On the west side:—
“The blood of one third its soldiers twice spilled in Tennessee crimsons the battle-flag of the brigade and inspires to great deeds.”
From the soldiers’ cemetery at Round Forest we rode on to the new National Cemetery of Stone River, then in process of construction. It lies between the railroad and the turnpike, in full view from both. A massy square-cornered stone wall encloses a space of modest size, sufficiently elevated, and covered with neatly heaped mounds, side by side, and row behind row, in such precise order, that one might imagine the dead who sleep beneath them to have formed their ghostly ranks there after the battle, and carefully laid themselves down to rest beneath those small green tents. The tents were not green when I visited the spot, but I trust they are green to-day, and that the birds are singing over them.
[11]. The right brigade of Palmer’s division had been the last to yield. The left brigade, in command of Hazen, was thus exposed to fire in flank and rear, and to the attempts of the enemy to charge in front. It required terrible fighting to beat back the enemy’s double lines: it cost a third of the brave brigade; but every moment the enemy was held back was worth a thousand men to the main line. General Rosecrans improved the time so well, in hurrying troops to the new position, that, when the enemy assailed that line, the fresh divisions of Van Cleve, Wood, and Rousseau, and the artillery massed on a commanding point, not only repulsed them, but they were charged while retiring by one of Crittenden’s brigades.... The enemy had miscalculated the temper of Hazen’s brigade; and Bragg was obliged to report, as he did in his first despatch, that he “had driven the whole Federal line, except his left, which stubbornly resisted.”—Annals of the Army of the Cumberland.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
THE HEART OF TENNESSEE.
Having spent the remainder of the forenoon in riding over other portions of the field, we returned to Murfreesboro’; and at half-past three o’clock I took the train for Nashville.
At Nashville I remained four days,—four eminently disagreeable days of snow, and rain, and fog, and slush, and mud. Yet I formed a not unfavorable impression of the city. I could feel the influence of Northern ideas and enterprise pulsating through it. Its population, which was less than twenty-four thousand at the last census, nearly doubled during the war. Its position gives it activity and importance. It is a nostril through which the State has long breathed the Northern air of free institutions. It is a port of entry on the Cumberland, which affords it steamboat communication with the great rivers. It is a node from which radiate five important railroads connecting it with the South and North. The turnpikes leading out of it in every direction are the best system of roads I met with anywhere in the South.
Middle Tennessee is the largest of the three natural divisions of the State. It is separated from the West division by the Tennessee River, and from East Tennessee by the Cumberland Mountains. It is a fine stock-raising country; and the valley of the Cumberland River affords an extensive tract of excellent cotton and tobacco lands.
Nashville is the great commercial emporium of this division. The largest annual shipment of cotton from this port was fifty thousand bales; the average, before the war, was about half as many: during 1865, it was fully up to this average, consisting mostly of old cotton going to market. Six thousand hogsheads of tobacco, two million bushels of corn, and twenty-five thousand hogs,—besides ten thousand casks of bacon and twenty-five hundred tierces of lard,—were yearly shipped from this port. The manufacturing interest of the place is insignificant.