On September 22, 1862, in the wake of what had been at least a strategic victory at Antietam, Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. In it the president announced that one hundred days from that date, January 1, 1863, all slaves living in areas then still in rebellion against the United States would be henceforth and forever free. The Emancipation Proclamation changed the immediate goal of the Union forces in the Civil War but not its underlying issues. The war had from the beginning been about slavery. Rebellious southerners had launched the Confederacy for the purpose of spreading and preserving slavery, while Lincoln had led the North in fighting to preserve the Union and constitutional government. Now the war would become as explicitly a contest about slavery on the part of the North as it had been from the opening shot, and before, on the part of the South.
The Emancipation Proclamation would also change the way the war was fought. Once it was issued, or at least once Lincoln’s January 1 deadline had passed, there could be no more thought of conciliating the South. The trend to hard war, with southern civilians feeling all of the harshness conquered citizens usually do feel in a civilized war, would continue apace. Most white southerners would fight to the bitter end to preserve slavery and the system of white supremacy for which they thought it the only protection, and they would fight with renewed bitterness and intensity. Once the Union began recruiting black troops the following year, Confederate troops perpetrated a number of atrocities and massacres against them when they had opportunity. The war was becoming even more brutal than it had been up to now.
Reaction to the proclamation in the South was predictable. An outraged Jefferson Davis inveighed against the proclamation as “the most execrable measure in the history of guilty man” and announced that henceforth captured Union officers would not be treated as prisoners of war but would instead be turned over to state authorities for punishment as “criminals engaged in inciting servile insurrection.” That threat was never carried out, possibly because the Union threatened retaliation on Confederate officers. Other white southerners denounced the proclamation in extreme terms. Confederate dentist and cartoonist Adalbert Volck depicted Lincoln as consorting with demonic spirits while writing the proclamation and contemplating with satisfaction imagined scenes of racial massacre.
Reaction among pro-Confederate northerners and even some Union-loyal Democrats was almost the same as that in the South. A regiment from southern Illinois, a part of the state where proslavery feeling ran strong, mutinied and had to be disbanded. In Virginia, McClellan was furious. To his wife he wrote, “I cannot make up my mind to fight for such an accursed doctrine.” Nonetheless, at the urging of more level-headed fellow officers, he restrained himself and issued a very correct general order to the troops of his army, reminding them that “the remedy for political errors, if any are committed, is to be found only in the action of the people at the polls.”
Abolitionists rejoiced all across the North, and a growing number of northerners who had never considered themselves abolitionists also applauded the proclamation as a necessary step toward winning the war. If slavery was trying to destroy the nation, one soldier wrote in a letter that was representative of the feelings of many northerners, then slavery needed to be destroyed. In the midterm elections that fall, the Republicans lost twenty-eight seats in the House of Representatives. Some of those losses may have been due to popular opposition to emancipation, but more were probably in response to disappointment with the apparent lack of progress in the war. Americans were and are notoriously impatient about such things. Placed in perspective, however, the Republicans’ electoral losses did not amount to much anyway. They lost fewer seats in Congress than the party holding the White House usually lost in midterm elections during that era.
British reaction to the Emancipation Proclamation was complicated. After a long and arduous political struggle, Britain had abolished slavery in all of its colonies in 1833, and since that time, Britons had come to pride themselves on their antislavery principles and feel rather superior to their American cousins on that score, as they did on every other. British leaders and much of the British press had for years sneered at the United States for its tolerance of slavery. During the first phase of the Civil War, British leadership could and did maintain that the Union cause was not the cause of freedom since the government in Washington did not have immediate emancipation as one of its direct war aims.
Now that had changed, and one would have expected to see the British government rally enthusiastically to the cause of freedom—if its prior strictures against the United States had been sincere. In fact, Prime Minister Viscount Palmerston and Foreign Minister Earl Russell were furious, ostensibly because they believed that the proclamation would incite slave revolt and massacres but perhaps because they resented losing their grounds for claiming moral superiority over the United States. At any rate, they came as close to leading Britain to war with the United States then as they ever did during the course of the war. Ultimately they did not dare to do so because of the tremendous outpouring of support for the Union among Britain’s middle and lower classes. Henry Adams, son of the highly capable U.S. ambassador to Britain Charles Francis Adams, wrote, “The Emancipation Proclamation has done more for us than all our former victories and all our diplomacy.” Though the Union cause had always been that of freedom, the Emancipation Proclamation made that fact clearly recognizable to the common man in Europe, and millions responded with enthusiastic approval. In vain, the haughty Times of London sniffed that the proclamation declared free only those slaves whom Lincoln had no ability to free and left in slavery all those whom he supposedly could have freed. The great majority of Britons recognized the proclamation’s tendency as clearly as Jefferson Davis had.
From that time to this, some have wondered about the apparent discrepancy the Times mentioned. Lincoln declared free those slaves in areas still in rebellion—areas where he had no control. He left untouched those slaves in areas loyal to the Union—areas where one might assume that he did have the power to act. In fact, Lincoln’s action was dictated by respect for law and fear of the federal courts, especially Roger B. Taney’s Supreme Court. Lincoln did not want to violate the Constitution, and he believed that emancipation as an exercise of presidential war power, a hostile act aimed at subduing enemies who were waging war against the United States, was indeed constitutional. He also knew that if given a chance, Taney would strike down any action that impinged on slavery whether it was constitutional or not. An act of war by the president would not immediately land in the federal courts and so, unlike the Confiscation Acts, would not give Taney his chance. Of course, freeing the slaves by an exercise of presidential war powers meant that Lincoln did not, in fact, have the authority to free any slaves in areas not at war against the United States, the areas the Times had blamed him for neglecting.
When Lincoln at last issued the final Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, he therefore omitted from its application the non-Confederate slave states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri as well as the northwestern portion of Virginia, soon to become the separate state of West Virginia; the approximately half-liberated Confederate state of Tennessee; and several Union-occupied parishes of Louisiana around New Orleans. Of the three and a half million slaves in America at that time, only about twenty thousand actually experienced their official freedom on that day. These were contrabands who had fled into Union lines and were for the most part living in contraband camps in areas that were still technically regarded as war zones. These twenty thousand had not exactly liberated themselves, but they had cooperated in their liberation, as hundreds of thousands of their fellow slaves would do before the war was over. For slaves still behind Confederate lines on the first day of 1863 and for their masters, the Emancipation Proclamation was a declaration of war aims. A promise of what Union forces would do when they arrived. Slaves and slaveholders in the omitted areas could easily read the portents and see that once slavery was eradicated in the rebellious states, its lease on life elsewhere in the United States would be very short indeed.
