26
AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 1863—FORREST AT CHICKAMAUGA
“Cross My Path Again at the Peril of Your Life”
From Richmond to deepest Dixie, loss of Vicksburg evoked shrieks for action. Somebody had to do something fast or the western Confederacy would be gone.
The majority of newspaper headlines focused on the war in the east, between the doorsteps of the executive mansions in Washington and Richmond, but much of the muscle, blood, and sinew of rebellion lay farther south and west. Since Confederate loss of the Middle Tennessee metal-forging region northwest of Nashville, most of the South’s war-supporting industries had withdrawn far into the interior—to such towns as Selma, Alabama, and Rome and Macon, Georgia. Much food for sustenance of Confederate armies came from Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia on railroads crucial for its transmission. With the trans-Mississippi now gone via the loss of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, beef and other products of Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas were similarly cut off. Myriad shortages not already in effect were in prospect.
Two subordinate generals—James Longstreet in Virginia and Nathan Bedford Forrest in Tennessee—proposed solutions.
Longstreet, Robert E. Lee’s senior subordinate, wanted out of the Army of Northern Virginia. He had seen Lee reject his counsel and order George Pickett’s disastrous Gettysburg charge, and he thought he could better himself and the Confederacy on the other side of the Appalachians. In the east Lee was supreme, but Braxton Bragg’s inability in the west was obvious to all but Jefferson Davis and a few of his military and political supporters. Bragg had bungled his chance to destroy Don Carlos Buell’s army in Kentucky in the fall of 1862 and had retreated from Stones River in early January 1863; now he was retreating to Chattanooga, vacating forage-rich central Tennessee and threatening also to cede the state’s eastern third and its Virginia-to-Georgia rail line to a Union army moving south from Kentucky under Ambrose Burnside.
Lee reluctantly approved Longstreet’s move. For too long he had essentially ignored all fronts but Virginia’s; he now had to face reality. Federals were dismembering the lower South, threatening the very foundations of secession. So Lee agreed to send Longstreet to East Tennessee to counter the Kentucky-based threat. Once in the west, Longstreet hoped to succeed Bragg as commander of the Army of the Tennessee. If the Confederacy was to avoid defeat, somebody had to. “I hope that I may get west in time to save what there is left of us,” Longstreet wrote a politician friend.
1Longstreet, in Virginia at the time, did not know the extent of the ruin. Forrest, in Tennessee, did. For fourteen months, he had had to serve under the vacillating, vengeful, and sickly Bragg, who was increasingly wracked by dyspepsia, neuralgia, and other pains of the stress of his position. Forrest wanted both to escape Bragg and to counter damage Grant had inflicted on the South at Vicksburg. In August, Forrest sent Richmond two copies of a letter—one through Bragg, the other straight to President Davis. He sent the second, he said, because he assumed Bragg would not forward the first.
Forrest’s letter asked for a command behind enemy lines: all the forces he could organize between Vicksburg and Cairo, Illinois. In sixty days, he wrote, he could prevent Federal plying of the lower Mississippi and raise several thousand troops who had gone home and become unavailable to the Confederacy otherwise. All he needed, he wrote, was a nucleus of four hundred men armed with four hundred long-range Enfield rifles and four rifled cannons to blow Federal shipping out of the river. He noted that, having lived on the Mississippi for more than twenty years “buying and selling negroes,” he knew both sides of it from Memphis to Vicksburg, as well as all the well-to-do slaveholders upriver and down. And the four hundred troops he wanted to accompany him included men who had rafted timber out of the delta and knew the region by heart.
Losing the territory in which he had labored for more than half his life had plainly shaken him. He seemed to lack faith that it could be retaken without desperate measures and a more original approach than Bragg appeared capable of. Forrest doubtless also wished to rid himself of Bragg’s insults and injustice. But knowing Bragg was a Davis favorite, Forrest dissembled. He said he would leave his present post “with many regrets, as I am well pleased with the officers in command.” Davis may have wondered why, if this was true, Forrest thought Bragg unlikely to forward the letter.
2Forrest’s plan almost certainly was born, at least partly, of his sour relations with his commander, but likely without the overweening ego with which the chain of command was rife. Forrest claimed to be making his proposal “
entirely for the good of the service.” He added that he had never asked for advancement, which—unlike the claim that his proposition was advanced in complete selflessness—was true.
3Forrest’s gambit, however, got nowhere. Jefferson Davis said the idea had value but sought Bragg’s input. And despite Forrest’s statement that he did not expect Bragg to forward the other copy of his letter, Bragg had done so—and effectively thwarted Forrest’s ploy. Sending the note to Richmond five days after Forrest penned it, Bragg ambiguously wrote that he knew “no officer to whom I would sooner assign” the independent command Forrest requested. No task, he added, was more important than recovery of territory along the Mississippi. But removing Forrest from the Army of Tennessee would rob it “of one of its greatest elements of strength” at a time of ominous need.
Davis approved Bragg’s recommendation of postponing Forrest’s request for the time being. He added, though, that the plan might be approved when circumstances changed. Davis thus put off dealing substantively with his western problem.
4
Circumstances in Tennessee were forbidding. In August, Major General Ambrose Burnside and 12,000 men of the Army of the Ohio neared Knoxville from Kentucky, liberating much of East Tennessee’s long-suffering unionist majority.
The region’s rage erupted. Mountaineers began taking revenge on secessionist sympathizers who had savaged them for two years. Confederate brigadier general A. E. Jackson reported from upper East Tennessee that many Confederate sympathizers were fleeing with their families and whatever they could carry, chased by unionist guerrillas who were committing “brutal murders.” Federal cavalry had reached Knoxville and an abandoned Confederate base at Morristown, cutting Jackson off from East Tennessee commander Simon Buckner and preventing the two from coordinating their defense of the eastern section of the state.
5Buckner could not have helped Jackson anyway. On September 1, Bragg ordered Buckner and his 9,000 troops of the Department of East Tennessee to fall back to the Chattanooga area. Forrest at Kingston got the same directive. Two days later, Bragg named Forrest head of the cavalry gathering north of Chattanooga.
Forrest’s new subordinates were unpromising. Division commander John Pegram, a thirty-one-year-old West Pointer from Richmond high society, tended toward indecision. He had been recommended for service in the west by Robert E. Lee—possibly, given Lee’s lack of concern with the western theater, to get Pegram out of his department. Colonel John S. Scott of the aristocratic First Louisiana was the rich planter who had refused to serve under Forrest when General P. G. T. Beauregard first sent Forrest east from Mississippi. Scott resisted orders from men he deemed his social inferiors and even quarreled with Pegram, who was plainly not.
