"...Lenihan's sense that he was racing against time before Farnsworth would elect to regroup for the winter; as such, his gallant attempt to push through the Inner Line lasted a good eight days from November 29th to December 6th, and set the stage for what this newer, more savage phase of the Nashville Campaign would look like. It was also the first time that American forces had genuinely attempted what is in modern parlance known as a "combined arms offensive," or as Lenihan phrased it in his notes "strategic supportive operations," with aerial strafing and bombing by way of rudimentary aircraft built by the Curtiss-Wright Corporation in Buffalo or airships built by the Cleveland Aerial Balloon Company. The Confederacy, having experimented with aerial bombardment in their limited Philadelphia Raid earlier in the year, now got a taste of their own medicine, as the bombing balloons made their way over Nashville, released their cargo, and then floated away before return fire could be engaged. Between late November and the final breakthrough into the city in early May, a space of approximately five months, US airships and airplanes carried out a total of a hundred raids over Nashville proper as well as satellite towns such as Hendersonville, Hartsville, Lebanon, Franklin, and Murfreesboro, all behind the Inner Line, demonstrating a fearsome new era of warfare in which a defensive line did not necessarily keep all behind it safe; what these air raids did not do was very much to actually physically hinder Confederate operations, killing less than five hundred people (the majority civilian, at that) and lacking the precision to do much genuine damage. Still, the psychological effect was palpable, and a key development in the war.
The raids during Lenihan's crossing of the Cumberland got much of the immediate attention in the Confederate press, in tandem with the firing of General J. Franklin Bell from his role as head of the Army of the Midlands. The losses of Kentucky and now the Outer Line were too much to ignore - he was cashiered at the same time that his superior and successor Hugh Scott was at the ASO and replaced by Beaumont Bonaparte Buck [1], who had been in charge of several garrisons throughout the fighting so far and was thought of as a superior defensive mind. In a way, he perhaps was; Buck arrested Lenihan's advances in the west of the theater near Dickson, preventing an attempt to attack the Inner Line from the southwest, where it was thought to be weaker, while cutting off the Confederacy's rail and road approaches from Nashville to their dogged but increasingly entrapped forces west of the Tennessee River near Jackson, Paris and the near-encircled Henry-Donelson Complex.
The end of Lenihan's looping, scythe-shaped offensive from Clarksville to the south and then southeast left a number of American divisions exposed to potential counteroffensive and the Confederates entrenched in the highlands around Kingston and Ashland City, effectively closing on any further operations for the remainder of 1914. The mood in both camps was one of exhaustion, but more so on the Confederate side - a year before at this time, the Union had save for a few tiny, artillery-damaged beachheads, been entirely north of the Ohio; now they were standing at the gates of Nashville. The strategic circumstances in the Midlands had reversed badly for the Confederacy in 1914, to the point that it was an open question whether the war could be fought to a stalemate, let alone won. [2]
1915 would dramatically complicate that question further..."
- Bleeding Heartland: The Midlands Front of the Great American War
[1] The most Southern name of all time
[2] The answer, obviously, is no