None of this would become reality, however, if Union armies did not win the war, and even as Lincoln issued his September 22 preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, two major Confederate offenses were still in full swing west of the Appalachians in the strategically decisive heartland of the South. Even before Lee had started his abortive foray into Maryland, Confederate forces in the West had seized the initiative, and as of the time of Lee’s retreat across the Potomac, the western Confederate forces were still pressing their offensives.
After capturing Corinth with his massive army at the end of May, Henry Halleck had dispersed his forces around West Tennessee and northern Mississippi with a view to holding the territory gained in the Union’s successful spring campaigns in the West. He had dispatched Buell with about thirty thousand men to march east from Corinth, along the line of the Memphis & Charleston Railroad, repairing the railroad as he went and using it as a supply line. His objective was Chattanooga, Tennessee. A small, ramshackle town of perhaps two thousand inhabitants sprawling on the banks of the Tennessee River at the foot of 1,500-foot Lookout Mountain, Chattanooga was the gateway to the southern Appalachians. It sat at the eastern end of the gorge by which the Tennessee River plunged through the Allegheny Range, here known as the Cumberland Plateau, and from it railroads ran not only west to Corinth and Memphis but also northeast through Union-sympathizing East Tennessee to Virginia and southeast to Atlanta and the heart of Georgia. Taking it would be a first step toward Lincoln’s long-desired goal of liberating the loyal citizens of East Tennessee, would seal off the most convenient line of rail communication between the Confederate eastern and western theaters, and would open the door for Union penetration into Georgia.
The task of defending Chattanooga fell to Confederate Major General Edmund Kirby Smith (West Point, 1845), who commanded the Confederate Army of East Tennessee. Smith’s task was complicated by the fact that he also had to defend Knoxville, one hundred miles to the northeast, which seemed to be threatened by a Union division under the command of Brigadier General George W. Morgan. Morgan had been a West Point classmate of Smith’s before dropping out because of bad grades. His force had recently driven some of Smith’s troops out of Cumberland Gap and occupied that position sixty miles north of Knoxville.
Smith felt he had far too few men to defend against these two, widely separated threats and thought his situation almost hopeless. The only ray of hope for the Confederates in East Tennessee lay in the fact that Buell was advancing very slowly, partially because he was Buell and partially because Confederate guerrillas were swarming the countryside through which he was passing, wrecking the tracks of the Memphis & Ohio behind him as fast as his men could repair them in front and necessitating constant detachments to repair tracks and chase guerrillas. As typical guerrillas, the Rebel raiders sheltered among the civil population, finding comfort and supply there and shielding behind (and thus abusing) the immunity that civilized armies attempt to show toward civilians. Just as typically in such a situation, Union troops grew increasingly frustrated with the guerrillas’ depredations and with the need to show restraint toward civilians, some of whom were undoubtedly collaborating with the bushwhackers who took potshots at them and waylaid their supply shipments. When Federal self-control slipped to the point that a Union brigade sacked the town of Athens, Alabama, a major scandal and federal government investigation followed. Nevertheless, at Athens, as on most occasions during the Civil War, the lives and persons of civilians remained safe, as the angry soldiers contented themselves with taking and destroying property.
Buell’s slow progress across northern Alabama gave the Confederates time to react. The passive stance of the scattered Union forces Halleck had left in northern Mississippi placed no pressure on Confederate forces in that sector and thus left them available to counter Buell. The Confederate Army of Tennessee (not to be confused with Grant’s Union Army of the Tennessee) had been encamped around Tupelo, Mississippi, since its retreat from Corinth. A few weeks after the retreat, Beauregard had granted himself an open-ended leave to recuperate at a southern Alabama health spa. Civil War commanding generals were not expected to take leaves, and this act was the last straw for Jefferson Davis, who promptly sacked Beauregard and replaced him with the army’s second-ranking general, Braxton Bragg.
It was therefore to Bragg, as well as to the authorities in Richmond, that Smith appealed for help in stopping Buell’s much larger force and saving Chattanooga. Richmond had no troops to send, and at first it seemed that Bragg was equally unable to help, faced as he was with Halleck’s originally much larger Union army at Corinth. Desperate, Smith renewed his appeals, urging that if Bragg would bring his entire army to Chattanooga and operate from there, he, Smith, would be glad to serve as Bragg’s subordinate in the campaign that would follow. Bragg outranked Smith, but since Smith had an independent command, the latter would not have been required by military law to obey Bragg unless the two were actually together at the same place. Smith was offering a higher degree of cooperation if Bragg would help him.
As the summer progressed, Bragg began to think this might be a good idea. The Union forces in front of him were spread out in garrisons holding West Tennessee and extreme northern Mississippi. They were obviously going nowhere, but he could get nowhere against them. He began to see that a rapid move to Chattanooga could do much more than just save the gateway to Georgia and East Tennessee. It could shift the whole momentum of the war in the region west of the Appalachians. Bragg decided to leave detachments in Mississippi to counter the two chief Union threats to the state. Sixteen thousand men under Major General Sterling Price would stay to watch the Federals in northern Mississippi, while about that many more Confederates would remain in the state under the command of Major General Earl Van Dorn, ready to counter Union efforts at taking the Mississippi River town of Vicksburg. After Farragut had taken New Orleans that April, he had taken his fleet up the river, captured Baton Rouge, and tried to take Vicksburg. There he had been joined by the Union river gunboat fleet—Pook’s Turtles and their timber-clad consorts—which had defeated a Confederate riverboat fleet and captured Memphis in June. Only Vicksburg remained as a Confederate outpost on the Mississippi, and Van Dorn was supposed to see that it held out.
With the rest of his force Bragg undertook the boldest strategic movement of the war to date. While his cavalry, artillery, and supply wagons proceeded across northern Alabama at a safe distance from Buell’s plodding army, his infantry would board trains and ride the railroad to Mobile, Alabama, where they would transfer to a different railroad for the ride up to Chattanooga. It was the most significant use of railroads in the history of warfare up to that time, and it put Bragg’s troops in Chattanooga in time to stop Buell, who was getting very close. As soon as the artillery and wagons arrived, the army would be ready to march northward into Middle Tennessee, turning Buell and threatening his supply lines.