Forrest’s previous associates, like his new subordinates, promised to give trouble. Cooperation between Forrest and Joe Wheeler, commanding the cavalry south of Chattanooga, was potentially problematic, given their Dover disagreement. Fellow Dover participant John Wharton, a brigadier who had been a Wheeler division commander but was for the moment under Forrest, was the Texas attorney with whom Forrest had had a flare-up during the Murfreesboro raid. Wharton’s cheerful subordination to Forrest could hardly be taken for granted.
6Topping this list of potential recalcitrants was Bragg himself. His continual blunders had sapped his army psychologically. His top generals—Leonidas Polk, John C. Breckinridge, William Hardee, and the just-arriving Virginian Daniel Harvey Hill, brother-in-law of Stonewall Jackson—were (or in Hill’s case, soon would be) in open revolt. Further down the chain of command, rampant dislike of Bragg engendered an atmosphere of incipient insubordination. The army’s hard-fighting riflemen had seen their valor wasted by Bragg’s vacillations in the face of the enemy and flouted by his petty vendettas against all who disagreed with him.
By appointing Forrest to head up one of his major cavalry contingents, Bragg had tossed him a bone—but a meatless one, and Forrest soon showed it had not mollified him. John Morgan had made an unauthorized cavalry raid across the Ohio River throughout most of July that resulted in the capture of Morgan and most of his troopers—and enraged Bragg. The commander had come to dislike Kentuckians as much as Tennesseans since his 1862 Bluegrass invasion, when, despite the promises of Morgan and others, Kentuckians had not flocked to his ranks. Cavalrymen took pride in being soldiers on horseback, but Bragg now directed that the remnant of Morgan’s men who had survived the trans-Ohio raid be dismounted and redesignated infantry.
Bragg’s September 3 directive naming Forrest commander of the cavalry north of Chattanooga placed the Kentuckians under him, and Forrest disobeyed the order to dismount them. In August, Kentuckian Adam Rankin Johnson, a onetime Forrest scout who had advanced to the rank of colonel under Morgan, had wangled permission from the War Department to reestablish Morgan’s unit if he could find horses for it. Johnson worked with fellow Kentuckian Buckner, then still commander of the Department of East Tennessee, to acquire horses and gather several hundred Morgan troopers. Nonetheless, Johnson said, Bragg remained bent on dismounting them and “would have done so, had it not been for the resolute action of Forrest.” One order affecting the Kentuckians may have been a general one Bragg issued on September 16 providing that all cavalrymen absent from their commands without authority be assigned to the infantry.
Forrest valued the bravery of the Morgan men, and if they remained mounted, they could be part of Forrest’s command. He probably also felt some empathy for Morgan, his fellow cavalry leader. Morgan’s background was more refined, but his prewar businesses had, like Forrest’s, included slave trafficking, although on a smaller scale. The two were likely acquainted before the war, because Forrest’s far-ranging slave buying and selling had taken him from Kentucky to Texas. As soldiers, he and Morgan showed much interest in each other’s exploits. Forrest’s empathy for his imprisoned fellow cavalryman likely strengthened as Morgan came under Bragg’s wrath. According to Johnson, Forrest ran the risk of a court-martial by ignoring Bragg’s order. Nonetheless, he did so, not only folding Morgan’s troops into his own command but keeping them close to him during the next few days after Bragg’s September 16 order.
7
While Bragg busied himself trying to punish his soldiers and control his generals, Union commander William S. Rosecrans made an audacious move. During late August and early September, he sent Major General Thomas Crittenden’s Twenty-first Corps to threaten Chattanooga from the north while the Fourteenth and Twentieth Corps of Major Generals George Thomas and Alexander McCook slipped south of the city, heading for Bragg’s rear.
Chattanooga itself had a population of just 2,500, but its importance was vast. It was a strategic rail hub of the first rank, junction of the East Tennessee & Georgia Railroad to Virginia, the Western & Atlantic to the southeast coast, and the Memphis & Charleston to the west. Most important, it was the gateway to key military matériel-manufacturing facilities in Georgia and Alabama. Sitting in a wide bend of the Tennessee River at an altitude of 750 feet, ringed by mountains three times as high, it was hard to get into and out of. Even before Bragg’s army began digging in after retreating there from Middle Tennessee in late summer of 1863, it was a fortress.
Bragg now paid dearly for having named Wheeler head of his cavalry so many months ago. The twenty-seven-year-old West Pointer guarded erratically, when at all. He left only troopers of the Third Confederate Cavalry to oversee fifty miles of mountain gaps and river crossings south-west of Chattanooga. The other two-thirds of his horsemen rested and refitted in Rome, Georgia, fifty miles away. He disregarded orders of August 30 and September 1 to keep an eye on passes through Lookout Mountain immediately southwest of the city and on a Federal concentration at nearby Bridgeport, Alabama. When Thomas and McCook were flanking Chattanooga from the southwest in late August, Bragg learned of these incursions from a civilian rather than Wheeler. He and his generals continued to believe Crittenden in the north was the main threat. Until September 2, thanks greatly to Wheeler’s inactivity, they had no clue where the southern Federal stroke was aimed. They did not know for sure until September 5, when Bragg read a summary of Rosecrans’s plan in a captured issue of the
Chicago Times.
8Suddenly realizing that he was being flanked, Bragg ordered a pullout from Chattanooga southward on September 6. He directed his northern infantry, Buckner’s, to hasten to bring up the rear of this move and ordered Forrest to screen Buckner with a brigade of cavalry. He meanwhile tried to rouse Wheeler and told him to run every risk to drive in all Federal pickets and locate the heaviest Federal concentrations. But he did not send this order until the afternoon of September 6. Even then, his southern cavalry commander seemed unwilling to understand the urgency of the situation.
Wheeler replied with a dispatch listing myriad reasons why he should not comply. His men were strung out across forty miles, the gaps between them blocked by felled trees; Bragg could get the desired information by “other means”; Wheeler’s horses would be exhausted; following Bragg’s order would expose Rome to the Federals. Wheeler’s lethargy seemed accompanied by blithe witlessness as he added that he believed that “if General Rosecrans’ army was commencing a vigorous campaign upon us, it was of the first importance that our cavalry be kept in as good a condition as possible, as it would be indispensable to protect our lines of communication.” Knowing in what locality Rosecrans would commence this “vigorous campaign” appeared unimportant to him.
9Bragg limped through September 6 in the dark. His few working scouts provided mixed indications of where the enemy was, and he called off the withdrawal. The next day, September 7, Wheeler’s minimal efforts and work by other scouts continued to produce conflicting reports. Bragg called his second council of generals in five days. The meeting showcased his poor performance under stress. He reached no decision in the council, then soon sent the generals another order to move south.
