Chattanooga
The spectacle was grand beyond anything that has been, or is likely to be, on this Continent. It is the first battle field I have ever seen where a plan could be followed and from one place the whole field be within one view.
When news of the fall of Vicksburg finally reached Washington on July 7, The New York Times titled its front-page story “The Hero of the Mississippi Valley” and extolled Grant’s “brilliant exploits.” Confederates, hearing of the fall of Vicksburg, surrendered Port Hudson to Nathaniel Banks on July 9, completing the opening of the Mississippi River.
Grant, by now used to the fickleness of the press, better appreciated the approval of those who knew him best. Sherman wrote on July 4, “Did I not know the honesty, modesty, and purity of your nature, I would be tempted to follow the example of my standard enemies of the press in indulging in wanton flattery.” Hard-nosed Cump stressed that “the delicacy with which you have treated a brave but deluded enemy is more eloquent than the most gorgeous oratory of an Everett.” Halleck, a student of military history, compared Grant with the greatest general of the age: “In boldness of plan, rapidity of execution, and brilliancy of results, these operations compare most favorably with those of Napoleon about Ulm.”*
IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE Vicksburg surrender, Grant started thinking in the future tense. While busy sorting out paroles, he informed Stanton that he had “no idea of going into summer quarters”—even with sweltering heat and widespread sickness among his troops—but wished to receive “as soon as practicable either general or specific instructions as to the future conduct of the war in his department.”
When paroled Confederate soldiers prepared to leave Vicksburg, they assumed they would take their slaves with them. Grant punched a hole in this presumption. In his instructions to McPherson, whom he entrusted with superintending Vicksburg, he declared, “I want the negroes all to understand that they are free men.”
What did Grant’s promise of freedom for slaves mean in the summer of 1863? He conveyed a nuanced message. On the one hand, “No enlistments of the negroes captured at Vicksburg will be allowed for the present.” On the other hand, “If they are then anxious to go with their masters I do not see the necessity of preventing it.” Finally, thinking beyond Vicksburg, “Some going might benefit our cause by spreading disaffection among the negroes at a distance by telling that the Yankees set them all free.”
Grant sent Chaplain John Eaton to Washington to brief the president and Stanton on what he was doing with liberated slaves. He assured them he was on board with emancipation. In a letter introducing Eaton, Grant reported, “Negroes were coming into our lines in great numbers,” but they were “receiving kind or abusive treatment according to the peculiar views of the troops they first came into contact with.”
Eaton reported back to Grant that Lincoln “had a map of your operations on a tripod” in his office. In a second interview, Eaton related that Lincoln was “well disposed towards you.” Grant had given Eaton the title “General Superintendent for Contrabands,” but Eaton wanted Grant to know “the President would prefer these people should be called freed-men or freed people”—a more positive designation.
JOHN MCCLERNAND REMAINED the problem that would not go away. The political general sent Lincoln a telegram on June 23, pleading to present his side of the story. In the coming months, the president would hear more from McClernand than he wanted, including his report on the Vicksburg Campaign.
When Grant reviewed McClernand’s report, he could not believe what he read. He wrote Lorenzo Thomas, “It is pretentious and egotistical.” Seething, he added, “This report contains so many inaccuracies that to correct it, to make it a fair report to be handed down as historical would require the rewriting of most of it.”
Grant decided the best defense required a thoughtful offense. He informed Lincoln he intended to send John Rawlins to Washington as his personal representative. Officially, the chief of staff went east to hand-deliver Grant’s lengthy official report; unofficially, he went to sniff out the results of McClernand’s public relations campaign and tell Grant’s side of the story.
Upon his arrival on July 30, Rawlins wasted no time in learning the lay of the land. He wrote, “Have just seen Genl Brains & Col Kelton. It is worth a trip here to see how delighted they are over your successes.” Despite a vigorous campaign being waged by the Illinois political general, “they have finally concluded to hand McClernand out to grass.”
The next day, Lincoln granted Rawlins two hours to present Grant’s report to his cabinet. After the meeting, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles confided to his diary, “This earnest and sincere man, patriot, and soldier pleased me more than…almost any officer whom I have met.” As for McClernand, “Rawlins has been sent here by Grant in order to enlist the President rather than bring dispatches. In this I think he has succeeded.”
AFTER VICKSBURG, LINCOLN considered bringing Grant east to assume command of the Army of the Potomac. This sentiment gained ground because of Grant’s growing popularity and Lincoln’s frustration with George Meade for allowing Lee to escape back into Virginia after Gettysburg. Aware of attempts to draft him, Grant wrote Charles Dana on August 5, “It would cause me more sadness than satisfaction to be ordered to the command of the Army of the Potomac.” He explained, “Here I know the officers and men and what each Gen. is capable of as a separate commander. There I would have all to learn. Here I know the geography of the country, and its resources. There it would be a new study.” What Grant did not say, but what he knew through army scuttlebutt, was that the Army of the Potomac was rife with cliques and contentions. He believed there would be dissatisfaction in “importing a General to command an Army already well supplied with those who have grown up, and promoted, with it.”
When Massachusetts senator Henry Wilson learned of the move to bring Grant east, he wrote Washburne to remonstrate against it—but for a different reason. Wilson expressed apprehension that if Grant “should take the Potomac army…he would be ruined by a set of men in and out of that army.” He worried that the eastern army, beginning with McClellan and the men he had recruited as division commanders, some of whom remained after his dismissal, were Democrats soft on slavery. Wilson had heard from Dana that Grant was “modest, true, firm, honest and full of capacity for war,” but he was not certain of Grant’s position on slavery.
Washburne wrote Grant and enclosed Wilson’s letter. Grant replied, “I never was an Abolitionist, not even what could be called anti-slavery, but I try to judge fairly & honestly and it became patent to my mind early in the rebellion that the North & South could never live at peace with each other except as one nation, and that without Slavery.” For the future, “As anxious as I am to see peace reestablished I would not therefore be willing to see any settlement until this question is forever settled.” Grant’s words revealed the distance he had traveled on the issue of slavery—all because of his experiences in the Civil War.