Kirby Smith was delighted. While Bragg held Chattanooga and waited for his artillery and wagons, Smith took his own small army, reinforced with the largest division of Bragg’s army, and marched north to deal with the small Union division at Cumberland Gap. Arriving in front of the gap, Smith sent a dispatch back to Bragg informing him that the Union position was too strong to attack and that he preferred going around the Federals by one of the other nearby gaps and entering Kentucky. Like Maryland, Kentucky was seen by Confederates as a slave state held in bondage to the Union only by the presence of Federal troops. That concept served as a powerful lure to Kirby Smith and a temptation for him to set aside his promises of obedience to Bragg as well as his strategic common sense.
The view that Kentuckians were awaiting only the appearance of a Confederate army to rise en masse and throw off the yoke of northern oppression had recently been reinforced by the exploits of the colorful and romantic Colonel John Hunt Morgan. In July, the Kentuckian Morgan had led his nine hundred Confederate horsemen on a daring raid into the Bluegrass State, capturing small Union detachments, including one Union brigadier general; damaging Union installations; destroying supplies; and leading the pursuing Union cavalry on a frustrating and fruitless chase. The enthusiastic reaction of Kentucky crowds, especially women, when Morgan’s command rode through towns encouraged Confederate commanders like Kirby Smith to assume that tens of thousands of men in the state were only waiting for the opportunity to join the Rebel army.
Smith’s planned lunge into Kentucky made political sense within the context of such assumptions, but it was not good military strategy since it would put Bragg and Smith too far apart to support each other and would leave Buell in their rear. It would work only if Kentuckians would rise en masse to help the Confederates drive out the Yankees. Despite Bragg’s urging and Smith’s own previous promise to obey Bragg’s orders, Smith defied the higher-ranking officer and led his troops into the Bluegrass State.
Henceforth Smith’s irresponsibility would control Bragg’s movements during this campaign. When on August 28 Bragg finally had his wagons and artillery on hand and could begin his march northward from Chattanooga, he had to keep his army between Smith on the one hand and Buell’s Union army on the other. To do otherwise would invite Buell to crush the two separate Confederate forces one at a time. Without Smith and the troops he had lent him, Bragg did not have men enough to fight Buell in Middle Tennessee, where he had hoped to stage the showdown battle of the campaign, and instead was forced by Kirby Smith’s maneuver to advance his army into Kentucky as well, swinging north and west on the inside track of Smith’s movement. Whether Bragg liked it or not, his whole campaign was now staked on the response of the Kentuckians. Hoping for the best, he brought along in his army’s wagons twenty thousand extra rifles to equip the hordes of Kentucky recruits for whom he and other Confederates earnestly hoped.
As Smith advanced into Kentucky, he first passed through the hilly southeastern part of the state, an area where slave ownership was relatively rare and the people were generally hostile to the Confederate cause. As the march continued, his small army was happy to leave behind the rugged hill country and descend to what Smith called “the long, rolling landscape” that characterized the wealthy Bluegrass section of the state. Waiting for them there, near the town of Richmond, Kentucky, was an even smaller blue-clad force that Union authorities had hastily scraped together from inexperienced recruits who had responded to Lincoln’s call for “three hundred thousand more.” Smith’s tough veterans defeated them easily, rounding up hundreds of prisoners and sending the rest fleeing in disorder from the battlefield. Then the Rebels advanced unopposed the remaining twenty-five miles and occupied Lexington, chief city of the Bluegrass region. Crowds of Kentuckians turned out to see and occasionally cheer them, especially women, who fluttered their handkerchiefs in greeting, but Smith thought that men were distinctly underrepresented among the spectators. Recruits were rare, but Smith’s Confederates settled down to occupy the Bluegrass and requisition its abundant supplies.
Abandoned by Smith, Bragg was not strong enough to seek battle with Buell in Middle Tennessee, but he did outmarch Buell, beating the Federals to Kentucky and capturing a Union brigade that had been guarding the bridge over the Green River at Munfordville. Bragg’s position at Munfordville put him squarely athwart Buell’s supply line running back to Louisville. Buell could, if he chose, try to march around Bragg on one side or the other, but that would make his army vulnerable to Bragg’s attack. If he chose to attack Bragg head-on at Munfordville, the Rebels, defending a strong position, would have even more advantages. It appeared that Bragg’s skill and his troops’ hard marching might win this campaign in spite of Kirby Smith.
One reason Buell moved so slowly was that he insisted on bringing with his army an unusually large number of wagons laden with supplies. Conversely, Bragg moved more quickly because his army traveled light and lived off the land. Encamped at Munfordville waiting for Buell to move, the Rebels soon exhausted local supplies. Kirby Smith was deaf to Bragg’s pleas that he either join him at Munfordville or at least send some of the supplies his men were gathering in the rich agricultural district around Lexington. Buell, who still had adequate supplies, was in no hurry to move, and finally Bragg had to give up and march east to join Smith near Lexington. That cleared the way for Buell to advance to Louisville, where he received abundant reinforcements and supplies and could reorganize and refit his army.
While Buell was busy in Louisville, Bragg tried one last gambit to salvage the campaign. Little chance remained of defeating Buell in battle with the Confederate forces then in Kentucky, and pitifully few Kentuckians had enlisted during the campaign. Perhaps if Bragg could install a pro-Confederate state government at Frankfort, Kentuckians would feel more motivated to volunteer, and if they did not, a pro-Confederate state government was just the thing Bragg needed to help him implement the Confederacy’s conscription law within the state. Richard Hawes, the Confederacy’s shadow governor for Kentucky, had accompanied Bragg on the campaign, and in a formal ceremony at Frankfort on October 4, 1862, Bragg had him inaugurated.
No sooner had Hawes finished his inaugural address than the sound of artillery fire to the northwest alerted the small assembly of Confederate officers and pro-Confederate Kentuckians that a strong Union column was approaching the state capital from the direction of Louisville. Apprised by scouts that the Federals were too numerous to be turned back by the detachment of his own army at Frankfort, Bragg had to beat a hasty and ignominious retreat, together with the would-be governor, now returned to exile status after only a few hours in the capital city he claimed.
