Jefferson Davis’s choice—Saved by the “Cracker Line”—Lincoln addresses the country—Fighting in the clouds—The center breaks—The South holds
Francis Lawley had been so sure that Jefferson Davis would dismiss General Bragg that in his Times dispatch on October 8, 1863, he wrote as though an announcement was imminent. Yet Bragg’s removal was not preordained. The Battle of Chickamauga had been a stunning victory for the South—the only one since Chancellorsville in May. Longstreet had complained to the secretary of war, James Seddon, “that nothing but the hand of God can help as long as we have our present commander,” without reflecting how his doom-laden letter would appear to the world beyond Tennessee and Georgia. To Davis, the charge seemed self-serving and melodramatic; he agreed with Bragg that it would have been impossible for his shattered army to chase after Union general William Rosecrans even for the ten miles to Chattanooga. Furthermore, aside from the obvious dangers presented by the Confederates’ internal disputes, the Army of Tennessee looked not only secure but on the verge of another success.
Chattanooga was not quite a one-horse town, but with few more than two thousand residents it certainly did not have the resources to feed and shelter an army of more than fifty thousand. The Tennessee River looped the town in a U-bend on three sides, with the fourth, which faced south, overlooked by an undulating chain of mountains. At the southwestern end rose Lookout Mountain, which towered two thousand feet above the town; toward the northeastern end, the six-mile-long Missionary Ridge gently curved around like a natural amphitheater. Since Bragg held both these high points and the railroads in the valley, the Federals’ only safe supply route was a single road through the backcountry that eventually reached Chattanooga via the far side of the Tennessee River. During the rainy season, which was just beginning, the road was expected to become an impassable mud track, leading to inevitable starvation for the Federals.
President Davis had already demonstrated his willingness to be firm with generals who opposed him. Despite public criticism he had shunted aside both Joe Johnston and Pierre Beauregard. But with Braxton Bragg, a man he liked and trusted, Davis was strangely protective. Not even the shocking number of Confederate casualties at Chickamauga—higher than those suffered by Lee at Gettysburg and far higher than those suffered by Rosecrans—shook Davis’s faith in him. After allowing the unhappy generals to air their objections for a couple of days, Davis climbed atop the appropriately named “Pulpit Rock” on Lookout Mountain and made a brief but spirited defense of Bragg to the Confederate troops assembled below, warning his listeners that “he who sows the seeds of discontent and distrust prepares for the harvest of slaughter and defeat.” Davis may have felt that there was no other credible alternative to General Bragg, but the Army of Tennessee disagreed. When Davis boarded his return train on October 14, 1863, much of the army’s will to fight went with him. Instead of giving him three cheers, soldiers shouted, “Send us something to eat, Massa Jeff! I’m hungry! I’m hungry!” (Bragg’s ability to manage the supply operations for the army was no better than his skills as a leader of men.) The news of Davis’s decision spread so quickly that two days later, Consul Cridland wrote to Lord Russell from Mobile, Alabama, that everyone was in despair because President Davis was “retaining General Bragg in command against all opposition.”1 Bragg’s retribution was swift. The leading rebels found themselves sidelined or dismissed; Longstreet’s command was reduced to the fifteen thousand soldiers who had accompanied him from Virginia, and he was sent to guard Lookout Mountain, as far away from Bragg as possible.
Lawley, Vizetelly, and Ross stayed with Longstreet for another week, loyally enduring the short rations and incessant rain until they could stand it no longer. Vizetelly completed a couple more sketches and Lawley one more dispatch, this time not even trying to sugar over his contempt for Bragg. There was no compelling reason for them to remain, but leaving proved more difficult than they expected, as the few trains running from Chickamauga were reserved for the sick and wounded. Ross solved their problems by making friends with the stationmaster, who retained a proud memory of being inspected by Lord John Russell at the beginning of the war. At first “I tried to explain that he might be mistaken,” wrote Ross, who realized that the man had confused Lord Russell with William Howard Russell. Since the stationmaster found them room in a covered wagon (which let in the rain only at the corners), he decided to drop the point.2
Ill.47 Chattanooga and the Federal lines from the lower ridge of Lookout Mountain, by Frank Vizetelly.
