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| The Holston, near Armstrong's.3 |
Nov. 28. 1863. |
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these efforts skirmishes frequently occurred, for sorties were made from the trenches.1 Finally, on the 25th, the day when the Nationals were carrying the Missionaries' Ridge, he threw a considerable force across the Holston, near Armstrong's (his Headquarters),2 to seize the heights, south of the river, that commanded Knoxville.
Quite a severe struggle ensued, in which the Confederates were worsted.
They succeeded, however, in seizing another knob, lower down, which rises about one hundred and fifty feet above the river, and so planted a battery on it that it commanded Fort Sanders, five hundred yards north of it. This advantage had just been gained, and the besiegers were huzzaing with delight,
when information reached Longstreet of Bragg's defeat at Chattanooga.
He well knew that columns from Grant's victorious army would soon be upon his rear, so he determined to take Knoxville by storm before aid could reach Burnside.
He was now strengthened by the arrival of troops under Generals Sam. Jones, Carter, “Mudwall” Jackson, and “Cerro Gordo” Williams, and he could expect no more.
For thirteen days he had been wasting strength in pressing an unsuccessful siege, and from that moment he must grow weaker.
Burnside was cheered by the same news that made Longstreet desponding, and he resolved to resist the besiegers to the last extremity.
Such was the situation of affairs, when, at eleven o'clock on Saturday night,
the air cold and raw, the sky black with clouds, and the darkness thick, Longstreet proceeded to attack Fort Sanders, then occupied by the Twenty-ninth Massachusetts, Seventy-ninth New York, two companies of the Second and one of the Twentieth Michigan.
The fort was bastioned, and the northwest was the salient of the angle, the point seen in the engraving on the next page.
In front of it the woods had been cleared over several acres, sloping gently to a ravine.
From
1 When the siege commenced there was in the commissary department little more than one day's rations, and supplies could then be received only from the south side of the Holston, across a pontoon bridge, the foe holding the avenues of approach to Knoxville on the north side of the river. Burnside's efforts were directed to keeping open the country between the Holston and the French Broad, and every attempt of Longstreet to seize it was promptly met. A considerable quantity of corn and wheat, and some pork, was soon collected in Knoxville, but almost from the beginning of the siege the soldiers were compelled to subsist on half and quarter rations, without coffee or sugar. Indeed, during the last few days of the siege, the bread of their half rations was made of clear bran.
Longstreet tried to break the pontoon bridge, by sending down the swift current from Boyd's Ferry, a heavy raft. Captain Poe, Burnside's able engineer, advised of this work, stretched an iron cable across the Holston above the bridge, a thousand feet in length, and farther up the river he constructed a boom of logs. These foiled the attempts of the Confederates to destroy the pontoon bridge.2 See page 157.
3 this is from a sketch by the author, taken from the piazza of Mr. Armstrong's house. The knob seen ver the low point of land around which the Holston sweeps, is the one on which the Confederates planted the battery that commanded Fort Sanders.
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