With Kentucky men of military age still avoiding Confederate ranks in droves, almost no hope remained for the success of the campaign, the central guiding concept of which—Kirby Smith’s confidence that Kentuckians were eager to join the Confederacy—had been shown to be a delusion. Still Bragg was determined to try every possible alternative before giving it up. Buell was advancing from Louisville in several different columns on separate roads. Bragg saw an opportunity to attack and possibly destroy the Union column approaching Lexington. He ordered Kirby Smith to attack it head-on while Leonidas Polk, commanding Bragg’s own army while Bragg exercised overall command of both forces, was to swing northwest and strike the Federals in the flank. The plan failed before it could begin as Polk became frightened and refused to obey Bragg’s orders, forcing Bragg to call off Smith’s attack. With that there was nothing left to do but abandon Lexington and begin retreating in a southeasterly direction.
As Bragg’s forces pulled out of the Bluegrass region and fell back toward the southeast and Buell’s separate columns continued advancing toward them from Louisville, Buell’s main column collided with Confederate forces near the town of Perryville on October 8, about forty miles southwest of Lexington. Not realizing the size of the force in front of him, Bragg attacked. Buell, whose headquarters were a couple of miles behind the front, somehow did not hear the firing because of a rare phenomenon called an acoustic shadow, an atmospheric phenomenon in which very loud sounds that can be heard at long distances are nevertheless inaudible at medium distances. Unaware that a battle was in progress, Buell sent no aid to his frontline troops.
Buell had cultivated a climate of command in his army such that none of his subordinates who did know about the battle felt authorized to send help either. For that reason and because many of the Union troops were green, the Confederates experienced initial success, driving the Federals back as much as a mile in some places before more experienced Union troops arrived and made a stand. The Confederate success had been not quite sufficient to start a chain reaction that might have led to the collapse of Buell’s larger army, and once the front was stabilized, the opportunity was past.
When Bragg that night learned the size of the Union force he was confronting, he resumed his retreat toward Tennessee. Buell made little effort to pursue and instead turned away and marched his army slowly to Nashville. The campaign was over, and neither side was satisfied. Kentuckians within the ranks of the Confederate army did not want to face the fact that their state had chosen not to fight for the Confederacy, so they blamed Bragg. Polk and Kirby Smith had performed poorly in the campaign, and they knew that Bragg knew it. So they blamed him too. Bragg was not adept at winning friends and influencing people, but even a skillful politician might have struggled to overcome the persistent campaign of undermining that would now be waged against him within the officer corps of his own army.
On the Union side, Buell’s slowness and lack of aggressiveness was the object of contempt both among many of his subordinates and among his superiors in Washington. During the midst of the campaign, Lincoln had decided to replace Buell with Army of the Ohio corps commander George H. Thomas (West Point, 1840). That would have been a disappointment, since Thomas, though steadier and more competent than Buell, was nearly as slow. As it turned out, Thomas refused the proffered promotion, perhaps because he supported Buell’s policies and perhaps because he did not want the responsibility of getting the army out of the mess Buell had gotten it into. Now with the campaign over and the Confederates having escaped back into Tennessee more or less unscathed, Buell’s continued tenure in command of the Army of the Ohio was precarious.
While Lee had ventured briefly into Maryland and Bragg and Kirby Smith had made their separate and poorly coordinated thrusts into Kentucky, a third simultaneous Confederate offensive had sputtered to an abortive start in northern Mississippi. Bragg had left Price there to watch the Federals at Corinth, Memphis, and other garrisons and had left Van Dorn in the central part of the state to watch the Union threat to Vicksburg. By late summer falling water levels in the Mississippi River had driven Farragut’s ships back down to New Orleans, relieving the pressure on Vicksburg and freeing Van Dorn to join Price in an offensive that would support Bragg’s efforts in Middle Tennessee and Kentucky. Together they would have about thirty-two thousand men and could pose a severe threat to Union forces in northern Mississippi and West Tennessee, who were already detaching troops to reinforce Buell.
Unfortunately for the Rebel cause, the Confederate command situation in Mississippi was as confused as it was in Kentucky. Just as Bragg outranked Kirby Smith but could not demand his obedience until their forces joined, so Van Dorn outranked Price but was similarly hamstrung by lack of authority to command him. Price proved as headstrong and uncooperative as Kirby Smith was proving at the same time in Kentucky. The Missourian wanted to drive northeastward toward Nashville. Van Dorn thought they should attack northwestward instead toward Memphis, and valuable time passed while letters went back and forth between them arguing the merits of their rival plans.
As Price maneuvered on his own, he reached the town of Iuka, less than ten miles from the Tennessee River in the northeastern corner of the state. Ulysses Grant, whom Halleck had left in command of the scattered Union forces in West Tennessee and northern Mississippi, had been following reports of Price’s movements and believed he had a chance to trap the Missouri general at Iuka. Concentrating all the force he could spare from the many garrisons Halleck had required him to hold, Grant made plans to attack. William S. Rosecrans, who was then serving under Grant, told Grant that he knew the roads in that region and that it would be possible for him to lead an independent column to strike Price from behind at Iuka while Grant attacked with his main force in front. It was almost impossible to coordinate such widely separated movements in the Civil War, but Rosecrans assured Grant it would work, and Grant reluctantly agreed. Rosecrans moved slowly and took the wrong road, leaving Price an escape route. When on September 19 Price detected Rosecrans’s approach and attacked him, another of those strange acoustic shadows prevented Grant and those around him from hearing the sound of the guns and joining the battle from the other side. In the end, Price escaped.
Chastened by this close call, Price joined Van Dorn, and the two of them agreed to attack the Union garrison at Corinth. Hoping to deceive Grant about his intended target, Van Dorn marched his army as if to bypass Corinth and move into West Tennessee, then turned back to attack Corinth from the northwest on October 3. Grant was not fooled and had Rosecrans in place at Corinth, strongly reinforced, and with more Union troops on the way from Grant’s other outposts. During the two-day battle, Rosecrans handled the defense poorly, and his troops suffered for it. Then when the Confederates nearly broke through his lines, Rosecrans panicked, galloping this way and that, cursing his men, declaring the battle lost, and ordering the burning of his supply wagons. Fortunately, the men in charge of his supply train were made of sterner stuff and ignored his order, while his frontline troops, many of them veterans of Fort Donelson and Shiloh, rallied and drove the Rebels back.
Grant had given Rosecrans strict orders to pursue the Confederates aggressively when they retreated from Corinth. Van Dorn’s indirect approach to the town made him vulnerable to being trapped, and Grant intended to do it. He not only reinforced Rosecrans but also dispatched another column to cut off Van Dorn’s crossing of the Hatchie River. These troops turned back the retreating Confederates on October 5, leaving Van Dorn at the mercy of Rosecrans’s victorious army. But Rosecrans did not pursue. Only after Van Dorn had had time to find an alternate crossing of the Hatchie and get his battered army to safety did Rosecrans show any interest in following him. By then the opportunity was past. Van Dorn was in a strong position with a secure supply line, and any “pursuit” would have meant launching an entirely new campaign, something Grant was eager to do but for which he knew his army needed further preparations. He ordered Rosecrans to halt, and Rosecrans responded by complaining that Grant had prevented him from pursuing the defeated Van Dorn.
