Sewanee
during the War Between the States:
"In any case, the War grows in
our consciousness. The even stands there larger than life, massively
symbolic in its inexhaustible and sibylline significance."
-Robert Penn Warren, THE LEGACY OF THE CIVIL WAR, 1961
During the night of April 12, 1861, the same date that the War began with the firing on Fort Sumter in the Charleston Harbor, enemies threw a firebomb into Bishop Polk's Sewanee home, nearly killing his wife and five daughters, and thereby making Sewanee the site of the first Union-sentimented attack of the War. Two months later, he accepted his commission as Major-General in the Confederate States Army. Thus, through an indecent act of violence at Sewanee, he who was first trained as a Man of War, but instead became a Man of God, was once again a Man of War in the fight to protect the Civilization of his Southern homeland.
"During the Civil War, Confederate and Federal forces frequently passed back and forth over the Plateau between Middle Tennessee and Chattanooga. The first few University buildings were destroyed in skirmishes. The most important engagement was the Battle of University Place, as the area was called at the time." -Russ Manning, THE HISTORIC CUMBERLAND PLATEAU, An Explorer's Guide, Second Edition, Outdoor Tennessee Series, 1999
Famous Tennessee Historical Commission marker 2 E 21 on Highway 41 A through Sewanee (after a long absence, the marker was re-erected Easter Semester 2004.)-
 |
ARMY
OF TENNESSEE
July 4, 1863
Here, extending 2 miles S.W.,
occurred the last battle of the
Middle Tennessee campaign. Protect-
ing Bragg's withdrawal, Maj. Gen.
Joseph Wheeler, with Texas Rangers
and the 4th Tenn. Cav., repulsed
an attack by the 5th & 6th Ky. Cav.,
under Col. Lewis Watkins, screening
advance of Rosecrans' Union forces.
 Maj. Gen. Joe Wheeler |
 |
"Incidentally, the area encompassed by this very accessible mini-hike once crawled dangerously with skirmishing Yankees and Confederates. That was 142 years ago, the same July which saw the destruction of Sewanee's "Original Cornerstone." But one doesn't have to be a military re-enactor or a Victorian adventure-seeker to pass a pleasant hour or two in the very Sewanee woods!" -Waring McCrady, "The Slope Wall Area, 1880s to 2000s," Keystone, Newsletter of the Sewanee Trust, May/June 2005
"SEWANEE, Franklin County, US 64- University of the South: Leonidas Polk laid the cornerstone of the central building in October 1860. When Federal troops occupied the area, the cornerstone was broken up into 'keepsakes' and carried off in Union pockets. The last full Confederate general, Kirby-Smith, and the last Confederate naval officer, Capt. Jack Eggleston [John Randolph], both died at Sewanee and are buried here." -Alice Hamilton Cromie, A TOUR GUIDE TO THE CIVIL WAR, Introduction by Bell Irvin Wiley, Fourth Edition, 1992
"At daylight on July 1 [1863], the Nineteenth along with the rest
of the Army of Tennessee were across the Elk River and heading for Cowan,
Tennessee, at the foot of the Cumberland Mountains. Although the terrain
around Cowan offered an excellent defensive position, Bragg ordered the
army to proceed to Chattanooga. Cheatham's division was the last to begin
the long ascent up the Cumberlands, camping at University Place the night
of July 3. The next evening the division brought up the rear of the army,
which had reached the Tennessee River... Bragg deployed the bulk of Polk's
Corps around Chattanooga, where the troops hastily constructed earthworks."
-John D. Fowler, THE MOUNTAINEERS IN GRAY, The Nineteenth Tennessee
Volunteer Infantry Regiment, C.S.A., 2004
 |
"Since
my report from Bridgeport, the whole army has crossed the Tennessee.
The pursuit of the enemy was checked and driven back at University
Place, on the Cumberland Mountains. Our movement was attended
with trifling loss of men and materials."
-Braxton Bragg, Headquarters of the Army of Tennessee, via
Chattanooga, July 7, 1863 (http://www.aotc.net/AotCfrontpage.htm) "Well father we are encamped on the camberland [Cumberland] mountain in a very nice place where they intended to build a city. they had commenced to build a large university in a beieutiful place but when the war broke out they stoped work + we now hold the place. I think the rebs is cleaned out of Tenn never to come back again." -Private M. Boots to his Parents from University Place, August 13, 1863 (http://www.89thohio.com/) |
The invaders destroying Bishop Polk's Cornerstone at University Place-
Blowing up the Cornerstone.
"In early July, 1863, the soldiers of an Illionois regiment
ignited a charge of gun powder in the cornerstone." -Narthex window
descriptions, All Saints' Chapel, THE UNIVERSITY
OF THE SOUTH.
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The Village of Sewanee and the Tullahoma Campaign of 1863
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"For more than a century, the dialouge has centered on the appropriateness of the consensus name Civl War versus the Southern alternative, War between the States. As the aforementioned letter to the editor of North & South stated succinctly, Civil War is objectionable to those who contend that the Southern states had legitimately reclalimed their sovereignty and formed a new, separate federation. Civil War is erroneous because the war of 1861-1865 was, in effect, a war between separate nations, not a war within one nation. Use of Civil War denies the Confederacy legitimacy as a separate nation and passes negative judgement on the legality of secession. The rivalry between these names for the war is more than a century old and carries enormous ideological implicaitons." -John M. Coski, Historian and Director of Library & Research at The Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia, "The War Between the Names: What Should the American War of 1861-1865 Be Called?," North & South, the Official Magazine of the Civil War Society, Volume 8, Number 7, January 2006
War-time Generals in command of departmental
territory that included Sewanee:
under construction
Confederate-
Federal-
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