On November 4, 1863, to divert Federal forces from Chattanooga, Confederate Gen. James Longstreet led two reinforced divisions from the city to attack Union Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside’s garrison in Knoxville. Burnside confronted Longstreet outside Knoxville, then withdrew to his fortification on November 12, and Longstreet besieged the city. After Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s army defeated Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg’s forces at the end of the month in Chattanooga, Grant ordered Gen. William T. Sherman to reinforce Burnside. Sherman marched north from Chattanooga on November 28, 1863, leading the XV Corps up the East Tennessee and Georgia Railroad Line through Philadelphia toward Morganton on the Little Tennessee River, where he planned to ford the shallows and continue to Knoxville. The corps arrived by way of Morganton Rd., but Sherman found the ford was 3½ feet deep and 240 yards wide, too deep for infantry to wade in near-freezing temperatures. Col. James H. Wilson, assistant inspector general from Grant’s staff, supervised construction of a bridge after troops found two large flatboats and carried forty to fifty men across the river as guards and a working party. Unoccupied houses and barns in Morganton were torn down for bridge timber, and the bridge was finished on December 4. Wet, cold, and poorly provisioned, the troops crossed the river, and Sherman soon learned that Longstreet was retreating rather than risk being trapped by the advancing Union forces. Longstreet withdrew to northeastern Tennessee for the winter and later returned to Virginia. His retreat ended the Confederacy’s last serious attempt to hold East Tennessee and the vital supply route between Atlanta and Virginia. Before the Civil War, Morganton had been a main shipping hub and business center on the Little Tennessee River, but after the war railroads slowly replaced riverboats in local transportation and the town declined. In 1968, the Tennessee Valley Authority tore down eighteen remaining houses, a store, and a church before construction of Tellico Dam, and the rest of the town was flooded, leaving only the Morganton Cemetery.