"Battle for Knoxville" Topic

"It was 150 years ago this weekend that Gen. James "Old Pete" Longstreet ordered a desperate charge up the hill toward the most formidable earthworks in East Tennessee. The men in gray who died here likely didn't even know it was called Fort Sanders. It had been the fort's name for only a few days.

Begun by the Confederates, who had held Knoxville for most of the war, and had evacuated just three months earlier, the earthworks had previously borne the rather unimaginative name of Fort Loudoun, perhaps by some casual French-and-Indian War buff, one either unsuperstitious or uninformed about the fate of that British fort several miles downstream, and a century earlier. Even that Fort Loudoun wasn't well-named. It was named for the Fourth Earl of Loudoun, who never set foot in this region. An enemy of the Scots and an enemy of Americans, he was a lout of a nobleman with few discernible noble qualities.

Rechristened in honor of the young Union brigadier general killed in action. William P. Sanders, just 30, was one of President Lincoln's freshest promotions. After being mortally wounded by a Confederate sniper on Kingston Pike, Sanders died at the Lamar House downtown, and was buried, secretly, because his commanding officer, Gen. Ambrose Burnside, feared how the news of the popular leader's death would affect morale in the besieged city. A Kentucky native who'd grown up in Mississippi, Sanders became the war's only Southern-born general to die for the Union…"

Full article here
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Amicalement
Armand

When I lived in Knoxville, I thought about trying to wargame this, but I gave it up feeling it was nearly impossible to recreate. It might make a nice solo game. At the time I could not find out how many soldiers were in Fort Sanders. I only knew that it was far less than the Confederate forces. IIRC I finally decided at the time that there were around 180 soldiers, not counting the artillery crew. At a scale of 1 figure = 20 men, this would have been 9 figures. These days I have no idea how many were actually there.

A more interesting battle from this campaign to game would be Campbell Station.