10Forrest could only have been frustrated by what followed. He was ordered south on September 8 to cover Rome, Georgia, and do the scouting Wheeler would not. On September 10 he got orders to return northward to find Crittenden’s Federals again and discern where they were headed. Forrest now seemed to be covering his own assigned territory and Wheeler’s—a circumstance that surely chafed him further.
That afternoon, Forrest found some of Crittenden’s men in a foolhardy position. They had crossed to the south side of Chickamauga Creek at a bridge nine miles out of Chattanooga. The northward-running creek, actually more of a river, stretched south and then southwest from Chattanooga, and by crossing it the Crittenden unit had placed the stream between itself and help, if needed. Forrest sent couriers to Polk and Bragg, each six miles away, and readied his troopers to get to the Federals’ rear and seize the bridge by which they had crossed the Chickamauga, trapping them.
11He heard nothing from Polk or Bragg. Around midnight he rode off to urge an attack, but found that Bragg and his army had pulled out southwestward toward LaFayette, Georgia. The opportunity was thus lost. The next day, September 11, Forrest conducted a fighting retreat. At Tunnel Hill, halfway between Ringgold and Dalton, he and Colonel Scott’s nine hundred Louisianans were joined by Pegram and George Dibrell, a hard-fighting bootstrap Tennessee cavalryman like Forrest himself. To avail themselves of cover, their forces fought as infantry and stopped Crittenden’s wary advance. In the process, Forrest sustained an unspecified wound serious enough for him to violate his teetotalism and take a drink of whisky. But he did not quit the field.
12Bragg had left Crittenden’s vicinity to seek another vulnerable Union force. Major General James Negley’s division of George Thomas’s corps had advanced through a gap in Lookout Mountain into McLemore’s Cove, twenty-some miles south of Chattanooga. There, across a branch of Chickamauga Creek, Negley’s Federals were isolated. Bragg ordered ex–Arkansas congressman and now Major General Thomas Hindman to attack them on September 11. Both Bragg and Hindman waffled. Bragg sent Hindman a message telling him not to attack if unsure, then another telling him if he was going to do it, he should hurry. The day passed nearly to dusk before Hindman attacked—and struck nothing. Negley had retreated.
13Bragg turned back to Crittenden. By September 12, the Federal general was at Ringgold, still well north of Negley and Thomas and even farther north of McCook. Bragg ordered Polk to attack Crittenden at dawn on September 13. Polk ignored the order. Bragg then called an unproductive council of his generals. Instead of making an attack, Polk got his men into line and awaited one. It did not come. Crittenden had left Polk’s front and gone to Lee & Gordon’s Mill, nine miles south of Chattanooga and nearer—but still apart from—Thomas, McCook, and Rosecrans’s other units.
14Bragg was like a man with no control over his legs and arms. His subordinates, cowed by his fierce irresolution and continual blaming of others when things went wrong, were as useless as he was. More depressed than usual, he temporarily abandoned attempts to exploit Rosecrans’s rashness. Rosecrans meanwhile became more guarded, realizing the error in scattering his men across a fifty-mile front against an enemy not in retreat. Bragg’s lassitude gave Rosecrans two days—September 14 and 15—to regather his army.
15
Forrest’s scouting of Rosecrans’s left had been impaired by other wide-ranging duties. One was the fighting that resulted in his wound at Tunnel Hill.
Bragg had sent him on September 9 to headquarter at Dalton, junction of the Georgia & Tennessee Railroad to Knoxville and the Western & Atlantic to Chattanooga. From Dalton—where he retained only his sixty-man escort and, his report seems to stress in defiance of Bragg, “about 240 of General Morgan’s cavalry”—he participated in the Tunnel Hill fight and supervised units guarding roads to his north, northwest, and west. But a week later, on the night of September 16, Bragg ordered him to seize two bridges and some fords on Chickamauga Creek; this was to be the Bragg army’s first move to cross the Chickamauga and attack Rosecrans. Whether Forrest got this order, though, is questionable. His report does not mention it, and on September 17 he left Dalton. Soon after noon, he rode into Ringgold, where one of his units under Colonel John Scott was holding off an advance by elements of Crittenden’s Federals.
Forrest’s command numbered 3,500, but it was scattered. A brigade under Colonel George B. Hodge was up the Tennessee-Georgia tracks, watching for a Burnside advance from Athens,Tennessee, where the Union general had moved after capturing Knoxville. Colonel Scott’s brigade was around Ringgold, protecting against Crittenden. Pegram was northwest of Dalton, screening Bragg’s headquarters at Leet’s Mill and Tanyard. Brigadier Frank Armstrong fronted Major General Frank Cheatham’s infantry due west of Dalton and also west of LaFayette.
16Early next morning—Friday, September 18—Forrest received an out-of-the-blue order. He was to lead an attack by the right wing of Bragg’s army. The plan was to turn the Federal left and cut Rosecrans’s communications with Chattanooga and Nashville.
17Both Forrest and his commander on the right, Brigadier General Bushrod Johnson, were added to the mission as afterthoughts. Bragg had planned to advance across Chickamauga Creek at two points, Thedford’s Ford and ten miles north at Alexander’s Bridge. But late on the night of September 17, to be sure he overlapped the Union left flank, Bragg decided on a third crossing still farther north at Reed’s Bridge. Johnson, who had a patchwork division eight miles east of the bridge at Ringgold, was in a prime location for the Reed’s Bridge job—as was Forrest, who was also there. And Johnson’s ranks were swelling with Longstreet’s Virginians, whom Lee had finally agreed on September 5 to send to Chattanooga to aid Bragg.
But Longstreet was not as glad to be coming as he had expected to be. He had hoped to take Bragg’s place, not to aid him. On September 18, as his men began to arrive from Virginia at the nearby Catoosa Railroad Station, Longstreet was chagrined.
18Bragg’s order to begin the attack caught Johnson on the road. A previous order, written September 16, had directed Johnson from Ringgold west-southwest to Bragg’s headquarters at Leet’s Mill, and he was amid that march on the early morning of September 18 when a Bragg aide caught him. Turn around, the aide said. Go back to Ringgold and take the road due west to Reed’s Bridge; Forrest’s cavalry would screen his right and front. When they arrived at the bridge, Johnson should cross it and turn left. Then, joined by Simon Buckner’s division from Thedford’s Ford and W. H. T. Walker’s from Alexander’s Bridge, he was to strike Crittenden and drive him south.
19
BATTLE OF CHICKAMAUGA: This Confederate-drawn map, with notable misspellings, shows Reed’s Bridge where Forrest’s men initiated the battle in the lower right quadrant; LaFayette Road running left to right and, at its right end, the “Cloud Yankee Hospital” captured by Forrest troopers on September 20, when they defended against Federal reinforcements under Gordon Granger. Snodgrass Hill, where George Thomas led the Federals’last stand, is at the top right center. Only infantry seems deemed worthy of mention here.
