Fortress Nashville / Forts

Fortress Nashville, also, Forts. .

Go at once to Nashville and select sites and give plans and instructions for redoubts to protect the city." , -Major General Don Carlos Buell to Captain James S. Morton

Fortress Nashville , Within months of Union occupation, Nashville was transformed from a Confederate capital into a supply base and troop garrison for Federal operations in the entire Western Theatre. Buildings were requisitioned for barracks. Churches became hospitals. New jails were constructed to hold prisoners of war. Union quartermaster James Donelson erected three large supply warehouses and built a third levee on the Cumberland River landing. During one month in 1863, 213 steamboats dispatched 62,666 tons of cargo to support the Union occupation., In August of 1862, Major General Don Carlos Buell, under orders from Military Governor Andrew Johnson, directed Captain James St. Clair Morton, the Army of the Ohio's chief engineer, to construct fortifications around the city to defend against Confederate attack. Between 1862 and 1864, the Union army built a series of forts from the old city reservoir above the Cumberland River east of town to Hydes Ferry at the Cumberland to the west. In addition to Fort Negley, other major fortifications were Blockhouse Casino (present City Reservoir) Fort Morton (Rose Park), Fort Houston (Music Row Roundabout), and Fort Gillem (Fisk University). Twenty-one minor installations were constructed as well. When the final modifications were completed in late 1864, Nashville was the most heavily fortified city in North America outside Washington, D.C., Forts , By the Civil War, fortifications had evolved into an important component of the American military. Though forts were built mainly to defend against coastal attacks, during the Civil War they were used to support the inexperience of raw recruits. Since the Revolution, Americans had viewed large standing armies as a threat to civil authority. Thus, in the 19th century the United States refused to create a large professional military force on the scale of European powers like Great Britain , only 16,000 men in 1861. If attacked, theorists recognized that volunteer militiamen needed to expand the ranks of the army would need the extensive protection provided by permanent or field works, like forts. The fortification system constructed to defend Nashville was representative of that principle., Dennis Hart Mahan, a military educator at West Point from 1830 to 1871, produced Treatise on Field Fortifications in 1836. The book was widely read and its theories employed by American military commanders before, during, and after the Civil War. Union Captain James S. Morton was a student of Mahan at West Point, finishing second in the Class of 1851.,

"Place the militia soldier on his natural field of battle, behind a breastwork, and an equilibrium between him and his more disciplined enemy is immediately established." , D. H. Mahan, Engineer

Captions (top to bottom) , . Union Blockhouses guarding the bridge over the Cumberland River , . The Capitol, called Fort Johnson during the war, surrounded by cannon , . D.H. Mahan