As the war entered its third year in the spring of 1863, civilian populations on the home fronts felt its pinch with ever increasing sharpness. In the South, the effect of the war was felt not only in the absence in the army of more than one third of the region’s white male population but even more directly in the growing shortage of food, especially in urban areas and near the fighting fronts. This was ironic because the South was an overwhelmingly agricultural region. At the outset of the war, Jefferson Davis had appealed to planters to shift from cotton to food production, but most had thumbed their noses at his request since cotton was a more lucrative crop. Indeed, if it could be run through the Union blockade on one of the sleek, fast, purpose-built blockade-running vessels that British shipyards were soon turning out, cotton offered bigger profits than ever in the markets of Europe. Yet despite the continued devotion of vast acreages to the white fiber, the South still produced enormous amounts of food, amounts that should have been adequate to feed its people. Why then was hunger stalking significant segments of its population?
One reason was the lack of transportation to move the food from where it was grown to where it was to be consumed. Although the South’s rail network had grown rapidly during the 1850s, it was still fragmented and partial. Very few trunk lines carried rail traffic from one southern region or state to another. Most of the South’s railroad tracks had been laid down with a view to carrying cotton and other produce from interior areas to ocean or river ports whence it could be shipped to the markets of the world. Few of these small rail systems connected with each other, and it would have done little good if they had since many had incompatible gauges (width between rails), and thus their rolling stock could not move on another railroad’s track.
The war made the South’s railroad transportation system worse. Each side tore up the other’s railroad tracks when it could reach them. Sometimes retreating Confederate forces tore up their own tracks to prevent advancing Federals from using them for supply lines. Sometimes the Confederate government disassembled a section of track in order to use the iron rails for the construction of ironclads, few of which, like the Virginia, were completed before the Federals could seize them and none of which enjoyed even the Virginia’s brief success. The iron that plated their incomplete forms or that lay stacked beside the dry dock awaiting application might well have served the Confederacy better as rails. Thanks to the shortage of transportation, food tended to stay in the agricultural districts where it grew rather than finding its way in sufficient amounts to the cities and fighting fronts where the need was greatest.
Further exacerbating the difficulty southern city dwellers faced in attempting to purchase food was the impact of the Confederacy’s method of financing the war. Americans (with the exception of some politicians) have never liked taxes, and during the nineteenth century they reliably voted for the sort of small government that is consistent with a low-tax, high-prosperity economic regime. Wars are expensive, and not the least of the curses they bring on a society is the growth of that society’s own government. What the government consumes or redistributes, the people must provide, whether they do so in taxes or by other means. Since the Confederate government never mustered the political will to impose the taxes necessary to finance a fraction of its war effort and since it was not very successful in obtaining foreign loans, it depended on printing presses churning out thousands upon thousands of Confederate banknotes.
The result was massive inflation, as the Confederate government sucked more and more of the value out of the money that remained in all of its citizens’ pockets, bank accounts, or mattresses. As prices soared, southerners condemned sellers as war profiteers. As holding cash became more and more obviously a path to economic ruin, smart businessmen tried to store their wealth in commodities instead, and the public labeled them hoarders and speculators, the worst kind of war profiteers. Preachers and editors published laments at how such economic practices revealed the lost virtue of the southern people, who now seemed to put personal gain ahead of devotion to their newly minted country, but in fact the culprit was their own government’s economic policies, which made such practices unavoidable for anyone trying to escape economic ruin.
Meanwhile, hardship steadily increased throughout the South and with it discontent. On April 2, 1863, that discontent flared up into open unrest. In Richmond on that day a large mob composed mostly of women began breaking into shops and helping themselves not only to food but also to clothing, shoes, and even luxury items such as jewelry. Some of the rioters were armed, and shopkeepers remembered particularly one large and forceful woman and the large and menacing Colt dragoon revolver with which she threatened them while she and others ransacked their stores. As the mob worked its way through the business district, the city militia battalion arrived, and so did Jefferson Davis.
