Because of its importance to transportation and commerce in East Tennessee, Knoxville was held for periods of time by both the Union and Confederate Armies. Confederate occupation was particularly difficult, since central East Tennessee was sympathetic to the Union. Following its success in Chattanooga, the Union Army marched northward to recapture Knoxville from the Confederates.

A site near the present-day University of Tennessee was the focus of an intense battle that lasted only 20 minutes on November 29, 1863. Historian Digby Seymour provides a description of the Battle of Knoxville in his work, Divided Loyalties: Fort Sanders and the Civil War in East Tennessee (Knoxville: East Tennessee Historical Society, 1990):

"With a rush and a yell the surging gray column advanced up the hill toward Ft. Sanders. As they neared the fort the leading lines crashed through brush barriers and bowled them aside like tenpins, but in the darkness the men tripped and stumbled over the telegraph wires stretched between the stumps. As the lead troops began tearing and kicking at the wires, they were knocked over by the sheer weight of numbers of the rest of the onrushing troops. At the moment of delay and confusion, one cannon...in the fort fired two quick rounds of canister into the storming party, but quickly closing their ranks the Confederates reached the ditch and chased away the gunners exposed on the platform.

"The rapid advance in almost complete darkness over terrain filled with obstacles and converging furrows brought the attacking force in a packed mass whose officers could no longer distinguish their own men. Hesitating only momentarily, the men swarmed into the ditch which they had been told was no more than four feet deep. They expected to get a toe hold on the berme and scale the parapet with one leap. But as they surged into the ditch they discovered to their horror that in places it was more than eleven feet deep, the embankment was slippery and icy, the berme had been cut away, and the parapet had been built up very high with cotton bales. Many of the men, not knowing what else to do, fired into the embrasures at any of the Federals foolish enough to show their heads." (page 193).

The present-day Confederate Memorial Hall museum in Knoxville, built in 1854, was Confederate General James Longstreet's headquarters during the siege of Knoxville. A sharpshooter, perched in the building's tower, fatally wounded Gen. William P. Sanders, who was leading a Union assault. The house still has cannon balls embedded in its walls, and blood-stained stairs lead up to the tower, where a Confederate artist drew pencil sketches of other soldiers on the plaster walls.

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