 And if you're not picking this up, please let me know and I'll try to adjust the microphones. Let me start out by pointing out that Ken Smith, who was the painter who painted at first light, which you probably saw up at the stairway, is here today. He would like to say a few words after I give my comments also. And we both are here to answer questions about what we've done and to sign prints and sign books. Of course, I'll be signing the books and Ken will be signing the prints. My topic today is Knoxville under siege. And before I begin it, let me reiterate what Joan said. Thank you very much for showing up. You had a lot of choices of making. You decided to come here. I'm grateful and humbled. The Knoxville siege, November 17th to December 4th, 1863. I would like to focus my remarks today about what happened to the people of Knoxville, the civilian population, as well as the 9,000 Union soldiers who were inside the city during the course of this siege of this East Tennessee town. It was, of course, besieged by Confederate forces under General James Longstreet, about 12,000 troops held by Union forces under Ambrose Burnside of about 9,000 troops. This is following the great Confederate victory at Chickamauga in late September, 1863, after which General Braxton Bragg decided to send Longstreet up to Knoxville in order to accomplish the recapture of this city, which the Federals had taken bloodlessly back in September of 1863. Knoxville was a town of 5,300 residents in 1860. Founded in 1791, it boasted East Tennessee University, which now is the University of Tennessee. The city boundaries stretched from First Creek on the east to Second Creek on the west, and from the Tennessee River on the south to the railroad on the north. But many houses dotted the valley north and west of town, constituting a suburb of mostly well-to-do residents. Let me see here about this. A photograph of Ambrose Burnside, everyone has seen him, I suppose, but it's obligatory to have photographs of the major commanders. General James Longstreet, a post war photograph of him long after the conflict is over. A map that will show you roughly where Knoxville is located on the north side of the Tennessee River. You can see the Union line of defenses that Union engineer Captain Orlando Poe designed and revised the construction of and the Confederate lines about three-quarters of mile outside of them. There were many, many houses, dozens of houses scattered between the two opposing lines, and the experience of those civilians is rather interesting, I think, and that's one of the things I'm going to be talking about today. First of all, the first priority for defense of the city, digging in, constructing the earthen defenses that Poe arranged. They also arranged for civilians to help the soldiers fortify the town. A number of Union sympathizers from Knoxville and the surrounding area volunteered, and they worked very hard. The Federals also rounded up a number of African-Americans, mostly free blacks. The black laborers, according to Poe, were particularly efficient in their laborers, as he put it. Knoxville had a population of about 752 blacks in 1860. That's a bit more than 20% of the city's residents. Many of the white citizens of Knoxville, who were pressed into service, however, were sympathetic to the Confederate cause because Knoxville was divided in sympathies during the course of the Civil War. Poe had a little fun with these guys, saying that they, of course, were forced to work against their will, and as Poe put it, they worked with a very poor grace, which blistered hands did not tend to improve. Now, the defenders also, in addition to digging earthquake fortifications just outside the city, they also fortified the streets of Knoxville. The 51st Pennsylvania set up barricades on Gay Street. They used old carts and wagons and barrels and lumber and cotton bales, whatever they could find. Many of the houses that lay between the lines and the suburbs to the north and west of town were caught in the middle of the siege. And I found an interesting account by a captain in the 51st New York, Captain Charles E. Walton, who was assigned a task at the beginning of the siege of going from house to house between the lines and telling the residents, look, as it is developing, you're going to be caught between opposing fires. He wrote that when he told the residents this more likely than not, they looked at him with looks of anguish and surprise because they couldn't take it in immediately. He was too busy to explain it to them anymore. He just kept going. But as he got to the next house, he looked back and he saw them. By that time, they had, it had all sunk in and there was a frenzy of activity coming out of every house with people gathering all the furniture they could, heading toward the city, looking for somebody to take them into in the course of the siege, trying to save all their belongings they could. And