The Battle of Marion: Breckinridge Holds the Salt Road

By December of eighteen sixty-four the Confederacy was running out of almost everything, but nothing terrified its quartermasters more than losing salt. Salt preserved the meat that fed the Army of Northern Virginia. The great saltworks at Saltville, Virginia, fourteen miles to the southwest of Marion, produced more than half the salt used by Confederate forces east of the Mississippi. Union General George Stoneman understood this perfectly when he led several thousand cavalry and infantry out of Tennessee on December tenth, eighteen sixty-four, aimed at the heart of that supply.

Confederate General John C. Breckinridge was waiting. Breckinridge was no ordinary commander. He had been vice president of the United States under James Buchanan, a Kentucky senator, and the Southern Democratic presidential candidate in eighteen sixty. Now he commanded all Confederate forces in southwest Virginia, and he concentrated his strength at Saltville, certain that was Stoneman's true target.

Stoneman feinted. He bypassed Saltville and came at Marion instead, splitting Breckinridge's attention. On December seventeenth and eighteenth, roughly a thousand Confederate infantry and cavalry held defensive positions on the high ground around the town against repeated Union assaults. Two regiments of United States Colored Cavalry fought in Stoneman's column, among the first Black cavalry units to see major action in the eastern theater. After two days of fighting, with their ammunition nearly gone, the Confederates withdrew.

Stoneman then doubled back and destroyed the Saltville works on December twentieth. Many of the great kettles were smashed and the works were badly damaged, though not wholly destroyed. The salt supply that had sustained Lee's army was crippled.

Breckinridge had held Marion but lost the war's most precious mineral. He would be named Confederate Secretary of War in February eighteen sixty-five, the last man to hold that office. By April, there was nothing left to secretary.