Battle of Marion - Background

Background

By 1864, the American Civil War was slowly drawing to a close. With Abraham Lincoln re-elected as President of the Union, and Gen. Ulysses Grant made commander of the Union Army, the possibility of a Confederate victory was steadily lessened. Along the Eastern Seaboard, Union forces pushed the Confederate forces of Gen. Robert E. Lee steadily back in successive Union victories at Wilderness and Spotsylvania. In the Appalachian mountains, Phillip Sheridan had defeated Confederate armies in the Shenandoah valley. As Union forces pushed southward, they destroyed significant portions of the Confederate agriculture base. As Union forces defeated Confederate armies in the northern reaches of the CSA, Gen. William T. Sherman began his march to the sea, which would eventually succeed in destroying 20% of the agricultural production in Georgia.

As Union forces advanced south, the infrastructure near the town of Marion—located in Southwest Virginia on the Middle Fork of the Holston River, between Saltville and Wytheville—became a major objective of Union forces. Marion itself was politically divided, with citizens fighting for the Union and the Confederacy. Until the winter of 1864, the town's location in a mountainous region had protected it from major fighting. In November 1864, George Stoneman—deputy commander of the Department of the Ohio and in charge of all Union cavalry units in eastern Tennessee—proposed an expedition into southwest Virginia to disrupt the production of supplies and facilities beneficial to the Confederacy. This gained the approval of Maj. Gen. John Schofield on December 6, 1864.