IN THE SUMMER of 1863, Grant faced myriad problems similar to those he’d experienced in the summer of 1862. Following his victory at Vicksburg, a tactical achievement made possible by concentrating his troops, Grant received orders from Halleck to disperse his army and detach divisions to support other operations. It was Shiloh all over again.
In August, he wrote Halleck requesting permission to visit Nathaniel Banks in New Orleans. Mobile, Alabama, the final Confederate deepwater port on the Gulf coast, was on his mind. He hoped to enlist Banks’s support for an attack there. On September 2, he arrived in the city from which he had sailed eighteen years earlier with an expeditionary force bound for Mexico. Banks hosted an event for the guest of honor that evening at the elegant St. Charles Hotel.
Two days later, Grant rode up to nearby Carrollton to lead a review. In recognition of Grant’s riding ability, Banks provided him with a huge bay horse. After a postparade party replete with plenty of wine, Grant, Banks, and their party mounted their horses for the four-mile ride back into downtown New Orleans. Grant gave his spirited horse his head, letting him run. But when a train approached and the locomotive blew its whistle, the horse shied in fear and fell on his rider—his full weight smashing Grant’s left leg. As Grant lay unconscious, one onlooker remarked, “We thought he was dead.”
Grant was carried back to the St. Charles Hotel, his entire left side swollen and throbbing. He remembered, “The pain was almost beyond endurance.” He had broken no bones but was barely able to move and lay immobilized in his hotel room for more than a week. He kept his customary good humor and told visitors his horse wanted to run through the train’s coach car but lost, “being the weaker vessel.”
Bedridden, Grant read. He particularly enjoyed Phoenixiana, a compilation of humorous sketches written by his West Point classmate George Derby. Some of Derby’s stories mimicked the style of Charles Lever, one of the novelists who had delighted Grant at West Point. Flat on his back, Grant tried not to laugh too hard as Dr. Phoenixiana poked fun at the pretenses of political and military leaders.
Grant’s horse had slipped and fallen on him in the dark at Shiloh, but the accident at New Orleans played into the hands of those determined to revive stories of his drinking. Banks, who did not know Grant well but had heard the stories, wrote his wife, Mary, “I am frightened when I think he is a drunkard. His accident was caused by this, which was manifest to all who saw him.”
But the “all” included General Cadwallader Washburn, who wrote nothing of drinking when reporting to brother Elihu, “After the review was over and Grant was returning to the city, his horse fell with him and injured him severely.” Grant may have been drinking, may have drunk too much, but he did not fall off the horse; the horse shied and fell on him.
LINCOLN’S APPRECIATION OF Grant was growing so strong that in the summer of 1863, already thinking ahead to the end of the war, he asked Halleck to solicit Grant’s views about his hope to organize a civil government in Mississippi. When Grant had not replied by the end of August (he was not used to thinking about civil governments), Halleck wrote Sherman with a similar request.
Sherman objected strongly: “A civil government for any part of it would be simply ridiculous.” He saw no possibility of putting in place a government until the South was thoroughly defeated.
Two days after Sherman sent him a copy of his letter, Grant wrote Halleck. He read the situation quite differently. Whereas Sherman had clearly become an apostle of a hard war, Grant sensed that “a very fine feeling exist[ed] in the State of Louisiana, and in most parts of this State, towards the Union.” The army should let it be known that by accepting terms to end hostilities, any Southern state “could receive the protection of our laws.” Rather than a hard-line approach that would subjugate and humiliate half the nation, Grant was thinking about how to bring people together.
GRANT RECOVERED FROM his injury in September 1863, just as the war in the west took an ominous turn. Throughout the summer, Lincoln had become disheartened by the slow progress of another army in the west, William Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland. Rosecrans, praised for what actually amounted to an inconclusive victory at Stones River, Tennessee, in January 1863, had then stopped at Murfreesboro, thirty-three miles southeast of Nashville. After six months of unremitting pressure from Lincoln and Stanton to move, on June 23 Rosecrans at last started to drive Bragg’s Army of Tennessee one hundred miles over the Cumberland Mountains to the edge of Chattanooga. There Rosecrans halted again.
On July 7, Stanton, delighted by news of victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, wrote Rosecrans, “You and your noble army now have the chance to give the finishing blow to the rebellion. Will you neglect the chance?” Irritated, Rosecrans shot back that his army’s achievements were not fully recognized: “You do not appear to observe the fact that this noble army has driven the rebels from Middle Tennessee.” He advised Stanton, do “not overlook so great an event because it is not written in letters of blood.” Rosecrans did not name Grant, but his criticism was clear: Grant had sacrificed too many men in attaining victory at Vicksburg.
Rosecrans finally marched on Chattanooga on August 16, forcing Bragg’s Confederate Army of Tennessee to withdraw on September 9. On September 11, Charles Dana arrived at Rosecrans’s headquarters with the same mandate he had brought to Grant’s headquarters the previous year—to be Stanton’s eyes and ears. Unlike Grant, who had given Dana a warm welcome, Rosecrans’s staff treated him like “a bird of evil-omen.”
When Dana took up his reportorial pen, his initial accounts were positive. Handsome, with wavy brown hair and blue eyes, Rosecrans made an admirable first impression. On September 14, Dana optimistically wired Stanton, “Everything progresses favorably.”
Moving south into the hill country of northwest Georgia, Rosecrans believed he had Bragg on the run. But the wily Confederate made a tactical retreat, waiting to fight another day at a location of his choosing. Bragg also expected reinforcements, including two divisions of James Longstreet’s Army of Northern Virginia corps.
On September 19 and 20, Bragg hurled his troops at Rosecrans’s forces in a surprise attack at Chickamauga Creek, fifteen miles southeast of Chattanooga. On the second day, in thickly wooded terrain, fifteen thousand troops charged through a gap on Rosecrans’s right. It was a confused and ferocious battle, and Longstreet’s divisions led a drive that forced most of Rosecrans’s forces from the field.
