In December 1864, Union Major General George H. Thomas held Nashville, Tennessee, with about 55,000 troops behind seven miles of trenches, while Ulysses S. Grant boarded a train to relieve him for not attacking. This episode lays out how the two armies got there: Sherman cut loose for the sea, John Schofield slipped past John Bell Hood’s sleeping army at Spring Hill, and Hood’s frontal assault at Franklin cost over 6,000 men. Hood then dug a four-mile line south of Nashville and waited, and an ice storm on December 8 froze both sides in place while Lincoln complained of a strategy of do nothing.

When the ice thawed, Thomas struck on December 15 with a feint against the Confederate right by United States Colored Troops, then a wheeling attack by James Wilson’s cavalry and A.J. Smith’s infantry that overran the redoubts on the left. On December 16 he ran the same play. At Shy’s Hill, Confederate trenches dug on the geographic crest left a blind slope, and General John McArthur attacked without waiting for orders. Hood’s line collapsed, and a misrouted pontoon train let the remnants escape across the Tennessee River.

• A Confederate soldier wrote that the shallow, muddy winter trenches gave him a graveyard feeling.
• Hood sent Nathan Bedford Forrest’s cavalry to Murfreesboro before the battle, leaving his army without its scouts.
• The 13th USCT lost 40 percent of its men in one charge on Peach Orchard Hill under enfilading fire.
• McArthur sent word that unless ordered otherwise, he would attack in five minutes.
• The Army of Tennessee fell from about 38,000 men to fewer than 15,000, and Hood resigned weeks later.