The Confederate president climbed atop a wagon near where the militiamen stood in line, nervously fingering their rifles. In a brief speech, Davis urged the rioters to return to their homes. Then he added, “You say you are hungry and have no money; here, this is all I have,” and with that he threw all the coins in his pocket into the crowd, which remained standing, sullenly glaring at president and militia. Finally, Davis announced that if the street were not clear in five minutes he would order the militia to open fire. He then pulled out his pocket watch and quietly watched the seconds tick off. Not until he had instructed the commander of the militia detachment to order his men to load their weapons did the crowd begin to filter away, but before the five minutes were up, the street was empty of rioters.
As ominous as this so-called Richmond Bread Riot was, its grave portent was heightened by similar outbreaks of civil unrest and looting that sprung up in several cities in Georgia and North Carolina. Clearly the strains of war were beginning to tell on southern society. Although suffering may have been more intense and was certainly more visible in the cities, it was present in the countryside as well. A large portion of the white male population was in the army, and many a farm was left to the efforts of a wife and such of the children as were old enough to wield a hoe. In many cases, the families left behind had been unable to raise sufficient crops, and their food supplies were dwindling.
Since the Confederacy was literally years behind in paying its troops, the soldiers had nothing to send their families back home. In this situation, a steady stream of letters began to reach the Confederate War Department from wives requesting furlough or discharge for their husbands so that the men could come home and help their families get in a crop. To have acceded to such pleas would have been to begin the dissolution of the Confederate armies, and the authorities not surprisingly declined. As the war progressed and the hardship became more acute, such letters increasingly came not to Richmond but to the soldiers themselves in the field, wives urging husbands to obtain leave if they could or come home without leave so as to save their families from starvation.
The fact that so many of the South’s white men were in the army was another sign of the long reach and considerable power of the central Confederate government in Richmond in defiance of the concept of state rights. The Confederacy had been well in advance of the Union in imposing national conscription, and its version of the draft was more rigorous and sweeping than the northern version, demanding the service of every man, with the exception of certain protected classes and skills, between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. Later the upper limit of the draft was raised to forty-five. Men of ordinary means complained bitterly about the “twenty-slave rule” that exempted large slaveholders from duty in the ranks, and state-rights purists, such as Georgia Governor Joe Brown, raged against the draft as a violation of the principles of federalism and constitutional government. Davis and the Confederate congress were undeterred, but in some regions of the South, draft resisters gathered in large bands and withdrew into the hills, woods, or swamps, there to bid defiance to Confederate authority. Well-advised draft enrollment officers did not venture into such areas.
The situation in the northern states was far different than that in the South, and although hardship might be felt in some families, particularly those whose breadwinners were in the army, the economy overall was booming. Yet despite abundance, the North also experienced significant social unrest during 1863. The causes of the turmoil included war weariness, unwillingness to be drafted, and disagreement with the cause of emancipation. War weariness affected all regions equally, but resentment of the draft and resentment of emancipation were closely related and combined to produce powerful effects in specific localities.
Discontentment with conscription stemmed both from an unwillingness to fight—at least to fight for the cause of emancipation—and also from the perceived inequity of the rules Congress had laid down for the administration of the draft. Out of the usual processes of compromise and legislative pulling and hauling had emerged an Enrollment Act in March 1863. The law required every man between the ages of twenty and forty-five to register (enroll), and then, provided that a federally established quota of recruits did not volunteer within a given congressional district, the draft would go into effect in that district and make up the difference. The congressmen had thought to soften the impact of the draft by providing two remarkably ill-conceived safety valves. A man who did not wish to serve had the option, if drafted, of hiring another, undrafted man to go in his place, thus securing permanent immunity from conscription. Naturally, such substitutes were bound to become expensive, so in order to keep the price within someone’s idea of reasonable bounds, the law also provided that a drafted man could pay the government a three-hundred-dollar commutation fee and go free but only until his number came up again in a future round of conscription, if it ever did.