The fall elections that year saw the Democrats make significant gains in Congress and elsewhere. The newly elected, Democratic-dominated Indiana legislature was so hostile to the war effort that it might have halted the state’s participation or perhaps even considered secession. The doughty Republican governor Oliver P. Morton was equal to the crisis. He directed the Republican legislators to stay away from Indianapolis, denying the legislature a quorum and preventing it from transacting business. Then he ran Indiana without it, financing the state government with loans from the federal government and even from patriotic private citizens.
Democrats claimed that their gains in Congress as well as in various state legislatures represented a popular repudiation of the Emancipation Proclamation. No doubt there were some voters who had gone Republican in 1860 and shifted their votes two years later because of their opposition to Lincoln’s announced intention of freeing southern slaves. This was especially significant in a state like Indiana, whose southern counties included large numbers of people who had moved into the state from Kentucky and still harbored slave-state sensibilities. However, the Republican losses in Congress were actually less than was usually lost in midterm elections of that era by the party possessing the White House. In that sense, they represented politics as usual, even in the midst of a great war, and a reasonably steady though by no means overwhelming degree of support for Lincoln and his war measures, including emancipation.
And if some Americans were not entirely satisfied with every measure Lincoln had taken in trying to win the war, Lincoln was foremost among them this fall. For the past fifteen months, since the summer of 1861, he had been placing his reliance on the most professional of professional officers to lead the nation’s armies—McClellan, the rising star of the prewar army in the East; Buell, McClellan’s proteégeé and less charismatic alter ego west of the Appalachians; and “Old Brains” Halleck, as his soldiers called him behind his back, author of books on the art of war, first in the Mississippi Valley and then in overall command in Washington. The results had been disappointing, to say the least.
McClellan had, in Lincoln’s homely phrase, “the slows,” and his operations had been so halting as to awaken in the minds of some serious people the suspicion that he was in fact a traitor who was trying to allow Rebel victory. After Antietam he had kept his army inert for weeks, doing nothing, while Lee’s cavalry commander, Jeb Stuart, led the Rebel horsemen on a ride all the way around the Army of the Potomac. It was the second time he had done that since McClellan had been in command. When McClellan responded to one of Lincoln’s many prods with the excuse that his army could not march at present because its horses were tired, an exasperated president replied, “Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigues any thing?”
Finally, with painful slowness, McClellan began to advance into the Virginia Piedmont. His position forced Lee to try to cover both the Shenandoah Valley and the shortest route to Richmond—opposite directions from where McClellan was. By edging toward Richmond, McClellan was able to gain an advantageous position from which he had a shorter route to Richmond than Lee did. In the hands of an aggressive general, that position could have been Lee’s undoing, but McClellan dawdled until Lee was able to recover and regain a position between him and Richmond. That was enough for Lincoln. On November 5 he relieved McClellan of command of the Army of the Potomac, replacing him with Ambrose Burnside. To Lincoln, Burnside’s repeated insistence that he was not capable of commanding the army seemed like refreshing humility after McClellan’s unwarranted boastfulness. Burnside had enjoyed success down the coast occupying places the navy had conquered, and he seemed like the sort of straightforward general who would fight instead of always dallying like McClellan.
By that time Lincoln had already run out of patience with Buell. After Buell had tamely allowed Bragg to retreat unhindered and unpursued from his foray into Kentucky that fall, Lincoln relieved Buell from command of the Army of the Ohio on October 24. To replace him he tapped William S. Rosecrans, the victor of Corinth, though the soldiers who had served under him there could have given the president a different perspective if he had been able to sit down and talk with them. Rosecrans had enjoyed a measure of success under McClellan in western Virginia during the opening months of the war and more recently under Grant in Mississippi. Lincoln expected him to be an energetic and aggressive commander. Elevated to command, Rosecrans promptly renamed his army the Army of the Cumberland.
Lincoln had brought Halleck to Washington in midsummer 1862 to direct all the nation’s armies, but Old Brains had proven a profound disappointment. Hesitant and afraid to give orders to generals in the field, Halleck had become, in Lincoln’s words, “little more than a first-rate clerk.” And, though Lincoln did not fully understand Halleck’s role in the matter, Old Brains had left behind him in Mississippi a situation that added to the president’s frustration. Halleck had dispersed the forces there into various garrisons so that it was hard to assemble a field army large enough to take the offensive. He had also, throughout his command in the Mississippi Valley, reprimanded and threatened to remove Grant every time that officer had exercised initiative. The Union’s best commander was thus little inclined to launch another advance and again risk Halleck’s wrath. Lincoln did not understand this, but he did sense that the Union had lost momentum in the Mississippi Valley. To regain it, he was inclined to turn away from the West Point–trained professionals who had hitherto mostly seemed to lead the Union armies to strategically correct futility. Instead he looked to a political general, John A. McClernand.
Since the death of Stephen A. Douglas from pneumonia in 1861, McClernand had been Illinois’s most influential Democratic politician, and having him in a general’s uniform since about that time had served Lincoln’s purposes by showing that this was more than just a Republican war. It served McClernand’s purposes by giving him the opportunity to win military glory that might catapult him into the White House, as it previously had Zachary Taylor, Andrew Jackson, and George Washington. In speeches while home on leave, McClernand boasted that he was a born soldier, incapable of fear. In fact, he was a born politician, seemingly incapable of laying aside his constant angling for office even when called on to help fight the nation’s most desperate conflict. He was a better general than most politicians, though that was not saying much, and he was a better politician than almost any other general.
After serving under Grant at Fort Donelson and Shiloh and having his division routed in both fights, McClernand had manipulated the governor of Illinois into finagling orders for him to go to Washington on state business. McClernand’s real business in the national capital was lobbying Lincoln for an independent command, and he pursued that goal relentlessly, accompanying the president on visits to McClellan’s headquarters at Antietam after the battle. At last his efforts were successful, and Lincoln granted him special orders to raise an army and lead it down the Mississippi to capture Vicksburg, the Confederate stronghold that had defied Union efforts at the height of Federal success the preceding summer.
