Chapter Ten

LAST OF THE MIGHT-HAVE-BEENS

1. Pursuit in Tennessee

IT was believed that the Middle West now was back where it had been in 1860. The Mississippi Valley was open again, and it was an article of faith that this river was the all-important highway to the markets of the world. The West was free; the terrible threat of isolation posed by secession was ended, and the farmers and traders of the continental interior no longer had to see a closed door at the mouth of the great river. They could also count themselves relieved from economic bondage to the merchants and bankers of the East.

Yet war is fought in a fog, and men are not always able to understand just what they have done. The Mississippi would never again be what it had been before — not even when the last vengeful guerrillas had been driven from the canebrakes and cured of their new habit of taking shots at passing steamboats. The road to the outer world would run east and west now, river or no river, war or no war. Not again would there be the lazy life of drifting downstream with the tide, high-pressure engines swinging paddle wheels in slow, splashing rhythm, corn and wheat and pork and mules and lumber borne away by the Father of Waters to the great ships waiting at the New Orleans levee. The dike that had obstructed the river was broken, but the old flow would never quite be resumed. The West had won the most significant campaign of the war, but it had not brought back the past. That was gone forever. Now the West must face east, not south. And the entire country must look to the future rather than to the past.

That the capture of Vicksburg would have unexpected results was no more than natural. It had been thought of as something that would soothe the rising war-weariness west of the Alleghenies and make farmers feel that they would gain by the war; it turned out to be the stroke that would decide the war itself, or at least would go far toward doing so, and Sherman was exultantly writing to his brother, the senator, that Federal armies “will be in Mobile in October and Georgia by Christmas if required.” He was talking with southern men of repute and position, and he reported: “The fall of Vicksburg has had a powerful effect. They are subjugated.”¹

Sherman could have been right. From a soldier’s viewpoint, all the logic was on his side; having lost the valley, the Confederacy could not hope to win the final decision. Yet the war was turning into something that no one battle or campaign could settle. It was no longer a mere matter of armies; it was turning into the first of the great modern wars, releasing unsuspected energies even as it brought infinite destruction, and its proper target now was not so much the opposing armies in the field as the will to resist, the capacity to keep on struggling for survival, in the hearts of the people themselves. Grant had wrecked the transportation and manufacturing nexus at Jackson, Mississippi, as an essential preliminary to the taking of Vicksburg. More and more the war would follow that pattern. The morale of a Mississippi planter or an Ohio farmer would finally come to be fully as significant as the condition of Bragg’s or Grant’s soldiers.

Odd things were beginning to happen. There was, early this summer, for a sample, the matter of John Hunt Morgan’s raid into Ohio and the possibly related business of Clement Vallandigham and his effort to become governor of Ohio.

Vallandigham was a northern Democrat who believed that the sheer weight of the northern war effort was crushing domestic liberties; believed, also, that under almost any circumstances it would be better to have Democrats in power than to have Republicans. He had been campaigning in Ohio with great vigor, uttering words that seemed calculated to discourage northern recruiting efforts and to bring about a readiness to accept a negotiated peace; and Ambrose E. Burnside — who, after Fredericksburg, had been gently removed from combat leadership and given the quiet post of command in the peaceful Ohio country — concluded that Vallandigham was an outright traitor, and he sent a file of soldiers to arrest the man and throw him into prison. The Lincoln administration, perceiving that this was making a martyr out of a sensationally effective Democratic vote-getter, canceled the imprisonment and sent Vallandigham into exile; sent him, in the month of May, through Rosecrans’s lines below Murfreesboro and straight into the southern Confederacy. Vallandigham went to Richmond and talked with important people there, and it seems that an unreal vision began to dawn.

Vallandigham represented many things, all of which could be summed up under one general heading: trouble for the Lincoln government. He was appealing to Northerners who were tired of the war. Many of them were basically sympathetic to the South. They had a shadowy, semi-military, semi-secret organization, cross between political chowder club and village lodge, known as the Knights of the Golden Circle, and some of them at least talked as if they favored a new secession movement in the Northwest, with further fragmentation of the Federal Union. Somehow, the Davis administration reasoned, it ought to be possible to make use of them.

So while Vallandigham flitted off stage — he went by sea to Canada, and in Ontario waited the right moment to return to the United States — John Hunt Morgan took off on a strange, abortive, extra-military sort of expedition north of the Ohio River.²

Morgan was a Kentuckian: one of the legendary southern horsemen, all dash and gallantry and unrestrained individualism, who looked more important at the time than they do in retrospect. He commanded cavalry under General Joe Wheeler, who in turn was answerable to Bragg, and while Grant was tightening his net around Vicksburg and Rosecrans at last was showing signs of activity Bragg had Wheeler send Morgan and some twenty-five hundred troopers up into Kentucky on a raid designed to break up the Louisville and Nashville Railroad and destroy Yankee supply depots. Morgan set out, calmly ignored his instructions, got his command across the Ohio River west of Louisville, circled up through southern Indiana, and then went zooming off across Ohio, commandeering horses and supplies as he went, while Burnside spattered the Middle West with telegrams to get militia and Federal troops up to head him off.

As a military move, Morgan’s raid was totally ineffective. Ohio was presently aswarm with troops, and Morgan and nearly all of his men were at last rounded up and captured after a wild dash that accomplished little more than to dampen the sympathies that a number of Ohio farmers had previously felt for the Confederacy. (Morgan’s troopers treated Ohio farms the way Grant’s men had been treating the farms in Mississippi, and the Ohioans did not like it.) Morgan and his principal officers were lodged in the Ohio penitentiary (from which place, some months later, they mysteriously contrived to escape) and a Federal general who had helped to capture them wrote that the whole affair had been a great lesson on the weakness of Copperheadism in Indiana and Ohio: “He who witnessed the great exhibition of patriotism and love of country in these mighty states on the passage of the Union army and then could doubt the ability and purpose of the people to maintain the government has certainly been ‘given over to hardness of heart, that he may believe a lie and be damned’.”³

Which was probably quite true. Yet the Morgan raid was an odd business altogether. Whether or not it grew out of the vision created by Vallandigham’s visit to Richmond, it was at least a significant symptom: the Confederacy would fight behind the lines in the North if it saw a chance, and it would strike at home-front morale and home-front economics as well as at Federal armies in the field. It had, in other words, no faintest intention of quitting; it would go on fighting with any weapon that was handy as long as it had the capacity. Still clinging to legalism, Jefferson Davis was finally beginning to realize that he was fighting a revolution.

General Grant, meanwhile, wanted to get on with the war. Counting prisoners of war and casualties in the preliminary fighting, the Confederates had lost more than forty thousand men in the Mississippi Valley campaign — the equivalent of the army that fought at Shiloh. Although many of the Vicksburg parolees would presently show up in Confed erate armies again without benefit of formal exchange, this represented a loss which the Confederacy could not possibly make good. Grant had seventy-five thousand men with nobody much to fight. It seemed to him that he ought to go marching across the South, knocking all of the underpinnings out from under Bragg’s army in Tennessee; he could take Mobile, cross Georgia, and in general pull the Confederacy apart without serious opposition. He wanted to move.

Pemberton had no more than signed the surrender papers when Grant was striking at Joe Johnston. Sherman took off on July 5, marching for Jackson again, with elements of three army corps in his command. The weather was blistering hot, and the men had been standing in trenches for weeks and were not used to long hikes; water was scarce, shoes and uniforms were in bad shape, and some of the soldiers were sore because they had never so much as set foot inside the fortress they had just captured. No matter; they marched east, Johnston faded back before them, and Sherman was a driver — regiment; would slog the dusty roads all day and make camp after dark, with stragglers hobbling in until midnight. An Ohio battery went lumbering over the field of Champion’s Hill, where it had been furiously engaged in mid-May; to their astonishment the men found that the very field they had occupied, all torn and trampled the last time they saw it by the clash of opposing armies, had been plowed and planted with corn, and the corn now stood four feet high, as lush and peaceful-looking as if there had never been a battle within fifty miles of the place.⁴ The road was lit with pillars of fire and of smoke by night and by day; cotton gins, farmhouses, anything that would burn went up in fire, and the colonel of one regiment, eying a pillared plantation manor house, burst out angrily: “People who have been as conspicuous as these in bringing this thing about ought to have things burned. I would like to see those chimneys standing there without any house.” A few days later, when the army marched back from Jackson — which by now was getting to be pretty shopworn — the plantation displayed nothing but blackened chimneys.⁵ Even the fences had been burned.

But although Grant had no trouble in driving Joe Johnston away, he got nowhere with his plan to keep the war moving. General Halleck had other ideas.

In some ways General Halleck was ideally fitted to be general-in-chief in the Civil War. He was a born gossip and politician, and for this if for no other reason he could understand that the administration’s chief problems were political rather than military. If a Buell had to be fired and a Ben Butler had to be retained because of political reasons, Halleck could understand it and he could adjust himself to it, and he could soothe other generals with chatty, half-indiscreet letters of explanation. But war itself he looked on as something out of books. The books said that when you invaded an enemy’s country the big idea was to occupy territory, and this now was Halleck’s obsession.

Grant’s army was split up. He must hold the ground he had conquered, with detachments here, there, and elsewhere to symbolize Federal occupancy. Also, he must send help to others; so part of Grant’s army went to Arkansas to quell Rebel armies which, having been amputated from Richmond by the victory at Vicksburg, could no longer be of real concern. Another part had to go down to Banks, who was nursing some plan for seizing Texas — another amputated area outside the main stream of the war. Still more had to go to Missouri, and there were forts and outposts in Mississippi and along the river to be manned. As a result, a Confederacy which was off balance and helpless in mid-July was given the rest of the summer to recover. That the rest of the summer was not time enough was more or less incidental; the breathing spell was granted, and instead of invading Alabama and sweeping up the Gulf Coast, Grant found himself visiting New Orleans to help Banks stage an elaborate review of troops — an event that bored Grant so excessively that he may have taken to the bottle again; best horseman who ever attended West Point, he suffered the indignity of falling out of his saddle at the review, injuring his leg so badly that he was crippled for weeks.⁶ Wherever this war might be won, it was not going to be won in the Deep South in the summer of 1863.

