Terrible Swift Sword (10 page)

As the Hood fight was ending, Confederate major general Patrick Cleburne's division assaulted the Union left—Thomas's corps. Thomas held, but the sun set on chaotic fighting. When darkness came, the shooting stopped.

Sheridan suggested to Crittenden that they counterattack that night, but Crittenden's men were fought out and in no condition for a night attack. The exhausted Yankees camped without fires and ate dry meals of hardtack and bully beef from their haversacks. The day's fighting was only a prelude.
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THE EARLY REBEL ATTACK anticipated for September 20 did not materialize. Lieutenant General Leonidas Polk was at a farmhouse three miles away, reading a newspaper and waiting for his Sunday breakfast, when one of Braxton Bragg's staff officers finally located him. Polk knew neither that there was to be an early-morning attack nor that he was supposed to lead it.

Hours later, at 9:30 a.m., the Rebels struck hard at the Union left, defended by Thomas's massively reinforced XIV Corps. Thomas pleaded for more reinforcements, and Rosecrans sent brigades from Crittenden's corps in the center and McCook's on the right. Rosecrans and Thomas were certain that the Confederates intended to break the Union left in order to seize the roads behind Thomas and isolate the Army of the Cumberland from Chattanooga.

They were wrong, although their mistake was understandable given that dense woods, smoke, and fog largely hid the armies from one another. With the foliage and smoke, even signaling was problematic. Chickamauga has been justifiably described as “a hidden battle,” directed not by army commanders but by field commanders. It became essentially a battle of brigades and regiments—a soldier's fight, waged with rare ferocity.

While Rosecrans and his commanders braced for powerful follow-up attacks on the Union left, Bragg's army instead began probing the Union line from its left to its right, seeking weak spots to exploit. The artillery sounded like “the thunder, as of a thousand anvils,” wrote Colonel John Beatty. Bragg's forces found no chinks in Thomas's lines where, by midday, roughly 40,000 of Rosecrans's 58,000 troops were concentrated, leaving the Union center and right thinly manned.

 

OPPOSITE THE POINT AT which Crittenden's and McCook's corps were joined, and near Sheridan's division, Hood and his commander, Lieutenant General James Longstreet, massed the five divisions of the Army of Northern Virginia's I Corps. The Rebels faced, at most, three scattered Union divisions. Longstreet's men waited for the right moment to strike.

With growing concern, Sheridan watched the steady migration of McCook's and Crittenden's brigades to Thomas's left wing. He recognized that “we were in bad straits” and that Thomas had to be reinforced. But Sheridan questioned the wisdom of shifting troops in the face of a numerically superior enemy.
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McCook had just ordered two of Sheridan's three brigades—those commanded by Brigadier General William H. Lytle and the wounded Colonel Bradley's successor, Colonel Nathan Walworth—to join Thomas when Longstreet attacked, his divisions arrayed in a single column to deliver a “clenched-fist blow.”
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McCook called it “a most furious and impetuous assault in overwhelming numbers.” The 16,000 Rebels crashed through a large gap that suddenly yawned in the Union right-center where Brigadier General Thomas Wood had just withdrawn his division to send to Thomas.

With pitch-perfect timing, Longstreet's five attacking divisions struck before the hole left by Wood's division could be filled and just as other units, including Sheridan's two brigades, were shifting to the left. Just thirty minutes earlier or later, and the Rebels might have met better-organized defenders.

Assistant War Secretary Charles Dana, a former journalist assigned to observe Rosecrans's army—some said to spy for War Secretary Edwin Stanton, who despised Rosecrans—had fallen asleep on the grass at Rosecrans's headquarters at the Widow Glenn's cabin behind Wood's division when “the most infernal noise I ever heard” awakened him. Upon sitting up, he observed Rosecrans making the sign of the cross. This alarmed Dana, although Rosecrans, described as “a Jesuit of the highest style of Roman piety,” was merely exhibiting his devout Catholicism. Dana, however, concluded, “If the general is crossing himself, we are in a desperate situation.”

He then saw for himself that they were indeed in deep trouble. A dense column of gray-clad troops, their bayonets glittering in the hazy sunlight, was quick-stepping toward them. The Rebel column stretched far to the southwest. Wood's division was nowhere to be seen.