Lincoln wanted McClernand to help attract the recruits needed to meet the quotas of the midwestern states under the president’s call for “three hundred thousand more.” He was then to use his newly gained military experience to help organize and train the new regiments from his home state of Illinois and its neighbors and then, when they were ready, form them into an army and lead them down the river to Vicksburg. The president expected McClernand to worry less about the niceties of West Point form and instead take the fight aggressively to the enemy.
McClernand’s new target lay squarely within Grant’s geographic department, but Lincoln neither removed Grant nor informed him of the planned new operation. The president left Halleck, his “first-rate clerk,” to write up McClernand’s formal orders. Halleck might have been unnerved by Grant’s daring aggressiveness, but he was appalled by McClernand’s naive pretensions and shameless politicking. Halleck was a West Point man through and through, and he had also been both a businessman and a lawyer out in California before the war. The orders as he drew them up made clear that Grant would still command all personnel in his department, including McClernand; that Grant could make his headquarters wherever he chose in his department, including with McClernand; and that McClernand’s expedition could include whatever troops Grant did not believe he needed for other operations in his department. McClernand, though a lawyer by profession, neglected to read the orders very carefully. Delighted with the prospect of an independent command out from under Grant, he hurried back to Illinois, where, instead of helping to recruit and train troops, he got married and contemplated with satisfaction his future military glory.
One thing that was clear to each of the generals to whom Lincoln had given new army commands that autumn was that the president expected action. If Lincoln had wanted the republic’s armies to settle into winter quarters for the next several months, he could have left the former generals in command. They were more than adequate for that.
Burnside moved first. Lee’s army was divided into two wings, guarding widely separated potential lines of Union advance. Burnside hoped to lunge between the two wings, cutting them off from each other and potentially from Richmond and forcing a battle in which he would hold all the advantages. When he shared his plan with Lincoln, the president said it would work if Burnside moved quickly. At first, he did. The Army of the Potomac marched on November 15 and two days later reached the Rappahannock River opposite the town of Fredericksburg, Virginia. Only a few hundred Confederate troops were on hand to dispute the crossing of Burnside’s 130,000 Federals. Burnside had ordered the army’s pontoons to be on hand ready for the construction of bridges across the Rappahannock, but through an administrative error, perhaps attributable to Halleck, the bulky, slow-moving pontoons were far away and would take two weeks to arrive.
Burnside’s initial idea had been good, but when a problem arose he seemed incapable of adjusting to meet the challenge. Rather than changing his plan or seeking alternate means of crossing at least enough of his troops to hold the key high ground beyond Fredericksburg until the rest of the army could join them, he simply sat down and waited for the pontoons to arrive, and while he did, Lee united the two wings of his army and had more than seventy thousand men on the high ground southwest of Fredericksburg.
Burnside contemplated the several possible crossing points in the neighborhood and decided that what would surprise Lee the most would be a crossing straight into Fredericksburg, directly confronting Lee’s strong position on a ridge called Marye’s Heights, which paralleled the river about a mile beyond the town. Lee certainly was surprised, and even as Burnside’s engineers on December 11 began laying the pontoon bridges opposite Fredericksburg, the Confederate general continued to doubt that his opponent could have blundered so spectacularly.
Lee left a single brigade of Confederate troops in the town to harass Union attempts to cross the river. As the engineers attempted to lay their pontoon bridges, Confederates hidden in the houses of Fredericksburg fired on them and drove them back from the riverbank several times. Confederate use of the town as a defensive position made it a legitimate target for the more than two hundred cannon Burnside had amassed on the high ground on his side of the river. They poured more than five thousand shells into Fredericksburg, substantially wrecking it but failing to drive out the stubborn Confederates. Finally Burnside ordered a brigade to make a cross-river assault, using the pontoons as boats, and the Federals cleared the town of Rebels in bitter house-to-house fighting. The engineers quickly laid the pontoon bridges, and the rest of Burnside’s army swarmed across the river. Once they got into the town-turned-fortress that no longer enjoyed the normal immunities of a civilian community, the Union soldiers took out their frustrations by adding a fair bit of vandalism to the damage Fredericksburg had already suffered from the shelling and close combat.
By the morning of December 13, Burnside was ready to launch his attack. He started with a diversionary assault a couple of miles down the river (which here flowed to the southeast). Here the Union attackers unwittingly struck a gap in Stonewall Jackson’s line and made some initial gains before Jackson, who had more troops available than the small force Burnside had designated to make the diversion, mounted a counterattack and drove them back.
Around 11:00 Burnside’s main effort got under way, with Union troops advancing straight out of Fredericksburg toward Marye’s Heights. The Confederate line ran along the base of the heights, where a sunken road, edged by a stone wall, offered a ready-made defensive position that the Confederates had enhanced with a shallow trench. The Rebel infantrymen could stand almost completely concealed and shoot over the stone wall, while behind and above them, along the crest of the ridge, Confederate artillery fired over their heads. The long and very gradual slope in front of them provided an excellent field of fire, while just outside the edge of town a steep-sided drainage ditch, crossable at only a couple of points, funneled the advancing Federals toward the strongest section of the Confederate line, where riflemen two or three deep awaited them behind the stone wall. The sector was so narrow that only one brigade could advance at a time.
Burnside’s grand attack thus degenerated into a series of brigade assaults one after the other, sixteen of them, right into the teeth of an impregnable defensive position. The Union infantrymen advanced bravely and were mowed down in rows until the survivors in each brigade could take no more of such mass suicide and dove to the ground seeking cover, sometimes behind the bodies of their dead comrades. Then the next brigade would advance to be butchered in turn, while the Confederates behind their stone wall suffered scarcely a handful of casualties. It was among the most one sided of the Civil War’s major battles. Inside Fredericksburg, Burnside’s dispirited troops took out their greatly enhanced frustrations in further damage to the property of the hapless but fortunately absent citizens of the town.
That evening Jackson urged Lee to attack and trap the Federals in Fredericksburg with their backs to the Rappahannock and only a few narrow pontoon bridges by which to escape. Lee demurred. He predicted that Burnside would order another day of fruitless assaults, bleeding the Army of the Potomac and further weakening it for the counterstroke he had in mind. In fact, Burnside, almost beside himself at the thought of the body-strewn slope outside of town, was contemplating putting himself at the head of his old Ninth Corps and personally leading a suicide attack the next morning. His subordinates talked him out of such a desperate move, and he sadly gave the order to begin the withdrawal to the northeastern back of the Rappahannock. The Battle of Fredericksburg cost the Federals 12,653 men killed, wounded, and missing, while Confederate losses were less than half that. Nevertheless, Lee, who still hoped in each major battle to annihilate the opposing army, was disappointed with the result.