Forrest had received no such order, so Johnson started with just his own troops. With no cavalry to serve as his eyes, he moved slowly. He was halfway to Reed’s Bridge when a single rifle shot—which hit nobody—caused him to stop his entire advance. Warned by residents that a Federal force lurked at Peavine Ridge just west of a creek in his front, he put his four infantry brigades in line of battle and waited. A Bragg aide rode up with orders for him to “move forward immediately.” About the same time, Forrest arrived with his escort and the couple of hundred Morgan troopers.
20Forrest did not scout the Federal position, perhaps because his arrival was almost simultaneous with that of Bragg’s peremptory order to advance. The Morgan Kentuckians, reinforced by skirmishers from some Tennessee regiments in Johnson’s ranks, moved forward into artillery fire supporting Federal cavalry. They worked their way across deep, muddy Peavine Creek, and their rifle fire killed the first man to die in the Battle of Chickamauga, a Federal private. His Union comrades withdrew in disorder, leaving a few horses and some gear and food. Over the next four hours, Johnson got several impatient orders from Bragg to press forward, informing Johnson that the rest of the army was waiting for him to attack, but to no avail.
21While Johnson dragged his feet, Forrest’s men and the Twenty-fifth Tennessee struggled across Peavine Ridge. The uneven ground bristled with briary thickets, punishing the many barefooted infantrymen. Perhaps in rage at their discomfort or joy at its end, when they reached Reed’s Bridge and saw it guarded by a strong Federal position, they spontaneously charged. The Tennesseans dispersed the guards before they could torch the structure, and at about 3 p.m., Johnson’s men began crossing. Forrest’s troopers led some across at an adjacent ford farther to the right.
22As they crossed, Johnson was relieved in more ways than one. Major General John Bell Hood of Longstreet’s corps arrived at Catoosa Station, got his horse from a railroad car, and galloped to the front. Johnson reported to him, then faded back into division command. Hood took control a mile past Reed’s Bridge. The vanguard of the column had veered to the left, as Bragg had ordered, and headed south on a road to Alexander’s Bridge. Pegram’s division had joined Forrest at Reed’s Bridge, and their troopers spent the night of September 18 behind Hood’s line of battle near Alexander’s Bridge.
23At dawn, Bragg ordered Forrest to ride back toward Reed’s Bridge to be sure the Confederate overlap of the Federal flank was complete. It was not. Rosecrans had detected the enemy buildup on his left and, during the night, sent George Thomas’s corps there from his right. In woods just west of Reed’s Bridge, Forrest and Pegram met a Thomas infantry brigade under Colonel John Croxton. Forrest saw that he was overmatched and sent an aide galloping to Polk asking for Armstrong’s division of his cavalry for reinforcement. Forrest himself meanwhile hurried to find friendly infantry while Pegram tried to hold off Croxton. Back down the road toward Alexander’s Bridge, he saw the Georgia brigade of Colonel Claudius Wilson, a Savannah lawyer, cooking breakfast after crossing the Chickamauga. Forrest asked for help. Wilson said he needed permission from his commander, touchy W. H. T. Walker. Walker then refused the permission without getting an okay from his own touchy commander, Bragg.
24Forrest went to Bragg. His report of significant Federal force well to the right of where it was supposed to be paralyzed the Army of Tennessee commander. Realizing his plans had been founded on out-of-date intelligence, he scrubbed his attack and vacillated. But he granted Forrest’s request, and Forrest led Wilson back toward Pegram.
25Forrest also received additional cavalry, but not as much as he had requested. Polk sent only half of Armstrong’s men: Colonel George Dibrell’s brigade. It galloped to Pegram’s right, dismounted, and stymied any possibility of further advance by Croxton, then moved around the Federals’ left. There Dibrell ran into another advancing Federal brigade under Colonel Ferdinand Van Derveer. Dibrell fought Van Derveer in the woods for half an hour before pulling back around 9:30 a.m. Van Derveer’s clash with Dibrell freed Croxton’s left to again turn all its rifles on Pegram.
For much of the morning of September 19, Croxton and Pegram battled for a ridge west of a sawmill called Jay’s. Nearly a third of Pegram’s troopers fell. Although the only supporting Confederate battery was running out of ammunition and most of its horses had been shot, Forrest seemed unfazed. He moved up and down the line telling the men that infantry help was on its way. “Go to it, my little man,” he told a mere boy frantically reloading and scanning the woods ahead. He patted the boy’s shoulder, and the youth, seeing who had spoken to him, sprang forward to a large pine tree, aimed the newly loaded weapon, and fired.
26When Wilson’s men arrived at the battlefield, they began driving Croxton back four hundred yards. Back and forth, the struggle ebbed, eddied, and flowed. With Dibrell now faltering on Reed’s Bridge Road on the Confederate right, Forrest sought more help for the fight against Van Derveer. Forgetting General Walker, who plainly did not understand the urgency, he galloped toward Alexander’s Bridge again and took matters into his own hands. Seeing Brigadier General Matthew Ector’s brigade in a field a half mile away, he ordered it up to aid Dibrell. Accompanied by Forrest, Ector charged forward until Federals and an accompanying battery nearly surrounded him. Together, Forrest and Ector fell back fighting to their earlier position at Jay’s Sawmill.
As morning wore into afternoon, the fighting sidled southward toward Alexander’s Bridge. Forrest went with it. He saw Brigadier George Maney’s brigade being pushed backward and sent a six-piece battery and Dibrell’s dismounted cavalry to Maney’s aid. The battery kept firing until the Federals were within fifty yards. Despite loss of horses, the cannoneers managed a retreat with all their pieces, thanks to help from Dibrell’s men. But the greatest pressure on Maney was from his left. Under fire for just forty-five minutes, Maney’s ranks were riddled; a colonel and two of four artillery officers died, and a lieutenant colonel and a major were badly wounded.
27Forrest did his last fighting of the day during their withdrawal. He gathered up Dibrell’s men, fewer and scattering on Maney’s right, and helped protect the retirement of the artillery. Toward dusk, Polk finally let Forrest have Frank Armstrong, a key Forrest subordinate. Armstrong gathered his division around Reed’s Bridge for the night.
28
Tension was beginning to take a physical toll on both Bragg and Rosecrans. By the evening of September 19, both armies’ command chains had turned into dress parades of dysfunction.
