Army of the Cumberland
The Army of the Cumberland ( Army of the Cumberland , often simply Cumberland Army ) was a major unit of the US Army in the Civil War .
The army was created in the fall of 1862 by renaming the previous Ohio Army . The army was named after the River Cumberland , and its first commander-in-chief was Major General William Starke Rosecrans . The first battle led the Cumberland Army from December 31, 1862 to January 2, 1863 on the Stones River , in which they could repel the attacks of the Confederate Tennessee Army and force them to evade.
After the operational readiness was restored, General Rosecrans carried out the Tullahoma campaign with the army in August, which achieved great strategic successes. The important railroad junction Chattanooga fell into the hands of the Unionists, and the Confederate Tennessee Army had to switch to northern Georgia . In the Battle of Chickamauga in September 1863, the Tennessee Army inflicted a heavy defeat on the Cumberland Army. The northerners evaded to Chattanooga badly damaged. The army was trapped there.
Grant greatly restructured the Cumberland Army. He replaced General Rosecrans with Major General George H. Thomas , who had shown steadfastness at Chickamauga. In addition, he combined old corps and built new ones from reinforcement troops. With the Cumberland Army reinforced in this way and some elements of the Tennessee Army , Grant succeeded in breaking through the Confederate lines at the Battle of Chattanooga in November 1863 - the city and the army were free again.
During the Atlanta campaign under Major General William T. Sherman in 1864, the Cumberland Army was the numerically strongest army and played a significant role in the capture of the city of Atlanta. After the battle it was above all the Cumberland Army under Thomas who opposed John Bell Hood's Tennessee Army in the Franklin-Nashville campaign and defeated him in the Battle of Nashville . After the war, the Army of the Cumberland participated in the Grand Review of the Armies , a military parade and celebration, in Washington, DC on May 23-24, 1865.
Overview
| commander | from | to | Major battles / campaigns |
|---|---|---|---|
| Major General William S. Rosecrans | October 24, 1862 | October 19, 1863 | Battle of the Stones River, Tullahoma Campaign, Battle of Chickamauga |
| Major General George H. Thomas | October 19, 1863 | August 1, 1865 | Battle of Chattanooga, Atlanta Campaign, Battle of Franklin , Battle of Nashville |
literature
- James M. McPherson (Editor): The Atlas of the Civil War . Philadelphia 2005, ISBN 0-7624-2356-0
- Larry J. Daniel: Days of Glory: The Army of the Cumberland, 1861-1865 . Baton Rouge, LA 2004.
- H. Cist: The Army of the Cumberland , 1909