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The eleven companies comprising the 14th Tennessee Infantry Regiment were brought together at Clarksville, Tennessee, during May of 1861 and organized into a regiment at Camp Duncan, near Clarksville, on June 6, 1861. A regiment of men in the Confederate army at the beginning of the war was typically around a thousand men, and the 14th Tennessee Infantry (a regiment) began service with slightly more than that standard.
At Camp Duncan the regiment was supplied with percussion muskets which had been converted from the old-style flintlocks. In all likelihood most men were satisfied, as some early units in the South were still being outfitted with flintlocks. Officers were elected by the men, and William Archibald Forbes was elected Colonel of the 14th Tennessee. A native of Richmond, Virginia, Colonel Forbes was a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, as well as a professor of mathematics there in the 1840s.Education brought him to Tennessee. Before the war he was a teacher and the president of Stewart College in Clarksville, Tennessee.
Around the middle of July 1861, the regiment received orders calling them to Virginia. Travel was to be by train, and due to logistics of the day, their route was to be circuitous: to Nashville, then to Chattanooga, then toward Knoxville and Bristol, and then continuing on into Virginia. During this time the first significant battle of the war was fought: the Battle of Manassas (called Bull Run by the Union). They missed the opening shots, but the 14th Tennessee was ordered to continue on, and would spend the next four years in Virginia, fighting under such men as Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson and Robert E. Lee.
The 14th Tennessee was initially brigaded (partnered) with two other Tennessee regiments: the 1st Tennessee, commanded by Colonel George Maney, and the 7th Tennessee, commanded by Colonel Robert F. Hatton. But during the winter of 1861-62, while serving defensive duty on the Potomac River, Maney’s 1st Tennessee Infantry was ordered to return to Tennessee, and it was replaced by another 1st Tennessee, this one commanded by Colonel Peter Turney. It should be noted that Turney’s unit was also known as the 1st Confederate Infantry Regiment and the 1st Tennessee Volunteer Infantry Regiment. Turney’s 1st Tennessee consisted of men who mustered into the Confederate service before Tennessee’s secession, and it was the only Tennessee unit upon the battlefield of First Manassas.
For the entirety of the war the 7th and 14th Tennessee Infantry were brigaded together, with either Maney’s or Turney’s 1st Tennessee always with them. Known as the Tennessee Brigade, these men earned the highest reputation among the units making up the Army of Northern Virginia.
The story of the 14th Tennessee is similar to so many Confederate units, and its story is practically the story of the Army of Northern Virginia. The Tennessee Brigade was initially commanded by General Samuel Anderson, who resigned his commission in May of 1862 due to age and ill health. Colonel Hatton of the 7th Tennessee was promoted to Brigadier General, and assumed command of the Tennessee Brigade. Three weeks later, General Hatton was killed at the Battle of Seven Pines, and the command of the brigade was then assigned to Brigadier General James Archer. General Archer was captured at Gettysburg, yet the troops continue on until the end. As for the 14th itself, Colonel Forbes was reelected, but mortally wounded at the Battle of Second Manassas while leading his men in a charge against enemy batteries.
Of all their engagements during the war, though, none was ever fiercer than the days of fighting at Gettysburg in July 1863. In the first day of fighting the 14th was ordered to take the town, but soon found itself almost completely surrounded. During a fierce fight the regimental colors (the flag we’re working to conserve) were twice shot down, and it was at this time that General Archer was captured.
On July 3, Heth’s Division, of which the 14th was a part, was selected to be part of the advance that would one day be known as Pickett’s Charge. Through grapeshot and canister the Tennessee Brigade marched forward, carrying its colors up the slope of Cemetery Hill and into the enemy’s works. The Tennessee Brigade holds the distinction as the only unit that occupied the Union works. At that time, in the fiercest of fighting, the flags of the 14th and 1st Tennessee – both a similar Richmond Depot issue – were captured.The men of the 14th Tennessee staggered back into the Confederate ranks, having been bloodied, but not beaten.
Through the retreat, they worked the rear guard, and they took a valiant stand over a week later at Falling Waters, Maryland.
On January 23, 1864 the regiment adopted the following resolution, approved by every man in the unit:
“Whereas, having observed with mingled pride and gratification the noble steps taken by our brother Tennesseans in General Bate’s Brigade, in initiating re-enlisting, emulating this noble example, and believing that nothing would sooner secure our independence and the blessings of an honorable peace, than by sustaining to our utmost the worthy President and his noble Commander in Chief of the Army of Northern Virginia, therefore, resolved: that we, the officers and men of the 14th Tennessee Regiment, do hereby re-enlist for the war, pledging our lives and sacred honor so long as one man is left to bear our colors, or fire a shot, they shall float defiantly in the face of an insolent foe. Thereby making this regiment the first to re-enlist in the Army of Northern Virginia.”
They kept their word, through the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Richmond, and Petersburg. On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House. In probably the first attempt at reconciliation, Union General Joshua Chamberlain arranged the official surrender of the troops to include a salute of arms by the Union soldiers toward the Confederate soldiers. He later wrote, “Before us in proud humiliation stood the embodiment of manhood: men whom neither toils and sufferings, nor the fact of death, nor disaster, nor hopelessness could bend from their resolve; standing before us now, thin, worn, and famished, but erect, and with eyes looking level into ours, waking memories that bound us together as no other bond; was not such manhood to be welcomed back into a Union so tested and assured?”
Marching among the remnants of that once-proud army, after four years of arduous service, were the boys of three rural counties in northern Middle Tennessee. Their battles were ended. Their war was over.