On the evening of December 2, 1864, the Confederate Army of Tennessee began a two-week siege of Nashville here, launching the South's last significant offensive operation of the Civil War and helping make Nashville the war's most extensive battlefield in sheer distance. After advancing from the Battle of Franklin, General John Bell Hood anchored his left flank at this point as more than 25,000 Confederates formed an investment line stretching more than 12 miles east to try to hem in Nashville south of the Cumberland River. Detached from Major General Nathan B. Forrest's command at Murfreesboro, Colonel David C. Kelley began a blockade of the Cumberland River with about 300 Confederates, artillery batteries, and a subsurface line of mines, later increasing his force to more than 1,200 cavalry before it fell to less than 800 by December 15. Early on December 3, Confederates captured the Union supply transports Prairie State and Prima Donna, taking 56 prisoners, 197 horses and mules, and provisions of corn and oats, and they disabled a third vessel, the Magnet, before the U.S. Navy arrived and recovered the captured ships. Between December 3 and 15, as many as seven regiments of Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee cavalry blockaded transportation on the Cumberland against seven heavily armed Navy gunboats, and in six engagements the Navy failed to dislodge the river batteries. In the fourth engagement on December 6, the U.S.S. Neosho was struck more than 100 times without sinking, though two rounds pierced its iron plating and one lodged unexploded in its powder magazine; Quartermaster John Ditzenback and Pilot John H. Farrell received the Medal of Honor for saving the vessel's colors after heavy Confederate fire shot them away. By moving mobile gun emplacements along the high ground, Kelley's cavalry convinced the Navy that they faced a force more than four times its actual size. On December 15, after Union combat-ready strength had risen to more than 49,000, Union forces feinted at one end of the field and divided the Confederate left along Richland Creek, crushing the Army of Tennessee in one of the war's most decisive battles. Kelley's artillery and five regiments from General Chalmers's cavalry were among the few Confederate units to hold and drive back a much larger Union cavalry force on the opening day, in a countercharge that also included 75-year-old civilian Mark Robertson Cockrill. After Federal troops overran Chalmers's headquarters at Belle Meade Plantation, Kelley withdrew that night through Bellevue to the Little Harpeth River and rejoined the retreating army near Hillsboro Road and present-day Old Hickory Boulevard, then helped provide a rear guard in a delaying action from Brentwood south for more than 100 miles into Alabama and across the Tennessee River above Muscle Shoals, where Union pursuit ended. This marked the end of the South's last great attempt to reclaim Tennessee or recover lost territory, and four months later the Army of Tennessee was surrendered by General Joseph E. Johnston near Durham Station, North Carolina, on April 26, 1865.