Lieutenant General Longstreet had arrived in the afternoon. When he stepped off a railroad car at Catoosa Station, ten miles behind the Confederate right, the vaunted erstwhile second in command of the Army of Northern Virginia found no welcome. Bragg had not even sent an aide to conduct him to the battlefield. Longstreet and two subordinates waited two hours for their horses to chug in on a following train, then set out down Reed’s Bridge Road, looking for headquarters. They had to navigate a rivulet of stragglers and wounded that turned into a bloody flood as they approached the front. Night befell them on the road. They blundered up to a Federal picket station and barely eluded capture. When they reached the headquarters camp at Thedford’s Ford at 11 p.m., Bragg had bedded down in an ambulance.
29Turning in was the most helpful thing Bragg did that evening. A little earlier, he had reorganized his forces into two wings comprising disparate commands and then ordered an attack at dawn. Reorganization would have been perilous at anytime, let alone after the onset of a major battle. Then, with three lieutenant generals under him—Polk, Hill, and the arriving Longstreet—he snubbed one. Putting the army’s right wing under Polk and its left under Longstreet, he left the flinty Hill virtually jobless as Polk’s second in command. Next, he ordered Polk to initiate the next day’s attack, although Polk argued against attacking without allotting more troops to the right. Bragg merely asked Polk if he understood his instructions and then dismissed him.
LIEUTENANT GENERAL LEONIDAS POLK
Bragg orally ordered Polk to assault at dawn, never writing out this critical directive; even an optimal subordinate needed a written copy to refer to in the heat of battle, not to mention in his eventual reporting of it. Nor did Bragg inform Hill of his reduced status or the jumping-off time for the next day’s assault. Hill came around at midnight looking for orders and could not find Bragg’s headquarters. And Polk bivouacked apart from his command, so that Hill, apprised only secondhand of his reduced position, then could not find Polk either. Finally, Polk never told subordinates Hill and Breckinridge that Bragg expected a daybreak attack. So, the next morning Hill informed Polk that many of his men had not been fed in thirty hours; they could not attack until rations were issued and they had eaten, he said.
30All night, Confederates on the right had heard axes at work. This signaled construction of breastworks, meaning that the earlier the Confederates attacked, the better. Yet Polk only formed up to fight at 9:30 a.m. on September 20, three hours past Bragg’s starting time. Polk commanded, and the far more experienced Hill was relegated to supervisor. During the night Hill had sent Breckinridge to the right to overlap the breastworks the Federals were heard throwing up, and Forrest got orders to extend Breckinridge’s line farther right. He dismounted Dibrell’s brigade and most of Armstrong’s division to fight as infantry, placing Pegram’s division in their right rear. Two Armstrong units—the First Tennessee and a 150-man battalion under Major Charles McDonald—were mounted.
31At 9:30, Polk’s wing—the Confederate right, comprising 9,000 men under Patrick Cleburne and John Breckinridge, not including Forrest’s—went forward. On the Confederate line’s other end, Longstreet heard the action, and his men moved as soon as he could get them all into position. Hood, with two brigades, was Longstreet’s spearhead on the Confederate left.
Forrest took his mounted detachment farther right to block the LaFayette Road. This road ran straight north to Chattanooga, its path slightly west of and roughly parallel to the snaking twists of Chickamauga Creek until it finally crossed the creek at Lee & Gordon’s Mill, two-thirds of the way to Chattanooga. Less than five miles north of Forrest’s position on this road on September 20, Federal Major General Gordon Granger headed a reserve corps on the Tennessee state line at Rossville, Georgia. Part of Forrest’s task was to protect the Confederate flank by warning of, and trying to fend off, any Union force coming down LaFayette Road from the north. That morning, he quickly blocked the road and captured a church beside it that had been converted into a 1,000-patient Union field hospital. Confederate cannons had targeted the bustling facility, and by the time two Armstrong units arrived there, all but about sixty nonambulatory patients had been moved to Chattanooga and the hospital abandoned. The cavalrymen rifled it of everything usable and mobile, including medical supplies and medicines precious in the blockaded Confederacy.
32The hospital captors comprised little more than a remnant. Forrest had dismounted most of Armstrong’s men and sent them forward to attack with Breckinridge on Breckinridge’s right, while keeping Pegram’s division to his own right rear as a reserve overlooking LaFayette Road from the east. Three-quarters of a mile southward, to Forrest’s left, blood now ran in rivers. Just west of LaFayette Road, the Federals had dug in on Horseshoe Ridge, a series of hills taking their name from the shape of the Federal line there. Before 1 p.m., Federal infantry under Major General George Thomas fought off two furious but ill-arranged charges by the Confederate right. To overlap the Federal left, Breckinridge had to assault in a single line against fortified Federals. Twice, his men—accompanied by Dibrell’s and most of Armstrong’s cavalry, dismounted—crossed LaFayette Road into Thomas’s left rear, but their single line was too shallow. They ran out of steam and pulled back.
33Forrest split his time between his mounted men, covering LaFayette Road to the north, and those afoot with Breckinridge. He came back toward Breckinridge’s main body as the fortified Federals threw it backward. Brigade commander Daniel W. Adams’s Louisiana unit had charged to the right of the breastworks and reached the west side of LaFayette Road, in Thomas’s rear, when they met a brigade of Negley’s Federal division rushing up LaFayette Road from the south. Adams was captured, and his men were recoiling back up the road when Forrest rode up behind a battery of the Washington Artillery of New Orleans, which had gone forward with Breckinridge. He challenged its pride of manhood with his own. “Rally here, Louisianans,” he shouted, “or I’ll have to bring up my bobtail cavalry to show you how to fight.” The cannoneers rallied and saved their guns.
34General Hill saw men fighting so well in front of him that he asked a nearby Forrest aide whose infantry they were. The men were Forrest’s cavalry, Major J. P. Strange told him. Hill, Stonewall Jackson’s brother-in-law, was taken aback. He had angered horse troops on the eastern front by saying he had never seen a dead cavalryman—meaning they never put themselves in harm’s way—but the performance of Forrest’s horsemen obviously made him rethink.
35Probably between noon and half past, Forrest galloped up to Hill. “That ever-watchful officer,” as Hill’s report described him, reported that Granger’s heavy Federal reserve force was now approaching along the LaFayette Road from Rossville. Granger had heard the battle from Rossville and could tell by its direction that Rosecrans was in trouble. He now rushed toward the field. Hill turned the north end of Breckinridge’s line to meet the new threat.
Overwhelming numbers bore down on Forrest’s horsemen on the road, requiring more firepower. Two guns that the Confederate Fourth Kentucky had captured the day before had been added to Lieutenant John Morton’s four, and Forrest also had another battery, Captain A. L. Huggins’s. These were not enough. Forrest asked Breckinridge for more, and Breckinridge gave him a section of Kentuckians under Lieutenant Frank Gracey.
