Clarksville, TN – The next meeting of the Clarksville (TN) Civil War Roundtable will be on Wednesday, March 19th, 2025 at Fort Defiance Interpretive Center, our new home, 120 Duncan Street, off New Providence Boulevard. Turn onto Walker Street off New Providence Boulevard and then onto Duncan Street. There are site markers on New Providence Boulevard above and below the park.
The meeting begins at 7:00pm and is always open to the public.
This month’s program – “Without Bugle or Drum: The Battles of Vaught’s Hill and Snow Hill, Tennessee, March-April 1863”.
The Battle of Stones River, which concluded in early January 1863, saw the Confederate Army of Tennessee falling back to the Tullahoma/Shelbyville region for the winter. Both sides licked their wounds, received replacements and settled in. But for the Union Army of the Cumberland, it was anything but a sleepy time. Gen. William Rosecrans, seeking to revitalize his cavalry arm which had yet to perform to its capability, put David S. Stanley, a veteran of the elite 1st U.S. Cavalry, in charge of his new cavalry corps. Stanley brought it better leadership and Rosecrans went to the mat with the War Department to get better horses and weapons for his troopers.
Finally ready to be unleashed by March 1863, Rosecrans and Stanley sought to use them to find the weak links in the Confederate defense line that ran from the Franklin-Columbia area, protected by Confederate cavalry under Earl Van Dorn and Nathan Bedford Forrest, to McMinnville in the foothills of the Cumberland Plateau. The latter area was held by John Hunt Morgan’s cavalry division who was in Joseph Wheeler’s Cavalry Corps.
Morgan was not a proper cavalry leader and disdained the role of recon and counter-recon, preferring, instead, to raid behind Union lines, which he was very good at indeed. Union troopers probed along the lines fighting numerous skirmishes. Against Forrest and Van Dorn they were rebuffed but that was not the case going up against Morgan’s lines.
Morgan would get soundly drubbed at Vaught’s Hill (aka Milton), Snow Hill and later at McMinnville by Union cavalry and infantry. It was this hat trick of defeats that planted in him the idea of going across the Ohio River where his division would be destroyed. It is also what gave Rosecrans his target for the forthcoming Tullahoma Campaign with his main thrust going against Morgan’s sector supported by more attacks to the west. Our speaker this month is Kevin McCray from Ohio and his program will be on the first two of these battles which are the topic of his recent and much needed book.
Our speaker this month is Kevin McCray. His interest in the American Civil War began with the conflict’s centennial in the early 1960s. He is forever grateful for his father giving him a copy of The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War.
He served as the chief executive of the National Ground Water Association from 1995 until his retirement in 2017. Previously, he served in multiple staff roles from the time he joined the Association in 1979. He was a consultant to nonprofits from 2016 to 2023.
In addition to Without Bugle or Drum, in 2003, he published A Shouting of Orders, A History of the 99th Ohio Volunteer Infantry Regiment, a Civil War unit, after 10 years of research. He also wrote Alien Thoughts, a collection of thoughts by UFO experts and buffs from the 1960s and 1970s.
In his professional career, he taught high school, worked in community relations for a state government agency, served as public relations director for a semi-professional football team, and worked as a marketing communications staff member for a larger manufacturing operation in Bluffton, Indiana. Today, he is a freelance researcher and writer on a wide range of topics.
