Confederate Defenses in Memphis

    Even before Tennessee left the Union, there was a call to build defensive works along the Mississippi River to protect the city of Memphis. Gideon J. Pillow wrote to Confederate Secretary of War Leroy P. Walker on April 20, 1861, asking that an engineer be sent to the city to direct “military defensive works.” Walker replied three days later that an engineer was on his way.[1] On April 26, Pillow reported that “Captain Stockton,” Philip Stockton, was working on batteries, but that the city was in a “most defenseless condition for want of arms.”[2] Walker responded that next day writing that Pillow could keep 3,000 muskets, and that in “addition to the large guns heretofore sent you, I have this day ordered four 32-pounders to go forward. I feel a deep interest in the defense of Memphis, and will do everything to render it secure.” Pillow then mentioned a point at Randolph as the “most eligible situation for a battery to protect Memphis,” seeking permission to fortify this location as well.[3] Walker consented on April 30. Randolph is about 30 miles north of Memphis. 

Fort Pickering, from a Federal sketch. (LOC)

   Directly in command of Memphis was John L. T. Sneed. Born in Raleigh, North Carolina, Sneed moved to Memphis in 1843 where he practiced law and served in the higher ranks of state government, including the General Assembly and state attorney general, and even unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 1869. Tennessee governor Isham Harrison appointed Sneed one of three state generals in 1861. When Tennessee joined the Confederacy, Sneed was not transferred with the troops to Confederate service.[4] Likewise, Stockton was replaced as Engineer in August by Maj Lewis G. De Russy.[5]

   Leonidas Polk was in command of the First Geographical Division or, Department Number Two, at various times from June 25, 1861 to March 5, 1862.  Local command in Memphis passed to Col. Lucius M. Walker, 40^th Tennessee Infantry. Walker was a nephew of US President James K. Polk and a brother-in-law of Frank Armstrong. Walker was also a West Point graduate but had resigned a year or so after being commissioned. On March 11, 1862, he was promoted to brigadier general. There is very little in Walker’s Compiled Service Record regarding his work in Memphis.[6]

   According to one early historian, it did not take long for Memphis to become “a great military center.” He also contends that the first steps to organize what became the Army of Tennessee took place in April 1861 in Memphis. More than fifty companies were organized in Memphis in the first year of the war.[7]

   By the end of April 1861, two batteries were under construction at Memphis, with additional works being constructed at Forts Harris and Wright (Randolph). Fort Harris was about six miles above Memphis, and under the command of Capt. William D. Pickett, supervising construction. Later, officials deemed the site “of little strategic importance and ordered the removal of the cannon.”. The main Confederate entrenchments at Memphis were constructed at the old Fort Pickering site. The site had seen numerous forts over the centuries. The original Fort Pickering was a frontier trading post in operation from 1798 to 1814. Confederates constructed a line two miles long, placing 55 cannons along the line to defend Memphis from attack.[8]

   The Confederate works in Memphis proper were never tested. They were ordered to be evacuated once the forts on the upper Mississippi River were evacuated and the Federal navy began its sojourn down the river. There is probably more to learn about the Confederate works, maybe an inventory conducted after their capture by the Federals in June 1862, or descriptions from Confederate soldiers stationed in Memphis proper and charged with building the works.

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[1] OR Vol. 52, 2, 57-8.

[2] OR, Vol. 52, 2, 72.

[3] OR, Vol. 52, 2, 73.

[4] Allardice, More Generals in Gray, 212-13.

[5] Phillip Stockton, CMSR, RG109, NA.

[6] Prouty and Barker, Civil War High Commands, 550, 870, 884; Lucius M. Walker, CMSR, RG109, NA.

[7] Lindsley, A Survey of Civil War Period Military Sites in West Tennessee, 5; Young, Standard History of Memphis, 337.

[8] Prouty and Barker, A Survey of Civil War Period Military Sites in West Tennessee, 5.

Site Visit Saturday: St. John’s Episcopal Church, Ashwood, TN

 

Patrick Cleburne 

  Churches occupy important places in our society. Many of them, and the grounds that surround them, are packed full of history. (You can check out a previous post on churches in the crossfire of the war here). One of those churches full of history is St. John’s Episcopal Church, just outside of Columbia, Tennessee.

   St. John’s was consecrated in 1842 by the Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of Tennessee, James Hervey Otey. It was built by Leonidas Polk, the Missionary Bishop of the Southwest. The land was donated by the Polk family, a part of a land grant awarded to William Polk of North Carolina. The church was constructed by the slaves from the various Polk plantations in the area, and served not only as a church, but as a school as well.

 During the war, Federal soldiers under the command of General Buell, on their way to reinforce Grant at Shiloh, forced their way into the church, wrecking the organ and removing some of the pipes. In 1864, as the Confederate army advanced towards Columbia, General Cleburne, on passing the church, reportedly told his staff “So this is the church built by General Leonidas Polk and members of his family? If I am killed in the impending battle, I request that my body be laid to rest in this, the most beautiful spot I ever beheld.” (Yeatman, “St. John’s-A Plantation of the Old South.” Tennessee Historically Quarterly, Vol. 10, No 4 (December 1951): 340) 

   Following the battle of Franklin, in which six Confederate generals were killed, three of them, Patrick Cleburne, Hiram Granbury, and Otho Strahl, along with two staff officers --Col. R. B. Young, Granbury’s chief of staff and Lt. John H. Marsh, who served with Strahl--were buried in the “potter’s field” section of Rose Hill Cemetery in Columbia, Tennessee. Hearing of this, Brig. Gen. Lucius E. Polk, with the help of Confederate chaplain Charles Quintard, had the five exhumed and reburied at St. John’s Episcopal Church. Many decades after the war, the three generals were again exhumed and reburied in other cemeteries. Cleburne was reburied in Helena, Arkansas; Strahl was reburied in Dyersburg, Tennessee; and Granbury was reinterred in Granbury, Texas.  Young and Marsh are still interred at St. Johns.

   There are other Confederate graves here as well, including Col. Robert F. Beckham, chief of artillery for Stephen D. Lee’s Corps. He was mortally wounded at Columbia, Tennessee on November 29, 1864. Brigadier General Lucius E. Polk, who was a nephew of Leonidas Polk, is interred at St. John’s, as is George Campbell Brown, who served on the staff of Richard Ewell in the Army of Northern Virginia, and James H. Thomas, a Tennessee delegate to the Confederate Provisional Congress. Mary Martin Pillow, the wife of General Gideon J. Pillow, is also buried at St. John’s. The form for the Ashwood Rural Historic District, for the National Register of Historic Places, states that there is a Confederate section with the dead from the battle of Ashwood behind the church.

   Carroll Van West, in her book Tennessee’s Historic Landscapes, considers St. John’s a “magnificent achievement in rural Gothic Revival architecture.” (368)  The church is no longer in use, save for one Sunday a year. But the building itself and the surrounding grounds are kept in immaculate condition. St. John’s is the oldest surviving church building in Maury County.

   My first and only visit came in May 2021.