Forrest then pulled back from the hospital and arrayed Morton, Gracey, and Huggins on a ridge to the east paralleling LaFayette Road. They opened up on Granger’s approaching Federals. Some of the shells struck the hospital. Forrest charged Granger’s flank with both artillery and cavalry but was beaten back.
36Granger, too, had problems. For two of the five miles on his route to the field, Forrest’s guns shelled him, killing and wounding a number of his troops. The Federals hurried off the road to their right as Forrest’s cannon and musketry set fire to the woods sheltering them. But Granger would not be diverted. He sent Brigadier General James Steedman onward with 4,000 men carrying 95,000 rounds of ammunition. Steedman ordered up a brigade from Rossville under Colonel Dan McCook to deal with Forrest and kept heading south toward the embattled Federal line.
37Granger and Steedman probably saved Rosecrans’s army. It was under mortal threat, having been struck hard at a charmed moment by the new arrival from Virginia: Longstreet. He had not even met his brigade commanders until he rode forward from Bragg’s headquarters at dawn, but he had arranged them well. Instead of the single, two-mile-wide line Polk had to employ, he put his two divisions in a power punch five brigades deep across a quarter-mile front.
38All morning, Thomas at Horseshoe Ridge requested more and more men and ammunition to resist Breckinridge’s assaults on the Federal left, and a nervous Rosecrans complied. Thomas’s position was vital to Federal retreat routes northward via LaFayette Road, and Rosecrans steadily transferred men to him from the right. About 11 a.m., Rosecrans pulled the division of Major General Thomas J. Wood from the Federal line to double-quick leftward to support Thomas. Some of Wood’s men were already skirmishing in his front, and enemy pressure was plainly building against the fortifications Wood had been told to abandon. Just ninety minutes earlier, however, a tired and shaky Rosecrans had given him a tongue-lashing for not promptly obeying an order. Angry, Wood obeyed now—leaving a quarter-mile gap in the breastworks.
39By coincidence, the Confederates chose that moment and that place to charge. Bushrod Johnson led Hood’s vanguard of Longstreet’s column through the gap Wood had left in the Federal front. Turning on Federals to his left and right, Johnson routed two Union divisions. The entire Federal line might have dissolved had it not been for the timely arrival of the 4,000 men and 95,000 rounds of ammunition Steedman had pushed past a far outnumbered Forrest. Thomas first hurried Steedman into line on the Federal left, then rushed him on rightward to a hill on the farm of a family named Snodgrass, where outnumbered Federals were trying to stem Bushrod Johnson’s wholesale breach of their lines.
Forrest’s men had done their best to stop Steedman. Lieutenant Colonel David Magee, marching his Eighty-sixth Illinois through the “smoking, burning sea of ruin” in a field west of LaFayette Road, said Forrest’s cannons “played upon us with spherical case, shell, and almost every conceivable missile of death.” Under the Forrest bombardment, Magee moved back into yet-unburned woods to his north and detailed men to extinguish the flames. The Federals unsuccessfully sent skirmishers to dislodge the Confederate guns. They could only lie down and wait out the continuing barrage. Yet Magee reported that he lost just one man killed and one wounded. An accompanying Ohio unit did not report its casualties, but its colonel reported that it remained under fire on a hill beyond the burning woods until nightfall. Perhaps the continued presence of pinned-down Union troops in his front encouraged Forrest to report wrongly that he had prevented most of Steedman’s troops from reaching Thomas until nearly dark.
40Longstreet’s breakthrough on the Confederate left eased Polk’s task on the right, where Breckinridge’s 10 a.m. assault had been repulsed in the late morning. Polk launched another charge all along his line in the late afternoon. In addition to weakened Union opposition, his men met Federals fleeing Longstreet up the LaFayette Road. Many surrendered and streamed through Breckinridge’s lines and away from the combat. At dusk, masses of other Federals trying to get northwest of the woods beyond LaFayette Road became disoriented and ran to and fro. For Forrest’s gunners, it appears to have been like shooting fish in a barrel. He reported that his guns fired at short range in open ground and killed “two colonels and many officers and privates.” Federal Brigadier Absalom Baird, leading the leftmost division in Thomas’s salient, reported total losses of 1,034 killed and 1,319 missing, most as his men tried to retreat in the gloom.
41At dusk on September 20, the right of the Army of Tennessee raised a howl of vengeful joy. The roar rolled all along Polk’s line. But Thomas’s remaining Federals hung on in a shrunken horseshoe. Only after dark did they slip off to Chattanooga.
42Thomas’s holding out on embattled Horseshoe Ridge symbolized a broader trend that bloody day. The battle had been fought apart from its commanders. Much of its field was woods dotted with clearings, and both Bragg and Rosecrans had spent most of the day far behind the lines. In fact, by 3 p.m., Rosecrans had left the field to Thomas, thereafter forever known as the “Rock of Chickamauga.” Like Rosecrans, Bragg had been in the dark to varying degrees all day. The next morning, the Confederate generals did not even know they had won. When Bragg found out, he seemed unconcerned with finishing the fleeing foe.
43The vast wreckage of equipment and men and commingling of regiments and divisions in the prolonged combat seemed to overwhelm his professional soldier’s sense of order. “The army is so disorganized,” he complained.
44Confederate casualties were ghastly. Complete figures, because of missing reports, are unknowable, but estimates run between 14,000 and 21,000, the latter approaching the combined losses of both sides at Shiloh. The Union total, more complete, was 16,000, bringing the combined loss of life and limb to at least 30,000, perhaps nearer 40,000. Shiloh’s was 24,000. Chickamauga entered the list of America’s bloodiest battles.
On the night of September 20, Forrest’s men slept on the field. Nearby was the captured hospital, with a pile of amputated arms and legs a dozen feet high and twenty feet across.
Forrest seems to have been unfazed. Fighting meant killing, according to his credo, and he exhibited marked reluctance to stop doing it at a time such as this, when it had become easiest. As in his hounding of Abel Streight, his impulse today was to stay on the heels of the retiring Federals, despite Confederate weariness. The Federals were weary too—and their flight from the battlefield indicated that the “skeer” was on. His troopers had not eaten for two days, and they and their horses thirsted in the dry Georgia autumn. He had ordered during the battle that the horses get “a partial feed”; the men could rifle corpses and rob Union wounded for enough sustenance to get them by. Early on Monday, September 21, he pushed them toward Rossville, rounding up more gangs of prisoners, abandoned weapons, and wagons along LaFayette Road.
45At 7 a.m. on September 21, Forrest and General Armstrong, riding with an advance troop of four hundred, saw Federal cavalry ahead. The Confederates kicked their mounts into a gallop, and the Federals fired and withdrew. A bullet struck Forrest’s horse in the neck. Seeing the animal’s blood spurt, Forrest stuck a finger into the wound and continued the chase. At a ridge point above a gap through which LaFayette Road ran to Rossville and Chattanooga, the swift Confederate arrival trapped some Federals in a treetop lookout post. Forrest reined in and jumped off the wounded horse. It fell and died.
