The Chattanooga and Knoxville Campaigns

Abstract

Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee besieged Union forces in Chattanooga after the Battle of Chickamauga in September 1863. Union Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and Maj. Gen. George Thomas took control of the Union Army there and exploited the complex mountainous topography to create a “Cracker Line” to the west. With the siege effectively broken by late October, Bragg sent Lt. Gen. James Longstreet’s Corps to Knoxville to retake that railroad city, which had been occupied by Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s Army of the Ohio since early September. In late November the Union Army of the Cumberland and Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman’s recently arrived Army of the Tennessee broke out of Chattanooga while Burnside’s men defeated Longstreet’s attack on Knoxville’s Fort Sanders. The Union Army’s successful Chattanooga and Knoxville military campaigns opened Georgia to Union invasion, confirmed Grant’s suitability for leadership over all Union forces, and recalibrated the politics of loyalty in a bitterly divided section of the South.