Chapter 19

In This Chapter

Trying to make the most of a golden opportunity: The South’s last chance for decisive victory

Gaining the advantage: Longstreet in the West

Examining who is in charge: Rosecrans versus Bragg

Making changes: Grant takes charge

J ust a few days before Grant’s triumph at Vicksburg, Mississippi, Union General William Rosecrans began to move his army, idle since January, toward Chattanooga, Tennessee. If Vicksburg was the strategic key to the Western Theater, Chattanooga came as a close second in strategic importance. The capture of this key rail junction would allow Union armies to strike south to Atlanta and the Carolinas, and even threaten the Confederate capital of Richmond from southwest Virginia. As long as a Confederate army held Chattanooga, eastern Tennessee and Kentucky were threatened with another invasion. Chattanooga became a place that each side had to have to accomplish their strategic goals in the war.

Unfortunately for both the Union and the Confederacy, commanders whose reputations for applying the military art were less than sterling led the armies facing each other in Tennessee at this time. As Rosecrans and Confederate General Braxton Bragg maneuvered, each exposed his army to potential disaster in the woods and thickets along a creek named Chickamauga, from an old Cherokee word meaning river of death. In September 1863, Chickamauga would earn its name a thousand times over.

Rosecrans: Approaching and Taking Chattanooga

In June 1863, General Rosecrans and his Army of the Cumberland began a maneuver in which he intended to force Bragg’s Confederate Army of Tennessee out of Chattanooga. Crossing the Tennessee River with 65,000 men, 45 days’ rations, and plenty of ammunition, Rosecrans headed into north Alabama and swung across to north Georgia and back into Tennessee, approaching Chattanooga from the rear. Faced with this situation, Bragg’s 44,000-man army would be forced to fight at a disadvantage or retreat.

Rosecrans used terrain, deception, and speed to his advantage in outflanking Bragg. He sent a small detachment to occupy Bragg’s attention outside of Chattanooga while the rest of his army used the mountainous terrain to screen his movements. He marched lightly (and therefore quickly), without the encumbrances of a long supply train. Rosecrans had help from the commander of the Department of the Ohio, General Ambrose Burnside, who decided that he had had enough of locking up Copperheads (pro-Southern sympathizers in the North) for the moment and wanted to join the fight. Burnside moved into the Cumberland Gap and east Tennessee, capturing Knoxville, a town within several days’ marching distance of Chattanooga. These movements also focused Bragg’s attention away from Rosecrans. By the time Bragg discovered that Rosecrans was approaching Chattanooga from the rear, he made a wise decision to abandon the city rather than be trapped in a siege. Rosecrans’s troops walked into the town on September 9. Rosecrans’s total losses to capture Chattanooga: six men, four of whom were injured accidentally.

Bragg retreated 20 miles south of Chattanooga to LaFayette, Georgia. By virtue of the fact that his was the only active confederate army in the war at this point, he benefited from the strategic shifting of forces to meet the most dangerous threat. A concentration of forces under Bragg could be used to attack Rosecrans and throw the Union’s strategic offensive momentum off balance, shifting it in the Confederacy’s favor again. Troops that Bragg had previously sent to Vicksburg rejoined his army, along with a corps from Knoxville, as did the advance elements of what would be most of the I Corps of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia — 15,000 men under General Longstreet. The corps was arriving by train, taking the long way around (a 900-mile route by rail) because General Burnside occupied Knoxville. This effort had taxed the transportation resources of the South to the limit, but they were arriving. Bragg had an army nearly as large as Lee did at Gettysburg — close to 72,000 men.

Bragg’s dilemma

Bragg was not a happy man in the summer of 1863. In fact, he was rarely a happy man, no matter what time of year. Bragg had been ordered to dispatch troops to assist General Pemberton who was commanding Confederate forces defending Vicksburg, which did not make him happy. But he had other problems that added to his unhappiness. Since the battle of Murfreesboro (see Chapter16) six months previously, Bragg had been quarreling with his subordinates, nagging them so that most were at the end of their patience — especially his two senior commanders, William J. Hardee and Leonidas Polk. Even Polk, an Episcopal bishop, had run out of Christian forbearance. Polk’s frustration, mirrored by other subordinates, stemmed from the knowledge that the only reason Bragg remained in command at all was that Confederate President Jefferson Davis approved of him. Davis got involved in the dispute, but instead of taking some Generals to the woodshed, he essentially told them all to get along. This, of course, solved nothing and would lead to great problems in the coming days for the Army of Tennessee.