the truth is Union commanders on all levels had full authority from Bragg to use outlying buildings as strong points or to burn them down to let to prevent the enemy from taking control of them. The Federals tore down many houses. They used the boards to build entrenchments. Another, an example of this is the famous mansion called Melrose on the west side of town that was right on the line that poll delineated for fortification. The Federals used it as a blockhouse. They knocked loopholes through the 19 inch brick walls that had been constructed by slave labor a few years before and they erected barricades in the windows for Union sharpshooters. Melrose was constructed by slave labor, as I said. It was owned by a loyalist named Thomas Powell and reportedly when told that the Federals needed his house, Powell said, all right, lay this house level with the ground if necessary. And there was another loyalist in Knoxville named David R. Richardson. He owned a pretty nice house on Summit Hill on the north side of town where Poe's line also incorporated that hill. Hailing from New Hampshire, he in fact was the man who housed the printer who printed Brownlow's newspaper before Brownlow left Knoxville. The Federals nevertheless cut down his shade trees, made them into an abaddis. They used the house and he tried to get compensation after the war from Burnside for the destruction of his property. In terms of food, well, it's a siege. In some ways it's not a real siege because the Federals were never completely cut off from the outside world but nevertheless the conditions mimic siege conditions. Food became a problem as the siege progressed. Coffee became only a memory for the Federals by November 21st. The citizens of Knoxville improvised by roasting wheat and corn. Union soldier William Todd of the 79th New York thought this made pretty fair coffee, as he said. But he called another concoction that was labeled Jeff Davis's substitute as pretty bad. It was made of, well, he said that it was drinkable but it didn't taste like coffee at all, made of a mixture of wheat and ochery and chicory. Now how do you find a substitute for good food? Well, it was more difficult. The garrison of Fort Sanders by November 21st was reduced to eating just a piece of brand bread about the size of your fist each day, Todd remembered. And Todd also said it took considerable scheming and planning to keep us in provisions during the course of the siege. If people are suffering for food, what about the animals? Hundreds of mules and horses inside Knoxville. They all were trying to subsist on less than full rations of forage. A Confederate sympathizer in Knoxville named Ellen Wrenshaw House felt sorry for the Union Army's mules and horses even though she didn't feel sorry for the Union soldiers. She wrote that these animals looked dreadfully poor things. I can hear them crying almost all day long. The mules often ate the wooden whiffle trees from the tongues of wagons or they ate the hare from horses' tails or from the tails of other mules. The residents of Knoxville, the civilians, how did they react to what was taking place of their city? It depended largely on their political allegiance because Knoxville was a divided town. I came across the reminiscence of an interesting woman born in France, a Swiss ancestry, Eliza Balli. She was a pro-Confederate, however, living just outside of Knoxville. In fact, during the siege, her house was within Confederate lines and she exalted in her diary, at last we are with our gray coats once more. They've come to fight for our freedom, she put it. And another rebel sympathizer in Knoxville was fairly well known. Elizabeth Baker Crozier had to leave her house in the suburbs when the Confederates approached the city on November 17th. Her home in that of her relative David Dietrich lay squarely between the developing lines outside Knoxville. Crozier did manage to return to her house on November 18th, but it was a wreck. I was overwhelmed with amazement, not knowing what to do, she recalled. My wine was all drunk, my hams, my bacon, my butter, my sugar all gone, eaten both by Union and Confederate soldiers in turn as they possessed the house. Let's say a word about the most prominent loyalists of East Tennessee. These are the people like Parson Brownlow and Horace Maynard and others who made the cause of the suffering East Tennessee loyalist population a major feature in Northern life. Parson William G. Brownlow, he and most other prominent loyalists of course had been hiding out in the north. They came back to Knoxville after Burnside occupied the city in September. The federal government helped them to come back. The federal government provided army ambulances to bring these prominent leaders back to Knoxville in mid-October 63. The federal government also provided $1,500 in cash and the ink that Brownlow would use to restart his pre-war newspaper in Knoxville, but