Stones River: The Soldiers' Battle, New Year 1863

Stones River battlefield. National Park Service

If a soldier ever saw lightning, and heard the thunder bolts of a tornado at the same time the heavens opened and the stars of destruction were sweeping everything from the face of the earth, if he was in this charge, he saw it.
>
— W. J. McMurray, History of the Twentieth Tennessee Regiment Volunteer Infantry C.S.A. (1904)

Among the rocky cedar glades near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, Union and Confederate armies fought a battle that marked the lives of thousands of soldiers and their families. It cost more than 23,000 casualties — the second bloodiest battle of the Civil War fought west of the Appalachians. Today Stones River National Battlefield is quiet; the park asks visitors to imagine soldiers crossing an old cotton field, stuffing the harvest's leftovers in their ears to dull the din.

How the armies got there

Early in the war, the Union tried to contain the South by spreading small forces along the Confederacy's 6,000 miles of land and water borders. When that seemed to falter, Union armies and river navies set out to break through a 400-mile front in Tennessee and Kentucky.

Tennessee and the states around it.

Nashville and middle Tennessee, from a military map of Kentucky and Tennessee drawn by Charles E. Swann and published by the Office of the Chief Engineer, Department of the Ohio, 1863. Library of Congress

The battle

December 30. The armies camped close to each other near Murfreesboro, and everyone knew a battle was hours away. Their bands played against each other until one struck up "Home Sweet Home" — and, as a Tennessee soldier remembered, "as if by common consent, all other airs ceased, and the bands of both armies, far as the ear could reach, joined in the refrain."

December 31, New Year's Eve. At dawn Bragg attacked while Union soldiers were lighting fires and eating breakfast. An Illinois sergeant major walked out to look:

The comfort of warming chilled fingers and toes and drinking a grateful cup of hot coffee outweighed for the moment any consideration of danger.... As all was so quiet, not a shot having been fired, I...walked out until the enemy's breastworks were in view and there, sure enough,...a succession of long lines of Gray were swarming over the Confederate breastworks and sweeping towards us.

Then chaos, and men running in every direction:

Our only salvation was to lie flat as possible, for the air seethed with the 'Zip' of bullets.... It reminded me of the passage of a swarm of bees.

The Union line was driven back three miles, holding here and there just long enough for Rosecrans to mass his cannon and shield the Nashville & Chattanooga Railroad and the Nashville Pike, his army's lifelines. About 40 cannon threw back attack after attack until the Confederates stopped for the day. Bragg had gained so much ground that he telegraphed Richmond: "God has granted us a Happy New Year."

January 1, 1863. In Washington, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring "that all persons held as slaves within any States...in rebellion against the United States shall be...forever free." Nobody at Murfreesboro knew. The day went to tending the dead and wounded who covered the ground and filled makeshift hospitals.

January 2. At 4 p.m., near the river, a Confederate charge drove Union troops back across Stones River — into the fire of Union cannon shooting more than 100 rounds a minute at close range for more than ten minutes. A Florida soldier wrote:

The nearest the [Yankees] came to getting me was shooting a hole in my pants and cutting hair off my right temple. I know a peck of balls passed in less than a yard of me....The man in front of me got slightly wounded [and]...the one on my right mortally and the one on my left killed.

In less than an hour, 1,800 Confederates were killed or wounded.

Two days later, in a cold winter rain, Bragg withdrew. Rosecrans stayed at Murfreesboro and built the largest fortification yet raised in the war.

The Union army fleeing a Confederate attack, painted by William Travis about 1865. Smithsonian Institution, photo no. 49431-A

The cost, and what it bought

Both sides claimed victory. But losing middle Tennessee cost the Confederacy rich farmland and opened a corridor into the Deep South — the route that later made Sherman's March to the Sea possible. A Pennsylvania soldier saw what was at stake:

Before this battle took place, the outlook for our country was very dark and threatening. Our armies had gained no signal victories for many months, and there was very great danger that some of the Nations of Europe would recognize the Southern Confederacy.... Had General Rosecrans' Army been defeated at the battle of Stones River...it would not only have prolonged the War, but would have greatly increased our danger of conflicts with foreign countries.

A Confederate soldier was simply worn out:

I am sick and tired of this war, and I can see no prospects of having peace for a long time to come, I don't think it will ever be stopped by fighting, the Yankees cant whip us and we can never whip them.

The war went on for more than two years, until the surrender at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on April 9, 1865.

