Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (65 page)

Nevertheless, Forrest was an embarrassment to Braxton Bragg. A self-made man, Forrest smacked of the slave market (where before the war he had made a fortune in slave dealing), and his grammar invariably left something to chance. He had no formal military schooling (or any other schooling, for that matter), and made up his own earthy maxims of war as he went. Always strike first, he counseled his artillery commander, the twenty-two-year-old John Watson Morton; “in any fight, it’s the first blow that counts; and if you keep it up hot enough, you can whip ’em as fast as they can come up.” Then, never let the enemy regain his balance, or, as Forrest put it, “Get ’em skeered and then keep the skeer on ’em.” His final piece of advice was never to be intimidated by professional soldiers, since, as Forrest had discovered, “Whenever I met one of them fellers that fit by note, I generally whipped hell out of him before he got his tune pitched.”
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Forrest was utterly indifferent to drill and urged his men to attack the enemy directly and without regard for the niceties of the tactics books. “General Forrest, as a commander, was, in many respects, the negative of a West Pointer,” wrote Morton. “He regarded evolution, maneuvers, and exhaustive cavalry drill an unnecessary tax upon men and horses.” Forrest’s untutored lust for combat might have merely resulted in more casualty-laden melees had it not been for his natural, baffling gift—a gift possessed by only a few generals in the Civil War, including Ulysses Grant—for sizing up a given tactical situation and instinctively knowing what to do in response. According to Morton:

[Forrest] had absolutely no knowledge or experience of war gleaned from the study of what others had wrought. General Forrest grasped intuitively and instantaneously the strategic possibilities of every situation which confronted him. … His knowledge of men was in most cases unerring; and his ability to inspire and bring out the greatest power and endurance of his men was unsurpassed. … His eye for position was almost
infallible, and his knowledge of the effect of a given movement on the enemy was intuitive and seemed to come rather from an inner than an outer source of information.
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Forrest was a fairly good inkling of what could be done by pressing relentlessly for decisive combat conclusions on the battlefield. Unfortunately, he was also everything that a tightly buttoned regular (such as Bragg) ought not to be, and Forrest never ceased to suspect that Bragg had authorized his raids chiefly as a means of getting him out of the way.

Forrest’s raids were almost the only activity Bragg, or anyone else, would indulge in after Murfreesboro. For six months, the Confederate and Union armies, exhausted and bloodied by the battle at Stone’s River, were content to rest and refit. Rosecrans’s self-confidence had been badly shaken by the carnage at Murfreesboro (his closest friend and adjutant, Colonel Julius Garesché, had been decapitated by a shell while riding beside Rosecrans, spattering the general with a mess of blood and brains), and instead of pushing on toward Chattanooga, he carefully fortified himself in Murfreesboro and began demanding reinforcements and supplies. Stanton and Halleck refused. “You have already more than your share of the best arms,” Halleck replied, “Everything has been done, and is now being done, for you that is possible by the Government. Your complaints are without reason.” When Stanton instead began prodding Rosecrans to get the Army of the Cumberland moving southward, Rosecrans went over Stanton’s head and began whining to Lincoln in March 1863 about enemies in the War Department who were denying him the promotion he deserved, the staff members he wanted, and so forth.
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Then, on June 23, 1863, Rosecrans’s old aggressiveness resurfaced, and the Army of the Cumberland suddenly lurched into action. Bragg’s Army of Tennessee was entrenched around Tullahoma, Tennessee, almost halfway between Rosecrans and Chattanooga, inviting an attack as a sure way of revenging itself for Murfreesboro. But Rosecrans deftly feinted to Bragg’s left, smartly zigzagged to Bragg’s right, and then slipped around behind Bragg in a skillfully executed turning movement that forced Bragg to retreat in confusion to Chattanooga. Rosecrans then paused and waited until more telegrams from Washington caught up with him, demanding more advances.