They arrived back in Augusta, Georgia, two days later, on October 24. To their relief, the Planters Hotel had rooms for all of them. “A clean bed with actual sheets,” exclaimed Lawley, “plenty of water to wash in, decent food, a table to write on, candles”—these were luxuries to a man “who has long floundered in the mud of General Bragg’s camp.”3 The weather was less harsh, too, and a gentle autumn wind replaced the cruel downpours of Tennessee. The men passed the afternoons on their hotel balcony in shirtsleeves, smoking and chatting. They tried out the local theater and discovered it to be quite passable. Vizetelly’s only complaint was the tea served at the Planters, which was so weak he wondered how it managed to reach the spout.4
Little news filtered down to Augusta from Bragg’s camp, and certainly none from the besieged Federals in Chattanooga. The three friends were unaware that Washington had sent 23,000 troops from the Army of the Potomac to reinforce Rosecrans. Lincoln had acted decisively; there was only one general he truly believed in, and he called upon him now. Ulysses S. Grant was summoned from his headquarters in Cairo, Illinois, and ordered to Chattanooga. Lincoln had written to Grant after Vicksburg, “When you turned northward, east of the Big Black, I feared it was a mistake. I now wish to make the personal acknowledgement that you were right and I was wrong.”5 The president showed his newfound faith in Grant by placing him in overall command of the three main Federal armies in the west.
Lincoln was taking a risk by interfering with the Army of the Cumberland. “Old Rosy,” as the soldiers called Rosecrans, remained beloved by the men; he had meticulously looked after their welfare, and many of them were sorry to see him dismissed. “Worst of all,” wrote the English volunteer Robert Neve of the 5th Kentucky Volunteers, worse than the short rations, lack of blankets, and leaking tents, “was the order for General Rosecrans to be relieved. It was read to us on parade.”6 Rosecrans’s popularity with the soldiers was the chief reason why Lincoln waited until after the election for state governor in Ohio on October 13 to dismiss him, fearing that to do otherwise could push the soldier vote toward Vallandigham (who lost by a wide margin). But once the election was out of the way, he agreed that General Rosecrans could be replaced by the “Rock of Chickamauga,” General George Thomas, who had prevented a complete Federal rout at that battle.
The Confederate siege of Chattanooga was so tight that after a mere three weeks, sutlers in the town were charging six cents for a mouthful of bread—the usual price for two loaves. In the animal pens, the horses and mules were staggering in the last throes of starvation. Every building in the town had been transformed into makeshift hospitals, except for the Catholic church where Rosecrans worshipped. Grant arrived at Chattanooga on October 23, still using crutches after a fall from his horse in August. But the painful injury had not affected his vigor or determination. The 23,000 reinforcements from Virginia had arrived, led by a chastened “Fighting Joe” Hooker. General Sherman’s corps was coming from Mississippi. Grant was confident he could best his opponent; the real enemy he feared was Tennessee’s geography. Somehow he had to ferry food and grain to Chattanooga before the entire Army of the Cumberland collapsed or surrendered.
If Rosecrans had at least been able to hold on to Lookout Mountain, the situation facing the Federals would not have been so dire. With the Confederates now in possession of it, all the southern routes into the town, including the river, roads, and railway, were exposed to enemy fire. But the engineers of the Army of the Cumberland had come up with a plan. It required a furtive night expedition along the Tennessee River, beneath the Confederate guns on Lookout Mountain. If successful, they would be able to build a pontoon bridge two miles upriver, where a bend in the river would put the Federal forces beyond the reach of artillery fire.
At 3:00 A.M. on October 27, fifty pontoon boats, each carrying twenty-four soldiers and two rowers, silently paddled past the Confederates. Robert Neve was in the fourth boat. “It was a fine moonlit night and very still,” he wrote. “We passed down very quiet and could even see the Rebel pickets standing before their fires. It did not create any alarm.”7 They seized the landing with relative ease, driving back a small Confederate counterattack with few losses. “The next job was to cut down all trees … all day long we had to work felling trees and making small breastworks. Here we were all but starving. Rations were very short.” A Confederate attack was expected, and it came at midnight on the twenty-eighth. This should have been Longstreet’s second triumph at Chattanooga, his opportunity to defeat Grant without having to engage in a major battle. But Longstreet had not been paying attention to the Federal inroads along the southern end of the valley, and he made a serious mistake now by sending only four brigades against the attack force. The Confederates were easily overwhelmed and had to retreat back up Lookout Mountain.
The next day, the first supply wagons carrying hardtack (called “crackers” by the army) and dried beef came rolling through along the “Cracker Line.” The route stretched back for hundreds of miles. In northern Kentucky, a partially restored Ebenezer Wells led a wagon train of more than two thousand pack animals, fighting fever and exhaustion to keep the supplies moving. Robert Neve soon noticed the difference in his rations. Over the next two weeks more supplies arrived, including fresh vegetables and new uniforms. “Our rations were getting better, and we felt better as well.” His regiment was so close to the Confederate pickets that they agreed to take turns on picket duty. “We would wave each other’s caps and then exchange newspapers.” The reversal of their fortunes was complete; it was now the Confederates who were outnumbered, starving, and miserable and the Federals who were growing in confidence and strength.
