Brigadier General Philip H. Sheridan sat pensively in his command tent the evening of January 9, 1863, and stared at the paper on his camp desk. ‘At 2 o’clock on the morning of the 31st [December 1862] General Sill, who had command of my right brigade,’ he began. Words eluded him as he set aside his post-action combat report and mused for a moment, remembering an old friend, now dead. His face flushed red, and his thoughts went back to the day before the New Year, the day of the Battle of Stones River, the day he wrecked his division to save the army.

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Sheridan hunched back over his camp desk, and beneath the flickering yellow glare of a newly issued candle he finished his sentence: ‘[Sill] reported great activity on the part of the enemy immediately in his front.’

Joshua Woodrow Sill, the 31-year-old commander of Sheridan’s 1st Brigade, was an old friend and former West Point classmate. A bond existed between the two soldiers, established during their years together on the Hudson River, that emboldened Sill to visit his division commander early on the morning of December 31 and discuss his growing fear over the military situation of the army, camped just south of Murfreesboro, Tenn.

Sheridan listened intently. Sill was a courageous soldier, not given to sudden flights of fancy. His claim that there were indications of Confederate movement on his brigade front were alarming. The two old friends mounted up and rode down the Harding farm lane, then dismounted and walked among the Union defenders, the 36th Illinois and the 24th Wisconsin. They strode out to the picket line and listened. They could clearly make out the sound of artillery moving in the ghostly half-light and the steady ‘trump, trump, trump’ of plodding Confederate infantry.

Quickly, they rode back to the command post of XIV Corps’ right wing commander, Maj. Gen. Alexander McCook. Sheridan shook him awake and gave McCook the freshly gathered information. McCook sloughed them off. The left wing commander, Maj. Gen. Thomas L. Crittenden, McCook explained, was scheduled to attack the right of the Confederate Army of Tennessee at first light. This attack, McCook reasoned, would relieve any threat on their own flank.

Sheridan would have none of it. He and Sill rode back to the brigade, and the bandylegged Ohioan ordered two of his reserve regiments, the 15th Missouri and 44th Illinois, to report to Sill, who placed them in position in short supporting distance of his lines.

Sheridan’s battle blood was now up. He walked through his regiments rousing the commanding officers from sleep and ordering the soldiers under arms. Next he made a beeline for his artillery and their officers: Captains Charles Houghtaling, Asahel Bush and chief of artillery Henry Hescock. Soon the cannoneers were at their pieces and ready. It was barely 4 a.m.

A few minutes after 6 a.m., Sheridan’s troops heard the familiar staccato sound of musketry to their right, then the intermittent roar of a rifled Parrott gun. It did not take long for the firing to grow into fusillades and the solitary report of a cannon to expand portentously into salvos by battery. The battle had opened with a vengeance; but, thanks to Sheridan’s alertness, the men of the 3rd Division would not be taken by surprise as would their cohorts in the 1st and 2nd divisions.

About 7:15 in the morning, the enemy advanced to the attack across an open cotton field, on Sill’s front. Under the command of Colonel J.O. Loomis and temporarily serving under the divisional supervision of Maj. Gen. B.F. Cheatham — rumored to be liquored up on some elegant Tennessee moonshine — the three left-flank regiments of Loomis’ brigade (the 26th, 39th and 25th Alabama) struck the Union brigade on Sill’s right and engaged them at close quarters. Loomis’ right three regiments (the 1st Louisiana, 19th Alabama and 22nd Alabama) charged Sill’s line.

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