Hello,

September 19th, 2016 – Our 90th meeting!! We continue our seventh year.

The next meeting of the Nashville (TN) Civil War Roundtable will be on Monday, September 19th, 2016, in the visitor’s center of Ft. Negley Park, a unit of Metro Parks, Nashville, TN. This is located off I-65 just south of downtown between 4th Avenue South and 8th Avenue South on Edgehill Avenue/Chestnut Avenue. Take Exit 81, Wedgewood Avenue, off I-65 and follow the signs to the Science Museum.

The meeting begins at 7:00 PM and is always open to the public. Members please bring a friend or two – new recruits are always welcomed.

Our Speaker and Topic - “Fighting And Dying In A Frozen Hell: The Battle of Nashville”

The numerous books on the 1864 Tennessee Campaign cover the usual points. The Confederates, after losing Atlanta, had no other choice in the West (they did but I digress) but invade Tennessee with an under-strength army moving into the teeth of Federal defenses where troops and naval warships could be quickly massed to stop them. After taking Nashville, they could cross into Kentucky and maybe even move to Virginia to link up with Lee’s beleaguered army there. This is pure nonsense of course and well beyond the physical and logistics capability of the Confederacy at the time, as if the Federals would just let this happen.

But most of these books do not go into the real details of things like the effects of the weather on the land itself, how badly men and animals do when their bodies break down from lack of food and the cold, etc. This month’s program changes all of that and brings a new focus into how this campaign should really be looked at from the following perspectives:

First, the significance of Nashville as prime target for Hood – military, size, railroad nexus, and level of fortification. Secondly, Hood’s egregious order to deny his engineers to properly place redoubts and guns at the military crest rather than topographic crest and their implications. Third,
December’s variable weather and its direct and indirect effects on Confederate construction of redoubts and trench network: underlying geology, engineering properties of soils, and terrain. Next, Hood’s inability to handle basic logistics: desperate shortages of clothing, blankets, forage, and rations. Then, we have the terrible suffering of the men in their own words and lastly, the impact of frozen ground, fogs, rapid thawing, and lack of a serviceable east-west road connecting the east flank to Hillsboro Road.

All of these points will be covered in a revealing program by Dr. Philip Kemmerly. Dr. Kemmerly is an Emeritus Professor of Geology in the Department of Geosciences at Austin Peay State University, Clarksville, Tennessee. He taught for thirty-nine years of which twelve years he served as chair. Dr. Kemmerly holds licenses to practice geology in both Tennessee and Kentucky and has been a geological consultant for thirty-five years. Professor Kemmerly has authored two books and some fifty refereed papers in international and national geologic publications. He is also the author of several papers applying geology, soil mechanics, statistics, and mathematics to problems of Civil War combat. His most recent contributions in military history deal with the battles of Shiloh and Nashville including in a recent issue of the Tennessee Historical Quarterly. Copies of this issue will be available for sale at the meeting.

We hope you will join us for this program offering truly new perspectives on the Battle of Nashville.