Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

purpose of invading the rights of our fellow-countrymen anywhere, but to maintain the integrity of the Union and protect the Constitution.” He had defeated Braxton Bragg at Perryville in October 1862, only to let Bragg retreat unscathed while Buell composed criticisms of the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln and the War Department had seen all they wanted to see of this kind of behavior from field officers, and on October 24, 1862, Buell was unceremoniously replaced by Major General William Starke Rosecrans. It would now be up to Rosecrans to finish the long-delayed conquest of eastern Tennessee, seize Chattanooga and Atlanta, and drive a stake into the heart of Georgia and Alabama.51

Like so many other high-ranking Union officers, Rosecrans was a West Point graduate, class of 1842, who served in the prestigious Corps of Engineers until 1854 (including a stint teaching at West Point from 1843 to 1847), when he resigned and opened up his own business as an architect and engineer. Unlike many of the others, however, Rosecrans was a Democrat and a Roman Catholic (his brother was a bishop), which made him an object of suspicion in an overwhelmingly Protestant culture. James A. Garfield, one of Rosecrans’s brigadiers and a radical evangelical preacher, sat up into the wee hours of many mornings with Rosecrans, “talking constantly and incessantly for hours on religion.” To Lincoln, any Union man with those credentials was a political godsend who could be used to rally Northern Democrats and working-class immigrants, and Rosecrans suddenly found himself rewarded in 1861 with a brigadier general’s commission. He served briefly (and not entirely happily) under Grant, and conducted a successful defense of Corinth from a rebel attempt to recapture that key Mississippi railroad junction in 1862. A serious student of strategy, paternal and well loved by every brigade and division he had ever commanded, Rosecrans now took over Buell’s 46,900 men, gave them the name “Army of the Cumberland,” and on December 26 moved south out of Nashville after Bragg.52

Braxton Bragg, meanwhile, had nearly gone the same way as Buell. Bragg was gravely hampered by an assortment of physical ills, ranging from nightmarish headaches to abdominal cramps, which made him quarrelsome with subordinates and a disciplinary fiend to his soldiers. After Perryville, rather than risk chances with a fresh invasion of Kentucky, Bragg went into winter quarters at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, approximately forty miles south of Nashville along Stone’s River. When Davis visited Bragg and the Army of Tennessee at Murfreesboro in early December 1862, Davis was delighted to see that Bragg’s men were “in good condition and fine spirits.”53

Bragg was soon given a chance to use the Army of Tennessee to redeem his reputation. The combative Rosecrans and the Army of the Cumberland moved down to within two miles of Bragg’s lines around Murfreesboro on December 30, and the next day, both armies planned to leap at each other’s throats in simultaneous attacks. In the event, however, the Confederates moved first, catching Rosecrans’s right flank still at breakfast and scattering it backward for three miles. The battle might well have been lost right there had not Rosecrans personally rode down the lines and rallied his men in the face of Confederate fire. When his chief of staff protested against exposing himself, Rosecrans merely replied, “Never mind me. Make the sign of the cross and go in.” As for Bragg, the Confederate commander kept on feeding his divisions into the fight piece by piece, feeling all along Rosecrans’s battered lines for a weakness. Somehow the Federals held on: one Federal division under a scrappy Irishman named Philip Sheridan lost all three of its brigade commanders and almost one-third of its men, but it slowed Bragg’s attack on the center of the Union line to a halt by midday. At other points, the Federals managed to repel Confederate attacks with nothing more than odds and ends of cavalry and, in one instance, members of Rosecrans’s own headquarters escort. By the time darkness fell, each army had lost close to a third of its men as casualties.54

Bragg immediately jumped to the conclusion that he had won a great victory, and he telegraphed Richmond that Rosecrans was falling back. Rosecrans himself was inclined to agree. But his three corps commanders disagreed; one of them, George Henry Thomas, snapped, “This army can’t retreat. … I know of no better place to die than right here.” When Bragg awoke the next morning, New Year’s Day, the Army of the Cumberland was still there. On January 2, Bragg launched a second series of attacks, hoping to prod Rosecrans into the withdrawal that Bragg presumed he ought to be making. Instead, by the end of the day, it was Bragg who became convinced that he had lost the fight and ought to retreat, and during the night of January 3, 1863, Bragg began pulling out of Murfreesboro for another camp twenty miles south.55

Murfreesboro was, like Shiloh, more like a simple slugfest than a model of tactical brilliance, but it temporarily made Rosecrans a national hero all the same. Bragg, meanwhile, was assailed by a mounting tide of criticism from his own officers for uselessly throwing away a victory. Just as at Perryville, at Murfreesboro Bragg demonstrated a fatal incapacity to perform under the stress of combat, and his abrupt decision to retreat was due at least in part to a simple loss of nerve. As one of Bragg’s disgusted subordinates remarked, Bragg could easily fight his way straight up to the gates of Heaven, but once there would doubtless order a withdrawal. One division commander in the Army of Tennessee, Benjamin F. Cheatham, vowed never to serve under Bragg again. Another, the Irish-born Patrick Cleburne, politely informed Bragg that no one really trusted his military judgment anymore: “I have consulted all my Brigade commanders… and they write with me in personal regard for yourself, in a high appreciation of your patriotism and gallantry… but at the same time they see, with regret, and it has also met