Terrible Swift Sword (11 page)

Sheridan's analysis of the battle suggested there was no “well-defined plan of action in the fighting, and this led to so much independence of judgment in construing orders among some of the subordinate generals.” Too many people were issuing orders that affected the entire army, he wrote.
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Colonel Silas Miller, who succeeded Lytle as brigade commander, described the debacle more vividly: the 3rd
Division, he said, had no more chance “than a broken-backed cat in hell without claws . . . . with both flanks exposed and receiving fire from three directions.”

Sheridan was never officially criticized. Forces beyond his control had sealed his division's fate. Others were deemed negligent, incompetent, and cowardly, but Sheridan's conduct, in fact, received praise in the reports of Rosecrans, McCook, and General in Chief Henry Halleck. “After gallant but fruitless efforts against this rebel torrent,” wrote Halleck, “[Sheridan] was compelled to give way, but afterward rallied a considerable portion of his force, and by a circuitous rout, joined General Thomas.”
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The ax instead fell on the three generals who rode to Chattanooga while Thomas still fought. The eager assassin was Dana, the assistant war secretary and Stanton's eyes and ears. A prolific report writer, Dana was trained in the era's journalistic stock-in-trade of gossip, innuendo, and even slander. He had devoted months to shaping Stanton's impressions of the Army of the Cumberland.

McCook and Crittenden were sacked first. And then, on October 19, Rosecrans was relieved, based partly on Dana's increasingly acid telegrams about his conduct and his men's opinion of him, but largely on Dana's false assertion that Rosecrans intended to evacuate Chattanooga—when Rosecrans was actually trying to secure his supply line so that he could launch a new offensive. Letters by others, including Rosecrans's chief of staff, Garfield, added to the proofs against him and made his downfall inevitable. President Abraham Lincoln remarked that in the weeks after Chickamauga, Rosecrans appeared “confused and stunned, like a duck hit on the head.”

Rosecrans's dismissal was delayed because of politics. The Ohio general backed John Brough for governor of his state, and it was important to the Lincoln administration that Brough win. After Brough defeated the Copperhead peace candidate, Clement Vallandigham, Rosecrans was let go.

Falsehoods and electoral politics notwithstanding, the immutable fact remained that Rosecrans had lost the battle and left the field. In the end, it did not really matter which particular accusation brought about his downfall. Stanton, who despised him, wrote that while McCook and Crittenden “made pretty good time away from the fight, Rosecrans beat them both.”
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Rosecrans's successor was Major General Ulysses Grant, who had become a national hero after capturing Vicksburg and thereby severing Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas from the rest of the Confederacy. Grant was given broader authority than Rosecrans—command of the Armies of the Cumberland, the Ohio, and the Tennessee under a new Military Division of the Mississippi. Grant now oversaw all Union forces between the Allegheny Mountains and the Mississippi River.

Given the choice of retaining Rosecrans as commander of the Army of the Cumberland or naming Thomas to the position, Grant selected Thomas. Rosecrans was sent to his last command, the Department of the Missouri.

Ambrose Burnside remained commander of the Army of the Ohio, and William Tecumseh Sherman was appointed to command the Army of the Tennessee. The experiment in unified command would inspire subsequent army reorganizations.
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TRADITION HAS IT THAT Chattanooga's name derives from an Indian word. It might have been Creek for “rock rising to a point,” or it could have come from “Choctaw-nooga,” for the Choctaws living along the river,
nooga
being the word for town. Or it might mean “mountains looking at each other.” All of these names are apt. Lookout Mountain, the dominant topographical feature, rises 2,300 feet to a point. In fact, mountains surround the city, which lies at the meeting point of the Cumberland Plateau and Appalachian Mountains. The Tennessee River is the town's other principal aspect.
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Following their victory at Chickamauga, the Rebels seized the important high ground overlooking the city: Lookout Mountain; Missionary Ridge, rising three hundred feet to the east and seven miles long; and Raccoon Mountain to the west. Long-range cannons were hauled to the summits of these prominences to fire down upon the Yankee camps around Chattanooga. Confederate rifle pits girdled Missionary Ridge, and Lookout Mountain became a fortress.