So was Lincoln. “If there is a worse place than hell,” he wrote, “I am in it.” He had sacked the popular commander of the Army of the Potomac and replaced him with a general he hoped would act aggressively. Now that general’s aggressive action had brought an embarrassing and bloody defeat in the still-stalemated but high-profile eastern theater of the war, where foreign observers and the heavy East Coast populace could not fail to take note of it. He tried to put the best face on matters in a public proclamation about the battle, but his optimism rang hollow. Morale plummeted in the Army of the Potomac, especially after Burnside’s attempt at a January offensive ended in humiliating, if bloodless, failure when a multiday rain transformed Virginia’s dirt roads into knee-deep troughs of mud, immobilizing the soaked and shivering Army of the Potomac before it could even reach the Rappahannock crossings. Less than a week later, Lincoln sadly decided to relieve Burnside.
Meanwhile, Lincoln’s new command arrangements had, as he intended, produced aggressive action on the war’s two other major fronts as well. The mere hint that offensive operations would now be welcomed rather than rebuked by Halleck had been enough to get Grant moving. Collecting together some of the forces Halleck had left scattered across West Tennessee and northern Mississippi, he formed a field army and in late November began advancing down the Mississippi Central Railroad into that state. He also directed Sherman, who had been commanding the Memphis garrison, to form a second column from the troops in and near that city and advance southeastward to rendezvous with Grant near Abbeville, Mississippi. Grant hoped that Confederate general John C. Pemberton, whom Davis had recently appointed to command the defenses of Mississippi, would challenge one force or the other and be caught in the closing Union pincers, but Pemberton fell back steadily in front of Grant, refusing to give battle.
Reluctant to continue stretching his own supply lines while pursuing the elusive Pemberton ever deeper into the interior of Mississippi and having learned, mostly through rumor, of McClernand’s new assignment, Grant changed his plan of campaign. After seeking and receiving reassurance from Halleck that he still had full command of all troops in his department, Grant ordered Sherman to go back to Memphis and there collect all the regiments of new troops coming down from the Midwest in response to Lincoln’s call the preceding summer for “three hundred thousand more.” With his new army of thirty thousand men or so, composed both of veterans and of the new levies, Sherman was to board riverboat transports and travel down the river to Vicksburg. If Washington wanted a direct campaign against the Confederate Gibraltar of the West, as Vicksburg was already being called, he would provide it, led by the competent professional Sherman rather than the scheming politician McClernand. Meanwhile, Grant would try to keep Pemberton’s main Confederate army occupied in northern Mississippi.
McClernand was still up in Illinois, delayed partially by festivities connected with his recent wedding and partially by a mistaken belief that he needed special orders from Washington in order to begin his river expedition. While he sent a string of whining dispatches to Secretary of War Stanton asking for such orders, Sherman, quite unbeknownst to McClernand, led McClernand’s intended army down the Mississippi from Memphis.
Sherman and his men were in agreement with the new Union policy of hard war. It was no use, they believed, trying to placate the Rebels by waging the war with kid gloves—or, as Lincoln put it, “with elder-stalk squirts charged with rose-water.” When Confederate snipers fired on some of Sherman’s transports from a small settlement on the Mississippi shore, he had some of his men go ashore and burn the place to the ground. From now on, the conflict would be waged with all the rigor the laws of war provided.
Sherman’s army reached its destination the day after Christmas and landed on the east bank of the Mississippi a few miles above Vicksburg. The army spent the next several days trying to advance against the Confederate fortress city. Confederate skirmishers, aided by a terrain of interlaced swamps and bayous, slowed the Federals’ progress. By December 29 they had come within sight of the main Confederate line of resistance, strongly entrenched on bluffs overlooking the meandering course of Chickasaw Bayou, a tributary of the Mississippi. The terrain was worse than Fredericksburg, with the bayou and its own numerous tributaries allowing the attackers to approach only on narrow fronts in a couple of places. Sherman ordered an assault, but it failed with a loss of 1,776 killed, wounded, and missing. Confederate losses were little more than one-tenth that many.
With rainy weather raising the river level and threatening to inundate his camps, Sherman ordered his troops back onto their transports. At this point, McClernand arrived, outraged at what he viewed as the abduction of his army and even more outraged that the plan he had advocated had already been tried and proven a failure. Pompous and insulting toward Sherman, whom he outranked, as well as Rear Admiral David D. Porter, who commanded the Navy’s cooperating squadron, McClernand was nevertheless at a complete loss to know what to do next.
Sherman and Porter talked him into making a side expedition up the Arkansas River, 150 miles north of Vicksburg, where the Confederates had built Fort Hindman at a low bluff called Arkansas Post and were using it as a base from which to stage hit-and-run attacks on Union supply and communications along the Mississippi. The expedition’s ironclad gunboats and thirty thousand ground troops might have been helpless against the unusual natural obstacles around Vicksburg, but Fort Hindman’s 5,500 defenders had no such advantages. After a short, sharp fight on January 11, 1863, Porter’s gunboats and McClernand’s troops, led primarily by Sherman, captured the fort and almost its entire garrison, more than squaring the casualty ratio for the campaign. Indeed, with Union losses at Arkansas Post scarcely over a thousand men, the campaign’s loss tally now tipped two to one in favor of the Union.
A few days later, Grant arrived to take command of the expedition in person. While Sherman had been experiencing frustration along Chickasaw Bayou and redemption, at least in a subordinate capacity, at Arkansas Post, Grant had been experiencing his own difficulties. After Sherman had departed for Memphis to begin his campaign down the river, Grant’s army had advanced more slowly, continuing to move down the Mississippi Central Railroad in order to keep Pemberton occupied, and for a time it worked.
The situation had become a matter of acute concern to Jefferson Davis, who made a tour of inspection of the Confederacy’s western armies during December. Joseph Johnston, who Davis had recently appointed overall Confederate commander in the West after his recovery from the wound he had suffered at Fair Oaks the preceding May, assured Davis that cavalry raids he was dispatching against Grant’s supply lines would suffice to repel the Union offensive, but Davis remained unconvinced. Against the advice of Johnston and Bragg he ordered the latter to detach ten thousand men, about one-fourth of his infantry strength, and send them to reinforce Pemberton.
