On June 14th, 1863, by order of Maj. General Burnside, then commanding the Department of the Ohio, Col. Sanders (Fifth Kentucky Cavalry), started from Mount Vernon, Kentucky, for East Tennessee, with a party of fifteen hundred men, which included the First East Tennessee Regiment under Col. R. K. Byrd. He passed _via_ the neighborhood of Huntsville, Scott County, East Tennessee, and Montgomery, Morgan County, and leaving Kingston and Loudon in succession to his right, made some captures at Lenoir’s, and moved up to Knoxville at daylight on the 20th. General Buckner was in command of the Confederate Army in East Tennessee. He was absent that day, having gone the previous morning to concentrate his forces at Clinton, but all possible preparations were made to repel Col. Sanders. Afterwards it was stated that he had no intention to assault the town, which if he had taken he could not have held. He himself officially reported that he “made demonstrations against Knoxville so as to have their (Confederate) troops brought from above.” An engagement followed upon his appearance before the town between the two hostile parties, chiefly with a Confederate battery planted on Summit Hill, southwest of and overlooking the railroad depot, and a United States battery on elevated ground opposite, near the junction of Fifth Avenue and Crozier streets, North Knoxville. Few injuries resulted to either side. Most of the shells thrown by Col. Sanders’ guns, missing their mark, flew over the town harmlessly enough, except in frightening the women and children with their whizzing through the air. But the casualties from one of the shrieking missiles were serious to the Confederates. It first mortally wounded the captain of a company of citizen volunteers, then struck and killed a sergeant who on higher ground was nearly prone with the earth to avoid harm, and finally exploded, killing a Lieutenant from Florida, who with other convalescents from the army hospital in the Deaf Mute Asylum close by, sat on a fence to see the fight. The Captain of Volunteers was a young man of specially amiable and genial qualities. His bravery and vivacity of spirits led him into heedlessness of danger. As he stood upon the hill-top that morning, nigh to the Confederate earthworks and artillery, and saw his fellow-soldiers drop for safety into the ditch at the same moment with the flash of Sanders’ guns, he exclaimed, standing upright: “Don’t be afraid; there’s no danger!” Instantly a shell hit him, and his mutilated body was tenderly borne to a kinsman’s house in town. Surgical aid was summoned and could mitigate his sufferings, but not save his life.