It was the post-Shiloh period all over again. The one-two punch was lacking. The administration was not cashing in on its victories. It was trying this summer to break its way into Charleston, South Carolina, in a combined army-navy operation. Charleston was not especially important, but it was a symbol; it was where secession began. To take the place and make it feel the final rigor of war looked like a worthy goal, and so an immense effort was under way. It had been supposed that the new monitors were shotproof, and so a flotilla of these dumpy ironclads led the way in the first bombardment of Fort Sumter; they proved to be a good deal less than shotproof and were so badly hammered that the naval commander, Admiral du Pont, halted operations and announced that the navy alone could never in the world open Charleston Harbor. The ironclads went to drydock and Admiral du Pont went into retirement; but although Admiral Dahlgren, who replaced him, was a sturdier sort, he had no better luck than du Pont had had, and as the summer grew old a dreary amphibious operation was under way, with the navy firing thousands of shells while it risked valuable ships, and with the army landing on sandy beaches and painfully trying to storm Confederate forts that turned out to be all but literally impregnable. Men and energy were consumed freely, but nothing in particular was accomplished.

One bit of legend was created in this attempt to take Charleston. On a sandy spit of land by the harbor entrance there was a Confederate stronghold called Battery Wagner, which the Federals had to take if they were to mount siege guns to reduce Fort Sumter; and the job of taking this place was given to the 54th Massachusetts, a regiment of colored troops — one of the two which had refused to accept pay unless the pay scale recognized them as full-fledged human beings who earned the same pay as white soldiers earned. Colonel of the 54th was young Robert Gould Shaw, a blue-blooded Bostonian who saw the war as a holy cause. He had led the 54th in a grand review on Boston Common before coming south, and his mother had looked on with intense pride to see her only son riding at the head of soldiers who had come up from slavery to manhood, and she had cried: “What have I done, that God has been so good to me!” Now the 54th charged across the sand to attack Battery Wagner, and there had been insufficient preparation. Shaw got his first line on top of the parapet, there was a flurry of bitter hand-to-hand fighting, and then Shaw was killed and a great many of his men were killed. The attack failed, and white colonel and colored privates were buried together in a common grave just outside the fort. Much later Battery Wagner was taken, and siege guns pounded Fort Sumter to rubble, but Charleston was not taken. Yet the memory remained, and the surviving soldiers of the 54th raised money to build a memorial to their colonel on Boston Common, and many Northerners remembered Mrs. Shaw’s cry … “that God has been so good to me!”⁷

In Virginia nothing much was happening. It was as if the two great armies there were still exhausted by Gettysburg; they moved back and forth, from the Rapidan almost to the Potomac, sparring constantly, occasionally stirring up a minor fight, but accomplishing nothing of importance. It seemed certain that there would be no major offensive in Virginia until the next year.

But in Tennessee, toward the end of June, the armies at last began to move.

Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland had been enjoying a rather pleasant war these last six months. It had been inactive ever since Stone’s River, and the camps around Murfreesboro began to look permanent. The men had made themselves comfortable, company streets had been precisely laid out by military engineers, and with logs and shelter-tent halves the men had made pleasant little homes; arbors of evergreen were arranged at tent entrances to provide shade, there were strict rules about keeping streets and tents clean and properly policed, and every evening the regimental bands played while the soldiers lounged about, smoked, played cards, and told tall tales. Even the men on picket duty felt that they had it easy; in Tennessee, they said, the mockingbirds sang all night long, and their songs made a man feel that he had company.⁸

Both Grant and Halleck had long been urging Rosecrans to move, but he had found reasons for delay. He argued that by staying where he was he was keeping Bragg and Bragg’s Confederate army up in central Tennessee, too far from Mississippi to send help to Joe Johnston; if he moved forward, he said, Bragg would retreat, and every mile of retreat would make it easier for him to interfere with Grant’s campaign against Vicksburg. Besides, said Rosecrans, it would be bad strategy for him to fight while Grant was fighting: it was a military axiom that no nation should fight two great battles at the same time. With this point Grant took issue. He was not familiar with the axiom, he said, but now that it was stated he did not think much of it. It would be bad, he admitted, to lose two great battles at one time, but it would not be at all bad to win two.⁹

In any event, the final week in June made it clear that Grant would presently have Vicksburg, and on the twenty-third of the month Rosecrans pulled his army out of camp and started south.

When the move came the soldiers welcomed it. They had been in camp too long. If life there was pleasant it was also dull, and as one veteran remarked, “We were simply rusting our lives away to what seemed to us to be no purpose.”¹⁰ The order to strike tents and pack up was obeyed with alacrity.

It was a hard pull that lay ahead. The objective would be Chattanooga, gateway to Georgia and eastern Tennessee, and although Chattanooga was no more than fifty miles away in an air line it lay on the far side of rugged mountainous country that had few inhabitants, few resources, and no decent roads. To get to Chattanooga across that barren upland would be almost impossible; the only good route led southeast along the line of the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad to the junction town of Stevenson, Alabama, forty miles from Murfreesboro, where this line crossed the Memphis and Charleston. Somewhere near Stevenson it would be necessary to cross the Tennessee River; Chattanooga lay thirty miles east and a little north. The difficulty about following the railroad would lie in the fact that General Bragg and forty-five thousand first-rate Confederate soldiers were strongly entrenched across the line of the Nashville and Chattanooga, less than a score of miles from Murfreesboro.

Rosecrans began his campaign with a good deal of skill. He had approximately sixty thousand men with him, and he had no intention of driving them against Bragg’s defensive system. Instead, feinting as if he meant to make such an attack, he shifted his main strength to the east, sliding clear around the Confederate right flank and threatening to cut the railroad in Bragg’s rear. Taken by surprise, Bragg retreated; by July 4 he had abandoned central Tennessee entirely, and a gloomy Cabinet in Richmond learned that he had retreated all the way to Chattanooga.

All of this Rosecrans had done expertly and — except for a few minor skirmishes — without fighting. But it had not been easy. During nine day of continuous marching, what Rosecrans described as “one of the most extraordinary rains ever known to Tennessee at that period of the year” came down to turn the soil into a spongy quagmire and to make unpaved roads nearly impassable. The rain kept on, hour after hour and day after day, with no letup: “No Presbyterian rain, either, but a genuine Baptist downpour,” an Illinois soldier called it. Men in the 6th Indiana remembered making a night march on a mountain road beside which flowed a little stream, swollen now to a torrent that covered the roadway so that the men marched sometimes in water thigh-deep, everything dark as the pit, rain pelting down mercilessly, men tripping over submerged boulders or stepping into invisible potholes. “It rained so much and so hard,” wrote one soldier, “that we ceased to regard it as a matter of any consequence and simply stood up and took it, without attempting to seek shelter or screen ourselves in the least. Why should we, when we were already wet to the skin?”¹¹

Over one especially bad stretch of mountain road an entire brigade of infantry was ordered to stack arms and then take station along the road all the way to the summit to help the supply wagons get up the grade. As a wagon or a gun came along, a rope would be attached and a whole regiment would help the mules or horses up the grade, turning the vehicle over to another regiment when it reached the end of its assigned beat and going back downhill to get another. It was fun for a while — it was at least different from ordinary marching — and the men treated it as a lark; but it kept on without a break, day and night, and the soldiers at last began to realize that “it requires a great many wagons to carry 20 days rations for men and animals, in addition to ammunition, medical supplies and other things required by an army.” The work went on from a Sunday evening to a Tuesday morning, with regiments working in shifts; during the nights flickering torches sputtered in the rain to light the way. Rosecrans recalled afterward that it took Crittenden’s army corps four days of extra-hard marching to advance twenty-one miles. When Bragg finally retreated and the Federals settled down in his old camping ground at Tullahoma, the men were able to get their boots off for the first time since they had left Murfreesboro, and one soldier confessed that “it would be hard to find a worse set of used-up boys.”¹²

Yet there were compensations. Veterans of the 104th Illinois remembered being in camp in the Elk River valley, rain still coming down, everything muddy and sopping, camping ground itself no more than just above water; and suddenly officers rode through announcing that Grant had captured Vicksburg, and the mountain gorge rang with cheers. As they yelled the men realized that their own hard marching had been a victory too, with the last armed Rebels chased out of central Tennessee and the road to Chattanooga now lying open; and they forgot about discomfort, short rations, and bad weather, and set about getting the mud off their clothing and making ready for the next move.¹³

The army waited in Tullahoma for nearly two weeks while Rosecrans carried on another long-distance argument with Washington. He was well aware that as Bragg retreated he would be reinforced, and he reasoned that since the Federal army which had just captured Vicksburg had nothing in particular to do it might as well move east and cover his own right flank when he resumed the advance. (Grant was arguing in much the same vein; if he should march on Mobile, he believed, Bragg could not conceivably stay around Chattanooga to fight Rosecrans, and all of the Deep South could be overrun before autumn.) But Halleck had other ideas, and Rosecrans was ordered to keep going. Only one concession was made, and it did not prove very valuable: Burnside was getting together an army of fifteen thousand men with which he would move down through eastern Tennessee and attack Knoxville, where the Confederates had troops under the same General Buckner who had surrendered to Grant at Fort Donelson.

On August 16 Rosecrans put his men on the road again. The rains had stopped and the roads were passable, there was an abundance of blackberries and ripe peaches which marching men could get without much trouble, and there seemed to be plenty of good spring water. Some of the men looked back on the hike down to the Tennessee River as actually almost enjoyable.