The Yankees threw up earthworks in the valley. In some places, their pickets were no more than three hundred yards from the Rebel pickets—so close that the army bands dueled with renditions of “Dixie” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” But the Union army, still reeling from its defeat, was unmistakably in a bad spot.

In addition, there was the daunting problem of supplying the army over a rutted, nearly impassable, sixty-mile nightmare of a road from the depot at Bridgeport, Alabama. The road was muddier, four times longer, and ten times more difficult to traverse than the four other potential routes. But land features shielded the road from Rebel artillery fire, while the others were vulnerable to shelling. Even so, Rebels hiding in the coves and valleys along the way ambushed the supply trains with depressing regularity, while the siege guns pounded the city from the mountains, and Rebel sharpshooters picked off Union soldiers. The Army of the Cumberland was soon on half rations.

Drought and the Union army's enormous requirements reduced the scruffy little river city to a wasteland. The trees were cut for fuel and fortifications, and on the branches of the few left standing, the leaves were curled and brown. Dust covered everything; wind moaning through the mountain gaps kicked up blinding dust
storms. The crackling gray grass was useless as forage, and so the supply trains had to haul animal feed too. When it finally rained in October, the supply wagons foundered in axle-deep mud, and the soldiers splashed to and from their flooded campsites.
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SHERIDAN MADE HIS HEADQUARTERS on the farm of William Crutchfield, a loyal Unionist who reputedly had a fistfight with Jefferson Davis over secession before the war. At first, Sheridan and his men's nerves “were often upset by the whirring of twenty-pounder shells dropped inconsiderately into our camp at untimely hours of the night” from nearby Lookout Mountain. But the shelling caused so few casualties that Sheridan's men soon “responded by jeers and imprecation” whenever a shell landed in the camp. The two armies were so close to one another that the Rebels watched the Yankees turn out for reveille and eat their meager fare, while the Union soldiers studied the Rebel defenses and even spied on Bragg's headquarters on Missionary Ridge.
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The food shortage inspired Sheridan, the former commissary officer, to improvise. A company of the 2nd Kentucky Cavalry had attached itself to Sheridan's division without orders, and its commander volunteered for any duty that Sheridan might assign him. Sheridan sent the cavalrymen, guided by his scout and intelligence agent, James Card, to the Sequatchie Valley outside Chattanooga to obtain supplies. By hiding in a cove at the valley's upper end and paying generously for everything, in a few days they had acquired plenty of food and forage, supplementing the scanty rations reaching the division from Bridgeport. “In this way I carried men and animals through our beleaguerment [
sic
] in pretty fair condition,” Sheridan wrote. His officers were so amply supplied, in fact, that they shared their fowl and eggs with other officers' messes.
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Still, the siege wore on everyone. Three soldiers who deserted Sheridan's command and headed north were caught, tried, and condemned to death. Sheridan assembled the entire division for the firing squad execution “to make the example effective,” he wrote. “It was the saddest spectacle I every witnessed, but there could be no evasion.”
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On October 23, Grant arrived in Chattanooga on crutches to command the armies of the West. Two weeks earlier in New Orleans, he had dislocated his hip and suffered a head injury when his horse bolted and collided with a carriage during a review prior to his departure for Tennessee (his detractors, with no evidence, whispered that Grant was drunk). At Bridgeport, Rosecrans, on his way out, met with Grant and described a plan made by him and Brigadier General W. F. “Baldy” Smith to open a new supply line between Bridgeport and Chattanooga that would be half the length of the current sixty-mile route, yet safe too. Grant made the plan his.

The daring operation involved more than 14,000 troops from Chattanooga and Bridgeport. Under the Rebel guns on Raccoon and Lookout Mountains, three converging forces—one floating down the river under the brow of Raccoon Mountain—seized Brown's Ferry before dawn on October 27. The troops built pontoon bridges, drove off the Rebels along Raccoon Mountain, and opened a second crossing later in the day at Kelley's Ferry on the west side of the mountain.

