Fort Sanders

On November 4, 1863, Confederate Gen. James Longstreet led two reinforced divisions from Chattanooga to attack Union Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside’s garrison in Knoxville and divert Federal forces from Chattanooga. Burnside confronted Longstreet outside Knoxville, then withdrew to his fortification on November 17, and Longstreet besieged the city. On the ridge overlooking the Confederate approach along Kingston Road, Federal troops enlarged unfinished works the Confederates had begun as Fort Loudon and renamed the stronghold Fort Sanders for Gen. William P. Sanders, mortally wounded on November 18 while delaying 17,000 Confederates with 700 cavalry and mounted infantry. Union soldiers strengthened the fort with walls 18-20 feet above an 8-10-foot-deep, 12-foot-wide ditch, felled trees sharpened toward attackers, and telegraph wire stretched from stump to stump. After twelve days of siege, 4,000 of Longstreet’s men assaulted the northwest bastion at dawn on November 29, but the trees, wire, ditch, and ice-slick parapet slowed them, and within twenty minutes the attack had failed. Pvt. John Watkins of the 19th Ohio Battery recalled that the ditch was nearly filled with Confederate bodies. After Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant defeated Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg at Chattanooga later that month, he sent Gen. William T. Sherman to reinforce Burnside; as Sherman approached, Longstreet withdrew on December 4, and Sherman soon rejoined Grant. Watkins returned in 1895 and found the fort being torn down as bullets were sought and a road graded through it.

Knoxville, Tennessee · United States