Early in September the army came out on the north bank of the Tennessee River, considerably west of Chattanooga. The soldiers had to cross the river and then negotiate a high mountain barrier before they could reach their goal, and it is possible that Bragg could have given them a great deal of trouble if he had made a stand there. But Bragg was taken with a spell of bleak pessimism, in the grip of which he seemed unable to do more than sit and think about all of the doleful things that were likely to happen to him. Rosecrans got all of his men across and then started east, looking for gaps in the mountain wall. Illinois soldiers coming out on the crest of Sand Mountain looked back and saw a tremendous pageant:

“Far beyond mortal vision extended one vast panorama of mountains, forests and rivers. The broad Tennessee below us seemed like a ribbon of silver; beyond rose the Cumberlands, which we had crossed. The valley on both sides was alive with the moving armies of the Union, while almost the entire transportation of the army filled the roads and fields along the Tennessee. No one could survey the grand scene on that bright autumn day unmoved, unimpressed with its grandeur and of the meaning conveyed by the presence of that mighty host.”¹⁴

Bragg apparently felt the same way, for he evacuated Chattanooga and withdrew into northern Georgia, waiting for the reinforcements which an aroused government at Richmond was at last ordering to him. On September 9 Rosecrans sent Crittenden’s corps into Chattanooga and ordered the other two to fan out far to the south, to get across the mountains as quickly as possible and cut off Bragg’s retreat. Men in the marching columns whooped and yelled when they learned that Chattanooga had been taken. Bragg was in full retreat, perhaps in a panic; all that mattered now was to push on after him, destroy his army, and win the war.

2. Ghoul-Haunted Woodland

In the four years of its life the southern Confederacy strove heroically to overtake a will-o’-the-wisp, and the story of its life is basically the story of the pursuit of a marsh fire, a flame dancing elusively in a fog of battle smoke. This phantom took many forms. Sometimes it was the dream of European intervention, and at other times it was the dream of a sympathetic revolt in the North; and always it seemed that if the evasive unreality could just be caught it would confer enduring life on an archaic society trying to become valid in a modern world. Of all of these dreams, none was more constantly and deceptively alluring than the belief that one hard blow might finally knock the North out of the war and bring victory.

There could be, in the fall of 1863, one more hard blow. The fabric of the Confederacy was beginning to wear very thin — Mississippi Valley gone forever, everything west of the river cut off, most of Tennessee lost, blockade tighter than ever, drain on manpower and material resources getting progressively greater; it was hardly possible now to keep from seeing what the final verdict was going to be. But it was not yet settled. Strength remained, and hope, and the determination that could command a final supreme effort. That effort would be made now, and it would be entrusted to that fate-haunted soldier, General Braxton Bragg.

Bragg was concentrating his army near Lafayette, Georgia, two or three days’ march south of Chattanooga. He was being strongly reinforced. Buckner was coming down from Knoxville with six thousand men; this left eastern Tennessee undefended — Burnside made Lincoln’s dream come true by marching into Knoxville with a small army before August was over — but there was no help for it. Other reinforcements were coming up from Mississippi. Most important of all, James Longstreet and a good part of his hard-hitting army corps were coming down from Virginia. (The card that might have been played in June would be played now.) Longstreet’s men were coming slowly, roundabout, by the rickety railroad network that led down through the Carolinas and Georgia, and men were quipping that such poor rolling stock had never been called on to carry such good soldiers, but no other way was open to them; the loss of Knoxville and Chattanooga had cut the Confederacy’s only direct east-west railway connection.

When all of these troops reached him, Bragg would command close to seventy thousand men. For once in the war, the Confederacy would go into battle with the numerical odds in its favor. Furthermore, Rosecrans was playing directly into Bragg’s hands just now. He was coming over the mountains into Georgia with his troops widely scattered, fairly inviting a ruinous counterblow.

Up to the moment when he occupied Chattanooga, Rosecrans had done extremely well. He had maneuvered Bragg clear out of Tennessee with very little fighting, his Army of the Cumberland was exultant, and if he had pulled it all together and caught his breath before trying to go on all would have been well. But old Rosy had suddenly lost his caution. Perhaps his advance had been too successful. He seems to have become convinced that the Confederates were in a panicky retreat that would go and on for many days, and all he could think of now was a headlong chase that would cut them off.

Part of his trouble was due to geography. The mountains that slant southwest from the Tennessee River near Chattanooga are immense ridges that run down across the northwest corner of Georgia and continue far into Alabama, and there are not many places where an army can cross them. The most substantial of the lot, Lookout Mountain, is one hundred miles long, and in 1863 its feasible crossings were widely separated. The road to Chattanooga from the west followed the valley of the Tennessee, clinging to a narrow shelf between river and mountain just before it reached the city; the next pass was twenty miles south, and the next one was twenty miles south of that. To bring all of his army up around the tip of Lookout Mountain would delay Rosecrans much more than his optimistic ardor would permit. It seemed better to have Thomas and McCook take their corps across the mountain by the more distant passes and fall on such Confederate troops as they might find after they had crossed. Crittenden, meanwhile, could march down from Chattanooga east of the mountains, following the valley of Chickamauga Creek, and the whole army could reassemble at its convenience somewhere in northern Georgia.¹

It was moving toward a haunted land. Chickamauga Creek had been named by the Indians, and its name reflected a forgotten tragedy far back in the past; the word was said to mean “River of Death.” The stream flowed north through a sparsely settled region of heavy woods and lonely fields, walled in by the mountains, shadowed by fate. In a few days it would earn its grim name afresh.

Bragg had concentrated, and he was waiting east of the mountains. Now the game was going his way. The pieces of the Army of the Cumberland were moving straight toward him, so widely separated that no Union corps could come to the rescue of another in case of trouble. But Bragg was always able to see his problems more clearly than he could see his opportunities. If the Federals did not know where he was, he did not quite know where they were either, his scouting and intelligence service having failed him; and he was complaining that campaigning in this country was confusing because one’s enemies might pop unexpectedly out of almost any mountain pass without warning. Beyond the dark shield of Lookout Mountain almost anything might be happening.²

Bragg tried to pounce on Thomas and McCook as they came over into Chickamauga Valley, but his own generals had caught the spirit of indecision that infected army headquarters, and the first moves missed fire. General D. H. Hill, who had served under Lee during the Seven Days’ and the Antietam campaign and had been sent down fron? Richmond to take command of one of Bragg’s army corps, watched the confused goings-on and reflected sadly that this army was not handled with the unworried competence he had been used to in Virginia. Hill had been depressed even before he joined Bragg. He had felt “the bitterness of death” in July, after learning of the Confederate defeats at Vicksburg and Gettysburg; the Confederacy, he believed, having been cut in half, would now be beaten in detail, and “the end of our glorious dream could not be far off.” But what he saw after he got to Georgia depressed him still more. The men in Bragg’s army were as good as any Lee had commanded, but something was seriously wrong at headquarters. Bragg had been given as fine an opening as a general could wish, but it was taking him forever to see it. When at last he did see it he seemed unable to do very much about it. ³

The Federals, meanwhile, were beginning to realize that they were in trouble. The private soldiers felt it. On September 11, when Thomas’s corps made camp east of the mountain, the men were vaguely uneasy. They sensed that innumerable enemies were all about them, with help a long way off — as veteran campaigners they knew enemy country when they saw it — and they were relieved when they saw Pap Thomas ride up, as stolid and unconcerned as if they were all back in camp at Murfreesboro, and settle himself massively on a stool under a tent fly to read dispatches and write orders. But the uneasy mood returned. Rosecrans had come wide awake at last and he was frantically ordering his scattered troops to concentrate a few miles south of Chattanooga, and the soldiers sensed that the high command had the jitters. As Thomas’s men went tramping north, following narrow roads through a gloomy country of limestone rocks and dense cedar thickets, they expected trouble. They had to make a forced march of it and they were kept on the road long after dark, and men who made the march wrote afterward about “the gloom and foreboding stillness of the autumn night.” For all that Thomas seemed so leisurely, it was recalled that when he bivouacked after midnight he told an aide not to let him sleep more than one hour.⁴

Bragg’s plan — when it finally took shape — was simple. He proposed to strike the Union left flank, driving the Army of the Cumberland away from Chattanooga — which was its only possible base of supplies and means of contact with the North — and penning it up in a tangle of dead-end mountain valleys where it could be destroyed. It was a perfectly good plan, and if it had been put into operation twenty-four hours earlier there would have been a Union disaster of the first magnitude. As it was, Bragg’s troops did not open their offensive until September 18, and it was the next morning before the battle actually began. Rosecrans had been given just time enough.

He had brought the Army of the Cumberland together in a stretch of comparatively level, heavily wooded country a dozen miles south of Chattanooga. To the east ran Chickamauga Creek, with the Rebels somewhere on its banks and with blue and gray skirmishers contending for possession of the fords and bridges. Off to the west loomed the endless blue mass of Lookout Mountain; and to the north, cutting the army off from the city, was the steep rampart of Missionary Ridge, a somewhat lower height which ran parallel to Lookout Mountain with Chattanooga in the valley between. There was a gap in Missionary Ridge at Rossville, and the road from Chattanooga came down through this gap and ran through the center of the army’s area of concentration. This road and the Rossville Gap the army must hold at all costs; to lose them would be to invite outright destruction.

The army occupied a line nearly six miles long, facing the east. Thomas held the left, looking toward the river crossings from which the main Confederate attack was likely to come, and the fighting began a little after dawn on September 19.

It was a bitter, confused fight, waged gallantly by armies whose commanders were not quite sure where their opponents really were. Bragg sent troops in on what he thought was the Federal left, but Thomas had posted his corps farther north than the Confederates supposed, and as the southern advance came groping up through the dark woodland feeling for the exposed flank, he sent a division in and flanked this advance and broke it. More Confederates came up, and the victorious Federal division was flanked and routed in its turn. As the day wore on, this fight for the Union left became the battle, drawing in more and more elements from both armies. The Confederate General Hill (who observed that not even in the brave days of 1861 had he seen southern troops fight with more dash and bravery than they were displaying here) learned something new about the quality of cavalry in the western Confederacy. Hill had always been contemptuous of cavalry, considering it a non-fighting arm given to useless riding and sashaying about, and he had once said bitterly that most gray troopers “cannot see, and cannot be made to see, an armed Yankee.” But here by Chickamauga Creek he found a line of Rebel foot soldiers fighting desperately and with cruel effectiveness amid fallen trees and brush, and when he asked what infantry this was he was told: Bedford Forrest’s cavalry!⁵

As the pressure increased, more and more of the Army of the Cumberland was sent to help Thomas — a full division from Crittenden’s corps and another from McCook’s — and although the Confederates gained ground step by step they took a fearful mauling while they were doing it. When night came, every unit in the Federal army had been in action. They had given ground, but they still held a great crescent covering the Chattanooga road. Most of the fighting had been on Thomas’s front, and by dusk he had nearly two thirds of the Army of the Cumberland under his control.

