November 19th, 2012 – Our 44th Meeting!! We continue our fourth year!
The next meeting of the Nashville (TN) Civil War Roundtable will be on Monday, November 19th, 2012, 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: “BRIDGE BURNING AND THE UNION UPRISING OF 1861 IN EAST TENNESSEE”
In the fall of 1861 East Tennessee unionists carried out a bold plan to burn nine railroad bridges between Bristol, Tennessee and Bridgeport, Alabama on the East Tennessee & Georgia and East Tennessee & Virginia Railroads. The plan was to disrupt the Confederate transportation of food, and supplies to and from Virginia. The destruction was to be a prelude for a surprise Union invasion from Kentucky. Although approved by President Lincoln, the invasion was cancelled at the last minute, despite some small battles that took place in eastern Kentucky, most of which were Union victories. But the road network crossing the mountains into Tennessee was not conducive to supplying an army in this region which served to help the Confederates. This cancellation left no time to notify the Tennesseans which left them open to the wrath of the occupying Confederates. The Confederate Army responded by rounding up Unionists from all over East Tennessee. Several of them were hanged and most wound up in jail in Knoxville. The majority of them never had the benefit of a trial. Their ultimate fate lay in a prison in the back country of Alabama in a little town named Tuscaloosa. The aftermath forced the Confederates to deploy even more men to protect the railroad in East Tennessee and the internecine violence between the two factions living in the same state got even worse. Indeed, it was a civil war within the Civil War.
Our speaker this month is Dorothy Kelly from Knoxville, Tennessee. She is an expert on the war in East Tennessee having written articles on it for North & South magazine as well as leading tours of sites in the Knoxville area in particular. She is a popular speaker on the Civil War roundtables circuit as well as an officer of the Knoxville Civil War Roundtable. Dorothy is also very involved in preserving Civil War sites in East Tennessee including Fort Dickerson in Knoxville. We hope you will join us for an informative program on one of the earliest episodes of the war in Tennessee.
Please join us for another informative meeting of the Nashville Civil War Roundtable. The Nashville CWRT is made possible
by Nashville Metro Parks and the Center for Military History at Middle Tennessee State University.