While Rosecrans retreated back toward Chattanooga, George Thomas rallied his men from the Snodgrass farm and Horseshoe Ridge. Rousing confidence with his courage, he mounted a spirited defense and blocked the advance of the gray-clad forces. For his steadfastness, Thomas won the nickname “the Rock of Chickamauga.”
Shortly after four P.M. on September 20, Washington learned of the result of the battle through Dana’s memorable words: “Chickamauga is as fatal a name in our history as Bull Run.” He sent his message to Stanton by secret code, but the telegraph operator in Nashville deciphered the content of the telegram, and before nightfall the singing wires of telegraphy had spread Dana’s damning story for the whole country to read.
ON OCTOBER 9, Grant received orders from Halleck to report to Cairo, Illinois. When he arrived on October 16, he found another telegram from the general in chief: “You will immediately proceed to the Galt House, Louisville, Ky, where you will meet an officer of the War Department with your orders and instructions.” Furthermore, “You will take with you your staff…for immediate operations in the field.” Halleck, it seemed, was back to the same controlling behavior he had enjoyed at Memphis in 1862, ordering Grant to report without telling him what his new assignment would be.
The next morning, Grant’s train stopped in Indianapolis; as it was about to start up again, a station worker frantically flagged down the engineer, telling him to wait for a special train just arriving from Washington with a government official from the War Department. At last, the mysterious official bounded onto the Louisville train and burst into Grant’s compartment. A bearded gentleman, wheezing from asthma, introduced himself as Edwin M. Stanton, secretary of war, and vigorously shook hands with Grant’s personal physician, Dr. Edward Kittoe of Galena, saying he recognized him as General Grant from his pictures.
As the train rolled toward Louisville and Rawlins straightened out who was who, Stanton handed Grant two sets of orders, “saying that I might make my choice of them.” Both created the Military Division of the Mississippi out of the old Departments of the Ohio, Cumberland, and Tennessee—all the territory from the Allegheny Mountains to the Mississippi River except for Nathaniel Banks’s Department of the Gulf. Lincoln had decided to unite three commands under his best general. He chose Grant.
Lincoln gave Grant full authority to organize his department as he wished. He could either keep Rosecrans or replace him with Thomas. Probably remembering his difficulties with Rosecrans at Corinth and Iuka in 1862, Grant chose Thomas.
Grant understood that the hinge in the battle for the west was now shifting from Vicksburg to Chattanooga. If Vicksburg had been the key to controlling the Mississippi, whoever held sway over Chattanooga, located at the juncture of Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia, could open the back door both to Georgia and to Virginia. Chattanooga, nestled in a valley between the Appalachian and Cumberland mountain ranges, a rail hub for three railroads, now became, after Richmond and Atlanta, the prize for Union forces in the fall of 1863.
ON MONDAY, OCTOBER 19, a gorgeous Indian summer day, Rosecrans returned to his headquarters to find a surprise. A telegram from Washington informed him he had been relieved of command. Stunned, he sent for Thomas and handed him the order. Thomas, indignant on behalf of his friend, protested that he would not accept the command. They talked and talked, Thomas finally agreeing.
At eleven thirty P.M., Grant’s telegram arrived: “Hold Chattanooga at all hazards.” He also wrote, “Please inform me how long your present supplies will last and the prospect for keeping them up.” Thomas replied he had five days of rations on hand, with two more days’ worth due by wagon train. A man of few words, Thomas declared, “I will hold the town till we Starve.”
GRANT STARTED FOR Chattanooga. Stopping overnight in Nashville, he listened to a long speech by Andrew Johnson, senator from Tennessee and now military governor of the state. Although there was no expectation of a word from Grant, he recalled, “I was in torture while he was delivering it, fearing something would be expected from me in response.”
When Grant’s train groaned into Stevenson, Alabama, the next evening, General Oliver O. Howard came aboard to pay his respects. Having prepared himself to meet “the successful commander in important battles,” the thirty-two-year-old with the dignified manner was taken by “surprise when I saw him.” A career U.S. Army officer who had lost an arm at Fair Oaks in the Virginia Peninsula Campaign of 1862, Howard admitted that he had expected the famous general “to be of very large size and rough appearance.” Instead, he found Grant to be “rather thin in flesh and very pale in complexion…noticeably self-contained and retiring.”
In the course of their brief conversation, Howard—now serving under Joe Hooker, who until June had been commander of the Army of the Potomac—remarked that “it was hard for an officer to pass from a higher command to a lower.” Grant countered, “I do not think so, Howard; a major-general is entitled to an army division and no more.” Howard never forgot what Grant said next: “Why, I believe I should be flying in the face of Providence to seek a command higher than that entrusted to me.”
Another visitor, Rosecrans, on his way north, entered into awkward conversation with Grant. In Grant’s recollection, Rosecrans “described very clearly the situation at Chattanooga, and made some excellent suggestions as to what should be done. My only wonder was that he had not carried them out.”
FIVE ROUTES, FOUR short and one long, connected Bridgeport and Chattanooga; but the four short routes—railroad, river, and two roads—were now disconnected. Only the long route remained barely open: a sixty-mile exercise in endurance.
At sunrise on October 22, because of Grant’s continuing lameness, Rawlins lifted him into the saddle “as if he had been a child.” Grant trudged along a wagon road in the valley of the Tennessee River and then into the Sequatchie Valley, where drenching rain turned the road into such a quagmire that the horses struggled with mud up to their bellies. The road was strewn with the remains of wagons and the carcasses of hundreds of starved mules and horses. Old Jack, Grant’s claybank horse, fell, painfully jamming his master’s injured leg. On the second day, Grant’s party traversed Walden’s Ridge before finally crossing a pontoon bridge into Chattanooga.
