Perry Webb wasn't my only ancestor who participated in the battle of Fort Sanders at Knoxville. My great-great grandfather Noah Loveday's brother Bradford was there, too.
With Major General Burnside and the Union army inside the fort, which was located near today's Ft. Sanders Hospital, Confederate Lt. General Longstreet thought he and his men could attack at dawn and take them by surprise. He surveyed the fort through field glasses and saw men walking up to the fort walls, but what he did not see was that they were walking across planks that spanned a ditch that was twelve feet wide and from four to ten feet deep.
In the dim morning light with freezing rain, the Confederate soldiers charged, only to be tripped by taut, low-strung wire before falling helplessly into the ditch, unable to scale its sides or the fort walls. As such, they were easy targets for the Union. The battle lasted only 20 minutes, but the Confederates suffered 813 casualties, while the Union had only 13. At least 200 Rebels were taken prisoner from the ditch. Eventually, the Confederate dead were buried in the cemetery behind what is called the Mabry-Hazen House.
Pension papers filed in the late 1880s after Bradford Loveday's death show that neighbors (Henry Ward, Matthew Ball, Emanuel Hurst, William Yarberry, Byram Hurst, Daniel Hurst, and Lewis Breeden), some of whom were Bradford's fellow soldiers, attested to the illness and injury Bradford sustained from his time in Knoxville and suffered with until his death on September 20, 1883.
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