with a different title, Brownlow's Knoxville Wig and Rebel Ventilator, kind of indicating what he intended to do in a symbolic sense with his enemies. Brownlow had not yet released the first issue of his new newspaper before Longstreet approached in mid-November and forced him to flee. And that's really what did happen. Brownlow and Horace Maynard and others took off in November as soon as they got word that Longstreet was on the way. A perceptive Union soldier explained why they left so quickly when he wrote that if the rebels ever caught Brownlow, quote, they would make shoestrings of him. Well, you know, they hid out in the north, of course, during the course of this. He came back right after the siege was over when the coast was clear. However, the women's state behind misses Brownlow's state in Knoxville rather than flee with her husband. They came a paragon in the view of most Federals who knew what her husband was and admired her husband and admired her. Mrs. Brownlow invited members of the 11th New York New Hampshire to use her house for the duration of the siege. She shared flour, lard, coffee, sugar, and eggs with the regiment. Now, what about Knoxville itself as a city? How did it fare during the course of this siege and with the presence of 9,000 soldiers cramped in it along with the civilian population? Observers said that a general destruction of fences took place. Union soldiers gathered firewood for cooking and warmth. They parked wagons and vacant lots. They set up tents in private yards and along the sidewalks of the city. Everyone said the streets of Knoxville became utterly filthy and that many, many buildings were damaged by careless soldiers. And what did the soldiers themselves think of the civilian population of Knoxville during the siege? Well, I'm not going to pretend that Sergeant William Taylor of the 100th Pennsylvania is typical, but he wrote a long letter to his family right after the siege detailing what happened. He made some interesting comments. He thought that the residents, the civilians of Knoxville were a pretty sorry lot. To quote William Taylor of the 100th Pennsylvania, they were a wretched, woe-be-gone looking set of people who stand at their doors and windows like rats at their holes. The men genuinely wear a very seedy, brown-colored jean suit and frequently it is patched all over and not always with material of the same color. Well, that's bad enough. What does Taylor say about the women of Knoxville? They scarcely look like women, he said. Withered and yellow and haggard with dresses to match, sometimes with a pipe in their mouth and spitting out of the windows. A pretty woman I have not yet seen, but I have heard of one. Well, it's a little ungenerous. Let's put it that way. Well, going from that to the topic of civilian casualties, they did occur in Knoxville. Knoxville tasted siege warfare when the Confederates began to pump shells into the city on the beginning of November 19th, and they continued to do so sporadically. They didn't do it deliberately, apparently. But because the location of the Union lines shells overshot Union targets and often landed into the heart of the city, tore down buildings, injured people. David Diedrich, who I've already mentioned, he abandoned his house between the lines and lived with his son-in-law near the deaf and dumb asylum during the course of the siege. Bullets often struck his son-in-law's house and other buildings on that street. And Diedrich said, he admitted it is safest to keep within doors, but he also admitted we have become so accustomed to the flying balls that we don't observe this precaution very well. And if you think about it, you know, this is late November, early December. The first nationally proclaimed Thanksgiving Day in American history took place on November 26, 1863. Abraham Lincoln had issued a presidential proclamation declaring it so. Burnside observed the day. He encouraged his soldiers to honor that day and give thanks. Burnside and his staff had a nice turkey dinner at the home of the loyalist Oliver Temple. Temple wasn't there, but his wife was there, and she hosted General Burnside. He enjoyed the meal, but he refused Mrs. Temple's coffee in deference to the fact that his own troops had none. What about the rest of the Union troops? Well, in the 51st New York, each man got one raw onion as a Thanksgiving treat. And the commander of the 36th Massachusetts made do with a hunk of cornbread as big as his fist with large bits of the cob ground into the meal. That was their Thanksgiving meal. As the siege lengthened, the inhabitants of Knoxville lived in cellars, or they camped in ravines to escape Confederate shells. All trade is stopped, reported a Michigan soldier. This city seems deserted as everyone went undercover. When nut called on to man the trenches, the men of Riley's Brigade of the 23rd Corps literally slept on the sidewalks of the city every night. Civilians