Before the reinforcements could arrive, Johnston’s prediction proved true. A raid led by Nathan Bedford Forrest created confusion in West Tennessee. Worse, a second, more or less simultaneous raid under the command of Earl Van Dorn, who finally seemed to have found his niche as a cavalry commander, struck directly at Grant’s forward base of supplies at Holly Springs, Mississippi, on December 21. The Union officer commanding the small garrison at Holly Springs proved to be a coward and put up very little fight. Van Dorn and his raiders destroyed the supplies and cut the railroad, putting Grant’s army immediately on short rations, with no prospect of resupply. Continuing to push back Pemberton’s army without a supply line would have been impossible, and Grant had no choice but to fall back on his rear-area bases in extreme northern Mississippi and West Tennessee. Though his troops had to take in their belts a notch during the trip, they staved off starvation at the expense of the farms and plantations in their path.
Pemberton was thus released to deal with Sherman and began shifting troops down to Vicksburg to meet the threat of the river expedition. The Battle of Chickasaw Bayou took place before most of them—or any of the troops from Bragg’s army—could arrive near Vicksburg. As it turned out, none of them were needed since the position on the bluffs overlooking Chickasaw Bayou was all but impregnable against any attacking force, even with only a handful of defenders.
In mid-January a frustrated Grant arrived at the headquarters of the Mississippi River expedition, still embarked on steamboats, and Sherman, McClernand, and Porter briefed him on the failure at Chickasaw Bayou and secondary success at Arkansas Post. Grant faced a dilemma. Only from the interior of Mississippi could Vicksburg be approached with any hope of military success. Yet any approach through the interior of the state invited constant repetition of the kinds of raids that had derailed his recent push down the Mississippi Central. McClernand further complicated Grant’s situation. Sherman, Porter, and other officers begged Grant not to leave the expedition in the not-so-capable hands of the ambitious political schemer. Grant knew he could not sack the president’s special appointee—not yet, anyway—and he also knew that any plan that divided his force into two columns would give McClernand, as second-ranking officer, command of one of them. Grant therefore determined to unite his army and encamp it on the Louisiana side of the river just above Vicksburg, there to stay until he somehow found a way to get around the Confederate fortress city and its many natural barriers.
By that time the third of the Union’s winter offensives had also run its course. Secrecy for military movements was a rarity in the Civil War, but few information leaks were as dramatic as the prompt publication by the Chattanooga Daily Rebel of news that Jefferson Davis was transferring one-fourth of Bragg’s infantry from the Army of Tennessee camps around Murfreesboro, Tennessee, to reinforce Pemberton in Mississippi. Among the Rebel’s most interested readers was William S. Rosecrans, who, though not a subscriber, received a copy in Nashville only a few days later. He immediately put his army in motion to attack Bragg’s weakened force at Murfreesboro.
Confederate cavalry gave Bragg ample warning and slowed Rosecrans’s advance so that it took several days for his Army of the Cumberland to cover the thirty miles to Murfreesboro. By the evening of December 30, 1862, the two armies confronted each other in battle formation straddling a shallow stream called Stones River, just north of town. That evening as the soldiers awaited the battle that was sure to open next morning, bands on both sides of the line took turns serenading the armies, who could clearly hear both the Rebel and the Union musicians. Finally, one of the bands struck up “Home, Sweet Home,” and all of the others on both sides joined in as the soldiers sang along, concluding the concert with a poignant reminder of the American culture the contending forces shared.
Each commanding general planned to attack the other’s right flank the next morning, but Bragg moved first, swinging wide to envelope the Union right. Suddenly plunged into a desperate situation, Rosecrans canceled his own attack and began shifting troops to shore up his hard-pressed right. There the Federals fell back, fighting furiously and leaving the battlefield littered with the dead of both sides. By late afternoon the right wing of the Army of the Cumberland had rotated back about ninety degrees and was desperately trying to hang on to the turnpike that ran northwestward toward Nashville and was the Army of the Cumberland’s only line of supply and, if it came to that, of retreat. Rosecrans coped with the situation much better than he had the similar one at Corinth three months before. He maintained his composure and rode along his lines encouraging his men, who cheered him enthusiastically wherever he appeared.
Bragg was tantalizingly close to a victory that might cut off and trap the Army of the Cumberland but lacked the troop strength to finish the job. If he had still had those ten thousand men Davis had sent to Mississippi, things would have been different, but in that case Rosecrans might never have attacked in that time and place. As it was, Bragg had had to commit his reserve early in the day to compensate for a blunder by an incompetent division commander whom he had tried to remove months ago, only to be told by Davis that the man must stay. The attack suffered a further setback from the blundering of another of Bragg’s subordinate generals who was intoxicated. Then when Bragg ordered the general commanding a large, unengaged division on his right to send troops for the final effort to crush Rosecrans’s line, that general, a politician and former vice president of the United States, first refused, then forwarded the troops a brigade at a time, so that there was little prospect of using them for a concentrated mass assault.
On the other side of the lines, Rosecrans was well served by his subordinates, especially his senior corps commander, George H. Thomas, who held a key sector and proved to be a veritable rock in such a defensive role. When nightfall ended the fighting and Rosecrans consulted with his generals about what to do next, Thomas and others were strong in urging him to hold his ground, and so he did.
Bragg also decided to stay put the next day. It was the first day of 1863. In Washington, D.C., six hundred miles to the northeast, Lincoln issued the final Emancipation Proclamation, but on the battlefield on either side of Stones River, the two armies watched each other warily without engaging in further combat. On January 2 Bragg tried a limited assault to take a key piece of terrain from Rosecrans’s Federals, but the attack turned out badly. That night, with his subordinates insistently urging him to retreat, Bragg finally gave up and ordered the Army of Tennessee to fall back behind a chain of hills called the Highland Rim, twenty-five miles to the southeast. The Battle of Stones River, or Murfreesboro as the Confederates called it, was over. Its percentage of casualties among the troops engaged, about one-third, would stand as the highest of any of the Civil War’s many grisly encounters.
Rosecrans had won a victory by default and one that had gained him only a thirty-mile-wide swath of Tennessee countryside, but at this stage of the war Lincoln was happy to take any victories he could get. While discussing further operations in an exchange of telegrams with Rosecrans several months later, the president noted, “I can never forget, whilst I remember anything, that about the end of last year, and beginning of this, you gave us a hard earned victory, which had there been a defeat instead, the country scarcely could have lived over.”1