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7. Into East Tennessee
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1. Boatner, Civil War Dictionary, 466; Crawford to Johnson, June 11, 1863, PAJ, 6:243–44; James A. Galbraith to Johnson, June 29, 1863, Andrew Johnson Papers, LC; TICW, 1:376, 379. CHAPTER 7 Into East Tennessee I n spring 1863 Lincoln appointed Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside as commander of the Army of Ohio with orders to move from Kentucky into East Tennessee and then turn down into the Tennessee Valley to link up with Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland. Attorney Robert A. Crawford of Greeneville , whom Burnside sent to gather intelligence, reported in June that “the secession forces [had] nearly all gone to Bragg’s army” near Chattanooga and “that there [were] not 2000 men between Bristol & Knoxville.” Also, in anticipation of the move into East Tennessee, Burnside had the 1st and 2nd Tennessee Infantry at Nashville leave by steamer in March to be mounted at Camp Dick Robinson. There the regiments, with about 600 men each, received training for mounted troops and for the care of horses. They were redesignated for several months as the 1st and 2nd East Tennessee Mounted Infantry.1 In June Burnside deployed Col. William P. Sanders, a Kentucky-born, Mississippi-reared West Pointer, to destroy the enemy’s line of communication below and above Knoxville. Sanders’s fifteen hundred mounted soldiers included his 5th Kentucky and the 1st East Tennessee Mounted, commanded by Col. Robert K. Byrd, a well-to-do slaveholder and Mexican War veteran. Moving out of Mount Vernon, Kentucky, on June 14, Sanders struck at Wartburg , west of Knoxville, marched south to Loudon, then rode rapidly northeast , burning the depot at Lenoir Station, ripping up railroad tracks, and cutting telegraph lines. When the Union force approached Knoxville, Dr. James G. M. Ramsey, an agent of the Confederacy’s Treasury Department, caught a freight train bound for Abington, Virginia, with funds from his bank. After Into East Tennessee 121 2. George W. Cullum, Biographical Register of Officers and Graduates of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., 1802 to 1950, 10 vols. (New York, 1950), 2:442; Digby G. Seymour, Divided Loyalties : Fort Sanders and the Civil War in East Tennessee (Knoxville, 1963), 77–78; OR, 23(1):386–88, 390; TICW, 1:376; TCWVQ, 1:35–38; James G. M. Ramsey, Dr. J. G. M. Ramsey Autobiography and Letters, ed. William B. Hesseltine (Knoxville, 1954), 110. 3. Ramsey, Autobiography and Letters, 108, 111. 4. Boatner, Civil War Dictionary, 568–69; OR, 23(1):639–45, 839–42; Eddie M. Nikazy, Forgotten Soldiers: History of the 2nd Tennessee Volunteer Infantry Regiment (USA), 1861–1865 (Bowie, Md., 1996), 29–31. seeing him off, an older married daughter saw men galloping from the southwest on the Kingston Road toward the Ramsey mansion. As they appeared, she asked, “‘Are you escaping from the Yankees?’ One rider, perhaps Colonel R. K. Byrd, who knew her, replied, ‘We are the Yankees themselves.’”2 Sanders’s horsemen demonstrated in front of lightly defended Knoxville, held by a battery and “parts of two regiments from Florida . . . , the local militia and [some] volunteers of Knoxville.” When a Virginia regiment arrived as reinforcement, Sanders moved on and burned the railroad bridges at Strawberry Plains and Mossy Creek. Leaving his artillery behind, he crossed Clinch Mountain back into Kentucky. Upon Dr. Ramsey’s return, he saw a “country full of disaffected citizens, seduced from their hiding places by the presence of an armed Federal force. Many of them spoke out in favor of the old flag.” Colonel Sanders credited Byrd and his guides for much of the success.3 The 2nd East Tennessee Mounted Infantry, commanded by Maj. Daniel A. Carpenter, a Clinton merchant, was part of Brig. Gen. James M. Shackelford’s force that pursued John Hunt Morgan across Ohio during early July. Shackelford and others captured most of Morgan’s cavalry in Meigs County, Ohio, near Kentucky. But Morgan himself eluded capture and pushed northward with three hundred remaining Rebels before being caught by Shackelford’s cavalry at West Point, Ohio. Carpenter was among those lauded by Shackelford . Meanwhile, to divert Burnside’s attention away from Morgan as well as to capture horses and mules, Col. John S. Scott’s Rebel brigade entered Kentucky on July 25 above Rogersville on a course north toward Lexington. He repulsed twelve hundred of Sanders’s men at Richmond, but when Scott heard of Morgan’s capture, he retreated into Tennessee.4 While these raids occurred, other Tennesseans recruited...