The night was unutterably gloomy — a fever-ridden dream, with lost regiments and brigades moving in and out under the thick of the woodland shadows, hunting new positions as the sluggish mechanism of the high command tried to pull the troops back to a stronger line. By turns the forest was silent with midnight blackness and aflame with the flaring lights of the guns and confused with shattering sound; men felt ill at ease as they tramped along overgrown lanes in the wood, moving from blinding darkness into a dancing play of lights caused by “a display of fireworks that one does not care to see more than once in a lifetime.” Nothing had been settled; tomorrow would be worse than today had been; the Rebels were in full strength, and somewhere, somehow, in this vast area of woodland and lost pastures, the showdown would come with the dawn. An Indiana regiment, staggering with exhaustion, found itself by the edge of a stagnant pool, and although dead men and horses lay in the stained water the men broke ranks, ran to the weedy margin, and lay on their bellies to drink. One of the soldiers looked about him at the horrible landscape … star-shine faintly reflected in the iridescent water, bloated corpses all about, men gulping a drink from water they would not ordinarily have touched, leafy branches overhead swaying in a ghostly breeze from nowhere, fitful light in the sky as distant guns went off … and he thought that this place was exactly like what Poe had been trying to get at when he wrote about the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.⁶

Dawn came in foggy, and through the mist and smoke the sun looked red and ominous. Bragg still clung to his original idea: knock loose the Federal left and drive the Union army back into the blind valleys from which it cannot escape. Rosecrans had caught on, and he visited Thomas that night and told him to hang on at all costs; and when morning came and the Rebels’ attacks were renewed, all of the reserves of the Army of the Cumberland shifted over to meet the assault. The Confederates drove their charge home, and stolid old Pap Thomas — born and made for moments of defensive crisis like this — notified Rosecrans that he would need help. Rosecrans detached a division from his right, where it did not seem that anything especial was going to happen; the division managed to go astray en route to Thomas and went wandering off in the back area somewhere, and Thomas sent word again for help. Nobody knew that the lost division had not reached him, and nervous Rosecrans concluded that he had all of the Confederacy crowding in on his left and sent more troops. Thomas, meanwhile, irked by the nonarrival of the reinforcements he had asked for, once more called for aid, and to Rosecrans it became obvious that the drive to crack his left flank had taken on gigantic proportions.⁷

This led to disaster. Bragg had received one enormous asset; James Longstreet, in person, had arrived on the scene, had been given full command of the whole left wing of the Confederate army, and had been instructed to strike Rosecrans’s right as soon as the fight at the other end of the line was well under way. Longstreet was a man who liked to take his own time getting everything ready before he fought, and he had had precious little time here; but he adapted himself this once, and while Rosecrans was shifting force to the left, Longstreet was lining up half of the Confederate army to hit him on the right. Somewhere around noon, just as the battle on Thomas’s front was flaming and crashing all through the woods and ravines, Longstreet massed his brigades and sent them in with the massive, all-out sort of punch that had ruined Pope at Second Bull Run and had almost knocked Meade’s army out of the hills south of Gettysburg.

Luck took a hand here: pure, unadulterated chance, which steps in now and then to make a fine hash out of the careful plans of harassed generals.

A little to the right of the center of his line, Rosecrans had a solid division under command of Brigadier General Thomas J. Wood — an old regular from Kentucky, solid and dependable, with a first-rate combat record. Wood had his men in an open field covering one of the lower stretches of the Chattanooga road, half a mile to the south of the sector where Thomas was fighting. The skirmishers along his front were active enough, but nothing very threatening seemed to be impending, and the dense woods a few hundred yards in his front concealed the fact that Longstreet had piled up an avalanche that was just beginning to slide forward. Far back at headquarters Rosecrans got word that a division on Thomas’s right needed help. Through some mix-up he got the idea that Wood was the next man in line; and off to Wood, pelting through the underbrush with the dispatch gripped in his teeth, went a blameless staff officer, carrying to Wood instructions to “close up on Reynolds” (the commander of the division that was in trouble) “and support him.”

Headquarters had been having its problems. Thomas had been calling for help, help had been sent, the calls were still coming in, and nobody quite knew where everybody was. The order to Wood was pure routine: he should edge over to his left (as headquarters saw it) and lend a hand to the nearest division. What headquarters had failed to notice, however, was the fact that another division of troops held the line between Wood and Reynolds. When Wood got his orders, therefore, it seemed to him that headquarters was telling him to pull his men out of the fighting line, march several hundred yards to the rear, pass behind the division that was immediately on his left, and move up to help General Reynolds half a mile farther north. Figuring that headquarters knew what it was about, Wood gave the order; and his division wheeled about and marched off to the rear at the precise moment when Longstreet’s thunderbolt was starting to crash forward through the underbrush and make its strike.⁸

Then everything came unstitched, and all the lower half of the battlefield was a wild swirl of smoke, exploding shells, running men, wild cheers, and desperately galloping generals who were suddenly compelled to realize that the men they were supposed to be commanding had gone completely out from under their control.

The battle had been boiling and steaming for Thomas’s men, and they had been holding their own in a vicious toe-to-toe struggle all morning — had been doing a little more than hold their own, in fact, for the Confederates opposite them had gained not a foot of ground and were fought out, gasping for breath, disheartened because every attempt to smash through to the Chattanooga road had run into an unyielding line of stubborn Yankees. Now, without warning, the great blow on the Federal right came in with pile-driver force and struck nothing at all. The result was catastrophe.

The Army of the Cumberland was cut in half. Everything south of the break-through point — including General Rosecrans himself and two of his three corps commanders, McCook and Crittenden — was driven off, generals and enlisted men and guns and wagons all streaming away from the battle, scrambling for a back road that would get them to the Rossville Gap and safety. Coolly taking everything in, Longstreet let them go and swung his victorious column sharply to the right to come in behind Thomas and break the Union army into panicky shreds. Federal control of everything west of the Alleghenies suddenly teetered and rocked, ready to come down in a Humpty-Dumpty crash that could never be repaired.

Pap Thomas, to be sure, was imperturbable. When things were going badly the only visible sign he ever gave was to indulge in a quaint habit of running his fingers through his patrician gray Virginia whiskers. These whiskers now got a furious going-over, but there was nothing else to show that he was disturbed. He methodically set to work to patch up a new line that would hold off the swarming Confederates long enough to avert complete disaster.

What a general could do, Thomas did; no more dependable soldier for a moment of crisis existed on the North American continent, or ever did exist. But what he could do would depend ultimately on the men in the ranks. These were the western farm boys who had gone wet and hungry under Sherman in Kentucky, who had been coldly drilled and disciplined by prim General Buell, who had stood up to the frozen flames at Stone’s River and gone slogging over the mountains in the heat of a Tennessee summer: and if enough of these would stop and make a fight of it the day might be saved — not otherwise.

The men who had not been driven completely off the field with Rosecrans and McCook and Crittenden were drifting north, division and brigade organization totally broken up, nobody knowing anything except that all the Rebels in the world had punched a hole in the line and were coming on as if they did not propose to stop short of the Ohio River.

Thomas had the spot picked. His own line was a wide horseshoe, bulging toward the east, a great shallow semicircle of fire and smoke and rocketing noise. Running west from the southern end of this horseshoe was a chain of hills, drawing a name from a log farmhouse owned by one Snodgrass, and this high ground Thomas chose as the place for a rally. One of the segments from Wood’s division, scrambling north amid the debris of the break-through, swung around in an open field near the hills and prepared to make a stand. Out of the woods to the south came a battle line in dusty blue, and the men held their fire — these must be some of McCook’s troops coming back into action after their rout. The line came nearer, and Thomas himself rode up and peered through the murk at it. Wave all your flags (he told Wood’s soldiers) and let them see who you are, but if they open fire let them have it: some of the Rebs are wearing blue here. Thomas galloped away, and the advancing line began to fire. It was one of Longstreet’s brigades, wearing Federal uniforms captured in the sack of Harpers Ferry or some such place, and the Westerners had never seen Southerners in blue. They returned the fire uncertainly, too late to do much good, after a brief stand they had to turn and run for it, and they re-formed at last near the Snodgrass house, dumped fence rails and bits of timber to make a breastwork, and began to fire in earnest.

All along these rolling hills a new Federal line began to take shape. An Indiana regiment came running up, its German colonel carrying his old slouch hat in his hand, rolled up like a club; he was hitting his men on the shoulders with it, shouting, “Go in, boys, and give ’em hell!” and cursing in undefiled high Dutch. An Ohio colonel had his men form in lee of the hill, marched them twenty yards forward to fire, had them return to shelter to reload, and then moved them forward for a fresh volley. In a little hollow just behind the firing line was Thomas himself. A staff officer noted that even in the heat of this furious battle Thomas sent an orderly into a nearby cornfield to collect a few ears of corn for his horse and stood watching the fight while the beast ate. His whiskers were a tangle by now, but otherwise he was cool and controlled. Quietly he told a colonel whose men were in action that this hill must be held at all costs. The colonel turned to him, took courage from his stolid, majestic presence, and cried out: “We’ll hold it, General, or we’ll go to Heaven from it!”⁹

This new Federal line along the hills was not, strictly speaking, a military formation at all. It consisted of fragments of men from a number of commands, a squad here and a platoon there, formal organization completely lost, nobody in particular in general command of anything—except that Thomas was always there, moving back and forth, unhurried, holding this mixed-up line in place by sheer force of his own personality. The Confederates charged in, were driven back, realigned themselves, and moved up again; Federal ammunition ran low, and men went about the field collecting cartridges from the bodies of men who had fallen; and somehow, in spite of everything, the chain of hills was held. Late in the afternoon, help came. Rosecrans had kept a few brigades in what he called his “reserve corps” far off to his left and rear, watching a road from which he feared the Southerners might make a stab behind his flank. This outfit, marooned out of sight, came over finally without orders; its commander, General Gordon Granger — a profane, bearded, rough-hewn regular-army type from the old days — had heard the tremendous crash of the battle action, had figured somebody needed him, and brought his men in just when Thomas needed them the most. They stiffened the patchwork line, and the last Rebel assaults were beaten off.

