More Than A Day Away By Mike Steely
Burnside begins march to Knoxville
South of Burnside’s advance, forces were scouting the mountain roads, earlier taken by Sanders, and reporting back on the route’s “terrible” condition. When word reached Burnside that loyal citizens all along the route had been expecting his forces for several days, he realized that Confederate authorities inside Tennessee probably also knew his army was moving that way.
In Tennessee, Simon B. Buckner was commanding Rebel troops and getting reports that Burnside’s force was some three times larger than it actually was. He could only guess which of the 43 usable passes in the Cumberland Mountains would be chosen by his enemy as a crossing point.
In Kingston, directly in Burnside’s path, sat the very able cavalry of Nathan Bedford Forrest, but Buckner split Forrest’s unit and sent 2,500 men to Cumberland Gap, now under John Frazer, to boost troop strength there. As Burnside approached, Buckner sent orders to Frazer to abandon the gap and fall back to safety, but the orders went through General Samuel Jones at Abingdon, who countermanded them and ordered Frazer to hold the gap at any cost.
As Burnside got underway, he sent two swift cavalry detachments by way of Big Creek Gap and another pass to distract the Rebels’ attention and tease their forces in Knoxville.
Burnside and his huge force then moved south, part of them marching by way of Williamsburg and through Jellico Creek to Marsh’s Siding and joining the long line of force that wandered down from Somerset. Crossing the Tennessee line, the thousands of men, equipment, cannon, remounts, and the like, skirted Huntsville and headed up the unbelievably exhausting slopes of Brimstone Branch, with their supply train trailing behind. The nighttime crossing was long remembered by the exhausted troops. Stories have long been told in Scott County, Tennessee, of a Rebel raid on the supply train from which the Army’s payroll was supposedly stolen or lost.
Burnside’s route was followed on August 14th by Major J. H. Simpson, the chief engineer, who wrote: “Our march (was) from Lexington, via Somerset, Ky., Smith’s Ford, Ky., Pine Knot Tavern, Ky., Chitwood’s, Tenn., Montgomery, Tenn., to Emery’s Iron-Works, thence to Lackey’s, thence via Campbell’s Station to Knoxville.”
Following the war, Ulysses S. Grant wrote this about Burnside’s situation:
“Burnside was in about as desperate a condition as the Army of the Cumberland had been, only he was not yet besieged. He was hundreds of miles from the nearest possible base, Big South Fork of the Cumberland, and much farther from any railroad we had possession of. The roads back were over the mountains; all supplies along the line had long since been exhausted. His animals, too, had been starved and their carcasses lined the road back toward Lexington, Kentucky.”
Ahead of his main march, Burnside had sent forces under Brigadier General S. P. Carter, hero of the bridge burning two years earlier, and hero of the Cumberland Gap campaign the previous year. Carter and his men were chosen for their knowledge of the region’s mountains.
During the crossing, Burnside put his men on half rations, and a few began to steal food from local Loyalist families. The general responded by branding the guilty soldiers on the cheeks.
On September 2, Gen. Carter’s men rode into Knoxville and captured the city without a battle. They also took a train loaded with supplies. The next day Burnside himself galloped into Knoxville to the cheers and delight of local citizens. The enemy, under Buckner, now moved south to Charleston, Tennessee, abandoning Frazier at the gap, and all of East Tennessee rejoiced. Burnside then sent captured railroad trains to Morristown and Jonesboro, where other supplies had been captured.
Confederate forces north of Chattanooga were by now regrouping and preparing to march on Knoxville to retake the city. However, Rebel forces throughout East Tennessee became torn between holding the salt and lead works in Virginia, helping with the ongoing struggles in Chattanooga, or joining the growing attempt to retake Knoxville. In the meantime, the Rebels at Cumberland Gap had been all but abandoned, with the commander there being told to hold, then vacate, then hold the gap.
Prior to crossing Cumberland Mountain far to the west of the gap, Burnside had dispatched Colonel John DeCourcy to infest the north face of Cumberland Gap to keep the Rebels from escaping in that direction. DeCourcy, the hero of the gap the year before, apparently had his own ideas of what was necessary there, and was destined to run head-on into none other than Burnside himself.
Rumors persist in Scott County, TN, that Burnside’s payroll train was attacked while the huge invasion force was climbing the rugged Brimstone Creek area of Cumberland Mountain.
No official report can be found on the incident but locals have searched for the payroll of gold, said to have been hidden by the Union guards during the attack.