On August 16, Rosecrans set off again, this time to turn Bragg’s position in Chattanooga, too. Finding an unguarded ferry on the Tennessee River about thirty miles below Chattanooga, Rosecrans threw the entire Army of the Cumberland across the Tennessee on the back of a single pontoon bridge and an assortment of rafts and boats. He then swept around behind Chattanooga and compelled Bragg to
abandon the city on September 8 without firing a shot in its defense. In only ten weeks, Rosecrans had moved the Army of the Cumberland almost a hundred miles southward, had outmaneuvered Bragg into abandoning all of eastern Tennessee and Chattanooga, and had done it all at the price of less than a thousand casualties.
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What Rosecrans did not know, however, was that in Richmond, an anxious Jefferson Davis had finally decided that the threat to Chattanooga was dangerous enough to justify desperate measures. At the very same moment that Rosecrans was crossing the Tennessee, Davis overrode Robert E. Lee’s objections and sent James Longstreet’s corps of the Army of Northern Virginia to reinforce Bragg at LaFayette, Georgia, about twenty-five miles south of Chattanooga. The southern railroads were in such poor condition that it took the first of Longstreet’s men ten days to make the 952-mile trip from Richmond to northern Georgia. By September 19, Longstreet and five of his nine brigades were with Bragg, and Bragg now determined to use his newly reinforced strength of 47,000 men (not counting Forrest’s dismounted cavalry) to strike back at Rosecrans. All unsuspecting, Rosecrans kept on rolling along merrily after Bragg into northern Georgia under the delusion that Bragg was still retreating, and not until September 10 did he realize that Bragg had actually turned and was moving in for the kill. Rosecrans hastily concentrated his four corps—approximately 56,000 men—in the valley of Chickamauga Creek, a dozen miles south of Chattanooga. Before he could devise a plan of action, Bragg struck first.
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Chickamauga is a Cherokee word meaning “river of death,” and for two days, September 19 and 20, Chickamauga Creek fully lived up to its name. The fighting on the nineteenth was a cautious draw, with Bragg hesitantly testing Rosecrans’s defensive lines behind Chickamauga Creek. The next morning, Bragg threw caution to the winds and launched a furious series of frontal assaults on the Federal corps that lasted for two hours without gaining much ground. But at 11:00
AM
, Rosecrans mistakenly pulled one of his divisions out of line and sent them in the wrong direction, just as Longstreet’s three divisions came avalanching down upon the 600-yard gap so conveniently left for them. The Federal left flank simply turned and fled in panic, sweeping Rosecrans and two of his corps commanders with it. “I saw our lines break and melt away like leaves before the wind,” wrote Charles Dana, who was traveling with Rosecrans as an observer. “Then the headquarters around me disappeared. … The whole road was filled with flying soldiers. … Everything was in the greatest disorder.”
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By 1:00
PM
, all that was left of Rosecrans’s army at Chickamauga was the single corps commanded by George H. Thomas, who had so stoutly rebuked the idea of retreating from Murfreesboro the preceding December. Thomas’s corps stood its ground against Longstreet on a small hill beside the road to Chattanooga, and gave the rest of the beaten Army of the Cumberland time to retreat. Thomas’s valiant rearguard action earned him the nickname “The Rock of Chickamauga,” but Thomas was almost the only senior Federal officer to emerge from the defeat at Chickamauga with any semblance of reputation intact. The Federals lost 16,000 men that afternoon (fully half of them as prisoners) plus 51 cannon and 15,000 rifles, not to mention innumerable horses, wagons, and supplies.
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Rosecrans never recovered from the shock of Chickamauga. A disgusted Lincoln told John Hay that “Rosecrans has seemed to lose spirit and nerve since the battle of Chickamauga,” and he imagined Rosecrans waddling in circles, “confused and stunned like a duck hit on the head.” Curling up in the defenses of Chattanooga, Rosecrans allowed Bragg to close off the Tennessee River and move his army onto Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain, the heights that loomed over Chattanooga. Without full control of the Tennessee, Rosecrans was in a very bad supply position, and within a month the despondent Army of the Cumberland was facing either starvation or surrender. Charles Dana anxiously wired Stanton, “It does not seem possible to hold out here another week without a new avenue of supplies.” Soldiers working on entrenchments hooted at their generals and shouted for hardtack. Nor did it seem that Rosecrans was likely to pull himself together in time to avoid the disaster. “The practical incapacity of the general commanding is astonishing, and it often seems difficult to believe him of sound mind. His imbecility appears to be contagious, and it is difficult for any one to get anything done.” Here was Vicksburg in reverse, and at last Lincoln decided that it was time to bring Grant onto the scene.
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Grant believed that Vicksburg had more than made up for the damage done to his military reputation at Shiloh, and he fully expected that he ought to be given a free hand in mounting a new campaign into the vital interior of Alabama. But Halleck had other plans, none of which included independent action for Grant. “The possession of the trans-Mississippi by the Union forces seemed to possess more importance in his mind than almost any campaign east of the Mississippi,” Grant
wrote, and Grant found himself reduced to policing the Vicksburg area “against guerilla bands and small detachments of cavalry which infested the interior.”