General Bragg grasped the magnitude of Longstreet’s mistake in failing to prevent the Federal bridgehead into Chattanooga, but his reaction to the disaster was perverse. Instead of trying to plug the gap or reinforce his position, Bragg chose to send Longstreet away, along with twenty thousand men, on an expedition to take Knoxville, Tennessee, from General Burnside. There was some rationale to the decision: if Burnside could be forced back to central Tennessee, the Confederates would repossess the three railways that passed through Knoxville and the all-important Cumberland Gap, which would restore the quick route to Virginia. But at best the mission was a dangerous sideshow when Federal supplies and troops were pouring into Chattanooga.
Bragg relished the thought of Longstreet’s having to operate on his own, hoping that this would expose some of his rival’s weaknesses. “One of General Longstreet’s most serious faults as a military commander was shown at this time,” admitted Francis Dawson. Longstreet made few preparations for the campaign and never bothered to speak to Dawson about ordnance. “Not one word was said to me by him on the subject. I had an inkling, however, of what was going on, and obtained ample supplies. Had I not done so, we should have been in an awkward predicament by the time that we reached Knoxville. Had anything been lacking, it is certain that the blame would have been placed on me.”8 The army reached its destination with less than half the number of wagons and animals required for a campaign. But Dawson’s prescience protected him from Longstreet’s growing fury as the general watched his army wilt under the twin assaults of hunger and cold.9 The capture of a Federal wagon train on November 15 eased some of the pain.
Longstreet desperately wanted to avoid a siege, and hoped to make Burnside fight him outside the town. On November 16, he thought he had succeeded. Burnside’s army was strung across a narrow valley outside Knoxville—a “beautiful position” for taking, recalled a Confederate officer. But the situation began to go wrong almost at once. When the cannons opened fire, Dawson was horrified to discover that the ammunition he had worked so hard to acquire was defective. Instead of raining fire and shot upon the enemy, the shells exploded prematurely or not at all. Two days of fighting ended with severe losses to the Confederate corps.
Longstreet vacillated while his enemy built stronger defenses. “There was a good deal of delay, for one reason and another,” wrote Dawson, “and we were so near the town that we could hear the tunes played by the band at Fort Sanders. The favourite air then was: ‘When This Cruel War Is Over.’ ”10 Longstreet had assured Bragg that Knoxville would be captured long before Grant’s reinforcements arrived at Chattanooga. This was impossible now that Burnside occupied the town. But since he had not heard from Bragg for several days, Longstreet wrongly assumed there was no imminent danger to the besiegers.
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Francis Lawley, Frank Vizetelly, and Fitzgerald Ross left Georgia in early November, once they knew for certain that General Longstreet would not be returning to Chattanooga. Vizetelly and Ross set off for Charleston, while Lawley, who was mystified by his friends’ enthusiasm for danger, headed for Richmond. Charleston was again being bombarded; if the Federals succeeded in taking the city, it would be one more disaster that Lawley would have to fudge for his readers. The strain of always putting the best face on Confederate fortunes was beginning to show in his most recent dispatches. When he arrived in Richmond on November 14, Lawley wrote a report for The Times that admitted far more than he perhaps realized. The enemy, he wrote, “hems in the edges of the ‘rebellion’ on every side.” The North had surrounded the South “with a cordon of vessels so numerous as for the first time in 30 months to make access to the Confederate coast really dangerous and difficult.”11
Lawley thought the city looked beautiful. A light dusting of snow covered most reminders of the war and imparted charm to even the most dilapidated buildings. President Davis had returned to Richmond a few days earlier, having toured Charleston’s defenses and delivered an encouraging speech to its embattled citizens. During his absence the Confederate cabinet had learned that the precious Lairds rams were almost certainly lost to them. The secretary of the navy, Stephen Mallory, still hoped that James Bulloch would find a way to rescue the vessels; with the exception of the Alexandra, the agent had always come through. But the rest of the cabinet thought the news vindicated its decision to expel the British consuls. They were convinced that the Royal Navy could have broken the blockade at any time during the past three years if the British had been truly in favor of Southern independence. The existence of the British blockade runners made no difference to Southern resentment toward Britain—though without them Lee’s army would be suffering even greater privations.
Lee had not fought a battle since Gettysburg and yearned to launch an attack against General Meade and the Army of the Potomac. It went against the grain with him to remain on the defensive, but, as he had explained to his wife in late October, “thousands were barefooted, thousands with fragments of shoes, and all without overcoats, blankets or warm clothing. I could not bear to expose them to certain suffering on an uncertain issue.”12
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General Meade was troubled by many worries, but the condition of his army was not among them. At the beginning of October, a scandal had threatened to tarnish the reputation of the cavalry corps, but it was quickly hushed up by the War Department. All the cavalrymen knew about it was that Sir Percy Wyndham had been escorted to Washington under armed guard. It was not clear why he had been removed. The War Department refused to say anything other than that he had been relieved “for the time being.” Sixteen years later, in 1879, the Decatur Daily News of Illinois ran an article that claimed to clear “an old mystery.” Apparently, two unnamed informants had accused Wyndham of plotting to surrender his regiment to the Confederates for $300,000. “Mr. Stanton could not, getting his information as he did, place Col. Wyndham under arrest … so the only road open was to remove him from command.”13 The informants had first brought the accusation to Secretary Chase, who took the matter to Stanton. They claimed to have a letter from the Confederate secretary of state, Judah P. Benjamin, that laid out a strategy to entice Wyndham into surrendering his cavalry.14 The War Department does not seem to have investigated whether Wyndham actually considered the bribe, nor was he interrogated about the letter.
