The Assault Upon Fort Sanders

At 6:20 on the morning of November 29, after a twenty-minute bombardment, about 2,400 men under Lafayette McLaws went forward in two columns. Longstreet had judged the ditch shallow after watching a sentry cross it, but the sentry had used a plank. Telegraph wire strung between stumps tangled the approach, and men in the ditch met thrown lit shells and flanking fire. Earl Hess counts 129 Confederates killed, 458 wounded and 226 missing, against about 50 Union losses. Word of the defeat at Missionary Ridge reached Longstreet thirty minutes later.

What the plaque says

The Assault Upon Fort Sanders Four brigades of infantry, Gen. James Longstreet's first Corps, emerging from the declivity to the north, made a bayonet charge upon the Federal Fort Sanders at this point, at dawn, Nov. 29, 1863. They were stopped with the heavy causalities by a deep ditch and by ranking cannon fire. This climaxed Longstreet's siege of Knoxville.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Blount Mansion — 1.1 mi
  The 1792 frame house of William Blount, governor of the Southwest Territory, Knoxville's only National Historic Landmark, where the people he enslaved are named.
• Beck Cultural Exchange Center — 2.2 mi
  Knoxville's Black history museum and archive, opened in 1975 in the 1912 Dandridge Avenue house the community bought for $22,500.
• Green McAdoo Cultural Center — 15 mi
  The 1935 school in Clinton that sent twelve Black students down Foley Hill to desegregate Clinton High School in August 1956, now a museum with bronze statues of the Clinton 12.
• Museum of Appalachia — 17 mi
  John Rice Irwin's 65-acre collection of moved log cabins and mountain objects north of Knoxville, opened in 1969, with a cabin believed to be Mark Twain's father's.

More markers nearby

• Fort Sanders — 0.2 mi
• General Clifton Bledsoe Cates 1895-1970 United States Marine Corps — 0.3 mi
• James Rufus Agee — 0.3 mi
• Fort Byington — 0.3 mi