The plan worked flawlessly. Three days later, a steamboat reached Kelley's Ferry with 40,000 rations. The new supply route, which crossed the Tennessee River in three places, ended food rationing in Chattanooga. It was christened the “Cracker Line” in recognition of troops' staple food, hardtack crackers.
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AS SUPPLIES NOW POURED into Chattanooga, Major General Joseph Hooker arrived at Bridgeport at the head of 20,000 men from the Army of the Potomac. In mid-November, Major General William Tecumseh Sherman joined Hooker with four divisions, more than 16,000 men, from Mississippi—the core of his new Army of the Tennessee. With the reinforcements, Union forces surpassed 80,000 men. Those who knew Grant were certain they would see action soon.
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While Grant's army grew, Bragg's shrank from a peak of 70,000 to about 50,000. Longstreet had left Chattanooga with his I Corps and General Joe Wheeler's cavalry division to drive Major General Ambrose Burnside's army out of Knoxville.

Longstreet and Bragg had been at swords' points since Chickamauga over how to proceed against the Yankees in Chattanooga—Longstreet wanting to take the offensive, Bragg preferring to starve them out. In late October, Confederate president Jefferson Davis visited the army, ostensibly to reconcile the two commanders. Dissatisfaction was also endemic among Bragg's subordinate officers, who were fed up with his habit of squandering hard-fought victories.

It is puzzling that Davis sent Longstreet to Knoxville, weakening Bragg's force at Chattanooga, just as the Union army was adding tens of thousands of troops. Davis might have done it to separate Longstreet and Bragg, or to prevent Burnside from reinforcing Grant, or possibly to win a double victory. Whatever the reason, when Grant learned that Longstreet had gone, he prepared to go on the offensive. In his
Personal Memoirs
, Grant observed that President Davis “had an exalted opinion of his own military genius,” sarcastically adding, “On several occasions during the war he came to the relief of the Union army by means of his
superior military genius
.”
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NOVEMBER 25, 1863–MISSIONARY RIDGE—Thirteen Union divisions numbering about 75,000 troops were either already in motion or poised to assault the towering heights to the south and east of Chattanooga. Arrayed against them were
Braxton Bragg's seven remaining Rebel divisions, with about 43,000 effectives. This was the day that Grant had ordained for ending the siege of the city.

Sheridan's and Wood's divisions were dug in on Orchard Knob, which they had stormed two days earlier. Before them, rising up from the valley floor, was the long silhouette of Missionary Ridge. Sunshine winked off the muskets and cannons of the Rebels in rifle pits at the ridge's base. Between it and the crest was another line of rifle pits, up a steep slope littered with boulders and fallen timber. Atop the ridge were more enemy troops, with cannons that intermittently shelled the two divisions.

The troops on Orchard Knob had been idle all day, as had the Rebel infantrymen on the heights facing them. However, Bragg's headquarters at the Thurman house, directly opposite them on the ridge crest, had been a hive of activity.

Early on November 23, a Confederate deserter had been brought before Sheridan with startling news: Bragg was preparing to fall back into Georgia. This information and other intelligence reaching Union headquarters convinced Grant that he must attack and defeat the Confederates surrounding Chattanooga without delay—before they slipped away to the south.

At 11 a.m. on November 23, Grant ordered Thomas to drive in the Rebel pickets and test the enemy lines to see if they were still held in force. Thomas instructed Major General Gordon Granger to ready his two IV Corps divisions for action. Wood's division would lead the assault, with Sheridan's division supporting it. The objective, Orchard Knob, was a small, lightly timbered hill that jutted one hundred feet above the Chattanooga Valley.

At 1:30 p.m., Grant, Thomas, Granger, Hooker, Assistant War Secretary Charles Dana, and other dignitaries watched from Fort Wood as Sheridan's and Wood's 10,000 men began their steady advance on Orchard Knob. “Flags were flying; the quick earnest steps of thousands beat equal time,” wrote Granger's chief of staff, Brigadier General Joseph S. Fullerton. Drums rat-a-tatted, bugles sounded, and officers shouted commands. Ten thousand bayonets flashed like “a flying shower of electric sparks,” noted Fullerton.

The Rebels on Orchard Knob left their gun pits to watch the spectacle, believing it was a grand review. When, minutes later, it dawned on them that the Union troops were in fact attacking, they scrambled back to their positions and began firing. After a sharp, short struggle, Sheridan's and Wood's men seized Orchard Knob and an adjacent hill.
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