Night on the battlefield

In April 1863 the Cleveland Herald printed the story of one night and day, as a private told it. At 9 p.m. on December 31, an ambulance left a Union field hospital for Nashville carrying two wounded men — one shot through the lung, one with a leg crushed — with the private walking alongside. For more than two miles of the stony pike they passed wrecked wagons, dead horses and rows of dead men, silvered by frost:

Yonder a cavalryman had fallen, his drawn saber reflecting in the moonlight against the dark earth where he lay; and beside him his comrade and his horse, all keeping the same silent watch of death.

At the fourth division's general hospital the wounded covered an acre, "every room was filled, every outhouse crowded, the very floor wet with blood." In the morning a surgeon whispered that the man shot through the chest would die.

At 9 a.m. on New Year's Day he was put in an army wagon for Nashville. At the bridge a Confederate battery opened fire; then Wheeler's cavalry came yelling after them. The man shot through the chest, gasping, ordered his companion to shoot the driver so they could surrender before they were killed. The driver would not stop. After nine miles of racing over the stony road he brought the wagon through, and that evening the wounded lay on cots under skilled surgeons.

The driver was Charles Stansell, Company G, 41st Ohio. The man shot through the chest survived, and when Stansell was later killed in a fight, he wrote a tribute for the Herald: Stansell "would not stop, but rushed on, heedless of our protests and threats...thus saving our team, our wagon, and our lives." At the request of the men he saved, Stansell is buried at the Hazen Brigade Monument.

The Hazen Brigade Monument

The Hazen Brigade Monument. Stones River National Battlefield

Hazen's Brigade was one of the few Union units that held its ground and never retreated on December 31. Soldiers from its four regiments buried their dead near the crest of a hill by the railroad and, in the months after the battle, built a 10-foot limestone monument, now surrounded by 55 graves. Its four faces read:

In 1985, rainwater seeping inside had loosened the mortar, so the top was taken off and the fill removed level by level. On July 29, 1985, work stopped: six levels down lay a six-pound shell and three other artillery shells, then two rifle barrels, a staff and more shells — all from the battle, most of them Confederate. The builders had sealed them inside, never expecting anyone to see them.

Objects found inside the monument, six levels down. Archer, Burton and Parrott are types of artillery shell. National Park Service

Visiting

Stones River National Battlefield is in Murfreesboro, 27 miles southeast of Nashville, and is open daily 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. except December 25. See the park's website.

For teachers

This page comes from a National Park Service Teaching with Historic Places lesson for U.S. history, social studies and geography units on the Civil War (1861–1865), linked to National Standards for History Era 5 (Standard 2B, the war on the battlefield and the home front). Questions to use with it:

• The maps: Which states bordering Tennessee were Confederate, and which were slave states held by the Union? Why break through in Tennessee? Why march in three corps, and why did the railroad matter?
• The battle: How might winter have affected the soldiers' mood? Why would they sing "Home Sweet Home" — written by John Howard Payne, with music by Sir Henry Bishop, first performed in 1823 — together with the enemy? Should Bragg have telegraphed his early success? Judged by casualties alone, who won? Why did Bragg withdraw, and why did middle Tennessee matter?
• The Herald story: How could the writer tell it in such detail? Why take the wounded man to Nashville? Why write a tribute to the driver?
• The painting: Pick one figure and describe what he sees and feels. Why paint this scene?
• The monument: Why build a monument so soon after such horror? Why seal battle objects inside? Was it worth preserving?

Activities:

1. Inscriptions — in pairs, interpret one of the monument's inscriptions, then write a new one.
2. Primary sources — list them (the soldiers' words, the Herald articles, the monument, the archeologist's diagram; the painting came later but drew on eyewitness accounts). For one, ask: who made it, when, why and for whom? Is it reliable, and how could you check? Was the author there?
3. Who fought here — soldiers came from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin. Is your state on the list? Were battles fought in your state — and how does your community remember its wars?

Sources

Based on "The Battle of Stones River: The Soldiers' Story," a Teaching with Historic Places lesson by Tammy Calvin Weller, former park ranger at Stones River National Battlefield, and Michael Harris, edited by Fay Metcalf and the Teaching with Historic Places staff, National Park Service, drawing on the battlefield's National Register of Historic Places file; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The soldiers' words were written in the 1860s and 1900s; the lesson quotes them from David R. Logsdon, Eyewitnesses at the Battle of Stones River (1989), and E. B. and Barbara Long, The Civil War Day by Day (1971). The Cleveland Herald articles are from April 1863. The lesson gives the two armies a combined 83,000 soldiers but estimates them separately at 41,400 and 35,000; only the separate estimates are given here.