The Chickamauga Campaign

Believing he had Bragg beaten without fighting a battle (Bragg had spread rumors that his army was falling apart and demoralized) and filled with self-confidence, Rosecrans began moving south in late summer. His goal was to take Atlanta, and he intended to end the war by Christmas. He moved his three corps — a total of 57,000 men — out of Chattanooga along three separate axes of advance. The distance between each corps was 15 to 20 miles, too far apart to assist each other in case of trouble. But Rosecrans did not expect trouble. In actuality, he had divided his army in the face of a concentrated foe waiting on his flank, which could fall on any one of his corps and annihilate it and then turn to defeat the other corps in detail. This is the kind of opportunity that the great captains of history have used to become the great captains of history.

Despite this opportunity, Bragg was not a great captain. Great captains become great because they build strong bonds of trust with their subordinate commanders. Such bonds are essential to the great captain’s success and imprint upon history because these subordinate commanders are the ones who carry out the captain’s battle plans. No one under Bragg’s command trusted or believed in his competence. Thus, when Bragg put his plan together to attack the isolated Union corps one by one, his subordinates carried it out poorly and halfheartedly.

In addition, the captain had a habit of beginning every battle he fought crippled by a startling lack of knowledge about his enemy. He was always surprised by what he found, and it always unnerved him. This situation was no different. Bragg assumed Rosecrans had only two corps, not three marching toward him. His attack was aimed at the corps he thought was the more isolated of the two. In reality, he was attacking the center corps of three, the worst possible choice when trying to defeat a divided enemy force in detail. Not only that, but he decided to attack before all of Longstreet’s corps had arrived.

Bragg’s subordinates made no real attacks on the enemy — they accomplished nothing more than alerting Rosecrans that he was not facing a demoralized, retreating Confederate army. More importantly, Rosecrans also recognized that he was in trouble if Bragg could cut off and attack his separate corps individually. He immediately ordered a concentration of the army. Over the space of four days, Bragg waited for Longstreet to arrive while Rosecrans united two of his three corps near Chickamauga Creek at a small town in the woods known as Lee and Gordon’s Mill. Rosecrans himself knew very little about the enemy, unaware that Bragg’s large army was poised to strike.

Bragg, still believing he faced only one Union corps, planned to strike the defender’s left flank and push the enemy southwest into the mountains, thus opening the way to Chattanooga. He first had to cross Chickamauga Creek. General Longstreet had arrived with most of his units, so Bragg decided to attack the enemy on September 18. To his surprise, he found most of the crossings well guarded. Rosecrans, realizing what the Confederates were doing, moved General George H. Thomas’s corps to secure the army’s left flank. That night, most of the Confederate army crossed the creek at various places; at the same time, Union units were marching north to protect the flank. Movement for everyone was slow and difficult. The heavily wooded terrain lacked any distinctive landmarks, and soldiers spent many hours backtracking on small rutted paths in the darkness. By morning, the Union line stretched 6 miles, and the Confederates were there in front of them.

The Battle of Chickamauga: Day One

The first day’s battle had no form — it was an intermittent and intense day of combat. Brigades were fed into battle up and down the Union defensive line. Units attacked and were met with counterattacks. Even a dramatic charge by Patrick Cleburne’s Confederates failed to make any progress. General Thomas’s Union troops had been hard pressed but were holding firm. Because of the heavily wooded terrain, neither Rosecrans nor Bragg had a very good idea of what was going on during the day. During the battle, the third corps of Rosecrans’s army arrived. Now Bragg unknowingly faced a united Union army.

Bragg had also received reinforcements — the last brigades of Longstreet’s corps and Longstreet himself. Bragg planned to make his flank attack the next day. He divided the army into two wings, Longstreet in charge of one, Polk in charge of the other. His plan of battle — turn the enemy’s left flank and drive him away from Chattanooga — had not changed since the first contact with the enemy, despite what had occurred over the past two days. Polk would attack first, followed by Longstreet.