Far to the rear, that part of the army that had been routed was piling back through Rossville Gap for Chattanooga. It was in complete confusion, a hopelessly disorganized mob. Rosecrans and his officers had ridden about, waving swords and shouting, trying to restore order, but nothing had worked. The formless column was simply streaming north toward safety, and nothing could be done with it. Old Rosy himself gave up at last and rode along with the column, silent, abstracted, seeming to hear and see nothing. As far as he could tell, the entire battle was lost; Thomas was out of sight to the east, probably undergoing destruction, and the only thing that mattered now was to get the survivors into Chattanooga and prepare for a last desperate stand. Once again the Confederates had completely defeated a Union general.

But they had not quite beaten Pap Thomas, or Pap Thomas’s men, and — in a measure — these saved the day. They hung on until close to sunset, saving the army; and when Thomas finally ordered a withdrawal and his exhausted brigades began to pull out of line and move back toward the Gap and Chattanooga, the Confederates were too fought out to pursue. Bragg himself was not much more alert than Rosecrans was. Commanders like Longstreet and Forrest urged a smashing pursuit — these Yanks are on the run, pile in after them and never give them a chance for a breather, we can crush the whole army if we keep at it — but Bragg had grown listless. His losses had been appalling, the day had been too much for him — and he went to bed at last, not quite certain whether he had won a great victory or narrowly avoided a humiliating defeat.

In the haunted woodland full night came down on a gloomy timber-land where lay more than thirty thousand dead or wounded men. And on the winding road through the Rossville Gap the rear guard of the Army of the Cumberland gloomily plodded on toward Chattanooga. The last stand along Thomas’s line had been very fine, and in later years the men would take enormous pride in it, but right now they felt shame and disgrace; they had held on gallantly and they had prevented complete disaster, but still they had been licked and now they were in full retreat. They marched in silence, and one soldier remembered: “While not a word was said, all knew that we were whipped and were retreating from the field. This was new medicine to us … it was bitter, and did not go down very well.”¹⁰

3. The Pride of Soldiers

There was no way out and there was no way in. Chattanooga lay at the end of the passage. Eastward there was nothing at all, except for General Burnside and the fifteen thousand men with whom he had occupied Knoxville, and these people were one hundred and fifty miles away, utterly unable to do anything except collect cattle and forage from the east Tennessee countryside and wonder how long the Confederates would let them stay there. To the north there was a barren wasteland of mountains which neither man nor beast could cross unless somebody carried food for the journey. To the south there was Bragg’s army, its campfires glittering at night all along the high rampart of Missionary Ridge, crossing the open plain, and extending across to Lookout Mountain. And to the west …

To the west ran the road to the outer world, the road to food and reinforcements and the infinite strength of the Federal government, a road that might have wound across the mountains of the moon for all the use the Army of the Cumberland could make of it.

Lookout Mountain shouldered its way clear to the bank of the Tennessee River, with a highway and a railroad clinging to the slopes of its northern extremity; and armed Confederates lived on top of this mountain, so close that if they chose they might almost have tossed rocks in the river and on the highway and the railroad. Not so much as a case of hardtack, a side of bacon, or a bale of hay could get into Chattanooga for the use of the Army of the Cumberland unless these Confederates consented, and they had drawn their lines on top of Lookout Mountain for the express purpose of withholding their consent. Rosecrans’s army was besieged, and although it had escaped destruction at Chickamauga the chances now seemed quite good that it would presently die of simple starvation in Chattanooga. If it stayed where it was it would quickly run out of food — the men were on half rations already, and the horses were dying so fast that it would soon be impossible to move any of the artillery — and if it tried to retreat it would have to go over the mountains north of the river; and the roads there were so bad and so roundabout and the country was so completely empty that an army which tried to retreat by that route would disintegrate in less than a week.

Downstream from Chattanooga, twenty-five or thirty miles away, there was the town of Bridgeport. The Memphis and Charleston Railroad ran through Bridgeport, and from their great supply base at Nashville the Federals could bring vast quantities of supplies to Bridgeport. The trouble was that the Confederates controlled the Chattanooga end of the route. If an army quartermaster at Bridgeport tried to get around this roadblock he would have to make a sixty-mile detour, sending his wagon trains north of the river through the almost impassable mountain country. This had been tried over and over, and the northern road was marked every rod of the way by the bodies of dead horses and the wreckage of broken wagons, but it did not do any good; no wagon train that went this way could carry very much except the forage which its own animals had to eat in order to make the trip. Couriers or small detachments of armed men could make the journey without great difficulty, but no wagon train or large body of troops could do it without coming to grief. The Army of the Cumberland was in a box.

From half rations the army came down to quarter rations. When a commissary wagon jolted by, soldiers would follow, hoping that something edible might fall out so that they could pick it up and eat it. Horses and mules — those that still survived: more than ten thousand of them had died — were allowed three ears of corn each day, and hungry soldiers robbed them so regularly that it was necessary to put armed guards around when the livestock was fed. The horses and mules were so desperate that they gnawed down saplings and hitching posts, and a number of wagons were ruined because the beasts had tried to eat them. After the animals had been fed their inadequate meals, soldiers would search the mud looking for stray grains. Other soldiers risked shots from Rebel pickets to go ranging out through the country between Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge to collect acorns.¹

Yet there was no serious grumbling. The men were depressed because they had lost a battle, but they seem to have accepted the scarcity of food without complaint, confident that sooner or later somebody would do something about it. The Confederates made no hostile moves; felt, apparently, that none was called for, since these Yankees would inevitably be starved into submission before much longer. At night the view was spectacular. An enormous semicircle of twinkling lights, running from the crest of Lookout all the way across the southern horizon to the northern end of Missionary Ridge, marked the Confederate campfires; down below, paralleling this crescent but several hundred feet under it, ran the line of Union fires. The lights lit the sky and almost seemed to dim the stars, and a veteran later remembered the sight as “grand beyond description.” Union campfires were rather skimpy most of the time. The only firewood was on the north side of the Tennessee, and the starving horses were too weak to haul it into camp.²

The soldiers’ confidence that somebody was going to come to the rescue was not misplaced. Washington reacted to the news from Tennessee with almost feverish vigor. Two army corps were detached from the Army of the Potomac, sent west by train and river boat, and hurried down across Kentucky and central Tennessee to Bridgeport; in command was Joe Hooker, recalled from semi-retirement for a job that looked as if it would call for a headlong fighter. Most of the Army of the Tennessee, with Sherman in command, was ordered east from the Mississippi, and it was marching along the line of the Memphis and Charleston, repairing damaged track as it came. And U. S. Grant, still nursing the leg he had injured in his fall from the saddle at New Orleans, was ordered north post-haste. He met Secretary Stanton at Indianapolis and was given command of all Federal operations between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi, except for Banks’s enclave in Louisiana; from Indianapolis he went straight to Chattanooga, pausing just long enough to send a telegram on ahead announcing that Rosecrans was relieved from command and that Thomas now would lead the Army of the Cumberland.

Disquieting rumors reached him at Louisville: the Army of the Cumberland was about to retreat. He sent Thomas another wire, ordering him to stay in Chattanooga no matter what happened, and got back the succinct reply: “We will hold the town until we starve.” This was taken in the North as a fine bit of bravado; actually, it probably expressed Thomas’s objective size-up of the situation — Chattanooga could be held against any assault, but unless a supply line was quickly opened the army literally was apt to die of hunger.³

Just before he reached Chattanooga, Grant met Rosecrans on his way north and the two had a talk. Rosecrans had laid plans for relieving the pressure, and the plans were good; looking back afterward, Grant mused that the only thing he could not understand was why these plans had not been put into operation. When he finally reached the beleaguered town after a miserable ride across the barren mountains north of the river — a very hard ride for a man with a damaged leg, who could hardly stick in the saddle and who could walk only with crutches — he found that things were being done. Chief engineer of the Army of the Cumberland was a General William F. Smith, universally known as Baldy, and Baldy Smith was an operator. He had put together a sawmill at Bridgeport, the motive power a steam engine rifled from some local machine shop, and he was sawing out a large number of planks; with these planks he was building a river steamer, which would be powered by still another steam engine taken from some other local factory, and before long he would be able to move supplies up the river. Meanwhile he had discovered a route by which, with the aid of a few combat troops, a new supply line into Chattanooga could be opened. Grant quickly saw that his own job was not so much to devise new plans as to put additional drive and energy into the execution of plans already made.⁴

Chattanooga lies on the south bank of the Tennessee, and along its waterfront the river flows straight west. Just below the city the river cuts sharply to the south, runs down to the foot of Lookout Mountain, and then makes a 180-degree turn and comes back north for several miles, turning west at last to curve around the northern end of Raccoon Mountain and continue past Bridgeport. As it makes the Lookout Mountain turn it encloses a long finger of hilly land no more than a mile wide, and along the base of this finger, in 1863, there was a little country road that started opposite Chattanooga and came out on the north-and-south stretch of the river at a place called Brown’s Ferry. This road was hardly more than two miles long, and it by-passed the Lookout Mountain bottleneck completely. If the river could be crossed at Brown’s Ferry, another passable road led across Raccoon Mountain to Bridgeport, no more than twenty miles away. Here, potentially, was a fine supply route, the only trouble being that the Confederates who held Lookout Mountain had troops in the valley between Lookout and Raccoon mountains and so made the Brown’s Ferry-Bridgeport road unusable.

