Nashville was technically a Confederate city that became a Union city. It seceded with Tennessee in June 1861. It fell to Union forces in February 1862. It spent the remaining three years of the war as a Union military headquarters. But the cleaner answer is that Nashville was a deeply divided city that never had a unified political identity during the Civil War, and that division shaped the trajectory of everything that came after.
The Secession
Tennessee was the last state to secede from the Confederacy, doing so in June 1861 after President Lincoln called for 75,000 state militiamen to suppress the rebellion following Fort Sumter. The vote was not close statewide, but it was deeply regional. East Tennessee was predominantly Unionist. Middle and West Tennessee, where Nashville sat, had stronger Confederate sympathies.
Nashville’s commercial class had complicated loyalties. The city had profited from both Northern trade and Southern cotton, and many of its wealthy residents were more interested in stability than ideology. When Tennessee joined the Confederacy, Nashville became the Confederate state capital, and Confederate forces built defensive forts along the Cumberland River.
Those defenses held for less than a year.
The Fall
After Grant captured Fort Henry on February 6, 1862 and Fort Donelson on February 16, 1862, Nashville’s fate was sealed. The Confederate forts guarding the river approach had fallen. Confederate leadership made no serious attempt to defend the city itself. Governor Isham Harris gave a speech urging citizens to burn their own property before the Union arrived. Retreating Confederate troops destroyed the river bridges. Then most of the Confederate leadership fled.
On February 23, 1862, Mayor Richard Cheatham formally surrendered Nashville to Union General Don Carlos Buell. Federal troops marched down Lower Broadway, wheeled toward the State Capitol, and raised the American flag over the building. Nashville became the first Confederate state capital to fall to Union forces.
The Confederate state government never returned. It relocated to Memphis, then fled Tennessee entirely when Memphis fell in June 1862.
The Division
Nashville’s population did not suddenly become pro-Union when Federal troops arrived. The city was divided then, and remained divided throughout the war.
Confederate loyalists stayed in the city, operated a secret underground network smuggling weapons and information to Confederate forces, and defied Union military authority. City leaders, clergy, and businessmen were ordered to sign an Oath of Allegiance to the Union or lose the right to work. Many refused initially. Prominent secessionists were arrested and shipped north to military prisons.
At the same time, Unionists who had been harassed under Confederate rule gained new footing. Escaped enslaved people and free Black residents from across the countryside poured into the city seeking safety and opportunity behind Union lines. By November 1862, over 50,000 Federal troops were stationed in or around Nashville, outnumbering the prewar civilian population several times over.
Military Governor Andrew Johnson, appointed by Lincoln in March 1862, ran the city with an iron hand. He arrested prominent Confederate supporters, forced loyalty oaths on everyone in a position of authority, and used Nashville as the first laboratory for what Reconstruction would look like in a recaptured Southern city.
The Complicated Legacy
After the war, Nashville moved quickly to embrace a Confederate identity it had not exactly held during the conflict. By 1893, the magazine Confederate Veteran was being published in the city. In 1894, the first chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy was founded in Nashville. Historians have called the city the “cradle of the Lost Cause,” the post-war revisionist mythology that reframed the Confederate cause as noble rather than as a defense of slavery. Confederate monuments went up around the city, and prominent families maintained Confederate identities for generations.
This is one of the stranger historical inversions in Nashville’s story: a city that was captured by the Union in 1862 and used as a Federal military base for three years became, within a generation, the intellectual and organizational center of Confederate memorialization.
The historical record on how Nashville’s Civil War allegiances actually broke down is straightforward. Tennessee provided 187,000 soldiers to the Confederacy and roughly 51,000 to the Union. Nashville’s business class mostly wanted order and profit. The city’s Black residents, enslaved and free, were consistently pro-Union in ways that rarely appeared in the official commemorations that followed the war.
The question of whether Nashville was a Union or Confederate city ultimately reveals more about how the postwar South constructed its mythology than about what actually happened in Nashville between 1861 and 1865.
Sources
- Wikipedia: “Battle of Nashville” (en.wikipedia.org)
- Wikipedia: “Tennessee in the American Civil War” (en.wikipedia.org)
- Wikipedia: “Nashville, Tennessee” (en.wikipedia.org)
- Tennessee Encyclopedia: “Civil War” (tennesseeencyclopedia.net)
- Tennessee Encyclopedia: “Civil War Occupation” (tennesseeencyclopedia.net)
- History of American Women: “Civil War Nashville” (womenhistoryblog.com)
- Emerging Civil War: “Today In History: The first Confederate State Capital Falls” (emergingcivilwar.com)
- American Battlefield Trust: “Battle of Nashville” (battlefields.org)
- A History of Tennessee Student Edition: tnsoshistory.com