For Grant, walking bone-weary into Thomas’s unadorned wooden headquarters on Walnut Street near Fourth, the roaring open fire in the front room could not mitigate the chill in the air. This was the headquarters of Rosecrans’s friend. People often compared the massive Thomas with George Washington. He had the build of a Jove-like marble sculpture. But to those close to him, he was “Old Pap Thomas,” a father figure they would follow anywhere.
Grant’s aide James Wilson entered minutes later to find his boss sitting on one side of the fireplace, a puddle of water forming from his wet clothing, and Thomas sitting on the other side. Wilson spoke up. “General Thomas, General Grant is wet and tired and ought to have some dry clothes….He is hungry, besides, and needs something to eat.” He knew Grant would never ask for these things. The nature of the feelings at this first meeting has engaged Grant and Thomas partisans ever since. Did Wilson observe rancor or reserve in the silence between the two generals?
Grant admired the courage of George Thomas—known as “the Rock of Chickamauga”—but was often frustrated by his tentativeness, captured in his second nickname: “Old Slow-Trot.”
During the evening, officers stopped by to converse about conditions in and around Chattanooga. Grant, although weary, lit up the conversation with a bombardment of questions. He immediately impressed General William Farrar Smith, called “Baldy” Smith to distinguish him from so many Smiths in the army. Now chief engineer of the Army of the Cumberland, Smith had fallen from presidential favor when he criticized Burnside and Hooker after Fredericksburg. Grant remembered that Smith “explained the situation of the two armies and the topography of the country so plainly that I could see it without an inspection.”
ANOTHER OFFICER DRAWN to Grant that evening was Captain Horace Porter. After graduating third from West Point in 1860, he had served briefly on McClellan’s staff before his assignment to Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland. Expecting to meet a large swashbuckler, Porter, like so many others, was surprised instead to encounter “a man of slim figure, slightly stooped, five feet eight inches in height, weighing only a hundred and thirty-five pounds, and of a modesty of mien and gentleness of manner which seemed to fit him more for the court than for the camp.” On that dreary evening, Porter perceptively observed, “So intelligent were his inquiries, and so pertinent his suggestions, that he made a profound impression upon everyone by the quickness of his perception and the knowledge which he had already acquired regarding important details of the army’s condition.” Porter comprehended that “his questions showed from the outset that his mind was dwelling not only upon the prompt opening of a line of supplies, but upon taking the offensive against the enemy.”
FIRST THINGS FIRST. With the Union army surrounded by the enemy, the next morning, Grant, Thomas, and Smith set out to find a way to break the stranglehold by opening up a supply line—what Grant would call “opening up the cracker line,” because it would bring in the essential military ration: hardtack.
Geography meant everything. The city snuggled in the four-mile-wide Chattanooga Valley, bounded by the snaking Tennessee River and grand mountains—Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain. Although it was only three hundred feet high, Missionary Ridge’s steep slopes gave dug-in defenders an enormous advantage against attackers. Standing within the city and looking to the right, one saw Lookout Mountain toward the southern end of the Cumberland Plateau. Whoever controlled twelve-hundred-feet-high Lookout Mountain controlled the major routes into Chattanooga.
Always a quick study with geography, Grant rode to where Smith pointed to an old wagon road starting west of the river and running to Brown’s Ferry. Because a forest of trees obscured Brown’s Ferry from prying Confederate eyes, Smith suggested that a pontoon bridge built across the river would open a more direct supply route to Bridgeport, Alabama. Grant dismounted from Old Jack and limped to the river for closer inspection. Directly across the Tennessee River, curious Confederate pickets watched. The pickets did not seem to be concerned with the presence of the three Union officers. Grant recalled later, “I suppose, they looked upon the garrison of Chattanooga as prisoners of war…and thought it would be inhuman to kill any of them except in self-defense.”
Impressed, Grant accepted Smith’s plan. Although Smith was only a staff officer, Grant empowered the outspoken engineer to mastermind the operation.
At three A.M. on October 27, William Hazen’s and John Turchin’s brigades began sliding nine miles down the Tennessee in pontoon boats, seven of the miles passing enemy-held positions. Under a full moon, with Confederate picket fires close by, another brigade slipped along the road Grant had used earlier, bringing heavy weapons with bridge-building supplies. Both groups reached Brown’s Ferry with rebels firing only a few wild shots. Once the pontoon bridge was completed, the cracker line opened.
HAVING BROKEN THE Confederate siege within five days of arriving in Chattanooga, Grant formulated plans to take the offensive. He was feeling stronger, he assured Julia, and believed that all the hard riding of recent days, “instead of making my injury worse has almost entirely cured me. I now walk without the use of a crutch or cane and mount my horse from the ground without difficulty.”
He saw how opening the permanent supply line changed morale. “It is hard for anyone not an eye-witness to realize the relief this brought,” he recalled. Soon full rations were enjoyed; new vegetables, clothing, and ammunition meant “cheerfulness prevailed not before enjoyed in many weeks.”
With reduced tension, Grant’s aide Wilson watched a scene “very amusing to me” at Grant’s headquarters, a two-story brick house. On a rainy afternoon, Wilson listened to Generals Grant, Thomas, Smith, John Reynolds, Gordon Granger, and Thomas Wood: “While cracking jokes and telling stories of cadet and army life, it was pleasant to hear them calling each other by their nicknames.” Reynolds called Grant “Sam”; Grant called him “Jo”; they spoke of Thomas as “old Tom” and of Sherman as “Cump.” But of more importance was the tone set by Grant that fostered the ability of these strong-willed generals to get along.
WITH THE SUPPLY line open, Grant—who carried responsibility for the whole department, not just Chattanooga—turned his attention to Ambrose Burnside, who had suffered such a humiliating defeat at Fredericksburg and now led the Army of the Ohio. Burnside’s army officially listed fifteen thousand infantry and eighty-six hundred cavalry, but his effective strength was actually much lower and strung out across East Tennessee. Grant recognized that “Burnside was in about as desperate a condition as the Army of the Cumberland had been.” Recent newspaper reporting had focused on “Burnside the Incapable,” yet Grant approached his relationship with Burnside without prejudgment. Burnside’s staff, in turn, welcomed Grant’s courteous manner.
