Why Fight Here?

In the quiet fields and forests along Stones River outside Murfreesboro, two great armies fought one of the most costly battles of the Civil War because this place lay between crucial transportation links. For the armies operating west of the Appalachians, railroads and riverboats were essential to movement, supply, and victory. Nashville, twenty-eight miles to the northwest on the Cumberland River, gave the Union Army of the Cumberland under Major General William S. Rosecrans a secure base where steamboats and trains brought in the thousands of tons of food and supplies needed to keep forty-three thousand men ready to fight, but remaining there could not defeat the Confederacy or restore the Union. To win, Rosecrans had to move southeast toward the rail yards of Chattanooga and Atlanta. By Christmas 1862, General Braxton Bragg's Confederate Army of the Tennessee, numbering thirty-eight thousand men and spread across more than sixty-five miles of central Tennessee farmland, was forced to concentrate at Murfreesboro when scouts reported the enemy advancing. Murfreesboro was the best place to assemble because it stood at the hub of a web of country roads, and the Nashville Pike and the railroad ran side by side there, making it the route the Federals had to take.

Murfreesboro, Tennessee · United States