Because Bragg had created these wings with little knowledge of the actual disposition of his units, division and brigade commanders were not sure to whom they belonged. Orders were lost and confusion reigned the night before the battle. Bragg had intended to begin the attack at dawn, but Polk didn’t do so. Bragg became anxious when by 9 a.m. nothing had happened, so he sent an aide to find Polk. Polk at that moment was sitting 3 miles behind the front lines sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch of a house, reading a newspaper and waiting for breakfast.

The Battle of Chickamauga: Day Two

Polk got a move-on, and the Confederates pressed General Thomas’s defenses hard (see Figure 19-1). Thomas had prepared well, building breastworks of logs to protect his troops from enemy fire and piling up debris to create obstacles for the attackers. But Confederate numbers began to tell, and Thomas’s line curled back. Thomas called for reinforcements, and Rosecrans provided units from the Union right flank and center, which weren’t engaged. Feeding more units into the battle on the left made his defenses weaker everywhere else. Rosecrans, riding along his lines, noticed what appeared to be a gap in the center of his defensive line. He could not see that one of his divisions was sitting in thick woods covering that part of the line, so he ordered General Wood, a divisional commander, to fill the gap. Wood, who had been the victim of one of Rosecrans’s violent temper tantrums for not following orders earlier, complied with this order quickly and efficiently, without questioning whether such a movement made any sense or not. Thus, as Wood pulled his division out of the way to fill this non-existent gap in the line, he unwittingly created a real quarter-mile gap in the line.

If you open a gap in your already thin defensive line, the last enemy General you want to see coming toward you is Lee’s warhorse, Longstreet. Longstreet had a reputation for conducting hammer blow attacks against the enemy. Where the fighting was toughest, his men were usually there — at Gaines’s Mill, Second Manassas, Antietam, Devil’s Den, and Little Round Top. Rosecrans had given his order to General Wood at the precise time Longstreet’s wing was initiating its attack. Gettysburg veterans Generals McLaws and Hood, along with the Army of Tennessee’s finest units, found themselves charging through an undefended opening in the Union line. With the piercing Rebel Yell, the Confederates charged into the open flanks and rear of Rosecrans’s army.

The Confederates drove nearly a mile into the Union rear. Rosecrans’s right flank collapsed, and soldiers headed for Chattanooga as fast as they could go. Rosecrans and most of his staff had been standing at the gap when the Confederates came through. The number of frightened and confused men jammed the road, literally sweeping Rosecrans and his staff up in the running mob. Rosecrans discovered he had been carried back to Chattanooga and was unable to return to the battlefield. For all he knew, the entire army had been wrecked.

But the army had not been completely lost. George H. Thomas stepped forward and saved the Union army (and perhaps the Union cause) from total disaster. As the right flank gave way, units in the center and left flank formed a horseshoe-shaped defensive line around the only prominent piece of terrain on the battlefield, Snodgrass Hill. Here Thomas took control, gathering men together into ad hoc units and putting them into line, refusing to leave the battlefield, and fighting on against enormous odds. His calm, determined example encouraged the soldiers, and he earned the name the “Rock of Chickamauga.”

Figure 19-1:Map of the Battle of Chicka- mauga.

A different Virginian

George H. Thomas was a Virginian who remained loyal to the Union. He attended West Point and served in the campaign against the Seminoles and in the Mexican War. He held various command positions during the first year of the Civil War, but did not lead troops in combat until 1862. For a brief time, he commanded the Army of the Tennessee after Shiloh.

Thomas performed well at Perryville and earned a reputation as a tough commander who looked after his men, who referred to him as “Pap.” Although Thomas would become one of the finest army commanders to emerge during the war, he could not go home again. Thomas was disowned by his family for choosing the nation above his state. His sisters never mentioned him again and turned his portrait to the wall at the family homestead.

The Battle Ends

For the rest of the day, Longstreet’s troops attempted to break Thomas’s defensive position again and again, but Thomas stood firm. Bragg did not order Polk to assist Longstreet’s assaults on Snodgrass Hill and allowed the battle to end with the coming of darkness rather than with a decisive attack. Thomas, supported by the reserve, withdrew back to Chattanooga that night. Bragg did not pursue Thomas, nor did he take any action to clinch what appeared to be a significant victory.