These troops could be handled, because Bragg had not put enough of them in the valley to hold the place against a real attack. Hooker was in Bridgeport with twelve thousand tough soldiers from the Army of the Potomac, and Thomas was in Chattanooga with a great many equally tough characters from the Army of the Cumberland; and one night, not long after Grant had arrived, Hooker sent men east over Raccoon Mountain while a brigade of Cumberlands got into flatboats and drifted quietly down the Tennessee, and between them these troops seized Brown’s Ferry and drove the Confederates out of the valley between Raccoon and Lookout mountains. The Confederates still held Lookout, but that no longer mattered. A pontoon bridge was laid at Brown’s Ferry, and the Federals finally had an adequate, unobstructed road leading in and out of Chattanooga.⁵

It would lead in, mostly, because the only way out that Grant was interested in was the road that led straight south, over the gun-rimmed heights where Bragg’s army was entrenched. Hooker had brought plenty of horses and wagons, and now his trains came creaking along the new route with rations and forage for the Army of the Cumberland. The soldiers lined the roads and cheered, dubbed the new route “the cracker line,” and spoke admiringly of the ramshackle little steamboat Baldy Smith had built, which helped mightily by carrying bacon and hardtack upstream from Bridgeport to a point within easy reach of Brown’s Ferry. The danger of starvation was gone forever. Grant had a breathing space in which to devise a plan for driving the Confederates out of their mountain strongholds.

The breathing space was not comfortable, because Washington was nervous and impatient. Burnside was in Knoxville, and from all the administration could find out, his men there were in as bad a fix as Thomas’s men had been in before Grant’s arrival. It was believed that if Grant did not smash Bragg very quickly Burnside’s little army would be lost en bloc, and Grant was getting almost daily messages — from Halleck, from Stanton, and from Lincoln himself — urging him to move fast.

Burnside’s men had had their troubles. The march down from Kentucky had led them over desolate mountains, along roads so bad that hundreds of horses and mules foundered and died. Transport became so inadequate that each soldier had to carry from sixty to eighty pounds on his back, plus eight days’ rations. The men tried to lighten this load by eating their rations as fast as they could, supplementing their diet with corn and blackberries gathered along the way. They also threw away most of their inedible freight, and as a result they were poorly equipped when they reached Knoxville. They did not like the rugged mountain country, and one soldier, looking back on the long hike, wrote bitterly: “If this is the kind of country we are fighting for I am in favor of letting the Rebs take their land and their niggers and go to hell for I wouldn’t give a bit an acre for all the land I have seen in the last four days.”⁶

Still, things were pleasant in Knoxville. Much of Lincoln’s old eagerness to get a Federal army into east Tennessee was based on the belief that this area was full of Union sentiment, and the soldiers found that this belief was justified. Crowds lined the streets to cheer when the men marched into Knoxville; one old man stood on the sidewalk, eyes uplifted, crying: “Glory! Glory! I have been enslaved but now I am free.” Country people visited the Union camps with gifts of pie and cake and other things to eat, and an Illinois cavalryman noted that “the oft-repeated story of the loyalty of the people of east Tennessee had never been exaggerated.” It was not hard to get enough meat and bread from the country around Knoxville to keep the army fed, even if things like coffee, sugar, and salt were almost unobtainable — to say nothing of clothing, medical supplies, and ammunition. The real trouble was that Burnside’s supply line, which ran through Cumberland Gap, was so long and difficult that it was in effect worthless. If his army was to be supplied, the supplies would have to come up from Chattanooga, and that could not be done until Bragg had been driven away.⁷

Then, in a misguided moment, Bragg detached Longstreet and sent him off with fifteen thousand veterans to take Knoxville and capture Burnside’s army.

Of all the mistakes Bragg made in this fall of 1863 — and he made quite a number — this was probably the worst. (Long after the war someone suggested to Grant that Bragg must have supposed that he could afford to send Longstreet away because of the belief that his position on Missionary Ridge was impregnable. Grant looked down his stubby nose, grinned quietly in his sandy beard, and remarked: “Well, it was impregnable.”)⁸ The move did not do Burnside any particular harm, and it fatally weakened the Confederate army for the battle that was about to be fought. But in the early days of November, when news of the move got abroad, it did give Grant some bad moments. The tone of the daily telegrams he was getting from Washington began to be very shrill.

On November 7 Grant ordered Thomas to attack Bragg’s right in order to compel Bragg to recall Longstreet and his men. Thomas was as willing a fighter as ever wore a uniform, but he had to reply that he could not comply with this order: he had no horses and no mules, and as a result he could not move one piece of artillery. Grant, in turn, had to tell Washington that he could not attack just yet; he must wait for Sherman and the Army of the Tennessee, and Burnside would have to get along somehow for a few weeks longer.⁹

While Grant waited for Sherman, he began to find that the situation at Chattanooga was in some respects unusual. The Confederates had been holding their dominant position for so long that they seemed to look on all of the Yankees in Chattanooga as their ultimate prisoners; regarding them so, they found little reason to make a tough war out of it. Grant went out one day to inspect the Federal lines, and he reached a point where Federal and Confederate picket posts were not far apart. As he approached the Federal post the sentry turned out the guard; Grant dismissed it and rode on — only to hear, before he had gone fifty yards, another cry: “Turn out the guard for the commanding general!” Immediately a snappy set of Confederates came swarming out, formed a neat military rank, came to attention, and presented arms. Grant returned the salute and rode away.… A little later he reached a spring which soldiers of both armies sometimes used. On a log by the spring was a soldier in blue, his musket at his side. Grant asked him what corps he belonged to, and the man, getting up and saluting respectfully, replied that he was one of Longstreet’s men. Before they went their separate ways, Union commander and Confederate private had quite a chat.¹⁰

There were times, indeed, when it seemed that the Union soldiers disliked each other more than they disliked the Confederates. Here at Chattanooga there were elements from three armies — Hooker’s two corps from the Army of the Potomac, Sherman’s Army of the Tennessee (when it finally arrived; the head of the column reached Brown’s Ferry on November 20), and the Army of the Cumberland; and these armies had distinct characteristics. Each was locked in by its own pride and clannish spirit, and each looked on the others as strange and rather outlandish groups. The Easterners gaped at the Westerners, especially at Sherman’s men, considered them undisciplined and abominably unmilitary in appearance, and remarked that except for the color of their uniforms they looked exactly like the Rebels. Sherman’s men, in turn, whooping and yelling as they marched through camp, slouching along with shapeless black hats jammed any which way on their heads, hooted and jeered at the men from the Army of the Potomac and made remarks about “kid gloves and paper collars” — to which the Easterners replied with disdainful comments about “backwoodsmen.”

One of Sherman’s veterans said he and his fellows had very little use for either Hooker’s or Thomas’s soldiers, and confessed that “to hear our men talk to them when passing them or their camps marching, you’d think the feeling between us and the Rebels could be no more bitter.” The Army of the Cumberland, he said, they could just endure, but the Army of the Potomac — it was too stiff, the men with their jaunty little forage caps looked too neat and tin-soldier-like, and “the 11th and 12th corps Potomac men and ours never meet without some very hard talk.” The Westerners noticed, too, that there was a great gulf between officers and enlisted man in the eastern regiments; in Sherman’s army a private was quite likely to be on a first-name basis with his company commander.¹¹

It was the Army of the Cumberland that was unhappiest in all of this. The men still carried the memory of their defeat at Chickamauga as a stain on their record. They had been whipped in fair fight; they would not be at peace with themselves until they had made up for that whipping — and here were two other armies brought in to rescue them. The plain implication was that they could not get out of their difficulties without help, and the men bitterly resented it; nor did the remarks which Potomac and Tennessee men kept on dropping make the load any easier to bear. The Cumberlands were like a blend of the other two armies. Buell and Thomas were drillmasters as stiff as any the Easterners had seen, and men who served under them learned to button their coats, shine their boots, and say “Yessir” when addressed by higher ranks; but the men themselves were Westerners. They walked with a long stride and they were bigger physically than the men from the East, and they considered that Stone’s River and Chickamauga were fights as tough as any the other men had been through. Now here they were, squatting on the plain looking up at the infinite lines of Confederate trenches on top of the Tennessee mountains, and the authorities obviously felt that they could not fight their way out unaided. Far down underneath, their pride in themselves as soldiers had been deeply, grievously damaged.

 … Under everything, the men had become soldiers. There were men from Ohio (to name a northern state at random) in each of the three armies; and the instinctive loyalty of all of these men went now to the army, not to the state or even to the nation. Far back at the dawn of life these young men had gone to the recruiting station and had taken the oath, and after that there had been a long round of drill, of dull marches across uninteresting country, of hard fighting where the real enemy was death itself, and terror and the danger of crippling wounds, rather than the opposing army in gray. What the war itself was all about had been lost in the shuffle somewhere. All that mattered now was the army itself, the regiment or the corps or the army to which a man gave his loyalty; it was Pap Thomas or Joe Hooker or Uncle Billy Sherman, with the grim stooped figure of Grant somewhere in the background; and in the queer way of soldiers the men could be stirred by an appeal to the badge they wore on their shoulders, or the address that home folk scrawled on an envelope, rather than by the tremendous issues for which, by the books and in theory, they were risking their lives. They could be cynical about everything but their own manhood, and that was somehow wrapped up in the army itself.

The war had had its way with them. They were soldiers: volunteers technically, professionals in all but name, moved now by the mysterious intangibles that go with soldiering. Under everything else, they were fighting not for the Union nor for freedom nor for anything else that carried a great name, but simply for the figure which they would finally make in their own eyes. They were about to go into a great fight, and their pride as soldiers might be the decisive factor in it.

4. A Half Dozen Roasted Acorns

Maybe the real trouble was that the battle was too theatrical. People could see too much; most particularly, the Confederates could see too much. They were up in the balconies and all of the Federals were down in the orchestra pit, and when the fighting began, every move down on the plain was clearly visible to the Southerners on the heights. Perhaps just watching it did something to them.