Grant wrote Burnside, “Have you indications of a force coming from Lee’s Army…towards you?” He added for reassurance, “If you are threatened with a force beyond what you can compete with, efforts must be made to assist you.”
On November 6, Grant learned from a deserter that two days earlier his old friend Longstreet had left the Chattanooga front with fifteen thousand troops, headed toward Burnside. Believing he must do something to relieve pressure on Burnside, and recognizing that with Longstreet’s movements Bragg’s force had been depleted by more than a quarter, Grant made plans to attack. He wrote Burnside, “I will endeavor from here to bring the enemy back from your right flank as soon as possible.” To build up his force, he wrote Sherman to stop repairing and guarding the railroad and hurry to Chattanooga.
On November 7, Grant wrote Thomas, “I deem the best movement to attract the enemy to be an attack on the Northern end of Missionary Ridge, with all the force you can bring to bear against it.” Emphasizing urgency, he ordered the attack “should not be made one moment later than tomorrow morning.” Despite the forcefulness of his order, however, Grant embraced a command structure affirming autonomy. “You have been over this country,” he added, “and having had a better opportunity of studying it than myself, the details are left to you.”
Thomas, concerned his beaten-up army was still not prepared for a full-scale attack, sent for “Baldy” Smith. “If I attempt to carry out the order I have received,” he told him, “my army will be terribly beaten.” Then, recognizing that Grant was particularly receptive to Smith’s ideas, Thomas urged, “You must go and get the order revoked.”
Obliging, Smith told Grant he was of the opinion that no movement should be made until the coming of Sherman’s army.
That evening, even though he believed speed was paramount in relieving Burnside, Grant revoked his order. “Thomas will not be able to make the attack of which I telegraphed you, until Sherman gets up,” he informed Burnside, then wrote Halleck, “It has been impossible for Thomas to make the movement directed by me for Burnside’s relief.”
Was Grant disgruntled with Thomas? Certainly, Thomas’s response had undermined Grant’s confidence in him. At the same time, however, he trusted Smith’s analysis as an engineer. And he knew Sherman was now only a week away. Unused to waiting, Grant reluctantly decided to wait.
GRANT REVEALED HIS sense of the moment to Julia: “Things will culminate here within ten days in great advantage with one or other parties.” He assured her, “With all this I lose no sleep, except I do not get to bed before 12 or 1 o’clock at night, and find no occasion to swear or fret.”
If Grant did not lose sleep, Washington did. Halleck found himself criticized by Secretary of the Navy Welles and Secretary of the Treasury Chase, the latter, formerly his supporter, now charging Halleck “was good for nothing, and everybody knew it but the President.” Halleck sought to get out from underneath these criticisms by pressuring Grant to light a fire under Burnside, his disgraced general. He implored, “I fear he will not fight, although strongly urged to do so. Unless you can give him immediate assistance, he will surrender his position to the enemy.”
Grant lit the fire in his own way. Burnside now began receiving telegrams from Grant that, although filled with suggestions of strategy, concluded with a steady refrain: “Your being upon the spot and knowing the ground must be left to your own discretion,” and, “Being there you can tell better how to resist Longstreet’s attack than I can direct.” Grant urged, “I do not know how to impress you the necessity of holding on to East Tennessee,” then followed this admonition two days later by affirming, “So far you are doing exactly what appears to me right.” Gun-shy from criticisms heaped upon him after the Fredericksburg debacle, Burnside rested secure in a commanding general for the first time in more than a year.
Sherman reached Bridgeport on the evening of November 13, most of his four divisions stretching several days behind him. They had trekked more than six hundred hard miles from Vicksburg across northern Mississippi and Alabama. On November 15, Sherman hurried to Chattanooga. Oliver Howard, meeting Sherman for the first time, recalled how he “came bounding” into Grant’s headquarters. He noticed Grant’s “bearing toward Sherman differed from that with other officers, being free, affectionate, and good-humored.” Sherman talked and talked, not bothering to sit down until Grant interjected, “Take the chair of honor, Sherman.”
“The chair of honor? Oh, no! That belongs to you, general.”
Not dissuaded, “I don’t forget, Sherman, to give proper respect to age.”
“Well, then, if you put it on that ground, I must accept.”
Howard enjoyed how Grant seemed to relax now that Sherman had finally arrived. Smoking one cigar after another, the two friends talked into the evening.
ON THE OTHER end of the spectrum, for all Braxton Bragg’s abilities, his efforts continually suffered from a headstrong style that resulted in bickering among his staff. Even though the Confederate Army of Tennessee had won its greatest victory at Chickamauga, his generals faulted him for not destroying Rosecrans’s army. The arrival of Longstreet, openly critical of Bragg, whom he compared unfavorably with Lee, exacerbated tensions. Longstreet advocated an offensive, whereas Bragg preferred starving the Union army into surrender.
In the midst of this discontent, Jefferson Davis traveled to Chattanooga to meet with Bragg and his generals. In the end, Bragg’s tenure was maintained by the only voter who mattered—the president of the Confederacy. Sensing that Longstreet had become the leader of the anti-Bragg faction, Davis ordered Bragg to send the rebellious general to recapture Knoxville.
By contrast, Grant’s command functioned with more cohesion and therefore effectiveness. Grant had several habits going for him that Bragg did not. He listened; he asked questions; he did not attempt to micromanage; he seldom engaged in criticism after a battle. Yet one challenge in particular would be working with Thomas, “the Rock of Chickamauga,” who for all his courage had acquired another nickname: “Old Slow-Trot.”
