Mansker Creek

The Louisville and Nashville Railroad, one of Tennessee’s most strategically important lines, closely followed Mansker Creek here, with a railroad bridge two miles downstream, and several companies of Union soldiers camped along the creek beginning in 1862 to protect the railroad and bridge. On August 20, 1862, Confederate Col. John Hunt Morgan and his brigade pursued a detachment of 300 Union cavalrymen along the railroad in this vicinity after the Federals had arrested nearly all the male citizens of Gallatin, including boys and old men, and were marching them along the tracks to Nashville. Morgan caught the cavalrymen, killed most of them, allegedly shooting some after they surrendered, attacked a nearby guard stockade, and freed most of the civilian prisoners. The next month, Union Col. William B. Stokes and the 5th Tennessee Cavalry raided a Confederate position near Goodlettsville and surprised Confederate Col. James D. Bennett’s 9th Tennessee Cavalry, part of Morgan’s command. With only 150 men against Bennett’s 400, Stokes and his troopers galloped into the camp firing, the Confederates returned fire as they scattered in all directions, and the Federals pursued them for at least three miles. Bennett lost 40 killed or wounded and 39 prisoners, while the Federals suffered no casualties. Union Gen. William Bowen Campbell, born on Mansker Creek in 1807, was a Mexican War hero and former governor of Tennessee; although both the United States and Confederate governments offered him a general’s commission, President Abraham Lincoln appointed him brigadier general of volunteers in 1862, but he resigned later that year because of ill health and after the war served briefly in the U.S. Congress.

Goodlettsville, Tennessee · United States