Speculation about Wyndham’s removal from active duty was rife: Lord Lyons received protests from the public after stories appeared in the New York press that accused him of being the instigator. “I have to say that there is no foundation whatever for the assertion made respecting me,” Lord Lyons wrote to a Mr. John Livingston in New York. He had not, as Livingston claimed, solicited or made “representations of a disparaging character against that brave officer.”15 On November 5, The New York Times intervened unexpectedly—probably at Seward’s behest—with an article on the controversy that explicitly denied Lord Lyons’s involvement and repeated the War Department’s stance that Wyndham was on temporary relief from duties. It would turn out to be a very long relief.
The Union cavalry wondered about the unexplained removal of its most colorful brigade leader; Wyndham’s habit of twiddling his mustache whenever he became angry was remembered with humor rather than the fear it once provoked. The corps would have been happy to have him back, especially after it suffered a humiliating defeat by Jeb Stuart’s troopers at Buckland Mills on October 19, which was dubbed “Buckland Races” by the Confederates after the Federals were chased upcountry for several miles. Meade was summoned by Lincoln for an interview in Washington and given to understand that he was expected to destroy Lee, not play cat-and-mouse with him. The result of the meeting was a small engagement near Fredericksburg on November 7, which netted Meade more than 1,600 prisoners, eight battle flags, and four artillery guns.
The secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, remained unimpressed and wanted Meade to push harder. Nothing about the situation in Virginia pleased him. But on November 14, Stanton received one piece of news that did give him satisfaction: the combined land and sea force sent to capture John Yates Beall had at last succeeded in cornering its prey. Bored with lying low in Richmond, Beall had resumed his raids on November 10. He managed to seize just one vessel before his whereabouts were exposed and the full might of the North pounced on the little band. Bennet G. Burley was one of only two who managed to escape. Beall and his crew were taken to Fort McHenry in Baltimore, where they were kept in manacles for six weeks until the Confederate secretary of the navy, Stephen Mallory, ordered eighteen Federal prisoners of war—picked at random—to be similarly shackled in retribution, which led to a relaxation of their treatment.26.1
“I have seen your dispatches,” Lincoln telegraphed Meade after the fight at Fredericksburg, “and I wish to say, ‘Well done!’ ” He then wrote to Burnside at Knoxville, giving him the news about Meade’s success and asking pointedly, “Let me hear from you.”16 Lincoln was also waiting anxiously for news from General Grant: the “Cracker Line” had saved the Army of the Cumberland from starvation, but far more was at stake than a battle over logistics. “If we can hold Chattanooga and eastern Tennessee,” Lincoln had written to Rosecrans before the general’s removal, “I think the rebellion must dwindle and die.”17
On November 19 the president was going to Gettysburg—whose 23,000 Union casualties in July remained the highest of any battle of the war—to speak at the dedication of the town’s new war cemetery. The solemn and painful task was made worse by the uncertainty in the west; Lincoln would have to address the mourners with Rosecrans’s disaster at Chickamauga still fresh in their minds. However, Lincoln did not wish to dwell on the dangers facing the country, or why duty had to be its own reward at such a time. He already had a theme for the speech, one advocated three months earlier by Seward’s financial emissary to London, John Murray Forbes, whose perspective on the meaning of the war had sharpened during his travels abroad. “John Bright and his glorious band of English republicans can see that we are fighting for democracy,” Forbes had written to Lincoln on September 8. “After we get military successes, the mass of the Southern people must be made to see this truth, and then reconstruction becomes easy and permanent.”18
A large retinue accompanied Lincoln to Gettysburg, including Seward, several governors and senators, and the French minister, Henri Mercier, but not Lord Lyons, who did not receive an invitation. Although the reasons for the visit were somber, the crowds greeted Lincoln with enthusiasm and lined up in large numbers to shake his hand. The principal speaker at the ceremony was not the president but the great orator Edward Everett, whose age and infirmities were sadly evident in parts of his speech. Everett spoke for more than two hours during the unusually hot afternoon, tripping up occasionally and at one point confusing Meade with Lee.19
