This Great Struggle (40 page)

THE BATTLE OF CHICKAMAUGA

By the evening of September 17, Bragg believed that goal had been achieved and gave the order for his army to advance westward, cross Chickamauga Creek, and then swing south to destroy the Federals. The next day his columns met stubborn and skillful resistance from Rosecrans’s cavalry screen and managed the crossing of the creek only late in the day but still several miles north of Rosecrans’s left (northern) flank. As George H. Thomas’s Fourteenth Corps reached Rosecrans’s temporary headquarters that evening at the Gordon-Lee Mansion, not far from Lee and Gordon’s Mill, after a hard day’s march the Union commander considered the reports from his cavalry of Confederates forcing the crossings of Chickamauga Creek north of him and ordered Thomas to give his men a short break and then get them back on the road for a night march all the way to the farmstead of a settler named Kelly, five miles north of Lee and Gordon’s Mill.

Thomas’s weary soldiers stumbled through the darkness on rough roads, less than half lit by the smoky light of occasional fence-rail bonfires set by the leading elements of the column, but their night of marching was decisive. When the battle opened the next morning, September 19, the Fourteenth Corps was as far north as any major element of Bragg’s army, and what precipitated the first clash of what was to become the Battle of Chickamauga was Federals probing eastward from the Kelly Farm and encountering Confederate cavalry guarding the flank and rear of Bragg’s army as it faced south ready, as Bragg supposed, to drive the Army of the Cumberland into McLemore’s Cove. A day of confused but intense fighting followed as Rosecrans shifted more and more troops north to support Thomas and Bragg turned unit after unit of his army and sent them driving to the west rather than to the south. With a dense forest canopy extending over most of the battlefield, both commanders could often do little more than order their arriving divisions to march toward the sound of the firing.

The day ended with the Army of the Cumberland holding its own, including the vital Chattanooga–La Fayette Road and Dry Valley Road, both giving access to Chattanooga. Rosecrans met with his generals that night and announced that he would not retreat the next day but would keep the left wing as strong as possible while the right wing continued to draw in on the left. Bragg too was determined to continue the fight the next day. That night he received further reinforcements, bringing his total strength to sixty-eight thousand versus Rosecrans’s sixty-two thousand, minus the losses of the first day.

Less auspiciously, Bragg’s reinforcements also included James Longstreet. Convinced that he was the Confederacy’s greatest general, Longstreet had found it galling enough serving under his imagined inferior Lee. He was incensed at having to serve under Bragg and doubly so when Bragg let a little thing like a battle distract him to the point of sending no welcoming party to meet Longstreet at the nearest railway stop, Catoosa Platform. When Longstreet finally arrived at Bragg’s headquarters late that night, Bragg felt compelled to reorganize his army in the middle of the night, midway through a major battle, in order to give Longstreet a command befitting his seniority if not his self-image. Bragg divided his army into two wings, the right under Polk, the left under Longstreet. The right would lead off the attack “at day-dawn,” and then the assault would extend farther and farther to the left until the whole army was engaged. They would bend back the Union left and drive the Army of the Cumberland into McLemore’s Cove.

Once again the Army of Tennessee’s high command malfunctioned. Polk, whose wing was to open the attack, failed during the night to notify his subordinate commanders that an attack was even scheduled, so when day dawned on the morning of September 20, the units of the Confederate right wing were out of position and completely unprepared for action. Instead of making haste to remedy his lack of preparation, Polk took a leisurely breakfast. After more than three hours and several increasingly irate messages and finally the personal intervention of the army commander, the assault finally began around 9:30 a.m., though it was still badly coordinated.

During the interval between the time the attack was supposed to have gone in and the time it finally did, the Federals in front of it, belonging to George Thomas’s very heavily reinforced Fourteenth Corps, made use of the time to build log breastworks. Such improvised field fortifications were coming into increasingly wide use during the course of 1863. They changed the whole equation of battle, multiplying the defenders’ strength by a factor of three or more. Polk’s stumbling assaults broke in slaughter in front of Thomas’s breastworks.