Standing on a mountain ridge overlooking Chattanooga and observing the confused mass of Union troops in and around Chattanooga, Bragg’s cavalry commander, Nathan Bedford Forrest, sent a message to the commander: “every hour is worth ten thousand men.” Forrest, like all the other army leaders, wanted Bragg to pursue the Yankees and drive the army like a wedge between Burnside and Rosecrans. This would force both to retreat, leaving Chattanooga back in Confederate hands and the road open for further offensive action. Unfortunately, Bragg did not believe he had won the battle. The number of casualties that his men had suffered unsettled him, and he had little interest in taking any decisive action. He moved forward and set up his troops around Chattanooga, locking Rosecrans and his 40,000 men in the town.

Battle Captain’s Report: The Battle of Chickamauga, September 18–20, 1863 Confederate Victory

Commanders: Union: Major General William S. Rosecrans, Army of the Cumberland, 57,000 men. Confederate: General Braxton Bragg, Army of Tennessee, 67,000 men.

Phase I: Rosecrans outmaneuvers Bragg and his army out of Chattanooga. Bragg retreats into Georgia. Rosecrans pursues, but thinking Bragg’s army has fallen apart, separates his three corps in rough mountainous territory; they cannot support one another if attacked. Bragg’s army, far from demoralized, is reinforced, including most of Longstreet’s corps from Lee’s army. Longstreet’s men have moved halfway across the Confederacy to join Bragg. Bragg prepares to attack the left flank of Rosecrans’s army.

Phase II: Bragg’s plans fall apart. Not only do his subordinate commanders fail to do what they are told, but also Bragg thought there were only two Union columns. He mistakenly attacked the center column of the Union army, thereby losing the advantage of surprise. Rosecrans hurries to assemble his forces, while Bragg, awaiting Longstreet’s arrival, allows Rosecrans to do so. The battle lines form near Chickamauga Creek.

Phase III: On September 19 Bragg attacks the Union defensive line, hitting the left flank hard but making no headway. Essentially a battle fought by individual brigades, neither commander has a clear idea of what is going on.

Phase IV: Bragg finally has all of Longstreet’s forces on the battlefield. He forms two wings, one commanded by Longstreet, the other by Polk. Polk was to hit the Union left, and Longstreet was to support Polk’s attack. During the night the Union troops had pulled back to a better defensive line in the woods and held their positions throughout the day as Confederate attacks forced the Union left flank to curl backward. At this time Longstreet moved his troops forward to the attack, just as a Union division by Rosecrans’s orders, had moved out of the line. This created a gap through which Longstreet’s men poured. The right flank of the Union army collapsed, leaving George H. Thomas’s corps and the army’s reserve to hold off a series of uncoordinated Confederate attacks. By nightfall, Thomas retreats to join the rest of the shattered Union forces in Chattanooga.

Casualties: Union 16,200, Confederate 8,500. This represents a casualty rate of 28 percent for both armies.

Chickamauga: The Results

No greater opportunities for the destruction of a Union army were ever presented to a confederate commander in the entire war. Rosecrans several times set his army up for decisive defeat; each time Bragg squandered his opportunity. Bragg had all the advantages: more men, a divided enemy force, a quarter-mile gap in the defensive line — and he still didn’t win decisively. His subordinates mangled or ignored his orders; Bragg threw away his numerical advantage in troops by fighting them as brigades in separate and costly attacks; he took no advantage of Longstreet’s incredible opportunity at the breakthrough; and he believed himself beaten even in the midst of an important victory, where he had gained the tactical and strategic initiative. Instead of using it to his (and the Confederacy’s) benefit, Bragg threw away his advantage by selecting to lay siege (surround with military force) to Chattanooga. The South’s last great opportunity was lost.

The Union: Mixed results

For the Union, Chickamauga was a setback and a humiliating defeat, but not a decisive blow. Union reinforcements arrived in a few weeks and the Western Theater consolidated its forces for another thrust into Georgia. In the aftermath of the Chickamauga Campaign, the strategic situation remained as it had been after Rosecrans had captured Chattanooga. Only now, the Union army was stronger and the Confederate army weaker. Rosecrans’s reputation was irreparably ruined, even though the men in the army respected him a great deal.

The Confederacy: Frustration

The news that initially came from Bragg was that Chickamauga was a great victory. It had been for a short while, but as reports from Longstreet and other Generals filtered back, it became clear to everyone that the battle had been a great waste and a golden opportunity lost. Bragg’s subordinates, who had urged him again and again to make the most of the victory, burned with anger and resentment. Bragg came under heavy criticism and dissension grew so bad that President Davis himself had to travel to Bragg’s headquarters to deal with the problems.