When he was finished, the audience steeled itself for another long speech, not knowing that Lincoln had been asked by the organizers to be short and concise. The two-minute address was over so quickly that the photographer did not have time to focus his lens, and many among the fifteen thousand listeners had not yet settled down. Lincoln himself believed that his words had fallen flat. Several newspapers criticized him for failing to live up to the occasion.20 Antonio Gallenga, a temporary correspondent for The Times, thought that Lincoln’s speech had been a total failure. English readers were told that the “imposing ceremony” was “rendered ludicrous by some of the luckless sallies of that poor President Lincoln.”21 But Lincoln’s private secretary John Hay recorded in his diary that the president spoke “in a firm free way, with more grace than is his wont.”22 Edward Everett had no doubts about the momentous nature of Lincoln’s speech. He congratulated Lincoln, confessing that he wished “I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”23 Everett realized that Lincoln had captured the essential nature of the war. In a mere 272 words, the president had defined the moral purpose of the country’s existence—democracy, freedom, equality—not only for the mourners at Gettysburg but for every subsequent generation of the American people. The Revolution of 1776 had brought forth:
a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.24
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Henry Yates Thompson arrived at Bridgeport, Alabama, forty-seven miles downstream from Chattanooga, on Friday, November 20, carrying a letter of introduction from Edward Everett to Dr. John Newberry, the head of the Western Department of the Sanitary Commission. It was late, so instead of continuing his journey to the commission’s headquarters, Thompson bedded down in one of their tents at Bridgeport. “Before I went to sleep,” he wrote, “I heard a solemn thudding sound outside. I asked my companion what was it and he said: ‘Oh, the last of Sherman’s men crossing the pontoons.’ ”25
Grant had been waiting for Sherman’s troops to arrive before he made his attack against General Bragg. By November 21 he had accumulated more than sixty thousand men. Staring down at them from Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge was a diminishing army of 33,000 Confederates. The “Cracker Line” had answered the Federal hunger pains, but no such relief had come to Bragg’s army. “Never in all my whole life do I remember of ever experiencing so much oppression and humiliation,” wrote the Confederate private Sam Watkins. “The soldiers were starved and almost naked, and covered all over with lice and camp itch and filth and dirt. The men looked sick, hollow-eyed, and heart-broken, living principally upon parched corn, which had been picked out of the mud and dirt under the feet of officers’ horses.”26
Thompson and Dr. Newberry boarded a steamboat for the last leg of the journey. It was another two days of arduous travel before they reached Chattanooga on November 22. That day, Bragg stacked the cards against himself still higher by sending two more divisions to Knoxville. “I had a fine view of the whole Rebel position on Missionary Ridge about three miles distant across a wooded valley,” wrote Thompson on the twenty-third:
The pickets and the skirmishers of both sides were behind their respective rifle pits in the valley below us and the Rebel pickets were plainly visible from Fort Wood, about half a mile from where I stood. All those round me were expecting immediate fighting. Soon I saw a sight I shall never forget. The whole Union army in the town—about 25,000 men under General Thomas—left their tents and huts and marched out past Fort Wood in long winding columns creeping into the valley and into line of battle round the town. From Fort Wood it all looked like a great review. But it was in deadly earnest.
Thompson was observing Grant’s test of Bragg’s resolve, to see whether the Confederate general was prepared to fight over Chattanooga or was planning to withdraw. The Union line charged toward Orchard Knob, a fortified hillock at the base of Missionary Ridge. The Confederates in the rifle pits, as mesmerized as Thompson by the bright spectacle rushing toward them, fled. Federal private Robert Neve was surprised to take the hill so easily: “We kept rushing on until we got in sight of their works, which we took with little opposition, and captured a number of prisoners. I took two myself,” he added. Thompson watched as the prisoners were brought in and noticed that they were “rough and ragged men with no vestige of a uniform.” During the night, while Neve lay shivering on the ground listening to every rustle and snap, Thompson rolled bandages for the Sisters of Mercy. He had not expected so much noise or, perhaps, so much blood. “This is war with a vengeance,” he wrote.27 The men had seemed universally brave and determined. Robert Neve could have enlightened him that nothing was ever uniform in battle: “I noticed in this fight that several officers and men got sheltered behind the trees, and kept waving their hats and cheering men up to a great degree, not even caring about firing a shot at the enemy.”28
After breakfast on November 24, Thompson returned to Fort Wood to watch the second day of the Battle of Chattanooga. Bragg had managed to recall one of the two divisions sent to Knoxville—General Patrick Cleburne’s—and had placed it at the far end of Missionary Ridge to shore up his right. Grant’s overall plan for the day was simple: to capture the extreme ends of Bragg’s position and then take the middle. “Fighting Joe” Hooker’s day had come.
I began to think nothing was doing [wrote Thompson] when at about midday, when I was dividing my lunch with one of the gunners on the fort, heavy reports of cannon and musketry from Lookout Valley made all of us hurry to that side of Fort Wood. I joined two officers looking through telescopes towards Lookout Mountain and we soon saw Hooker attacking, his men plainly visible to us sweeping round the steep face of Lookout.
