More Than A Day Away By Mike Steely
The month of September is important in the history of Knoxville. It was the month the city was captured by Union forces, and the East Tennessee region remained in Northern hands for the rest of the war.
Unlike the rest of the state, East Tennessee had voted to stay in the Union and had been under the unwanted control of Confederate forces.
From September 1862 until September 1863, no major military action occurred as Rebels held Cumberland Gap. Rebel positions went unchallenged except for a few incidents, some of which bear recounting. One of these involved “Unionists” (meaning civilian loyalists) raiding a Rebel garrison at the gap.
In October 1862, General Joseph Wheeler’s Confederate cavalry arrived at Cumberland Gap to form a rear guard for Bragg and Kirby-Smith’s invasion. In January 1863, the raiding force under General S.P. Carter bypassed the historic pass and raided East Tennessee, returning through western Virginia and little-known gaps in eastern Kentucky. Then on September 7, 1863, a skirmish took place at Cumberland Gap when Union troops somehow got through Confederate pickets and burned the grist mill on Gap Creek.
By now, both siege commanders from the prior year, the Union’s George Morgan and the Confederacy’s Edmund Kirby-Smith, had been transferred to other theaters of the war. Hopes of Loyalist families in the region seemed only frustrated wishes. The blistering but all-too-brief hit and run raid by Colonel Sanders brought encouragement, but the Rebels remained in strict control.
Yet few knew that Sanders’ raid was a forerunner of a coming liberation. At Camp Nelson on the Kentucky River south of Nicholasville, General Ambrose Burnside had been planning a sweeping descent into East Tennessee. He was waiting only for many of his ill Union troops to recover, and for fresh horses and supplies. In preparation for his coming campaign, he positioned troops in a line a hundred miles long, stretching across eastern Kentucky.
As Union troops massed near Somerset on what is now called Burnside Island, General Ambrose Burnside moved his headquarters to Crab Orchard and sheltered himself and his staff in the Spring Hotel, a health spa which soothed some of his officers with its mineral baths.
A few weeks before General Burnside moved his troops into Tennessee by way of Pine Knot and Marsh’s Siding in McCreary County, the Confederate forces in Knoxville were seeking all the information they could get on the Union commander’s plans. The Rebels believed that the main Union force, encamped near Crab Orchard, was assembled and ready to invade. The question was: Where would the march come from?
Colonel J. B. Palmer, commander of the Fifth Brigade, reported that several Whitley County men had recently been arrested and then released by the Federals and were in Knoxville attempting to get a friend out of Confederate hands. One of the detainees spoke of his friend, George Little, a Williamsburg attorney and former deputy marshal who had gone with Colonel S.P. Carter on his successful raid in January of 1863.
Little told the informant that he had recently returned from General Carter’s forces who were ready to move on Tennessee. Carter’s force, Little added, was going to invade “via one of the gaps north of Cumberland Gap” and General Burnside, with the main force, would invade “via Somerset, Kentucky, and Jamestown, Tennessee.”
“My informant believes that Little really thought that the movement would be made as indicated,” Colonel Palmer reported. He added that the invasion would come by way of Big Creek Gap (LaFollette, Tennessee), and by way of Jamestown, and that Burnside’s likely objective was not Knoxville but Tullahoma, in Middle Tennessee.
Colonel Palmer noted that the statements of the Whitley County men “are not, perhaps, perfectly reliable” but added that they could be depended upon for their impressions.
Much the same information was being reported to Rebel authorities by others, and W. W. Mackall, a Confederate chief of staff, ordered Major-General Wheeler to send John Hunt Morgan’s Cavalry to Wayne County, Kentucky, to check out reports of mass troop movements there. On May 4th, Confederate commander Major- General Dabney H. Maury ordered Major-General Samuel Jones, in Western Virginia, to send reinforcements to Bristol and Greeneville, Tn., in expectation of an invasion. He noted that Gen. Humphrey Marshall’s forces were along Pine Mountain, near Cumberland Ford (Pineville).
Apparently, the Yankee efforts to confuse the Rebel command were successful, thanks to Williamsburg’s George Little and others. The expected invasion by Burnside did not come until August, and did not arrive by any of the routes the Rebels expected.
To be continued next week.