had increasing difficulty finding enough food. Charles Walton of the 51st New York admitted that they had to pay huge prices to get little morsels of food and they did not stand on the quality. Many of them sold their property at whatever bargain prices they could to buy a little bit of food. The Confederates had also wrecked the gasworks in Knoxville before they evacuated the city in September and the streets of Knoxville were dark every night except for moonlight when the weather was clear. Well, the famous attack, the Confederate attack on Fort Sanders on November 29th, 1863. You can see that map showing the location of the northwest bastion of Fort Sanders and the two Confederate columns that were arrayed to attack at dawn November 29th. It, of course, was a bloody failure. The photograph of the northwest bastion of Fort Sanders taking in March of 1864. The deep ditch that was more important probably than any other feature to defeat the Confederate attack was clearly seen. There's an example. There's an illustration of Ken Smith's very nice painting, Confederate guns on what we today call Morgan Hill, firing the opening guns to signal the attack and participate in the softening up bombardment, preceding the attack on Sanders. An 1891 depiction of the attack on Fort Sanders, which is relatively rare and interesting, I think, in its color and design. More than 200 Confederates were captured as a result of that failed attack at Fort Sanders. And after that, Longstreet continued his presence outside the city until December 4th, hoping to lure Federal troops away from Chattanooga to help Braxton Bragg's defeated army there. As a result, more suffering took place, more food shortages as the siege lengthened, bread consisting of what one soldier described as sunflower, corn and caught meal and molasses mixed up and baked together, continued to be served to the Federals in chunks that were three inches by two inches in measure, pitch black in color, reminded the men of bricks and sassafras tea substituted for coffee. The poor Federal horses and mules, they suffered worse and worse as the siege neared an end. Some of the mules began to eat fences and cedar posts or chewed the spare wheel of a caseon, an artillery caseon. One Union officer estimated that when the siege ended, 400 mules had either died of starvation or had been deliberately killed by the Federals so that they wouldn't have to feed them. Usually when they kill them, they put their carcasses in the Tennessee River and floated them downstream. Longstreet ended the siege on the night of December 4th, 1863, when a relief column of 30,000 troops under William Sherman, sent by Grant from Chattanooga, approached much more force than Longstreet could deal with so he retreated to the northeast. Post siege, everyone is relieved. Something like normal life began to appear on the streets of the city. Henry Tisdale of the 35th Massachusetts reported stores are opening. Vehicles of all kinds begin to move about. Whistles to blow, citizens coming into the suburbs to look after their homes. Still, Knoxville seemed to be pretty well run down to many people. A few burned houses, I don't know, quite a few burned houses and barricades. How much destruction to the city? Well, we can only rely on estimates. The chaplain of the 27th Michigan thought that at least 100 families in Knoxville were homeless because of the siege. Modern historians estimate anywhere from one fourth to one third of the city's buildings were destroyed during the course of the siege of Knoxville. Ellen Renshaw House moaned in her diary, the city is completely ruined, scarcely offensive standing. The sidewalks are like a stable yard, and the stench is horrible, especially from the hospitals that are housing hundreds of sick and injured Union and Confederate soldiers by that time. But many, many Knoxville civilians are dependent on the Union army for food on a daily basis. How many civilians died? Well, we don't know exactly. The number of civilian deaths appears to have been light. The only reported death was that of a little girl who was killed by a stray bullet while she was standing in her own doorway at her own home. Maybe Horace Maynard, who returned to Knoxville after the siege ended, put it well for everybody. When he wrote to a correspondent early in January 64, the principal thing with everybody in town is finding something to eat. And let's leave the last word with Elissa Bali, that French-born pro-Confederate, who visited Knoxville in April 1864 to be shocked by seeing nearly all the trees in the town cut down and still many, many buildings, just a burned hook. For her, everything was changed, she said in her diary. I hardly knew our poor Knoxville again. Well, just as a final note, Knoxville, of course, recovered. The Union army held the city for the rest of the war. By spring of 1865, when the war came to an end, the town was being rejuvenated once