The Battle of Nashville: Shy, Smith, and Hood

by Doris Boyce

A detail in the death of a Williamson County Civil War hero was clarified after Colonel Shy’s grave was desecrated in 1977. Until that time it was believed that he had died from a mini-ball shot from a muzzle-loading firearm during the Battle of Nashville, December 16, 1864. When an anthropologist reconstructed the wound in Shy’s skull he found that the wound was too large to have been caused by a mini-ball. Shy’s wound was from the bombardment that Nashville citizens had watched from Capitol Hill.

William Mabry Shy, Colonel of the 20th Tennessee, was left dead on the top of what was then Compton Hill. When his body was recovered, it had been stripped naked and bayoneted to a tree. His descendants still have the bayonet. General Benton Smith, Shy’s superior officer, was taken prisoner at the bottom of the hill and whacked over the head three or four times with a saber. He never recovered, and his life ended in an insane asylum.

General John Bell Hood, Confederate commander of the battle, seemed to associate valor with casualties. Hood was a none-too-stable combat veteran who had to be tied on his horse because of a useless arm and an amputated leg. Sixteen days earlier, on November 30th, Hood had attacked the Union Army in the bloody one-day Battleof Franklin, which had resulted in 6,000 Confederate losses.

The Battle of Nashville thrust 21,000 of Hood’s ill-equipped infantry and 4,000 cavalry against General George H. Thomas’s well-equipped Union infantry, about 60,000 strong. The fighting took place in the hills around present-day Harding Place/Battery Lane and spread over five miles, from Franklin Road to Hillsboro Pike. The Union bombarded for two days before charging with overwhelming force. Confederate survivors limped away as best they could after suffering some 4,000 casualties. After the Battle of Nashville, Hood, a West Point graduate who believed in frontal attacks with flags flying, retreated to Mississippi. In January of 1865, less than one month later, he gave up command, having all but destroyed the Army of Tennessee. Hood died in relative obscurity after ten years as a successful New Orleans businessman.

Thankfully, the valor of the Confederate dead will not be forgotten. A few names have been chosen to represent the many who died. In 1968 the Metro Historical Commission placed a plaque at the slope of Compton Hill, which had been re-named Shy’s Hill. It can be accessed by Shy’s Hill Road or by (General) Benton Smith Road from Harding Place two blocks west of Granny White Pike.

Photograph by Kathy Lauder.

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