On the morning of November 16, Grant, Sherman, and Thomas rode out to look over the ground. Learning from Vicksburg, Grant determined that a frontal assault against a fortified location would prove too costly. Thomas argued for the precedence of taking heavily fortified Lookout Mountain, while Smith argued for the precedence of attacking Missionary Ridge. Either way, speed mattered. Grant wrote Halleck, “I am pushing everything to give Gen. Burnside early aid.”
At this moment, a high-ranking visitor from Washington arrived. General David Hunter, twenty years Grant’s senior, had achieved notoriety in May 1862 when he issued an order emancipating slaves in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida—an order that was immediately rescinded by Lincoln. Secretary of War Stanton sent Hunter west in fall 1863 on an assessment tour that included inspecting Grant’s command.
ON NOVEMBER 18, Grant completed his final plans. He agreed with Smith that the best place to attack would be Bragg’s lightly defended far right position at Missionary Ridge. But instead of Thomas, he gave the assignment to the general he trusted most: Sherman. If Sherman ran into unexpected opposition, Grant would either order Thomas to come to his aid or have Thomas attack the Confederate center at Missionary Ridge. Grant commanded eighty thousand men—Sherman’s four divisions, Thomas’s four divisions, Hooker’s three divisions, and two divisions to be held in reserve under Howard—nearly twice Bragg’s forty-two thousand troops.
Grant’s plan was working better than he knew. On November 20, Bragg informed Davis, “Sherman’s force has arrived, and a movement on our left is indicated.” Bragg had expected the main attack to come where Thomas urged—at Lookout Mountain.
Grant set November 21 to start the offensive. But heavy rains and a lost pontoon bridge at Brown’s Ferry slowed Sherman’s troops. If disgruntled with Sherman’s delay, Grant was more troubled by Thomas. He wrote Halleck, “I have never felt such restlessness before as I have at the fixed and immovable condition of the Army of the Cumberland.”
GENERALS ARE FOREVER gathering intelligence, often conflicting. How to sort out the true from the false, the timely from the dated? At three thirty A.M. on November 23, a deserter appeared reporting Confederate forces retreating south toward Atlanta. Grant urged Thomas, “The truth or falsity of the deserter who came in last night, stating that Bragg had fallen back, should be ascertained at once.” He knew from experience that deserters were sometimes plants sent into enemy lines to confuse the Union command. In fact, Bragg had dispatched the divisions of Patrick Cleburne and Simon Bolivar Buckner to lend a hand to Longstreet in fighting Burnside.
Willing to change his carefully prepared plans, Grant instructed Thomas, with Sherman not yet prepared, to make a demonstration in front of Missionary Ridge to test Bragg’s intentions—whether he was departing or staying.
At one P.M. on November 24, bugles broke the calm. Men streamed out of their tents and assembled on the broad plain at the eastern edge of Chattanooga. Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland, believing they had been assigned a secondary role in Grant’s battle plan, took their places in blue columns. As Grant peered through field glasses, Colonel Joseph Fullerton captured the wonder before them.
Flags were flying; the quick, earnest steps of thousands beat equal time. The sharp commands of hundreds of company officers, the sound of the drums, the ringing notes of the bugles, companies wheeling and countermarching and regiments getting into line, the bright sun lighting up ten thousand polished bayonets till they glistened and flashed like a flying shower of electric sparks—all looked like preparations for a peaceful pageant.
The Confederate pickets looked on, watching what appeared for all the world to be a grand review. Thomas’s lines were two miles from the foot of Missionary Ridge. A large open plain separated Confederate skirmishers and the Union troops on parade. Halfway across the plain lay some small hills, including Orchard Knob, a rocky hill about one hundred feet above the valley floor.
For half an hour, Thomas’s men went through the traditional paces of a review. Suddenly, at two P.M., the fourteen thousand soldiers surged forward, rushing across the plain until they stood atop Orchard Knob. Confederate skirmishers—a mere 634 on the small hills—fired a few shots, but they were completely outnumbered and ultimately retreated to the lower parts of Missionary Ridge. Grant and Thomas ordered the troops to entrench, now one mile nearer the Confederate front line at Missionary Ridge. It had fallen to Thomas to direct the first charge at Chattanooga.
ON NOVEMBER 24, the first elements of three of Sherman’s divisions crossed to the north side of the Tennessee River in pontoon boats. Heavy rains swelled the Tennessee to a width of fourteen hundred feet, but Sherman set in place a specially made 1,350-foot-long pontoon bridge.
At Fort Wood, located on an elevated point east of town, Grant watched and waited. He wired Sherman at eleven twenty A.M., “Until I do hear from you I am loath to give any orders for a general engagement.” Sherman welcomed the last troops across the river at twelve twenty P.M. With light rain and low-lying clouds hiding his movements, he answered through Dana that all was well.
By one P.M., Sherman’s men, attacking in three parallel columns, made rapid headway against what seemed Bragg’s surprisingly lightly defended right flank. At his headquarters by the river, Sherman was informed by signal relay that his men had advanced a mile and a half to their objective—the north end of Missionary Ridge.
AT THE SAME time, Grant’s plan called for Hooker to do no more than hold the Confederates in place. “Fighting Joe,” with a force of ten thousand veterans from his own, Thomas’s, and Sherman’s divisions, led a combined army that had not worked together before. Everything changed when, after weeks of trying, intelligence officers intercepted a Confederate message: “If they intend to attack, my opinion is it will be upon our left [at Lookout Mountain].” Grant now corrected course to subvert Confederate expectations. At twelve thirty A.M. on November 24, he ordered Hooker to mount a “demonstration” to “aid Sherman’s crossing” to Missionary Ridge. Hooker knew a demonstration was second fiddle, but he was itching for a fight and ordered his troops to be ready to move by daylight. Carter Stevenson, marshaling his Confederate defenders at Lookout Mountain, felt certain Hooker would not be so foolhardy as to strike openly up the mountain.
