Forrest's First Raid: The Battle of Murfreesboro, July 1862

In the summer of eighteen sixty-two, the town of Murfreesboro was lightly held by Union forces who felt reasonably secure. The Confederate threat seemed distant. What happened on the morning of July thirteenth would disabuse them of that notion and introduce the Union army to a commander they would spend the rest of the war trying to stop.

Nathan Bedford Forrest had only recently been given his first independent command. He left Chattanooga on July ninth with roughly fourteen hundred cavalry and rode hard into Middle Tennessee. Before first light on July thirteenth, he struck Murfreesboro in separate columns simultaneously. One column hit the camp of the Seventh Pennsylvania Cavalry on the Woodbury Pike east of town. Another went for the courthouse and jail in the town center. Within the first hour, Forrest had overrun a Federal hospital and captured Union Brigadier General Thomas Turpin Crittenden along with his staff. By late afternoon, every Union unit in Murfreesboro had surrendered.

The Confederates destroyed Federal supplies and tore up miles of railroad track before withdrawing. In purely military terms, the raid was temporary. Within a week, Federal forces reoccupied the town. But the consequences were lasting. Forrest's lightning strike delayed the Union advance on Chattanooga by diverting troops and breaking the supply line. And the tactical template Forrest demonstrated here, hard riding, simultaneous strikes, speed as a weapon, would define Confederate cavalry operations in the western theater for the next three years. This was his first large-scale raid behind Federal lines and the opening act of one of the most feared careers in the Civil War.