Stones River: The Battle That Saved the Emancipation Proclamation

On the last day of eighteen sixty-two and the first two days of eighteen sixty-three, about seventy-eight thousand Union and Confederate soldiers fought each other to a bloody standstill along the banks of Stones River, just outside Murfreesboro. When it was over, more than twenty-three thousand men were dead, wounded, or missing, making Stones River one of the highest casualty rates of any battle in the war, on either side.

The fight began on the morning of December thirty-first when Confederate General Braxton Bragg's army hit the Union right flank with a crushing blow that crumpled three divisions and drove the Federals back nearly two miles before dawn was fully up. Union General William Rosecrans stabilized his line, refused to retreat, and held through the day on sheer will and artillery. For a full day on New Year's Day, the two exhausted armies simply faced each other in the cold. Then on January second, Bragg ordered one more assault across the river. It was repulsed by massed Union artillery that fired at nearly point-blank range. Bragg retreated toward Chattanooga.

The victory could not have been more timely. Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January first while the battle was still in doubt. A Union defeat at Stones River might have fatally undermined the Proclamation's credibility and renewed pressure to seek a negotiated settlement. Lincoln wrote to Rosecrans that the battle had been like gold saved in time of need. The battlefield is preserved today as a National Park Service site with more than six thousand one hundred Union soldiers buried in the adjacent national cemetery, more than twenty-five hundred of them unknown.