Hooker, knowing he bore the badge “Failure” on his chest after Chancellorsville, turned his demonstration into an opportunity to redeem himself. In a daring attack up deep ravines and across heavily timbered land, his men ascended the northern slope of the supposedly impregnable Lookout Mountain. New York captain George Collins captured the feeling that morning: “The heart of every man was in his mouth.” Hooker hoped at best to capture the lower and middle slopes of the mountain, as deserters had informed him that the top, “Lookout Nose,” was heavily defended by three brigades with cannon. Soldiers found it tough going as they struggled to hold a musket in one hand and grab a tree limb or rock to help their climb.
As Grant strained to see the action, low clouds blocked his view. The blinding fog, at first an enemy to Hooker’s men, became a friend as it shrouded their movements. Halfway up, at an outcropping where iron ore magnate Robert Cravens had built his home in 1855, entrenched Confederate artillery temporarily stopped Hooker’s drive.
At midmorning, Hooker’s blended army experienced a celestial phenomenon that would be remembered by veterans into the next century. The fog suddenly lifted, revealing a cloud bank above and fog below. Between, a clear blue sky appeared. Below, where Grant had been straining to see, soldiers clad in blue unexpectedly came into view.
Hooker wanted to take Lookout Nose, but with Confederate troops retreating, he decided to stop at the white clapboard Cravens house that for weeks had been a symbol of the Confederate occupation of Lookout Mountain. The desperate struggle that day would later be remembered as “the Battle Above the Clouds.”
ONCE SHERMAN’S ARMY reached what they thought was the top of Missionary Ridge, they were dismayed to discover in front of them a much larger hill. Because he’d been forced to work without adequate maps and from a distance, Sherman had not recognized his major error. His advance regiments realized Missionary Ridge was not an unbroken elevation, as it had appeared from Chattanooga. They had captured Billy Goat Hill. Now the goat was on them—a deep ravine divided Billy Goat Hill and Tunnel Hill of Missionary Ridge. But Sherman, down at his command center, was ignorant of this mistake and sent a night lantern to notify Grant of his success. At six P.M., Grant telegraphed Halleck: “Sherman carried the end of Missionary Ridge.”
NOVEMBER 25 DAWNED cold and clear. At nine thirty A.M., Grant repositioned his headquarters to Orchard Knob, a centrally located high ground from which he could see the sweeping semicircular theater of war. All eyes and ears focused on Sherman’s progress. At the same time, Grant wanted Thomas to remain ready to assist by advancing the remaining mile across the plain to seize the rifle pits at the foot of Missionary Ridge. Hooker was ordered to pursue Bragg’s forces if they raced to reinforce the Confederate defense against Sherman at Missionary Ridge.
Before long, Grant began to adjust his plans to the day’s changing circumstances. In an initial surprise, the first rays of the morning sun illuminated the Stars and Stripes flying at the “Nose” of Lookout Mountain. Hooker had outdone himself. Immense cheering erupted, with generals and soldiers waving their hats in the air. Taking the peak meant the sixty-three-day Confederate occupation of Lookout Mountain was over.
The next surprise brought bad news. Sherman, coming up from his command point at the Tennessee River, saw for himself the unexpected deep ravine between his position and Tunnel Hill. He also discovered he was up against Patrick Cleburne, whom Bragg had transferred from Lookout Mountain. The rebels, idolizing this Irish-born veteran of Stones River and Chickamauga, were ready to follow his lead. Sherman ordered brigades led by division commander Hugh Boyle Ewing (the son of Thomas Ewing and Sherman’s foster brother) to move forward, but they had to hug the mountain on their way up the hill to avoid the rapid fire raining down upon them from above. At times the combatants were so near each other that the rebels threw rocks.
By noon, six hours after he had begun his assault, Sherman grew more frustrated. Iowan John Corse and his brigade had attacked up the north slope of Tunnel Hill and been hurled back. At twelve forty-five P.M., Sherman sent an abrupt one-sentence message to Grant: “Where is Thomas?” Havinge met stiff resistance, he was responding to a telegram from the previous evening, in which Grant had written that Thomas would either carry “the enemy’s rifle pits” in front of Missionary Ridge “or, move to the left to your support.” But, Grant qualified, the decision would be made “as circumstances may determine best.”
In a day of improvisation, the final surprise came late in the afternoon. Grant left Orchard Knob for lunch at two P.M.; returning at two thirty, he saw how much had changed in half an hour. Instead of Sherman’s troops moving forward on the attack, as Grant expected, they could be seen dropping back. At three P.M., heedful of the shortened daylight hours in late November, with Sherman stopped and Hooker overdue, Grant turned to Thomas: “Hooker has not come up, but I think you had better move, on Sherman’s account.”
Thomas walked away. Minutes passed with no response. The Army of the Cumberland had remained spectators as battles raged to their left and right. Did Thomas object, worrying that his troops would be slaughtered by the dug-in defenders? Grant walked over to Thomas Wood, one of Thomas’s division commanders. “General Sherman seems to be having a hard time,” he said. Wood agreed. Grant continued, “I think we ought to try to do something to help him.”
Gordon Granger, commander of Thomas’s Fourth Corps, had a habit of fiddling with artillery, and he was doing so just then. At the end of his tolerance, Grant spoke forcefully: “General Thomas, order Granger to turn that battery over to its proper commander and take command of his own corps. And now order your troops to advance and take the enemy’s first line of rifle pits.” Grant intended to immobilize the Confederates at the top of Missionary Ridge until Sherman arrived to spearhead the attack.
The excitable Granger, standing beside Grant, lifted his arm and began barking, “Fire! Fire!” Immediately a rare sight in military history commenced. Almost twenty-four thousand men in blue massed forward in assault formation, in a two-mile-long line, double deep with skirmishers in front—larger by far than Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg—and it began to sweep across the plain of the geographic amphitheater at the base of Missionary Ridge. Thomas’s division commanders—Absalom Baird on the left, Thomas Wood and Phil Sheridan in the center, and Richard Johnson on the right—faced an imposing enemy, sixteen thousand men.