Close by me was General Grant in a black surtout with black braid on and quite loose, black trousers and a black wideawake hat and thin Wellington boots. He looked clean and gentlemanly but not military having a Stoop and a full reddish beard, the moustache much lighter than the ends which were trained to a peak.
We saw Hooker’s men fall back once—then they advanced again. After some little suspense we saw the Rebels run round the face of Lookout near the top and Hooker’s line advance after them, rifles popping all along the face of the mountain and guns shelling the retreating Rebels from Moccasin Point and Fort Negley. An officer beside me with a telescope cried out: “There they are and the Rebels are running.” His glass was pointed to the steep face of Lookout more than half way up—and there sure enough, just three miles from us along the sparsely wooded face of the mountain, we saw a running fight with the Rebels retreating before Hooker’s men.
When Hooker’s men planted that large U.S. flag near the top of the mountain, the whole of the troops, and the people in and around Chattanooga, who must number some 60,000 at least, seemed to hurrah together.
The only man who seemed unmoved was General Grant himself, the prime author of all this hurly burly. There he stood in his plain citizen’s clothes looking through his double field-glasses apparently totally unmoved. I stood within a few feet of him and I could hardly believe that here was this famous commander, the model, as it seemed to me, of a modest and homely but efficient Yankee general. I stood next to General Grant for quite some time. If the battle had been a pageant got up for my benefit I could not have had it better.29
Map.18 Chattanooga, November 24–25, 1863
Click here to view a larger image.
Thompson had witnessed the “Battle Above the Clouds,” so called because a light fog had formed on parts of the mountain during the fight, obscuring the valley below. Hooker’s victory had been achieved with surprisingly little cost; his casualties, including those missing and captured, were fewer than two thousand. The following day, the twenty-fifth, was supposed to be Sherman’s turn for glory. Grant expected his man, who had served him so well at Vicksburg, to complete the rout and drive the Confederates off Missionary Ridge. But Sherman’s adversary was General Patrick Cleburne, a former corporal in the 41st (Welsh) Regiment of Foot, who was the best commander in the Army of Tennessee. Cleburne’s new British volunteer aide-de-camp, Captain Charles H. Byrne, who had accompanied Ross and Vizetelly on their journey from Charleston in September, described the fight for his friends. “Three times did they charge our position, and three times were they repulsed,” he wrote. “The third charge was the most determined of the lot. They managed to reach the crest of the hill, and there they fought us for about two hours at a distance varying from twenty to thirty paces;—so close were they that our officers threw stones.”30 Byrne’s horse was shot in the neck. Rather than abandon his comrades, he chose to remain and fight on foot.
The bravery and sacrifice of Cleburne’s soldiers became immaterial after Grant exploited the fact that Bragg had allowed the center of the Confederate line to thin dangerously during the fight to only fifteen thousand men. At Gettysburg, the Confederate charge at Meade’s center had proved fatal because Lee had failed to dent the Federal strength; but here there was a genuine weakness and Grant prevailed. General Thomas’s division of twenty-five thousand rose from the base of Orchard Knob and smashed through the Confederate defenses at the top of the Ridge. No one had ordered the men to go that far; rage and madness simply took hold of them. “We had all got mixed up,” wrote Robert Neve. “Every man done as he liked, firing to the best advantage until we got twenty yards from the top. Someone cried out, ‘Fix bayonets!’ and ‘Forward to the charge.’ ” The Confederates ran, “leaving cannon, wagons, horses, tools and everything. It was a perfect rout.”26.2 31 Four thousand Confederates were captured on the Ridge, twice the number of casualties for the battle.
Bragg was powerless to halt the men as they came hurtling down the other side of the mountain toward Ringgold. Sam Watkins saw him ride. “Bragg looked scared. He had put spurs to his horse, and was running like a scared dog.… Poor fellow, he looked so hacked and whipped and mortified and chagrined at defeat, and all along the line, when Bragg would pass, the soldiers would raise the yell, …‘Bully for Bragg, he’s hell on retreat.’ ”32 The only division that did not panic was Cleburne’s, which held off the Federals long enough to enable the bulk of Bragg’s army to escape off the mountain. The Confederates managed to stay ahead of their pursuers, crossing through Ringgold Gap into Georgia toward the station town of Dalton. Grant did not have the wagons and supplies for an incursion into enemy country, and he forbade his generals to pursue the Confederates past Ringgold.
Henry Yates Thompson explored Bragg’s deserted headquarters two days after the battle, on November 27. Since the twenty-fifth he had been helping Dr. Newberry by identifying the dead and pinning their names to their jackets. The first slain Federal he found turned out to be named John Bull. As Thompson wandered among the bullet-scarred trees, picking up souvenirs, he stumbled across a pile of bodies. He had not noticed them at first because their faded uniforms were the same color as the leaves. They had no hats or shoes.