Forrest took the captured Federals’ field glasses and climbed the lookout tree. He scanned the landscape ahead, then descended to dictate a message to Polk. He said he was a mile from Rossville on Missionary Ridge, the towering range that runs northeast along the eastern side of Chattanooga. From there, he claimed to be able to see Chattanooga and its environs. Enemy wagon trains were going around the end of Lookout Mountain, he said, adding that he had captured Federals who said two pontoons had been laid across the Tennessee River to put it between Rosecrans and the Confederates. “I think they are evacuating as hard as they can go,” Forrest’s note finished. “They are cutting timber down to obstruct our passing. I think we ought to press forward as rapidly as possible.”
46The postscript of Forrest’s note asked Polk to forward the dispatch to Bragg. Polk might as well have forwarded it to Abraham Lincoln. Bragg had seen more than enough Federals for a while. Longstreet tried to get Bragg to move forward that morning—to no avail. Bragg himself said he dismissed Longstreet’s suggestion out of hand. The Army of Tennessee could do nothing “for want of transportation,” he reasoned. Almost half his army consisted of troops who had just arrived from Virginia on a train, bringing with them no wagons or artillery horses. And nearly a third of the artillery horses the army did have had been killed in the battle.
Forrest dictated another, similar message four hours later, near noon, saying he could hear axes ringing on the side of Lookout Mountain. The Federal rear guard was obviously throwing up obstructions to stop pursuit. Time was of the essence. Forrest brought up his artillery and dismounted his men. For several hours he tried to dislodge the Federals holding Rossville Gap and open a path for the Confederate infantry he assumed was on the way. But the Federal force was too large, and neither Polk nor Bragg replied to his notes. Bragg busied himself consolidating his troops, ordering them to pick up matériel left on the battlefield, and preparing recriminations for the tardy battlefield obedience of intra-army enemies. On September 22, while Forrest still waited, Bragg prepared to relieve Polk for disobeying his order to attack at daylight instead of 10 a.m. on September 20. Division commander Thomas Hindman would meet the same fate for not attacking in McLemore’s Cove on September 10. Within two more weeks, the Polk firing would touch off an attempt by several other top generals—including Longstreet, Hill, and Buckner—to oust Bragg.
47In the meantime, on the evening of September 21, Forrest rode to Bragg’s headquarters to ask why the army did not advance. Bragg, roused from sleep, parried with a question of his own. How could the army advance without supplies? “General Bragg,” Forrest answered, “we can get all the supplies we need in Chattanooga.” He left.
The next day, September 22, Forrest remained puzzled and furious. A member of Morton’s artillery asked him if the army was going to advance. “No!” he stormed. Then he seemed to soliloquize on Bragg’s folly. “I have given him information of the condition of the Federal army,” he said, as if to himself. “What does he fight his battles for?”
48Forrest returned to his troops facing Rossville Gap. He formed a line of battle facing the gap and continued to wait. A single brigade under Major General Lafayette McLaws, finally sent by Bragg, arrived that afternoon. Forrest had moved up to the north end of Lookout Mountain, but his industry was of no use. McLaws’s orders were to engage in little more than picket duty: to advance to two miles from Chattanooga. Forrest soon got orders to bivouac and refit. He likely gave vent to his eloquent profanity.
49Bragg hatched a comparatively puny alternative to pursuit. On September 23 he ordered Wheeler on a raid northwestward, to Rosecrans’s rear; Wheeler’s objective would be to cut the Federal supply line to Nashville. Five days after Chickamauga, Bragg ordered Forrest and his men farther north, but not to harm Rosecrans. They were to head northeast to drive off a force of Burnside’s Knoxville-based army, which had reportedly advanced to Charleston, Tennessee. The Charleston foe turned out to be a brigade of mounted infantry, and Forrest shelled it into retreat. Learning that Federal cavalry was camped up the road near Athens, he thought it “necessary to follow” and chased the combined Union force through Athens past Sweetwater to Philadelphia, Tennessee. He stopped when the Federals crossed the Tennessee River at Loudon, eighty miles north of Chattanooga.
50This fighting dash up the Tennessee Valley on jaded horses netted only about 20 Federals killed or wounded and 120 captured. The pell-mell scamper seems to indicate Forrest’s mounting post-Chickamauga frustration—a desire to do something—and his increasing resolve to escape Bragg.
Bragg remained more intent on disciplining subordinates than on pursuing the Federals. He proceeded with the suspensions of Polk and Hindman and prompted near rebellion within the officer corps. Dissatisfaction with him, which began after the Kentucky retreat a year earlier and increased following the Stones River withdrawal in January, verged on mutiny. Buckner, a stickler for every regulation, complained that Bragg had robbed him of his authority over the Department of East Tennessee. Hill branded Bragg’s leadership inept, and Longstreet wrote letters to Richmond jockeying for his job. Frank Cheatham mulled asking for a transfer, and even Bragg’s genial chief of staff, West Point classmate Brigadier William W. Mackall, wanted out. Mackall had known Bragg longer, and perhaps better, than anyone else in the army, and his judgment of his chief was damning. He wrote his wife that although Bragg gave himself totally to his work, he was “repulsive” in manner and loved flattery and deference. He was reluctant to give credence to bad news, and if it did prove true, he was not prepared to accept and act on it. And he demanded absolute obedience, which his continually changing orders made difficult to give.
51Forrest’s East Tennessee chase infuriated Bragg. He soon told another subordinate that Forrest was “nothing more than a good raider” and that his “rampage” toward Knoxville epitomized his ignorance, especially of cooperation. And, Bragg raged, Forrest was all too typical. The Army of Tennessee, Bragg said, did not include “a single general officer of cavalry fit for command.”
52Bragg apparently excluded Wheeler from his indictment. Although he quickly reorganized his army’s mounted arm into a single unit again, he retained the erratic Georgian as its commander. As for Forrest, Bragg sent him new orders—twice. The first, on September 25, Forrest apparently ignored. Three days later, a Bragg aide wrote him to “without delay turn over the troops of your command previously ordered” to Wheeler.
