wire entanglements--telegraph wire stretched from one tree stump to another to
another--delayed the attack, but the fort’s outer ditch halted the Confederates. This ditch was twelve feet wide
and from four to ten feet deep with vertical sides. The fort’s exterior slope was almost vertical, also. Crossing the
ditch was nearly impossible, especially under withering defensive fire from musketry and canister. Confederate
officers did lead their men into the ditch, but, without scaling ladders, few emerged on the scarp side and a small
number entered the fort to be wounded, killed, or captured. The attack lasted a short twenty minutes. Longstreet
undertook his Knoxville expedition to divert Union troops from Chattanooga and to get away from Gen. Braxton
Bragg, with whom he was engaged in a bitter feud. His failure to take Knoxville scuttled his purpose. This was the
decisive battle of the Knoxville Campaign. This Confederate defeat, plus the loss of Chattanooga on November
25, put much of East Tennessee in the Union camp. |