I went on to a knoll commanding the ridge in both directions [he wrote]. I found two Rebels—one dead and one just alive unattended since the battle. I gave the wounded man what brandy I had left in my flask and he spoke a little. His brains were protruding—the wound was in the back of his head. He seemed thankful for the brandy. I minced and mixed some meat, onions and biscuit and put water with them. He tried to eat but could not chew. A Federal came to help and washed his face.
While combing through the field, Thompson had a second shock. He saw two children, a little girl and boy, scavenging among the dead. They were collecting bullets. “The little girl said she lived ‘over there,’ pointing to Bragg’s headquarters. She had been in the house all through the battle,” he wrote. No one seemed to be responsible for them. The children seemed unaware of the danger that had passed over their heads, or of the perilous future that awaited them once the soldiers were no longer around to share their rations.33 The pageantry Thompson had seen from afar had darkened to a scene of gore and horror. “The impression left on me by my walks the next day through those blood-stained woods,” he wrote later, “fixed a conviction in my mind, a conviction of the absolute and essential wickedness of those who talk lightly of war and still more of those who lightly begin a war.”34 Thompson was ready to return home. “Now I am tired to death,” he wrote. His ship was not leaving until December 23, but Thompson felt he had witnessed enough suffering and intended to spend the final weeks of his stay in America visiting friends and enjoying himself as a tourist. His opinion of the North had grown higher still now that he understood the great suffering endured by its people.
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“God be praised for this victory, which looks like the heaviest blow the country has yet dealt at rebellion,” George Templeton Strong wrote in New York after hearing the news from Chattanooga. “Meade’s army again reported in motion and across the Rapidan,” he added to his diary entry. “The nation needs one or two splendid victories by its Eastern armies to offset those gained in the West.”35
Two days later, on November 29, General Longstreet received a wire from Jefferson Davis confirming the Confederate defeat at Chattanooga and ordering him to abandon his siege at Knoxville so that he could provide support to Bragg. The telegram had come an hour too late for eight hundred Confederate and thirteen Federal soldiers. One of the worst-planned assaults of the war had just taken place in front of Burnside’s defenses. Francis Dawson was so sickened by the fiasco that he could not bear to write about it in his memoir. All he could say about the twenty minutes of slaughter was that Longstreet’s attack “failed utterly.”
The Confederates began to march away from Knoxville on December 4. Fearing that General Sherman was on his way to help Burnside, Longstreet decided it would be safer to retreat farther east rather than head south toward Georgia. “The men suffered frightfully,” wrote Dawson. “It is no exaggeration to say that on such marches as they were obliged to make in that bitter weather they left the bloody tracks of their feet on the sharp stones of the roads.” Longstreet, stricken with remorse and self-doubt, wished to be relieved of command. His request was denied, but President Davis did accept General Bragg’s resignation. The general blamed the defeat on the cowardice of his troops and the personal animosity of his commanders without ever examining his own part in either cause. President Davis had no other alternative than to recall his stubborn opponent General Joe Johnston and order him to take command of Bragg’s Army of Tennessee.
In the Federal army, General Burnside, too, asked to be relieved. He was satisfied that his reputation as a commander had been redeemed by the capture of the Cumberland Gap and the defense of Knoxville. No longer would he be known solely for the disaster at Fredericksburg and the humiliating “Mud March” of January 1863. The real victor of the Cumberland Gap, Colonel De Courcy, was also determined to leave the army. The War Department, not interested in deciding the contest between a departing general and his disgruntled colonel, had never responded to De Courcy’s complaints. He was saved from becoming bitter by the loyal support and admiration of the soldiers who had been with him on the campaign. “It was the unanimous opinion of the officers in De Courcy’s brigade that this trouble actually grew out of jealousy caused by the brilliant result of De Courcy’s tactics,” Lieutenant Colonel McFarland of the 86th Ohio Infantry later claimed. “It will be borne in mind that 2500 men, well protected by rifle-pits, forts, and cannon, had surrendered to 800, who were without effective support of any kind.”36 The injustice meted out to De Courcy so grieved his old regiment that on December 19 the officers and men of the 16th Ohio Volunteer Infantry presented him with a commemorative sword, sash, and belt. Captain Hamilton Richeson declared:
Officers there are who command the confidence of those under them, but who cannot win their respect. Others have the respect of the men but not their confidence. You, sir, not only possess the confidence, but also the respect of the soldiers of your regiment.… Indeed, through all the vicissitudes, dangers, privations and vexations of a soldier’s life, while you were with the regiment you made so perfect, your conduct was admirable.37
De Courcy had always hoped that he would win their respect, though devotion had seemed out of the question because of his famously disciplinarian style. The 16th’s parting gift demonstrated that he had achieved far more than he had believed possible. “If I did well it was because they did better,” he replied. “Under fire they were ever firm, cool and self-reliant.” De Courcy’s Civil War experiences had been harsh and frequently heartbreaking, but were by no means in vain. The soldiers he had tried so hard to mold into idealized versions of British troops remained proudly and defiantly true to their American roots; rather, it was De Courcy himself who was transformed into an officer and leader worthy of his men.26.3