again. A Union artillery captain who was part of the garrison of Knoxville wrote in April of 1865, Knoxville looks quite cheerful. The shade trees are all leafed out and look beautiful, and everything is just as quiet here as if there was no war and no excitement. And of course, within a few days, Lee is surrendering and there is no more war or excitement, and Knoxville can recover in peace after 1865. All right, thank you very much. I'd like to invite Ken to come down and say a few words if he would like to, and then maybe we can jointly answer questions. That's the best way to do that. Would you like to? All right. Thank you, Ken, very much. And I appreciate your attention, everyone. More than happy to answer any questions or respond to anything you'd like to say. Yeah, it's an interesting question. The question was why the attack on Fort Sanders, why not someplace else? Longstreet got to Knoxville November 17th and spent basically the 17th and the 18th establishing his position and trying to reconnoitre. Instead of making any kind of attack immediately, when the Union defenses were still developing, he waited several days. He's waiting almost seven or eight days, isn't he? During the course of that time, he's waffling. He doesn't know exactly what to do. And the consensus of opinion for most everybody was that north of the river, there were no genuine weak spots with the possible exception of the northwest bastion at Fort Sanders. And the reason is because that fort had been somewhat badly placed according to the terrain feature on that ridge north of Knoxville. And so the northwest bastion did have some degree of dead space, as engineers say, meaning space that wasn't adequately covered by the fire of the defender. So that you might possibly, you can make an argument that that was a weakness of Fort Sanders. The irony was that Poe knew of the weakness fully. So he spent several days compensated for it. And when the Confederates attacked the course, it was far stronger than they realized. Part of it is a breakdown of reconnaissance and intelligence gathering on the Confederates. Part of it also is that there weren't any good options on the north. Part of it too is James Longstreet himself, which I argue was an indecisive person in many ways when faced with a difficult problem like this. He was criticized by his own people for waffling so much over the course of so many days. He didn't make a decision to attack, for example, over here on the northeast sector, and then cancel it at the last minute. He made a decision to attack south of the river and cancel it at the last minute. This happened three or four times in the course of that week after he got to Knoxville and he frustrated his command of the great deal about it. And, you know, he did view operations south of the river as having some potential for success, but he didn't have too many troops to spare. He had about two brigades of Confederates to spare down there. And the Confederates could deploy enough troops to effectively counterbalance that. Part of it is that the Confederates don't have enough resources to operate everywhere where they have an opportunity to do so effectively. But it's a very good question, an interesting question that I try to deal with in the book as much as I can. Joan, did you have your hand up? Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah, I forget all the sort of details of that issue, but the sources that are really most reliable say that it was basically like a small barge-like craft that they pulled across, that they loaded the cannons on, and pulled it across by hand with a cable. And that the pontoon... I think Longstreet says in one account that it's pontoons and then in another account he admits that it's a raft. I believe that's the issue, if I remember correctly. Thank you. Any other questions? Yes, sir. You're addressing an issue here that has been debated ever since November 1863. It's a good question. Why is Bernstein sending 12,000 of some very good troops from his army away from Chattanooga when he's being outnumbered by Union forces who are gathering at Chattanooga to raise the siege that he has imposed on the defeated Union army in Chattanooga? Eventually Ulysses Grant is going to have 50, 60,000 men outnumbering Bragg, two or three to one almost. Part of the re... Let me look at it this way. After Bragg's great victory at Chickamauga on September 19th and 20th, the defeated Union army retreated to Chattanooga and was in bad shape. James Longstreet, who had helped to win that victory after he brought two divisions of Lee's army from Virginia and led them on the battlefield, told Bragg, what we need to do is take the offensive against the Federals, bypass fortified Chattanooga, strike at Nashville and seize Middle Tennessee, and Bragg utterly refused to do it for many reasons, some of which are legitimate, others I think are not. Because he refused to take that