Heroes and Goats

This campaign highlighted two Generals who made excellent plans, but were unable to employ their forces once they encountered the enemy. Here we see that plans do not win battle. Generals become goats because they are unable to rise above the images their plans have implanted in their heads and deal with the actual situation on the battlefield. When the army commanders become goats, it is usually their subordinates who become the heroes because they are doing the real fighting.

Heroes

Heroes stand out due to a dramatic action. Thomas simply would not be outfought and would not quit. His careful preparation of the battlefield allowed him to fight effectively throughout the day, even after the rest of the army collapsed and disappeared. The determined attack by Longstreet’s men demonstrated what role chance can play on the battlefield. Heroes are born when chance favors the bold. Here are the heroes:

George H. Thomas: In one of the most dramatic actions of the war, Thomas refused to be scared off and saved the Union army from disaster at Snodgrass Hill. He was rewarded for his efforts with an army command.

Longstreet’s Corps: Fresh from Gettysburg and still believing that they could win the war on their own, these redoubtable men nearly did so. Leading another brilliant attack, Lee’s Old War Horse took advantage of timing and circumstance to deliver what should have been the killing blow for the Union army.

Goats

These two goats were undone by their own stubbornness and unwillingness to listen to their subordinates. Thomas demonstrated that stubbornness was sometimes good, but these two Generals did not attempt to understand the changes that occurred on the field and how they affected the course of the battle. Without a clear idea of what is happening, a battle degenerates into a confused mob of men fighting without direction or purpose — much of the two-day battle of Chickamauga took this form. Here are the goats that were responsible for the chaos:

Braxton Bragg: He fought his best battles against his own subordinates, not the Yankees. This lack of trust and support became a fatal flaw to his battle plan. Never having a clear idea of where the enemy was, he spent his army’s strength in pointless attacks. When Bragg finally discovered the location of the enemy and saw that the enemy had been beaten, he suddenly became cautious. When the battle was over, he faced an open rebellion among his Generals.

William S. Rosecrans: Rosecrans began a brilliant campaign of maneuver and then threw it all away by starting a fight with his forces deployed in a manner that invited complete disaster. His poor leadership at Chickamauga led to a near fatal blunder. Within a matter of minutes on September 20, most of his army was swept away — and his future with it. Abraham Lincoln described him as “confused and stunned like a duck hit on the head.”

Turned Tables at Chattanooga

Bragg, as shaken by his victory as Rosecrans was by his defeat, prepared to starve the Yankees out of Chattanooga. Two important terrain features dominated the town — Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge. With artillery and troops on these two positions, the Confederates owned Chattanooga. All the roads except one were cut off, and supplies coming 60 miles across the mountains were not enough to keep the Union troops and animals fed. Confederate cavalry had a field day destroying wagon trains. As September turned to October, it looked like the Union would face a Vicksburg in reverse. (To find out more about Vicksburg, see Chapter 18.)

Now Rosecrans is out

Rosecrans never regained his confidence after Chickamauga. Abraham Lincoln and General in Chief Halleck watched from Washington with dismay, as the Army of the Cumberland wasted away. Unwilling to face another idle winter, Lincoln consolidated the Union armies into one administrative organization called the Division of the Mississippi, put Grant in charge of this organization and ordered him to deal with the situation in Chattanooga. Grant’s troops had been idle since Vicksburg; they now were headed for Chattanooga, as were two corps from the Army of the Potomac, the unhappy XI Corps and the XII Corps, both under-manned after the fierce fighting at Gettysburg. (I talk about the battle at Gettysburg in Chapter 18.) The Army of the Cumberland, trapped in Chattanooga, also got a new commander — George H. Thomas, whose troops now referred to him as “Old Hero.” Grant himself was on his way to assess the situation in Chattanooga.

Handling the problem: Davis arrives

Although it appeared that Bragg held all the cards, he was not so secure. The army was angry about the hollow victory, and his Generals had sent a letter to President Davis requesting that Bragg be relieved of command. Bragg began removing all his senior officers from their command, beginning with Polk. But if Bragg thought he was having trouble with unruly subordinates up to this time, he faced an entirely different situation with Longstreet.