Or it might have been the eclipse of the moon, which took place a night or two before the battle. There had been a great silver light over mountain and plain and rival battle lines, and it died and gave way to a creepy rising shadow as the moon was blotted out, so that the armored ridge was a silent, campfire-spangled mass outlined against a pale sky, with darkness coming up out of the hollows. Both armies looked on in awed silence, and the sight seems to have been taken as an incomprehensible omen of ill fortune. (Ill fortune, but specifically for whom? The Army of the Cumberland decided finally that it must mean bad luck for the Rebs: up on the mountain crest the Johnnies were a lot closer to the dying moon than the Federals on the plain, and the portent of disaster which seemed to be involved in this eclipse must be aimed at those who were nearest to it.)¹

Or, finally, it may be that everybody had been waiting too long. The armies had been in position for two months, or nearly that, with nothing much to do but look at each other. Day after day and week after week the Confederates had lounged in their trenches, looking down on men who could not conceivably do them any harm, and during all of that time the Federals had lounged in their own trenches, looking up at foes who seemed to be beyond all reach. What would happen when the men finally went into action might be strangely and powerfully affected, in a quite unpredictable way, by those long weeks of waiting and watching.

If justice existed on earth and under the heavens, Braxton Bragg would have been right; his position was impregnable. Missionary Ridge rose five hundred feet above the plain, sparse trees and underbrush littering its steep rocky slope; it ran for more than five miles, from southwest to northeast, and the Confederates had all of it. At its base, fronting the plain, they had a stout line of trenches, and on the crest they had another line, studded with cannon. Halfway up, at the proper places, there were other trenches and rifle pits, manned by soldiers who knew what to do with their rifles when they got a Yankee in the sights. To the west, a detachment held Lookout Mountain — not the crest, which rose in a straight palisade no army could scale, but the steep sides which ran down from the foot of the palisade to the edges of the Tennessee. The detachment was not large, but the mountainside was steep and the Yankees were not up to anything menacing, and it was believed that this detachment ought to be able to hold its ground. Across the flat country between Lookout and the southwestern end of Missionary Ridge, there was a good line of fieldworks held by infantry and artillery. And at the upper end of Missionary Ridge, where the high country came down to the river a few miles upstream from Chattanooga, there was broken hilly ground held by some of the best men in all the Confederacy — the division of Irish-born Pat Cleburne, a tremendous soldier who had trained his men to the precise pattern which had been glimpsed by his pugnacious Irish eyes.

Bragg was right, by any standard anyone could use. His main position could not be taken by assault, not even if nearly a third of the Confederate army had been sent up toward Knoxville to squelch General Burnside.

The Army of the Cumberland held the low ground south of Chattanooga; Lookout Mountain looked down on it from one side and Missionary Ridge looked down on it from the other, and men who had heard about Fredericksburg and Gettysburg, with their doomed charges on high ground, could look up at these heights and have disturbing thoughts. On November 23 Thomas moved his army forward. It drove Confederate skirmishers and advance guards off the plain and seized a little detached hill, named Orchard Knob, which came up out of the flat ground a little outside Chattanooga. If Thomas wanted to order an assault on Bragg’s position he had an excellent place to take off from, but there was little reason to think that this would help very much. Missionary Ridge was still five hundred feet high, and it was studded with Rebels from top to bottom.

This was the nut that U. S. Grant was expected to crack, and as he made his plans he did just what Thomas’s grumpy men had thought he would do. He gave the big assignments to Sherman and to Hooker, and to the outlanders these officers had brought in with them. The Army of the Cumberland would have the inglorious job of looking menacing and helping to pick up the pieces, while the men from the Army of the Tennessee and the Army of the Potomac had the starring parts.

Grant proposed to hit the two ends of the Confederate line at once. Hooker would strike at Lookout Mountain, and Sherman — moving his army upstream, across the river from Chattanooga, and crossing over by pontoons — would hit the upper end of Missionary Ridge. While they were breaking into the Confederate flanks, Thomas’s men could attack the center. The latter attack would not accomplish anything in particular, for it would be suicide to expect troops to take that tremendous height, but if they could apply enough pressure to keep Bragg from reinforcing his flanks their job would be done. Sherman and Hooker would win the battle.²

It was ordered so, and the men of the Army of the Cumberland got the full implication of it. They were veterans, and in any ordinary circumstances they would have been happy enough to let somebody else’s army do all of the heavy fighting. But these circumstances were not ordinary. Their pride had been bruised badly enough in recent weeks, and now it was being hit harder than ever. In the eyes of the commanding general, obviously, they were second-class troops. They waited in helpless, smoldering anticipation for the battle to begin.

It began on November 24, after a good many delays, when Hooker sent his Easterners forward from Lookout Valley to seize the mountain that looked down on the road and the river and the city of Chattanooga. At the same moment Sherman got his army across the Tennessee, above Chattanooga, and sent it driving in on the northern end of Missionary Ridge.

Hooker’s men found their job unexpectedly easy. They outnumbered the Confederates on Lookout Mountain by a fantastic margin — five or six to one, as far as a good estimate is possible — and they clambered up the rocks and steep meadows and drove the defenders out of there with a minimum of effort and a maximum of spectacular effect. The Cumberlands (and the newspaper correspondents) were all down in the valley, watching. They saw the high ground sparkling with musket fire and wreathed in smoke, and a mist came in and veiled the top of the mountain from sight; and then at last the mist lifted, and the Union flag was flying from the crest of the mountain, the Confederates had all retreated, and Joe Hooker was a fine handsome dashing soldier whose men had scaled a mountain and licked the Rebels in front of everybody. The newspapers blossomed out with great stories about “the battle above the clouds.” The left end of Bragg’s line had been knocked loose from its moorings, although actually the achievement was not as solid as it seemed. Hooker’s men still had to come down the eastern slope and crack the battle line in the plain, and that would take a little more doing.

While Hooker was at it, Sherman’s rowdies from the Army of the Tennessee attacked Pat Cleburne’s men and found that they had taken on more than they could handle.

Missionary Ridge did not run in a straight line to the edge of the Tennessee River, as Grant and everyone else on the Federal side supposed. It broke up, before it reached the river, into a complex of separated hills with very steep sides, and Sherman’s men no sooner took one hill than they found themselves obliged to go down into a valley and climb another one, with cold-eyed Rebel marksmen shooting at them every step of the way — and occasionally rolling huge rocks down on them. By the end of the day the Army of the Tennessee had had some very hard fighting and had not yet gained a foothold on the end of the ridge. Sherman believed (apparently mistakenly) that Bragg was drawing men from his center to reinforce Cleburne, and he called for help.³

When the battle was resumed the next morning, nothing went right. Sherman’s men hammered at the northern end of Missionary Ridge and got nowhere. Hooker took his troops down from the slope of Lookout Mountain and headed south, to strike the other end of the Confederate line, but he went astray somewhere in the wooded plain; there was a stream that needed bridging, the pontoons were missing, and this blow at the Confederate left missed fire completely.

On Orchard Knob, Grant and Thomas watched the imperfect progress of this unsatisfactory battle. Sherman continued to believe that the Confederates in his front were being strengthened, and he was calling for more reinforcements. Some of Thomas’s troops were sent to him, but he still could not push Pat Cleburne’s men off the heights. By midafternoon his attack had definitely stalled, with severe losses, and Hooker’s push had not materialized. If anything was to be done the Army of the Cumberland would have to do it.

What was planned and what finally happened were two different things. Grant told Thomas to have his men attack the Confederate line at the base of Missionary Ridge, occupy it, and await further orders; the move seems to have been regarded as a diversion that might lead Bragg to strengthen his center by withdrawing some of the men who were confronting Sherman. No one had any notion that the Army of the Cumberland could take the ridge itself. Thomas apparently was dubious about the prospect of taking even the first line of trenches; he was slow about ordering the men forward, and Grant had to prod him before they finally began to move.⁴

The men were impatient, for a powerful excitement had been rising in them all day. They had heard the unending crash of Sherman’s battle off to their left, and they sensed that things there were not going right. Straight ahead of them was the great ridge, and they looked at it with an irrational, desperate sort of longing. One of them remarked afterward that they were keyed up to such a pitch that “if General Grant had said the word Missionary Ridge would have been taken in thirty minutes time.”⁵

The word came — not to take the ridge, just to take the trenches at its base — and the men surged forward in one of the most dramatic moves of all the war. The battle line was two miles wide, eighteen thousand men in four solid infantry divisions, moving toward an impregnable mountain wall that blotted out half the sky. Flags snapped in the wind, and Thomas’s carefully drilled men kept a parade-ground alignment. The Confederate guns high above them opened with salvos that covered the crest with a ragged dirty-white cloud; from some atmospheric quirk, each shot they fired could be seen from the moment it left the gun’s muzzle. The Cumberlands kept on going and, from Orchard Knob, Federal artillery opened in support. General Gordon Granger, who had done so much to save the day at Chickamauga, was on Orchard Knob, and he was so excited that he forgot he was commander of an army corps and went down into the gun pits to help the cannoneers. Thomas stood on the hill, majestic as ever, running his fingers through his whiskers. Beside him, Grant chewed a cigar and looked on unemotionally.

The plain was an open stage which everybody watched — the generals back on Orchard Knob and the Confederates on Missionary Ridge. Crest and sides of the ridge were all ablaze with fire now, and the Army of the Cumberland took some losses, but it kept on moving. Up to the first line of trenches at the base of the mountain it went, the men swarmed over the parapet, and in a moment the Confederate defenders were scampering back up the hillside to their second and third lines. The Cumberlands moved into the vacated trenches, paused for breath, and kept looking up at the crest, five hundred feet above them.

The rising slope was an obvious deathtrap, but these men had a score to settle — with the Rebels who had whipped them at Chickamauga, with the other Federal armies who had derided them, with Grant, who had treated them as second-class troops — and now was the time to settle it. From the crest of the ridge the Confederates were sending down a sharp plunging fire against which the captured trenches offered little protection. The Federals had seized the first line, but they could not stay where they were. It seemed out of the question to go forward, but the only other course was to go back, and for these soldiers who had been suffering a slow burn for weeks, to go back was unthinkable.