Forrest fumed. According to his assistant adjutant general, Charles W. Anderson, Forrest exploded and dictated a wild letter resenting Bragg’s treatment of him. Anderson said the letter accused Bragg of lying and informed him Forrest would soon visit headquarters to reaffirm his words in person. Anderson related that as a courier rode off with the letter, Forrest said, “Bragg never got such a letter as that before from a brigadier.” The same day, Forrest wrote Wheeler that he was turning over the brigade of Armstrong and two under H. B. Davidson but keeping the ones under Dibrell and Pegram. He added that “neither men nor horses are in condition for an expedition” such as the raid Wheeler was embarking on into Rosecrans’s rear. Forrest was not exaggerating, Wheeler found. The running fight up the Tennessee Valley, following the days at and after Chickamauga, had utterly exhausted his troopers and horses.
53Forrest soon rode to Bragg’s headquarters atop Missionary Ridge. His letter, or perhaps just his manner, led Bragg to tell him there that his cavalrymen were just on loan to Wheeler and would be returned after the raid. Bragg possibly added that Forrest would be arrested if he did not comply immediately with future orders; Forrest had flouted Bragg’s order to dismount Morgan’s men and turn them over to the infantry, and, according to a famous story, the subject would soon surface again.
Forrest took a breather after the meeting. Having vowed after the battle of Dover never to serve under Wheeler again, he now took a leave and let his men go on Wheeler’s raid without him. But he had hardly arrived at LaGrange, Georgia, where Mary Ann Forrest was staying, when on October 5 he received another Bragg order. It said all his troops had been transferred to Wheeler. He was to report to the twenty-seven-year-old for instructions.
54This was the last straw. Forrest rode to headquarters again. This time an in-law, Forrest chief surgeon J. B. Cowan, accompanied him. Cowan later said he had no idea about the purpose of the ride. Forrest was unusually quiet. When they arrived at Bragg’s tent, Forrest brushed past the sentry and found Bragg alone. Bragg rose to shake hands, but Forrest ignored the hand and jabbed his left index finger toward Bragg’s face. He began spewing a litany of the slights Bragg had dealt him over seventeen months:
You robbed me of my command in Kentucky and gave it to one of your favorites—men that I armed and equipped from the enemies of our country. . . . You drove me into West Tennessee in the winter of 1862 with a second brigade I had organized, with improper arms and without sufficient ammunition . . . and now this second brigade [sic], organized and equipped without thanks to you or the government, a brigade which has won a reputation for successful fighting second to none in the army . . . in order to humiliate me you have taken these brave men from me. . . .
I have stood your meanness as long as I intend to. You have played the part of a damned scoundrel, and are a coward, and if you were any part of a man I would slap your jaws and force you to resent it. You may as well not issue any more orders to me, for I will not obey them, and I will hold you personally responsible for any further indignities you endeavor to inflict upon me. You have threatened to arrest me for not obeying your orders promptly. I dare you to do it, and I say to you that if you ever again try to interfere with me or cross my path it will be at the peril of your life.
55This speech as reported by Cowan took insubordination to its ultimate extreme: an emphatic and contemptuous resignation, refusal to accept further orders, and a challenge to his superior to try to discipline him for it—not to mention the threat of murder if they ever met again.
56
During the first week of October, apparently a few days after his raging encounter with Bragg, Forrest wrote his commander a letter of formal resignation from the Army of Tennessee. The letter arrived at headquarters at a lucky time. It turned out to constitute what would have been considered a minor addition to a major revolt.
On October 4, twelve generals in the Army of Tennessee signed and sent to Jefferson Davis a petition to sack Bragg. The signers included Lieutenant Generals Longstreet, Hill, and Polk, Major Generals Buckner and Cleburne, and seven others. Forrest’s name was not among them.
At Bragg’s urgent request, Davis hurried down from Richmond to resolve the dispute. Once he arrived, however, he displayed characteristic misjudgment of subordinates. He had not only predetermined to sustain Bragg but also resolved to find a place in Bragg’s army for the now notorious General John Pemberton, loser of Vicksburg. Davis arrived on October 9 and stayed until October 14. If he thought he could talk Bragg’s detractors out of their enmity or let them bluster themselves out of it, he was wrong. His obliviousness to their complaints only made things worse. After five days of raising the generals’ hopes that their demand for Bragg’s removal would be granted, he retained Bragg, let Bragg banish Hill, and transferred Polk to Joe Johnston in Mississippi. Longstreet sulkily headed his corps off toward Knoxville to battle Burnside.
57Forrest, a mere brigadier and comparatively unlettered, was likely not invited to sign the generals’ petition. His name did figure, though, in Davis’s talks with Bragg. Forrest’s resignation was fresh, and Davis brought up Forrest’s earlier request to operate independently along the Mississippi; that would keep the rough-hewn Tennessean in the war and placate some western constituents, who were increasingly alarmed as Federal armies ravaged their territory. Davis was as ignorant of Forrest’s gifts as Bragg was impervious to them, but Davis knew the shrinking Confederacy needed all the help it could muster.
On October 13, Bragg sent a note to Davis’s Richmond office releasing Forrest. The transfer of “that distinguished soldier . . . can now be granted without injury to the public interest in this quarter,” Bragg disingenuously wrote.
58A week later, on October 20, Forrest remained unhappy. On that date, Bragg aide George Brent wrote in his diary, “Forrest is here and is much dissatisfied.” Probably Bragg had objected to giving Forrest a modest detachment with which to form the nucleus of the army he planned to raise in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky. Forrest had requested his own 65-man escort, Morton’s artillery, Major Charles McDonald’s 160-man battalion, and the disputed 240 Kentuckians who had served with Morgan and whom Forrest had refused, in the face of a Bragg order, to dismount and convert to infantry.
Davis again mediated. Having extended his Georgia trip to rally war support, the Confederate president summoned Forrest to meet him in Montgomery, Alabama. The two then rode a train to Atlanta, and Davis wrote Bragg on October 29 suggesting that Bragg grant Forrest’s request for the nucleus troops. Bragg complied with one exception: he kept the Kentuckians.
59Around November 1, Forrest left Bragg’s neighborhood. He could never, however, escape Bragg’s influence, because Bragg’s long and disastrous stint with the Army of Tennessee was followed by service as Davis’s principal military advisor in Richmond. Well after the war, Davis would tell a Tennessee governor that he himself never understood Forrest’s worth before the contest was lost. By then, the deposed Confederate president seemed to recognize that this failure stemmed in considerable part from the shortsightedness of Bragg and commanders like him. But it never would have occurred to Davis that the oversight was more generally attributable to the myopia and class consciousness of the Dixie elite.
“The trouble was that the generals commanding in the Southwest never appreciated Forrest until it was too late,” Davis said. “I was misled by them.”
60To the contrary, the trouble was the South’s self-proclaimed “better class of people.” Forrest’s hands were too callused by the axe and the hoe, his nostrils too familiar with the stink of sweat, and his language too full of the commonness of the cotton field for their gentility to countenance. Davis and most of his generals were members of their circle. Forrest never could be.