Longstreet was frustrated with Bragg’s caution and lack of initiative. He wrote Davis, pleading that Bragg be relieved, for the army’s sake. He even asked that General Lee take temporary command of the Army of Tennessee. Bragg’s problem, in this situation, was that he couldn’t relieve Longstreet; he still belonged to Lee in the Army of Northern Virginia.

The situation within the army was so bad that the President of the Confederacy himself had to travel all the way from Richmond to deal with the problem. As he had before, he did everything but make things right. He ignored the subordinate leaders’ blunt assessments of the commanding General and kept Bragg in command, reassigned other commanders, and sent Longstreet off on a mission to push Burnside out of Knoxville. Sending him there had little military merit. Burnside was harmless, and Bragg needed Longstreet’s 15,000 men to maintain the siege.

Forrest takes on Bragg

Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of America’s great combat leaders, rising from Private to Lieutenant General, commanded the cavalry at Chickamauga. He watched the enemy retreat and pleaded with Bragg to take action to pursue Rosecrans’s defeated army. Forrest refused to serve under Bragg any longer and made his feelings plain, telling his commander face to face: “I have stood your meanness as long as I intend to. You have played the part of a damned scoundrel.”

He also warned Bragg that if they ever crossed paths again, Bragg would be a dead man. This is from a man who killed 30 enemy soldiers with his own hands. Like other officers who opposed Bragg, Forrest ended up in another region.

Grant takes charge

Just as Longstreet departed on his curious mission, General Grant arrived in Chattanooga from Vicksburg. He matched Bragg’s force when he gathered his reinforcements. He planned to break out of Chattanooga and drive south into Georgia, so he had to sweep Bragg’s army off Missionary Ridge. Grant believed a frontal assault against entrenched troops was useless; he placed George Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland at the base of the ridge to keep the enemy occupied. Thomas’s job was to do nothing more than occupy the front line Grant believed the army too demoralized to do any more. The main effort would be directed against the Confederate flanks. Sherman’s Army of the Tennessee would attack the Confederate right flank, while General “Fighting Joe” Hooker, rehabilitated somewhat after his defeat at Chancellorsville (see Chapter 17), would attack Lookout Mountain with most of the units transferred from the Army of the Potomac.

Hooker succeeded in taking Lookout Mountain on November 24 (see Figure 19-2). Since Longstreet’s troops had left, the Confederate defenders on the mountain were now outnumbered by more than six to one. Hooker’s men captured the critical terrain quickly and placed an American flag at the top for all to see. On the other flank, Sherman’s attack made no progress, bogged down by very rough terrain and a masterful defense by Pat Cleburne’s division.

The soldiers take charge and win

The next day, November 25, Sherman renewed his attack, sending six divisions against Cleburne’s entrenched troops. Grant gave orders to Thomas to move his army forward to take the Confederate trenches at the foot of Missionary Ridge and hold there for further orders. He wanted to keep Bragg occupied to the front, so he would not send reinforcements to Cleburne. Thomas sent 32,000 men in a sweeping charge that the entire battlefield could observe. Thomas’s divisions took the front trenches but were exposed to enemy fire from above. Eager to prove themselves, they pushed up the ridge without orders.

Confederate defenders at the top of the ridge were helpless: The infantry could not fire for fear of hitting their own retreating men. The artillery was improperly positioned to shoot at all. It was a spontaneous movement of men in small groups who took the battle out of the Generals’ hands and made it their own. They dashed up the steep ridge so fast that the Confederate defenders — who had all the advantages and until then put up a stiff resistance — broke and ran for their lives. It was one of the great triumphs of the war for the Union army; a triumph achieved by the soldiers themselves.

Figure 19-2:Map of the Battle of Chatta-nooga.

Arthur MacArthur

As an 18-year-old Lieutenant of the 24th Wisconsin Regiment, Arthur MacArthur took the colors from a fallen soldier, in the face of intense artillery and rifle fire, and led the men up the steep slope. He planted the colors on the top of Missionary Ridge. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for his act of gallantry. Arthur MacArthur would go on to a distinguished military career as one of the great leaders of the post-war army. His son, however, would achieve far greater fame. Douglas MacArthur, who also received the Medal of Honor, became one of the greatest soldiers in American history.