offensive and got so much pressure from Longstreet and other people to do something rather than just sit on top of Missionary Ridge and look out mountain and wait, which is what he was doing. Bragg almost as a second thought or as a way to relieve pressure on him or as a substitute for a major offensive decided on a minor offensive, not to seize Middle Tennessee, but to retake Knoxville. And it doesn't...it makes some sense because Burnside is somewhat vulnerable up there. He has an insecure supply line and only about 9,000 troops or so. So Bragg basically said, let's send Longstreet with 12,000 men and if he can capture Knoxville quickly and come back fast before Grant is able to act at Chattanooga, it will work. And it's a logical plan. The thing is that Burnside handled his troops very well and prevented Longstreet from achieving a quick victory. Burnside was able to delay Longstreet and fall back to the city and fight on the defensive campaign to the point where Bragg could never recall Longstreet anymore. And of course another reason that he did... many people argue that another reason Bragg did this was to get Longstreet out of his hair and to get a thorn in his side out of his system. And that's probably part of it too. Many observers ask the same question. You know, ultimately Knoxville is of secondary importance, Chattanooga is of primary importance and Bragg got a lot of criticism for apparently not following that strategic dictum. Maybe that answers your question a little bit. Yes, sir? It's basically Chapman Highway, Joan? Is that it? No? Oh, you're right, you're right. Thank you. Anything else? Oh, yes, ma'am. Well, why didn't they eat the mules and horses instead of putting them in the river? I guess the bottom line is nobody considered horses and mules to be proper food. I know that the starving Confederate garrison of Vicksburg ate mules and actually the Union soldier at the Battle of Stones River in December, late December, early January, ate horses also because their supply lines were disrupted by Confederate cavalry attacks and many of them did cut out a chunk of a horse that was killed on the battlefield and ate it. Most of the people who did that said it tasted okay. They didn't mind it. You know, you do that only in an emergency situation and it's an interesting question because I had never really thought of that and I guess another way to look at it is that at Vicksburg the Confederates were completely cut off from the outside world who had no choice and basically it's the same at Stones River because the Federals were confined on the battlefield for several days and really couldn't go out in forage. In Knoxville, Longstreet only covers the Union position on the north of the river and he only has troops over here also. In other words, this whole area is open to the Federals. They can go out into the countryside and they have a pontoon bridge here too and so I came across a wonderful diary kept by an Ohio soldier who was part of the guard at the pontoon bridge so every day he's detailing how many wagons go across the river to the south to gather forage and bring back herds of pigs and cattle. So the Federals are foraging in this area widely during the course of the season bringing in a fair amount of food plus there's a lot of food coming down the river the French Broad River just to the northeast of Knoxville has a lot of loyalist farmers there the word goes out and they gather all the food they can and they bring it to a gathering point just upstream from Knoxville where a Union Army captain named Robert Dowdy organizes it under barges and floats it down at night to Knoxville so these two sources of food really make it possible for the Federals to survive this conflict without having to resort to eating horses and mules I guess that's the best way to express that. By the way, the Confederates saw these horses and mule carcasses coming down they fished them out and got the horseshoes and the nails out of them to use because they were desperately short of that kind of stuff this logistical aspect of the siege of Knoxville is in some ways the most fascinating to me because it's logistics and supply and food and hunger dominated both sides in this conflict yes sir, that's a good question and the answer is no in this part of Tennessee the population is overwhelmingly loyalist and when Burnside entered East Tennessee in September he recruited about three or four thousand local people to join the Union Army so there is an army that is tapping into local sources of manpower but it's the Federal Army rather than the Confederates those three or four thousand Union East Tennessee loyalist newly raised troops that Burnside had manned this sector of the siege lines the eastern side which was the least threatened so Burnside put those guys there and he put his best troops over on the west side those ninth core units anything else? I appreciate it very much, thank you