This, however, was not what Lincoln and Stanton had in mind for Grant. Both the president and the secretary of war had been keeping a close and inquisitive eye on Grant ever since the capture of Forts Henry and Donelson in February 1862, and Lincoln defended Grant after the Shiloh debacle. When Alexander McClure accused Grant of drunkenness and incompetence at Shiloh and urged Lincoln to cashier him, Lincoln “gathered himself up in his chair and said in a tone of earnestness that I shall never forget,
‘I can’t spare this man; he fights
.’” Francis Carpenter remembered one “self-constituted committee” that visited Lincoln in 1863 to warn the president against Grant’s reputed alcoholism. “By the way, gentlemen,” Lincoln remarked after hearing them out, “can either of you tell me where General Grant procures his whiskey? because, if I can find out, I will send every general in the field a barrel of it!”
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Behind the jokes, Lincoln remained unsure about Grant, and in 1863 Stanton sent Charles Dana to keep an eye on Grant during the Vicksburg campaign and report anything untoward. As it turned out, Dana gave Grant the highest possible praise: “the most modest, the most disinterested, and the most honest man I ever knew, with a temper that nothing could disturb, and a judgment that was judicial in its comprehensiveness and wisdom… whom no ill omens could deject and no triumph unduly exalt.” That clinched the matter for Lincoln and Stanton. In October, unwilling to face the prospect of the destruction of an entire Federal army at Chattanooga, Stanton wired Grant to come up the Mississippi to Cairo, and thence to Louisville, and meet with him personally. Their trains crossed instead in Indianapolis on October 17, with Stanton boarding Grant’s car, mistaking Grant’s medical attaché for Grant, and confidently informing the aide that he recognized him from his photographs. Once the proper identities had been sorted out, Stanton informed Grant that Lincoln had decided to consolidate all Federal military operations in the west (except for the occupation of Louisiana) and put Grant in command of them all. Next, Grant was to take himself and whatever troops he had at hand over to Chattanooga to rescue the Army of the Cumberland. Grant never hesitated. Three days later, he relieved Rosecrans of command of the Army of the Cumberland and turned it over to the hero of Chickamauga, George Thomas. Three days after that, Grant himself was in Chattanooga.
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What Grant did to lift the siege of Chattanooga looks almost ludicrously simple from a distance, but that only underscores the real genius of his accomplishment. First, Grant reopened the Tennessee River supply line to Chattanooga on October 28. Then Grant brought up substantial reinforcements, including two army corps shipped by railroad from the Army of the Potomac under Fighting Joe Hooker in October, and two more from the Mississippi under William Tecumseh Sherman by mid-November. With these forces in hand, and with Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland, Grant now turned on the complacent Bragg and prepared to drive him off his positions atop Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge. The inevitable confrontation came on November 24 and 25. After a preliminary skirmish the day before, Grant sent Hooker’s men up the steep sides of Lookout Mountain (on Bragg’s left flank) and threw Sherman’s men at a railroad grade and tunnel on Bragg’s other flank. Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland, angered and humiliated, was held in reserve in the center to await the results.

As it turned out, Hooker’s men easily cleared the Confederates off Lookout Mountain, but Sherman’s attack on the tunnel stalled. To relieve pressure on Sherman, Grant ordered Thomas’s men to seize the trenches the Confederates had dug along the base of Missionary Ridge. But when the Army of the Cumberland finally got moving, it scarcely bothered to stop at the trenches but kept right on going up the 200-foot-high face of Missionary Ridge and over the top. The Confederates up on the ridge were taken completely by surprise. The colonel of the 24th Mississippi watched in slow-motion disbelief as “under a galling and destructive fire the Federal army climbed up the steep sides of the mountain. I thought they could never reach the summit, but a short time before night set in I had the bitter mortification of seeing our line, about one hundred and fifty or two hundred yards to the left of our brigade, give way and run in confusion. I heard the triumphant shout of the Federals as they placed their colors on the ridge.” The center of Bragg’s line caved in, and the rest of the Army of Tennessee stumbled back along the roads down to Georgia, with Bragg berating his men for the disaster.
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