Battle of Tulifinny: The Citadel Cadets Hold the Line

In early December of eighteen sixty-four, General William Tecumseh Sherman's army of roughly sixty thousand men was closing the last miles of the March to the Sea, pressing toward Savannah, Georgia. Sherman had ordered a scorched-earth campaign: crops burned, livestock killed, Confederate infrastructure systematically destroyed. Standing between a Union column from the coast, about five thousand strong under General John Foster, and the Charleston-Savannah Railroad, one of the last functioning Confederate supply arteries in the Southeast, was a patchwork Confederate force of about nine hundred.

The battle that erupted along the Tulifinny River from December sixth through the ninth was an unlikely Confederate success. The defenders managed to hold the critical railroad crossing and kept the supply line open long enough for Lieutenant General William Hardee to evacuate thousands of Confederate troops from Savannah before the city fell.

What made the Battle of Tulifinny unusual, even by Civil War standards, was the composition of the Confederate force. Among the defenders was the full South Carolina Battalion of State Cadets, three hundred forty-three young men drawn from both the Citadel Academy in Charleston and the Arsenal Academy in Columbia. These were students, some of them teenagers, pressed into actual combat to plug the gap in the Confederate lines. They held.

Also on the Union side, the battle saw one of the rare Civil War engagements in which United States Marines fought in a land battle. Marines from the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron were landed to join the infantry assault on the Confederate position.

The Charleston-Savannah Railroad survived, Hardee's army lived to fight again, and the Citadel cadets returned to their classrooms, having fired real rifles in a real battle at the edge of a South Carolina swamp.