This Hallowed Ground (50 page)

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.
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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.”
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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?”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.

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.
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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.
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