Did the North or the South win the Battle of Nashville on December 15-16 in 1864?

Answer 1

John Bell Hood led the Rebels to a disastrous frontal assault that all but ruined his army.

You seem to be thinking of the Battle of Franklin, which occurred about two weeks before. It is useful to know the events that led up to it...

Hood began that campaign a few days earlier, by doing an end run out of Alabama, across the Tennessee River, with most of his Army of Tennessee, to the east of the Union Army IV and XXIII Corps, while part of his army (Corps of S.D. Lee?) demonstrated against the Union main body on the Tennessee River. Schofield, the union commander, didn't realize the trouble he was in until almost too late, then ran for his life to the north. At one point, (Near Spring Hill?) this required a night march within yards of Hoods sleeping troops; nobody told Hood until he arose the next morning. Evidently, he had not foreseen that Schofield's 'Passion for the rear' would induce him to attempt a night march. But some say that Hood could not be roused from a laudanum induced coma to order a night attack...

When he awoke the next morning, was not pleased, and drove his army after them, catching up with them that afternoon south of Franklin. At about 4PM, he ordered an attack by his army over two miles of open ground, without artillery preparation, against hastily improved existing fortifications. Think Pickett's' Charge, but with twice the troops over twice the distance with no artillery support...

On the outskirts of Franklin, the union troops could see that they were backed up to an unbridged river, which they were trying to repair, and were forced by that circumstance to fight for their lives. Schofield was on the far side, where he couldn't interfere with the troops that did the fighting. There was a small union position, held by two brigades, some distance in advance of the fortified main line. They waited too long to flee, consequently, the rebels were able to chase them back and open a breach in the main union line, but not for long. A counterattack by Opdyke's union brigade closed it. Elsewhere, it wasn't really even close. You've got to remember that by this time in the war, union troops in the west were primarily veterans, had the habit of victory, and more importantly , in some cases, had breech loading or repeating rifles rifles. In the bloody math regarding frontal assault against entrenched positions during the ACW, Hood would have needed a 3-1 advantage in manpower to have a chance of winning. It was more like 3-2, or less...

The slaughter on the confederate side was horrendous: 6,000 casualties in the hours from 4 PM until dark, including about a dozen of the most illustrious generals of the AOT, six of whom were dead. The union army continued its flight as soon as the battle started to die down, and were gone by the next morning, retiring into the fortifications of Nashville, arguably the second most fortified city in the country after Washington D.C. The best thing Hood could come up with was to follow them, and wait outside Nashville in field fortifications, including several redoubts, for the ax to fall...

And fall it did, about two weeks later. The union general in Nashville in overall command was George H. Thomas. He was a loyal Virginian, not much in favor by the powers that be as they were then constituted. He was not interested in just winning the coming battle, he wanted to obliterate the AOT. To do this, beside assembling cavalry for a pursuit of the defeated enemy,(most of whom didn't even have horses!) he had to turn the collection of units sent there from all over the west into an army. The army that had fought at Franklin was to be about one half of Thomas' but it had been about one third of the force that Sherman had used to besiege and occupy Atlanta; he had taken two thirds of the best troops and marched right out of the war toward Savannah. To make up for the deficit, troops were sent toward Nashville from as far away as MISSOURI! The XVI Corps arrived in a downpour just in time to be assigned a position in the trenches outside Nashville the night before what was to be the start of the battle!

Those aforementioned Powers (Grant, Halleck, Stanton, and Lincoln) had been clamoring for Thomas to attack without remounts, all his promised troops, etc. Thomas had an undeserved reputation for slowness, and Schofield has been intriguing to replace Thomas by telling those powers that Thomas was dragging his feet, so that command of the army would fall into his lap as senior officer present. What was really going on was that the Powers, especially Grant, were worried that Hood had a chance of getting north of Nashville. In the unlikely event that he did, they thought there was nothing to stop him short of Lake Erie, but by 1864, Tennessee was pretty well stripped of supplies and forage, and Thomas probably would have caught up to him before he got too far. But those powers would then be forced to explain why it seemed like a good idea to let Sherman wander away before neutralizing Hood and the AOT...

The morning (12-8) of the scheduled attack, the rain had turned to sleet and covered the countryside with a sheet of ice. Nobody was going anywhere, but the clamor to attack only accelerated! A few days later, a day before Grant himself headed toward Nashville to take command, he sent another general, John Logan, with orders to replace Thomas if he had not yet attacked. Logan got as far as Louisville before he heard the news of Thomas success on the first day, while Grant heard of it in Washington. Thomas troops likewise drove the AOT out of their positions the second day, and the pursuit was on. About a week of continuous rain later, his troops, led by the cavalry, had pushed the remnants all the back to Alabama, where they'd started, over a hundred miles away, past at least three rain swollen rivers, bleeding stragglers every step of the way. The AOT never again fought as a cohesive army, though some units got to North Carolina by the end of the war...

Thomas' army, by covering that distance, under those conditions, in that length of time, in their pursuit, doesn't seem slow to me...

What do you think?

The short answer is that it was a crushing victory for the north...