Portal:American Civil War/This week in American Civil War history/50

December 5
1864 - Murfreesboro - Nathan Bedford Forrest, commanding one infantry and two cavalry divisions, surprised this supply depot Rutherford County, Tennessee, driving Federal garrison troops into "Fortress Rosecrans"

December 6
1864 - Washington, D.C. - President Lincoln nominated his former Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to replace Roger B. Taney, who had died

December 7
1862 - Hartsville - John Hunt Morgan and his outnumbered Confederate cavalry detachment boldly captured the Cumberland River crossing and the defending Union garrison in Trousdale County, Tennessee

1862 - Prairie Grove -

1864 - Murfreesboro - Veteran Union commanders Horatio P. Van Cleve, Włodzimierz Krzyżanowski and their brigades engaged then unexpectedly broke elements of Forrest's cavalry corps to force Confederate withdrawal from this Tennessee rail station

1864 - Fort Fisher -

December 9
1861 - Caving Banks - Douglas H. Cooper's combined Texas volunteers, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek Indians attacked Opothleyahola's camp of Creek and Seminole Indians along the banks of Bird Creek in what is now Tulsa County, Oklahoma

1861 - Washington, D.C. - Faced with multiple battlefield reverses, shoddy and apparent corruption in War Department contracts, the U.S. Congress established Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, with Benjamin Wade as chairman

December 10
1861 - Richmond, Virginia - The Confederate States of America accepts a rival state government's pronouncement that declares Kentucky to be the 13th state of the Confederacy.

December 11
1862 - Fredericksburg - Union Army engineers began assembly of six pontoon bridges under the cover of 220 artillery pieces of Stafford Heights; after William Barksdale's Mississippi sharpshooters began picking off the workers, Army of the Potomac commander Ambrose Burnside ordered landing parties across the Rappahannock River to secure a beachhead for the bridges