The officers felt exactly as the men felt. Phil Sheridan was there, conspicuous in dress uniform — he was field officer of the day, togged out in his best — and he sat on his horse, looked up the forbidding slope, and drew a silver flask from his pocket to take a drink. Far above him a Confederate artillery commander standing amid his guns looked down at him, and Sheridan airily waved the flask to offer a toast as he drank. The Confederate signaled to his gun crews, and his battery fired a salvo in reply; it was a near miss, the missiles kicking up dirt and gravel and spattering Sheridan’s gay uniform. Sheridan’s face darkened; he growled, “I’ll take those guns for that!” and he moved his horse forward, calling out to the men near him: “All right, boys — as soon as you catch your breath you can go on again.” All up and down the line other men were getting the same idea. Brigadier General Carlin turned to his men and shouted: “Boys, I don’t want you to stop until we reach the top of that hill. Forward!” The colonel of the 104th Illinois was heard crying: “I want the 104th to be the first regiment on that hill!” And then, as if it moved in response to one command, the whole army surged forward, scrambled up out of the captured trenches, and began to move up the slope of Missionary Ridge.⁶

Back on Orchard Knob the generals watched in stunned disbelief. Grant turned to Thomas and asked sharply who had told these men to go on to the top of the ridge. Thomas replied that he did not know; he himself had certainly given no such order. Grant then swung on Granger: was he responsible? Granger replied that he was not, but the battle excitement was on him and he added that when the men of the Army of the Cumberland once got started it was very hard to stop them. Grant clenched his teeth on his cigar and muttered something to the effect that somebody was going to sweat for it if this charge ended in disaster; then he faced to the front again to watch the incredible thing that was happening.⁷

Up the side of the ridge went the great line of battle. It was a parade-ground line no longer. The regimental flags led, men trailing out behind each flag in a V-shaped mass, struggling over rocks and logs as they kept on climbing. Confederate pockets of resistance on the slope were wiped out. Now and then the groups of attackers would stop for breath — the slope was steep, and it was easy to get winded — but after a moment or so they would go on again.

Looking down from the crest, the Confederates kept on firing, but the foreknowledge of defeat was beginning to grip them. The crest was uneven, and no defender could see more than a small part of his own line; but each defender could see all of the charging Federal army, and it suddenly looked irresistible. The defensive fire slackened here and there; men began to fade back from the firing line, irresolute; and finally the Federals were covering the final yards in a frantic competitive run, each regiment trying to outdo the others, each man trying to beat his fellows. A company commander, running ahead of his colors, grabbed the coattails of one of his men, to hold him back so that he might reach the crest first.⁸

No one could ever determine afterward what unit or what men won the race, and the business was argued at old soldiers’ reunions for half a century. Apparently the crest was reached at half a dozen places simultaneously, and when it was reached, Bragg’s line — the center of his whole army, the hard core of his entire defensive position — suddenly and inexplicably went to pieces. By ones and twos and then by companies and battalions, gray-clad soldiers who had proved their valor in a great many desperate fights turned and took to their heels. Something about that incredible scaling of the mountainside had been just too much for them. Perfectly typical was the case of a Confederate officer who, scorning to run, stood with drawn sword, waiting to fight it out with the first Yankee who approached him. An Indiana private, bayoneted rifle in his grip, started toward him — and then, amazingly, laid down his weapon and came on in a crouch, bare hands extended. There was a primeval menace in him, more terrifying than bayonet or musket, and the officer blinked at him for a moment and then fled.

As resistance dissolved, the victorious Federals were too breathless to cheer. They tossed their caps in the air, and some of them crossed the narrow ridge to peer down the far side, where they saw what they had not previously seen — whole brigades of Confederates running downhill in wild panicky rout. The Federals turned and beckoned their comrades with swinging arms and, regaining their wind, with jubilant shouts: “My God! Come and see them run!”

General officers began to reach the crest. Sheridan was there, laying proudly possessive hands on the guns that had fired at him. The General Wood whose division had been ordered out of the line in that disastrous mismaneuver at Chickamauga was riding back and forth laughing, telling his men that because they had attacked without orders they would be court-martialed, each and every one. He found the private who had charged the Confederate officer bare-handed and asked him why he had done such a thing; the man replied simply that he had thought it would be nice to take the officer prisoner.⁹

The battle of Chattanooga was over now, no matter what Sherman or Hooker did. With a two-mile hole punched in the center of his line, Bragg could do nothing but retreat, and as his army began to reassemble on the low ground beyond the mountain, it took off for Georgia, with Cleburne’s men putting up a stout rear-guard resistance. Phil Sheridan got his division into shape and took off in pursuit, figuring that it might be possible to cut in behind Cleburne and capture his whole outfit, but his pursuit was little more than a token. The Army of the Cumberland was temporarily immobilized by the sheer surprise of its incredible victory. Nobody wanted to do anything but ramble around, yell, and let his chest expand with unrestrained pride.

Oddly enough, it was a long time before the soldiers realized that they themselves were responsible for the victory. They tended to ascribe it to Grant and to his good management, and they told one another that all they had ever needed was a good leader. One officer who had shared in all of this army’s battles wrote that during the uproar of this conflict “I thought I detected in the management what I had never discovered before on the battlefield — a little common sense.” When Grant and Thomas came to the top of the ridge the men crowded about them, capering and yelling. Sherman himself was thoroughly convinced that the battle had gone exactly as Grant had planned it; to him the whole victory was simply one more testimonial to the general’s genius.¹⁰

Washington felt much the same way; but Washington also remembered that Burnside was still beleaguered in Knoxville, and when Lincoln sent a wire of congratulations to Grant he added the words: “Remember Burnside.” Grant started Granger off to the rescue with an army corps; then, figuring that Sherman would make a faster march — and feeling apparently a little disillusioned about Granger after noticing the man’s unrestrained excitement during the battle — he canceled the order and sent the Army of the Tennessee.

Burnside, as it turned out, was in no serious trouble. Longstreet had made a night attack on his lines and had been repulsed, after which he drew his troops off and menaced the Union garrison from a distance. Sherman’s men relieved the Knoxville situation without difficulty, except that the pace at which Sherman drove them marched them practically out of their shoes. They found the Federals in Knoxville ragged and hungry — the food allowance had been reduced to a daily issue of salt pork and bran bread, so unappetizing that it took a half-starved man to eat it — but things had not been as bad in Knoxville as they had been in Chattanooga before Grant’s arrival, and Sherman and his officers were slightly nonplused when Burnside and his staff welcomed them with an elaborate banquet. One of Burnside’s officers explained later that the whole town had been ransacked to get such a meal together; both soldiers and civilians had felt that they ought to make some tangible expression of their gratitude to the men who had raised the siege. Sherman fumed privately over what he considered the military folly of trying to occupy Knoxville at all, and the effort to nudge Longstreet off to a safer distance involved a good deal of highly uncomfortable winter campaigning, but the danger was over. Before too long, full railroad connections with Chattanooga were restored, which meant that plenty of food and clothing could come in. Half of the army came gaily down to the station to greet the first train — a ten-car freight train which, when the doors were opened, turned out by some triumph of military miscalculation to be loaded with nothing but horseshoes.¹¹

Back in Chattanooga the soldiers prepared for winter and for the spring campaign that would follow. Grant was turning Nashville into one of the greatest supply bases on the continent, and the railway connection with Chattanooga was being restored and strengthened; in the spring Grant would take Atlanta and Mobile, and he wanted everything ready. Meanwhile he rode out one day with Thomas, Baldy Smith, and other officers to look at the battlefield of Chickamauga. A young staff officer stuck as close to Grant as he could, hoping to hear some profound comment by the victor of Chattanooga on the scene of the most desperate fight the Army of the Cumberland had ever had. He was disappointed. Grant made only one remark that the staff man could remember, and it was nothing much for the history books. Looking about at one place where all the trees were scarred and splintered by bullets, the general observed: “These trees would make a good lead mine.”¹²

Pap Thomas also made a remembered remark about this time. During the battle of Chattanooga it had occurred to him that the little hill of Orchard Knob would make a beautiful burying ground for Union soldiers slain in battle, and not long after the fight he ordered a proper military cemetery laid out there, detailing whole regiments to help in the work. The chaplain who was going to be in charge of burial services when everything was ready came to him and asked if the dead should be buried by states — Ohioans here, Hoosiers there, Kentuckians over yonder, and so on. Thomas thought about it and then shook his head.

“No — no, mix ’em up, mix ’em up,” he said. “I’m tired of states’ rights.”¹³

States’ rights, as a matter of fact, had made its last great counterattack, and the Confederacy had passed the last of the great might-have-beens of the war. Its supreme attempt to restore the lost balance had failed. By making the greatest effort it could make — pulling together a large army even at the cost (never risked before or afterward) of taking men from Lee’s army — it had made its final bid for victory at Chickamauga. It could not again make such an effort, and it would not again have a chance to make the tide flow in the other direction. The Army of the Cumberland might have been destroyed at Chickamauga but was not destroyed; it might have been starved into surrender at Chattanooga, but that had not happened; and now Bragg’s wrecked army was recuperating in north Georgia, Bragg himself replaced by cautious little Joe Johnston, and from this time on the Confederacy could hope to do no more than parry the blows that would be leveled against it. The dream that had been born in spring light and fire was flickering out now, and nothing lay ahead but a downhill road.

The shadows were rising that winter, tragically lit by a pale light of southern valor and endurance which were not enough to win and which the victorious Federals glimpsed as they looked back on the immediate past. A man in the 46th Ohio recalled strolling along the fighting line at the northern end of Missionary Ridge, the day after the battle of Chattanooga had ended, and looking down at the unburied body of a dead Confederate, and he wrote:

“He was not over 15 years of age, and very slender in size. He was clothed in a cotton suit, and was barefooted — barefooted, on that cold and wet 24th of November. I examined his haversack. For a day’s ration there was a handful of black beans, a few pieces of sorghum and a half dozen roasted acorns. That was an infinitely poor outfit for marching and fighting, but that Tennessee Confederate had made it answer his purpose.”¹⁴