From the crest of Missionary Ridge, more than fifty guns opened fire, while from Fort Wood, Fort Negley, and Orchard Knob, Union artillery retorted. To everyone’s surprise, Thomas’s troops quickly captured the rifle pits, braving a hail of fire, shells bursting above and around them, the dead and wounded falling on the withered winter grass. As Union soldiers rushed forward, they could not believe what they saw. The defenders, panicking, abandoned their positions and started to retreat up the ridge. Shouting at the top of their lungs, “Chickamauga, Chickamauga!” the Union soldiers kept going. If order characterized the charge across the plain, disorder described the charge up the mountainside.
Amazed, Grant demanded, “Thomas, who ordered those men up the ridge?”
“I don’t know,” Thomas replied.
Through field glasses Grant looked on in wonder as Thomas’s men, with regimental flags flying, confronted an obstacle course of ravines, cut timber, and, farther up, loose rock. Yet in what seemed like no time at all they reached the crest, which they found poorly defended—no one had expected them to be there. The men of Sheridan’s division were the first to reach the crest, and the honor of planting the first colors fell to eighteen-year-old Arthur MacArthur, Jr., captain of the Twenty-fourth Wisconsin, who shouted, “On Wisconsin!” MacArthur was his regiment’s fourth color-bearer—the first was shot, the second run through with a bayonet, the third “decapitated.” Young MacArthur would go on to become the senior general of the army from 1902 to 1909 but is remembered best as the father of Douglas MacArthur, commander of Allied forces in the Pacific in World War II.
AT ORCHARD KNOB, Hooker pushed northward along Missionary Ridge, having been delayed for hours as engineers constructed a bridge over Chattanooga Creek. Grant asked for his horse, and as he rode up to the crest of the ridge, the common soldiers recognized him and clung to his stirrups, raising their voices in cheers. He lifted his hat and halted again and again to thank the men.
In the midst of the celebration, Lincoln wired Grant: “Remember Burnside.” He intended to do just that. Sherman, his troops having been stopped earlier in the day by a Confederate counterattack and thus disappointed at Chattanooga, was not pleased to receive his orders on the evening of November 25: “The next thing now will be to relieve Burnside.” It was no easy command. Grant knew Sherman’s men were exhausted, having existed on two days’ rations since they’d left Bridgeport seven days earlier. Sherman, remembering his embarrassing mental breakdown at the beginning of the war, told his friend, “Recollect that East Tennessee is my horror.”
But his fears were for naught. On December 5, as Sherman approached Knoxville, a messenger from Burnside notified him that early that morning, when the fog lifted, Federal pickets discovered Longstreet had disappeared and was on his way back to Virginia.
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IT IS HARD to exaggerate the importance of Grant’s victory at Chattanooga. In less than three days, his new command, consisting of three armies that had never fought together before, had driven south the Confederate Army of Tennessee—a formidable adversary that had besieged Chattanooga for more than two months. The door now opened to Georgia and Atlanta.
It remains debatable whether Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland acted on its own accord in chasing the fleeing Confederates or whether Grant or Thomas ordered the remarkable ascent. Charles Dana, who witnessed the event from Orchard Knob, wrote, “The storming of the Ridge by our troops was one of the greatest miracles in Military history. No man who climbs the ascent, by any of the roads that wind along its front, can believe that eighteen thousand men were moved up its broken and crumbling face, unless it was his fortune to witness the deed.” Grant was still amazed by the battle when he offered his official report one month later, writing, “I can only account for this…on the theory that the enemy’s confusion and surprise at the audacity of such a charge caused confusion and purposeless aiming of their pieces.”
Credit for victory at Chattanooga deserved to be shared. Sherman, misjudging the terrain, acted too slowly on this occasion. Hooker, on the other hand, dazzled—proving his grit in the west in order to erase the shame of having been removed from his eastern command. And Thomas, initially reluctant to take over from Rosecrans, restored morale to the beaten Army of the Cumberland.
The Confederate leadership also deserved credit—Braxton Bragg, for failing to anticipate Grant’s battle plans; Jefferson Davis, for ordering the detachment of Longstreet toward Knoxville, robbing Bragg of one of the best armies at his disposal. Grant, with his dry sense of humor, wrote of Davis later, “On several occasions during the war he came to the relief of the Union army by means of his superior military genius.”
Grant did not have an exalted opinion of his own genius. He knew that at Chattanooga he had waited too long for Sherman to succeed; in mistrusting Thomas, he had probably missed an opportunity to thrust him into the battle earlier on November 25. Yet Grant’s calm determination first lifted the more than two-month-long Confederate siege of the city, then orchestrated the often discordant armies that had never before fought together.
With admiration, President Lincoln wrote General Grant on December 8: “I wish to tender you, and all under your command, my more than thanks—my profoundest gratitude—for the skill, courage, and perseverance, with which you and they, over so great difficulties, have effected that important object. God bless you all. A. Lincoln.”
On December 14, concluding his visit, General David Hunter telegraphed Stanton his estimation of his one-month-long observation of Grant. Hunter had been “received by General Grant with the greatest kindness. He gave me his bed, shared with me his room, gave me to ride his favorite warhorse, read to me his dispatches received and sent….He is a hard worker, writes his own dispatches and orders, and does his own thinking.” Furthermore, “He listens quietly to the opinions of others and then judges promptly for himself.” As for his habits, “He is modest, quiet, never swears, and seldom drinks, as he only took two drinks during the three weeks I was with him.”
BECAUSE OF URBAN renewal in the 1950s and 1960s, all Civil War structures in Chattanooga—including Grant’s headquarters—were torn down. Yet the visitor today, standing on top of craggy Orchard Knob, two and a half miles east of the center of the city, can imagine the three-day battle in late November 1863. As Grant wrote Congressman Washburne, “The spectacle was grand beyond anything that has been, or is likely to be, on this Continent.”
*By superior maneuvering, Napoleon encircled the Bavarian city of Ulm, compelling the Austrian army, waiting for reinforcements from the Russians, to surrender.