Noon was approaching when Longstreet’s turn came. With more time to prepare, he had (whether by accident or design is unclear) arranged the eight brigades of the center of his wing in a column of attack five brigades deep on a two-brigade front and had aimed it at the Union right center, where the two-brigade division of Brigadier General Thomas J. Wood held the line.

At least, Wood was supposed to hold that sector of the line. In fact, at the moment Longstreet advanced, Wood’s brigades were not in line. Longstreet and his Confederates could not have known it, but a misunderstanding had occurred at Rosecrans’s headquarters about the actual arrangement of the Army of the Cumberland’s units. Rosecrans, who thanks to his nervous nature had in recent days been unnecessarily depriving himself of rest and nourishment, became confused and, thinking a gap existed in his lines, ordered Wood to march his division to a different part of the field and close the gap. In fact, no gap had existed—until Wood pulled his brigades out of line in obedience to Rosecrans’s order. And just then, before Union officers could remedy the sudden disruption of their army’s line, Longstreet’s column of attack roared through the gap, splitting the Army of Cumberland in two within minutes.

Following up his success, Longstreet drove the severed right wing of the Army of the Cumberland off the battlefield after short but bitter fighting, but the defeated Federal units were able to withdraw via the Dry Valley Road behind the cover of Thomas’s still-intact left wing. While still holding his lines on the left, Thomas was able to use his reserves and some rallied formations from the Union center to cobble together a line on a chain of hills blocking any Confederate advance northward in pursuit of the retreating Union right. There he held on through hours of intense fighting until retreating on Rosecrans’s orders late in the evening. Rosecrans sent the orders from Chattanooga, to which he had fled shortly after Longstreet’s breakthrough.

THE BATTLE OF CHATTANOOGA

Chickamauga was the first Confederate victory in the western theater of the war, but it was not the decisive victory the Confederacy had needed and on which it had gambled in weakening other regions to reinforce Bragg. Because it had been the Union right that broke, while the left wing held firm, the battle offered Bragg no opportunity for exploitation or pursuit. Thomas’s wing, reinforced by now with much of the rest of the Army of the Cumberland, continued to cover the retreat, taking a strong defensive position so that any attempt by Bragg to advance toward Chattanooga would have ended in slaughter. So too would any Confederate attack on the heavily fortified Union lines just outside the town of Chattanooga, into which Rosecrans had withdrawn his army within little more than twenty-four hours after the end of the fighting in the valley of Chickamauga Creek. Then Rosecrans transformed the situation into one that did, after all, offer decisive results to Bragg.

The Army of the Cumberland was still full of fight, but its commander was a beaten man. His army in Chattanooga depended for its supplies on the road and rail corridor via the Tennessee River Gorge downstream from the town, yet Rosecrans ordered his troops to withdraw without a fight from the high ground that commanded that route. That high ground was the northern extremity of Lookout Mountain, towering 1,400 feet above Chattanooga and, more important, dominating the Tennessee River, which lapped the toe of the mountain. Confederates on Lookout and in the adjoining Lookout Valley to the west of the mountain could prevent supplies from reaching the bluecoats in Chattanooga via boats on the river, wagons on the road that hugged its bank, or trains on the railroad track that ran beside it. Bragg advanced in the days after the Battle of Chickamauga, occupied the high ground, and placed Rosecrans’s army in a state of siege almost as severe as that which Grant had successfully laid to Pemberton’s army in Vicksburg a few months before. Rations were soon desperately short in the camps of the Army of the Cumberland, and the army’s horses and mules died in droves from starvation.

In Washington, Rosecrans’s defeat at Chickamauga had aroused concern. His behavior after the battle, acting, in Lincoln’s words, “confused and stunned, like a duck hit on the head,” excited consternation, especially on the part of the excitable secretary of war. Lincoln and Stanton quickly made arrangements to send relief to beleaguered Chattanooga. They dispatched two corps of the Army of the Potomac, the Eleventh and Twelfth under the command of Joseph Hooker, by rail as reinforcements, and, far more important, they assigned Grant to take overall command of all Union forces west of the Appalachians and to go to Chattanooga at once and set the situation there to rights.