The Battle’s Aftermath

Unlike earlier Civil War battles, Grant followed up this victory with a vigorous pursuit of the defeated enemy. One reason he did this was the relatively small number of casualties — about 5,800 out of the 60,000 men Grant had assembled. Bragg’s losses were higher, about 6,700 for the 46,000 in the Army of Tennessee. In fact, many of the losses were prisoners or deserters rather than killed or wounded. Grant also dispatched a force to chase Longstreet away from Knoxville, pushing him into North Carolina. By following up his victory with aggressive action, Grant secured all of Tennessee for the Union.

After weeks of maneuver through southern Tennessee and northern Georgia, days of terrible and costly battle at Chickamauga, and a month of siege, the strategic rail center of Chattanooga was firmly in Union hands. Bragg had thrown away several chances to change the strategic picture. Given every advantage, presented every opportunity by his opponent, Bragg wasted brave men in pointless frontal attacks. Even then he came close to winning, but lost the will to make anything of it. After the humiliating spectacle of his army simply disappearing in the face of the Union army’s attack (only Pat Cleburne held his men together to make an orderly retreat), Bragg provided his usual explanation — he blamed it all on his subordinates. By this time, even Jefferson Davis could not ignore the obvious. Bragg had to go. Davis made the personally distasteful decision to hand over command of the Army of Tennessee to Joseph E. Johnston, a man he disliked intensely, and ordered Bragg to Richmond to serve as the president’s military advisor.

Heroes and Goats

At long last, the Union began to identify its heroes. In the months after Chattanooga, the North came to know these generals as heroes. On the other side, Bragg could no loner be considered the goat after this engagement because he was removed from command.

Heroes

The heroes who emerged from Chattanooga shared the same qualities: determination, a clear-eyed understanding of war, and aggressiveness. The men in the ranks began to sense that they were led by tough commanders who would bring the war to a victorious end. They responded in kind with a dramatic and spontaneous attack. Here are the heroes:

George H. Thomas: Taking over command of the Army of the Cumberland from the dispirited Rosecrans, Grant asked for an assessment of the situation at Chattanooga. Thomas’s words were like a tonic: “I will hold the town till we starve.” Always levelheaded in planning and decisive when engaged in combat, Thomas’s star continued to rise.

The Army of the Cumberland: Shamed at Chickamauga and humbled and nearly starved out at Chattanooga, the men of the army were relegated to a minor role in Grant’s breakout plan. Without orders and with nothing more than fierce determination to get the best of their enemies, they took Missionary Ridge in a mass assault.

Ulysses S. Grant: After Chattanooga, he was promoted to Lieutenant General, the highest rank in the Union army. Grant proved to be the man who was not afraid to fight. He had the ability to bend the enemy to his will. He accomplished this feat through an understanding of strategic goals, maneuver, deception, combined arms, and mass. Given all the tools of war that the industrialized North provided, he used these tools to their fullest extent. He became the man of destiny.

William T. Sherman: Sherman was another Union commander on the rise. In 1863, he demonstrated the capability to lead armies. He understood Grant’s intent perfectly, almost in the way Jackson understood Lee. He was tough, uncompromising, and always anxious to push the enemy hard and fast. Grant trusted him completely.

Philip H. Sheridan: He was another tough guy who emerged from the Western Theater. As a division commander, Sheridan had a reputation for hard fighting. Grant needed just such a combat leader in later campaigns.

Goats

Bragg came up a goat in every battle that he fought — something was clearly amiss. His subordinates hated him, and the army disliked him, yet President Davis kept him in command. Finally, enough was enough, and Bragg was replaced. The Army of Tennessee, dispirited by Bragg’s failures and demoralized by inactivity, responded in kind and ran from the battlefield.

Braxton Bragg: No officer ever had better intentions. And no officer, by his own actions, ever did so much to sabotage those good intentions.

The Confederate Army of the Tennessee: How could men who had so often stood the test of battle fall apart like raw recruits? The answer lies in one word: morale. Morale is the fighting spirit of the army that allows it to survive immense hardships and dangers and still function. By late 1863, it no longer existed. The distrust between Bragg and his subordinate leaders sapped the army of its remaining morale. The empty victory of Chickamauga and the wasteful siege at Chattanooga broke the bonds of trust between the leaders and the led. When faced with a charge up Missionary Ridge, they had no stomach for it. They fought with great skill and even desperate courage in later battles, but, at this point, they were done.