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3 unusual facts about Western Theater of the American Civil War


11th Michigan Volunteer Infantry Regiment

It was assigned to front-line combat duty in the Army of the Cumberland in the Western Theater and participated in most of its leading battles and campaigns, including the Chattanooga Campaign and the 1864 Atlanta Campaign.

Western Theater of the American Civil War

The Confederacy was forced to defend with limited resources an enormous land mass, which was subject to Union thrusts along multiple avenues of approach, including major rivers that led directly to the agricultural heartland of the South.

It excluded operations against the Gulf Coast and the Eastern Seaboard, but as the war progressed and William Tecumseh Sherman's Union armies moved southeast from Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1864 and 1865, the definition of the theater expanded to encompass their operations in Georgia and the Carolinas.


August Kautz

Transferred to the Western Theater, Kautz later assisted in operations as a colonel with the 2nd Ohio Cavalry against Confederate General John Hunt Morgan's highly successful raid behind Union lines in Indiana and Ohio during June–July 1863 and under the command of Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside at the Battle of Knoxville from September to December 1863.

David P. Jenkins

During the American Civil War, Jenkins served in Union Army under Generals Grant, Pope, Sherman and Burnside in the Western Theater.

Faugh A Ballagh

A variant transliteration of the motto, 'Faj an Bealac!' was inscribed on the regimental colors of the (Federal) 7th Missouri Volunteer Infantry, the "Irish Seventh", which fought in the Civil War's Western Theater as part of Grant and Sherman's Army of the Tennessee.

John Tyler Morgan

When Rodes was promoted to major general and given a division in the Army of Northern Virginia, Morgan declined an offer to command Rodes's old brigade and instead remained in the Western Theater, leading troops at the Battle of Chickamauga.


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