Rosecrans and his staff hastily evacuated the cabin when musket balls and shells began to rain down. They rode to higher ground along the eastern flank of Missionary Ridge and halted. There, Rosecrans, who must have felt like he was reliving the first hours of Stones River, watched his right wing break apart. He sent for Sheridan, but Sheridan could not come; “affairs were too critical” for him to leave his command.
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Brigadier General Jefferson C. Davis's division and, behind it, Sheridan's third brigade, commanded by Colonel Bernard Laiboldt, were slammed backward as though struck by a flash flood. Under “terrible fire,” Sheridan recalled Lytle's and Bradley's brigades, which had begun marching to Thomas, to meet the onslaught. But the intensive gunfire unleashed by Longstreet's assault columns “shivered the two brigades to pieces.”
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Lytle, a lawyer and well-known lyric poet from Cincinnati, as well as one of the most beloved brigade commanders in the Union army, pulled on his gloves prefatory to leading a counterattack and reportedly said, “If I must die, I will die as a gentleman.” He was shot four times and killed. Confederate officers who had known Lytle before the war guarded his body; a Rebel surgeon cut a lock of Lytle's hair and sent it to his sister, along with her brother's notebook and a poem he had composed.
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BOTH SHERIDAN'S AND DAVIS'S divisions had been routed. In just forty-five minutes, Longstreet's divisions had crushed the Union right and driven it back one mile. In the hour of stunning defeat, Captain Edwin Parsons of the 24th Wisconsin saw Sheridan “come tearing down in the rear of our line, alone, his hat in hand, and showing in his face the agony he felt at the disaster that had befallen our army there.”
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As Longstreet turned his columns to strike Thomas's right and Leonidas Polk continued to hammer his front, Longstreet's left column, commanded by General Thomas Hindman, encountered the only serious resistance from the Union right.

Union colonel John T. Wilder had led his cavalry brigade to a hilltop that faced the left side of the charging column. Quickly dismounting, the Yankees opened fire on the Rebels with their Spencer repeating rifles. The lethal volley prompted Hindman's division to veer to its left and attack Wilder's brigade. With sheeting gunfire from their seven-shot carbines, Wilder's men repelled four assaults before the Rebels gave up.
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Rosecrans believed that holding the Dry Valley Road, which looped around the rear of his lines, south to north, was essential to his army's survival. It must be kept open so that the routed troops from the right and center could reach McFarland's Gap and Rossville, byways to Chattanooga.

Rosecrans ordered Sheridan and Davis to make a stand on the Dry Valley Road with their divisions. Longstreet had to be prevented from marching up the road and capturing the Union commissary wagons, or capturing Rossville and severing the way to Chattanooga.
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ON A LOW RIDGE overlooking the former positions of the army's right and center wings, Sheridan collected his stunned division. Never had he been beaten so badly. Sheridan and Davis began marching up the Dry Valley Road.

Lieutenant Colonel Gates Thruston, the XX Corps chief of staff, encountered the two generals as they marched their men around the army's rear. Sheridan, he wrote, was “furious . . . . swearing mad, and no wonder. . . . . His splendid fighting qualities and his fine soldiers had not had half a chance. He had lost faith.” Thruston offered to find out what Thomas's situation was and to report back to Sheridan and Davis as soon as possible. He rode off.
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At last free to report to Rosecrans, Sheridan discovered that he had already left the battlefield. “It is to be regretted that he did not wait till I could join him, for the delay would have permitted him to see that matters were not in quite such bad shape as he supposed,” Sheridan later wrote.

Rosecrans had joined the shattered formations making their way back to Chattanooga, where he intended to organize the city's defenses and a “straggler line” to turn back troops retreating from the battlefield. He had planned to send his chief of staff, Garfield, to Chattanooga, but Garfield had convinced Rosecrans to take charge of Chattanooga himself while Garfield went to Thomas.

Rosecrans reached Chattanooga before 4 p.m., as the fighting continued to rage on the other side of Missionary Ridge. His decision to remove himself from the
battlefield would be fatal to his military career, while Garfield, who joined Thomas, would see his star rise until, at its zenith in 1881, he became the twentieth president.
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THE PHLEGMATIC THOMAS WAS now the ranking officer on the battlefield and, in fact, the only remaining corps commander; McCook and Crittenden had followed Rosecrans to Chattanooga.