Grant arrived in the town on October 23 via the same route that was bringing the Army of the Cumberland its thin trickle of supplies, a rough track that made a sixty-mile roundabout trip through the mountains. Arriving cold and wet in a howling storm after the long, muddy ride, Grant received a chilly welcome from Thomas, who on Grant’s orders had recently assumed command of the Army of the Cumberland in place of Rosecrans. Thomas sympathized with Rosecrans and resented having to take orders from Grant. Undeterred, Grant set to work to break the siege. First, he ordered his old lieutenant Sherman, now leading Grant’s former command, the Army of the Tennessee, to bring four divisions of the victorious veterans of Vicksburg across northern Alabama and southern Tennessee to join the force around Chattanooga.

Then Grant implemented a plan to reopen the supply line into Chattanooga through the Tennessee River Gorge. Part of the scheme had been developed by Rosecrans’s staff before his relief, but Rosecrans had not thought the time right for implementing it. Grant excelled at recognizing good plans and making them happen. In a skillfully executed night assault, Union troops descended the Tennessee by boat and seized key terrain in Lookout Valley, aided by the fact that Longstreet, who commanded the Confederate troops in this sector, had devoted only a tiny fraction of his available force to holding that vital position. The detachment that had come west from the Army of the Potomac, commanded by former Army of the Potomac commander Joseph Hooker, then moved in from the railhead at Bridgeport, Alabama, and linked up with the Federals who had taken Lookout Valley, strengthening the Union grip on the Tennessee River Gorge. With that, the “Cracker Line,” as the Union soldiers called it, was open, and supplies, including the ubiquitous hardtack “cracker” that was the mainstay of the Union soldier’s diet, began to flow into the town in vast amounts.

This changed the entire operational equation around Chattanooga and throughout the western theater of the war. From holding a stranglehold on the Army of the Cumberland in Chattanooga, Bragg had gone literally overnight to simply sitting in front of a fully supplied opposing force that now outnumbered his own. He immediately ordered Longstreet to gather his forces and counterattack to regain Lookout Valley and reestablish the siege, but that general, who had seemed so impressive in Virginia when Lee had told him what to do, blundered again, using only a couple of brigades and managing the fight so badly that the attack fizzled almost as soon as it got started.

Few options remained open to Bragg. A frontal assault on the fortified lines around Chattanooga would play directly into Grant’s hands. Retreating toward Atlanta was unacceptable to the Confederate government. Waiting passively in place to see what Grant would do promised to be as disastrous a policy for Bragg as it had been for Pemberton a few months before. A move westward to turn Grant’s right flank would take the Confederates directly into the path of Sherman’s oncoming force.

That left only a move to the northeast to turn Grant’s left flank. It would be risky, of course, but so was everything else Bragg could do. It would require getting rid of Burnside’s small Union force at Knoxville, but Burnside was known not to be one of the more formidable Union generals. Besides it would open the way for a turning movement that might repeat the northward campaign that had shifted the scene of conflict all the way into Kentucky the preceding year, and it would also reopen the direct rail connection to Virginia. Lee had been clamoring for the return of Longstreet’s detachment, and Davis usually listened to Lee. Bragg, for his part, was more than willing to part with Longstreet, at least, after that general’s recent performances. Using Longstreet’s divisions to clear East Tennessee as the first phase of the army’s turning movement would thus have the added benefit of getting Longstreet away from Chattanooga and of getting his troops halfway back to Virginia and thus pleasing the Confederate government in Richmond.

So Bragg ordered Longstreet to take his detachment up the Tennessee Valley to Knoxville, destroying or driving off Burnside’s force. Burnside proved as unskillful as expected, and Longstreet had an opportunity of trapping the Union force before it could fall back into the Knoxville defenses. Longstreet, however, matched Burnside blunder for blunder and let the Federals escape. Then he settled in for an inept siege of Knoxville.

By November 24 Grant’s preparations at Chattanooga were complete. On that day, Sherman’s command made a river crossing above the town and moved quickly to take up a position threatening Bragg’s right flank on the northern end of Missionary Ridge, a six-hundred-foot-high landform on the east side of Chattanooga. By nightfall Sherman’s troops were poised to advance against Bragg’s flank on the ridge. Simultaneously, Hooker’s command successfully stormed Lookout Mountain, pushing back the Confederate left flank to Missionary Ridge so that Bragg’s entire line ran along the ridge.