General Meade had suffered the misfortune of embarking on his new campaign against Lee the day after eastern newspapers reported Grant’s boast that his army was “driving a big nail in the coffin of the rebellion.” Meade had learned that the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, which was little more than half the size of the 80,000-strong Army of the Potomac, was encamped in two separate locations some thirty miles apart. His plan was to creep across the Rapidan River, strike at one Confederate corps with all his might, and then quickly go after the other. But gross incompetence by one of his generals, who became lost, and miserable weather, which slowed down the others, wrecked Meade’s beautiful design. By the time all the Federals were across the river and in place, Lee had his full army ready and properly entrenched. The area, known as Mine Run, was only eight miles from Chancellorsville. It was a thickly wooded area divided by a stream that ran into the Rapidan River. When Meade surveyed his army’s position on November 30, he knew in his heart that he had failed. Though Lee had fewer than fifty thousand men at his disposal, they were expertly placed behind impregnable defenses. A soldier from Massachusetts looked across at the Confederate works and “felt death in my very bones.”39
Meade made the courageous decision to call off the attack, though he knew he would be dubbed a coward by the Northern public, and quietly pulled his army back over the Rapidan. During the retreat a sudden freeze almost paralyzed the Army of the Potomac. The 7th Maine Infantry, young Frederick Farr’s regiment, suffered its worst night of the war as it crossed the Rapidan on December 1. “We halted after marching for a short time, and the night being intensely cold we made fires,” wrote a friend of Frederick’s. “This was the last that has been seen or heard of him. It is supposed that wearied out by the exceptional hardships he had undergone, he fell asleep by one of the fires and did not awake till the rebel cavalry came up to him and took him prisoner, as the Rebs followed close at our heels.”40 No one had received word from Frederick, but it was assumed that he was in one of the prisons near Richmond.
The Army of the Potomac retired to its winter camps, which were spread out between the two “Raps,” the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers. The Army of Northern Virginia followed suit on the other side of the Rapidan, and out west, the opposing armies under Grant and Johnston did the same. There would be no more fighting until the spring. Although the Federal offensive in Virginia had not materialized, it was Lee rather than Meade who was on the defensive, and the same pattern was being repeated all over the South. Charleston held, despite the continued bombardment of its forts, but the question was for how much longer. Wilmington was still open, but Mobile and Galveston, though nominally under Confederate control, were receiving only a trickle of blockade runners. John Jones, the War Department clerk in Richmond, had heard that the capture rate was one in four blockade runners; “we can afford that,” he wrote.41 But Jones had also heard in the War Department that soldiers were threatening to desert in order to feed their families and protect their farms. Grant’s victory at Chattanooga had given the Union a base from which to attack not only the heart of the South, but also its munitions and gunpowder factories in Georgia.
Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Chickamauga—the three Confederate victories in 1863—had not taken the South one step closer to independence, whereas Gettysburg had restored the morale of the Northern public, and Vicksburg had showed that victory was possible. “The signs look better,” Lincoln wrote after the Mississippi River was reopened to travel and commerce. “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.” Much of Mississippi, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Virginia north of Fredericksburg were under Union control; the Gulf and Atlantic coasts were also closed off from the Confederacy; and Texas, Arkansas, and most of Louisiana were inaccessible to Richmond. But these advantages seemed less certain when the core of the Confederacy—Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama—remained intact; two formidable Confederate armies and the great Robert E. Lee were at Davis’s disposal; and the fighting spirit of the South remained unbroken.
26.1 Unwilling to volunteer for the regular Confederate army, Burley briefly tried his hand at journalism before turning to the stage. He joined the New Richmond Theatre, run by the British theater manager Richard d’Orsay Ogden. Burley’s first role was a small part in the aptly named The Guerrillas, a Confederate melodrama set during Stonewall Jackson’s military campaign in 1862.
26.2 This was also Robert Neve’s final day of the war. Already sick with dysentery, he was sent to the hospital after the battle and was never again well enough to fight. He mustered out of the army in September 1864 and returned to England. His health permanently damaged by the war, he died in his mid-thirties in 1879, and his wife, Charlotte, successfully applied to Washington for a widow’s pension.
26.3 In early 1864, De Courcy submitted his resignation. He received an ordinary discharge on February 19, which, after protests, was amended to an honorable discharge on March 3. He was forty-four years old. More than half his life had been spent in the service of one army or another, and he could not imagine beginning a new life in business or farming. De Courcy chose to go home to England. His future prospects were slim. But there was still one career open to him: he could marry well. On May 10, 1864, De Courcy married Elia, Comtesse du Bosque de Beaumont, a French widow of independent means.38