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

Bragg in a skillfully executed turning movement that forced Bragg to retreat in confusion to Chattanooga. Rosecrans then paused and waited until more telegrams from Washington caught up with him, demanding more advances.

On August 16, Rosecrans set off again, this time to turn Bragg’s position in Chattanooga, too. Finding an unguarded ferry on the Tennessee River about thirty miles below Chattanooga, Rosecrans threw the entire Army of the Cumberland across the Tennessee on the back of a single pontoon bridge and an assortment of rafts and boats. He then swept around behind Chattanooga and compelled Bragg to abandon the city on September 8 without firing a shot in its defense. In only ten weeks, Rosecrans had moved the Army of the Cumberland almost a hundred miles southward, had outmaneuvered Bragg into abandoning all of eastern Tennessee and Chattanooga, and had done it all at the price of less than a thousand casualties.62

What Rosecrans did not know, however, was that in Richmond, an anxious Jefferson Davis had finally decided that the threat to Chattanooga was dangerous enough to justify desperate measures. At the very same moment that Rosecrans was crossing the Tennessee, Davis overrode Robert E. Lee’s objections and sent James Longstreet’s corps of the Army of Northern Virginia to reinforce Bragg at LaFayette, Georgia, about twenty-five miles south of Chattanooga. The southern railroads were in such poor condition that it took the first of Longstreet’s men ten days to make the 952-mile trip from Richmond to northern Georgia. By September 19, Longstreet and five of his nine brigades were with Bragg, and Bragg now determined to use his newly reinforced strength of 47,000 men (not counting Forrest’s dismounted cavalry) to strike back at Rosecrans. All unsuspecting, Rosecrans kept on rolling along merrily after Bragg into northern Georgia under the delusion that Bragg was still retreating, and not until September 10 did he realize that Bragg had actually turned and was moving in for the kill. Rosecrans hastily concentrated his four corps—approximately 56,000 men—in the valley of Chickamauga Creek, a dozen miles south of Chattanooga. Before he could devise a plan of action, Bragg struck first.63

Chickamauga is a Cherokee word meaning “river of death,” and for two days, September 19 and 20, Chickamauga Creek fully lived up to its name. The fighting on the nineteenth was a cautious draw, with Bragg hesitantly testing Rosecrans’s defensive lines behind Chickamauga Creek. The next morning, Bragg threw caution to the winds and launched a furious series of frontal assaults on the Federal corps that lasted for two hours without gaining much ground. But at 11:00 AM, Rosecrans mistakenly pulled one of his divisions out of line and sent them in the wrong direction, just as Longstreet’s three divisions came avalanching down upon the 600-yard gap so conveniently left for them. The Federal left flank simply turned and fled in panic, sweeping Rosecrans and two of his corps commanders with it. “I saw our lines break and melt away like leaves before the wind,” wrote Charles Dana, who was traveling with Rosecrans as an observer. “Then the headquarters around me disappeared. … The whole road was filled with flying soldiers. … Everything was in the greatest disorder.”64

By 1:00 PM, all that was left of Rosecrans’s army at Chickamauga was the single corps commanded by George H. Thomas, who had so stoutly rebuked the idea of retreating from Murfreesboro the preceding December. Thomas’s corps stood its ground against Longstreet on a small hill beside the road to Chattanooga, and gave the rest of the beaten Army of the Cumberland time to retreat. Thomas’s valiant rearguard action earned him the nickname “The Rock of Chickamauga,” but Thomas was almost the only senior Federal officer to emerge from the defeat at Chickamauga with any semblance of reputation intact. The Federals lost 16,000 men that afternoon (fully half of them as prisoners) plus 51 cannon and 15,000 rifles, not to mention innumerable horses, wagons, and supplies.65

Rosecrans never recovered from the shock of Chickamauga. A disgusted Lincoln told John Hay that “Rosecrans has seemed to lose spirit and nerve since the battle of Chickamauga,” and he imagined Rosecrans waddling in circles, “confused and stunned like a duck hit on the head.” Curling up in the defenses of Chattanooga, Rosecrans allowed Bragg to close off the Tennessee River and move his army onto Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain, the heights that loomed over Chattanooga. Without full control of the Tennessee, Rosecrans was in a very bad supply position, and within a month the despondent Army of the Cumberland was facing either starvation or surrender. Charles Dana anxiously wired Stanton, “It does not seem possible to hold out here another week without a new avenue of supplies.” Soldiers working on entrenchments hooted at their generals and shouted for hardtack. Nor did it seem that Rosecrans was likely to pull himself together in time to avoid the disaster. “The practical incapacity of the general commanding is astonishing, and it often seems difficult to believe him of sound mind. His imbecility appears to be contagious, and it is difficult for any one to get anything done.” Here was Vicksburg in reverse, and at last Lincoln decided that it was time to bring Grant onto the scene.66

Grant believed that Vicksburg had more than made up for the damage done to his military reputation at Shiloh, and he fully expected that he ought to be given a free hand in mounting a new campaign into the vital interior of Alabama. But Halleck had other plans, none of which included independent action for Grant. “The possession of the trans-Mississippi by the Union forces seemed to possess more importance in his mind than almost any campaign east of the Mississippi,” Grant wrote, and Grant found himself reduced to policing the Vicksburg area “against guerilla bands and small detachments of cavalry which infested the interior.”

This, however, was not what Lincoln and Stanton had in mind for Grant. Both the president and the secretary of war had been keeping a