On the night of December 30, 1862, two armies camped about 700 yards apart near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and their bands traded Yankee Doodle and Dixie before both played Home Sweet Home. William Rosecrans, with about 41,000 men, needed a victory for Lincoln two days before the Emancipation Proclamation took effect; Braxton Bragg had roughly 35,000. Both generals planned the same attack on the enemy’s right. Bragg struck first at 6 a.m. on December 31, while Union soldiers on the right were cooking breakfast, and drove them back three miles.

Philip Sheridan had his division in line by 4 a.m. and held the cedar thickets of the Slaughter Pen, losing all three brigade commanders, while William Hazen’s brigade held Hell’s Half Acre as the Union line folded into a horseshoe along the Nashville Pike. Bragg wired Jefferson Davis that he had won, but Rosecrans, backed by George Thomas, stayed. On January 2, John C. Breckinridge was ordered against a hill across the river and walked into Captain John Mendenhall’s massed artillery at McFadden’s Ford, and Bragg retreated to Tullahoma.

• Stones River had the highest casualty percentage of any major battle of the war, nearly a third of all combatants.
• Alexander McCook ordered extra campfires to mislead the Confederates, which also ruined his own men’s night vision.
• Rosecrans held his council of war covered in the blood of his chief of staff, decapitated by a cannonball beside him.
• Mendenhall placed 45 guns hub to hub facing the ford and 12 more to the south for enfilade fire.
• Breckinridge lost 1,800 men in under an hour and was heard crying out for his Kentucky Orphan Brigade.