Thomas's left wing now constituted fully two-thirds of the army, but with casualties and all the Confederate forces now concentrated against him, he was outnumbered two to one. Atop Horseshoe Ridge and Snodgrass Hill, with the indispensable support of General Gordon Granger's reserve division and battery of three-inch rifles, Thomas threw back attacks by Polk from the east and Longstreet from the south. His courageous stand saved the Army of the Cumberland from destruction and Chattanooga from capture. Thomas deserved his sobriquet: “The Rock of Chickamauga.”
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Until Thruston reported to him, Thomas had been unaware of the right wing's collapse. Told by Thruston about his encounter with Davis and Sheridan on the Dry Valley Road, Thomas ordered him to have them bring all the troops they could round up. Not daring to attempt a retreat in daylight, Thomas hoped to hold out until dark.

With difficulty, Thruston made his way through the clogged roads to Sheridan and Davis. “We held a hasty conference,” Thruston wrote. “Davis ordered a right-about at once, and marched briskly to the front.” Sheridan, however, was “still without faith” and continued on to Rossville with his division.

But Sheridan intended to circle back to Thomas from Rossville, believing that Longstreet's corps lay between him and Thomas's embattled divisions on Horseshoe Ridge and Snodgrass Hill. As the day ended, 1,500 men from Sheridan's 3rd Division took positions near Thomas's left in the vicinity of the field hospital at the Cloud House. But by then, the major fighting was over, and Thomas was withdrawing. Sheridan sent his younger brother and aide, Lieutenant Michael Sheridan, to Thomas for instructions. Cover his retreat, Thomas told him.

 

OUTSIDE ROSSVILLE, SHERIDAN AND Thomas dismounted and sat together on a rail fence watching the endless lines of powder-blackened troops stride by. Both men were downhearted and exhausted; it had been a dreadful day. Neither said much.

As Sheridan rose to go, Thomas asked an aide to fetch a flask of brandy from his saddle holster, and they shared a drink before riding off to their respective commands.

Later, in Rossville, Sheridan lay down under a tree, his saddle serving as a pillow. Some soldiers brewing coffee nearby brought him a tin cup of it and a small piece of hard bread, the first food he had eaten in twenty-four hours. “I was very tired, very hungry, and much discouraged by what had taken place since morning.”

Indeed, the Army of the Cumberland had suffered a decisive defeat; more than 16,000 Union soldiers had been killed, wounded, or captured. But the Rebel victory, great though it was, had come at an even higher price: 18,400 casualties. While Chickamauga was the Confederacy's greatest victory, the cream of its Western armies lay dead on the field, and something even more precious had been lost. “The
élan
of the Southern soldier was never seen after Chickamauga,” wrote Confederate lieutenant general D. H. Hill. “That brilliant dash which had distinguished him was gone forever.”

Bragg did not resume the Confederate offensive the next day, despite the urging of Longstreet and other generals. “How can I?” he reportedly replied when Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest, after observing the disarranged Yankees from atop Missionary Ridge, exhorted him to pursue Rosecrans's army. “Here is two-fifths of my army left on the field, and my artillery without horses,” protested Bragg. Afterward, Forrest grumbled to his officers, “What does he fight battles for?” Bragg chose to besiege Chattanooga instead.
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CHICKAMAUGA WAS THE NADIR of Sheridan's career as a general. Except for Lytle's gallant counterattack, Sheridan's division had been a nullity, swept aside by Longstreet's onslaught. Sheridan failed to rally his men until after the fighting had moved beyond him, and he arrived too late to aid Thomas.

Some historians have even questioned whether Sheridan reached Cloud House, as well as whether he shared a drink with Thomas, but both events very likely occurred. Sheridan's detractors, irritated by his occasional tendency to gloss over his shortcomings and promote himself, point to his conduct at Chickamauga as evidence that he was overrated as a general.

But Sheridan's performance, even on his worst day of battle, was arguably competent. Despite losing 1,500 of his 4,000 men, Sheridan managed to gather his shattered division and, with part of it, join Thomas. While neither he nor Davis lent material assistance to Thomas, they attempted to return to the battlefield when their commanding general and corps commander did not.