Rarely was the law of unintended consequences more starkly on display than in this legislative masterpiece. The three-hundred-dollar commutation price was still far out of reach of an unskilled laborer, for whom that sum might represent an entire year’s wages or more. Substitutes were even more expensive. The wealthy could purchase exemption, while the working man had only the choice of fight or flight (to Canada). This led to unrest and complaints (similar to simultaneous grumblings in the Confederacy) that the conflict was “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” Instead of mollifying public annoyance with the draft, the commutation and substitution provisions became the focus of the discontent.
In most districts, diligent efforts by local authorities succeeded in meeting the recruiting quotas. This was usually accomplished by offering large bounties for recruits, payable on enlistment. Most (though by no means all) of the recruits thus gained were the dregs of society, and many turned out to be bounty jumpers, enlisting in one locality for a large cash payment, then deserting as quickly as possible to enlist in another town for another large bounty, repeating the process over and over until they either amassed a fortune or else were caught and placed before firing squads. They, as well as the substitutes whom wealthy draftees hired, were of at best dubious value to the army, as were the conscripts who actually did find their way into the ranks. The latter made up only a small percentage of the total numbers mustered into service since the impact of the draft lay primarily in spurring “voluntary” recruitment. However, its net yield was but a small trickle of good soldiers among hordes of nearly worthless substitutes, bounty jumpers, and conscripts.
In some areas, resistance to the draft was more intense and could flare up into violence. This was true in localities where popular opposition to the cause of emancipation ran high. In such districts men angrily announced that they would not fight for the African Americans, to whom they referred with disparaging epithets. Regions of particular resistance to the draft included the Ohio River valley in the southern parts of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, but the furor was most intense among the Irish immigrant population that made up most of the lower class of New York City.
When in the summer of 1863 a renewed round of conscription was about to go into effect in the city, the Irish population launched the war’s most violent urban riot. For several days mobs ran rampant through the streets, killing policemen and African Americans and burning buildings, including an orphanage for black children. In order to quell the riot, authorities finally had to bring in several regiments of troops from the Army of the Potomac. Some officials had doubts as to whether the citizen-soldiers would actually fire on their rioting fellow citizens in the streets of New York. The veterans of Gettysburg had neither doubts nor hesitation in mowing down those whom they saw as traitors who were stabbing the Union cause in the back while the more honest Rebels attacked it in front. The arrival of battle-hardened troops quickly brought peace to the streets of New York.
Northern opposition to the Union cause could take more outwardly respectable forms than the raging mobs in the streets of New York. A large faction of the Democratic Party in the North denounced the war as wicked, foolish, and a failure to boot. These “Peace Democrats,” also known as “Copperheads,” controlled the Indiana legislature and had considerable political strength in other states as well, and they criticized the war and obstructed measures for its support as much as they could. Indiana’s Republican governor, Oliver P. Morton, showed considerable determination and creativity in order to keep his state contributing to the Union war effort.
Sometimes Union authorities lost patience with the Copperheads. After Ambrose Burnside’s unhappy tenure in command of the Army of the Potomac, Lincoln had assigned the earnest but inept general to command the Department of the Ohio, duty which at that point in the war involved mostly the administration of a rear area including several midwestern states. On April 13, 1863, Burnside issued General Order Number Thirty-Eight, stating that he would not tolerate the “habit of declaring sympathies for the enemy.” Eighteen days later, former congressman Clement L. Vallandigham defied the order.
Vallandigham had reached Congress in 1857 after narrowly losing the 1856 election in his district but then persuading the Democratic majority in Congress to seat him in place of his victorious Republican opponent. As an incumbent he had won the next two elections by the thinnest of margins. When the Civil War began, Vallandigham, a virulent racist and enthusiastic backer of slavery, had denounced the Union cause and voted against every single bill for the support of the armed forces. In the 1862 elections, despite the country’s dissatisfied mood that had given the Democratic Party additional seats in Congress, the voters of western Ohio had swept Vallandigham out of office in a landslide. Nevertheless, the renegade Ohioan was one of the foremost leaders of the Copperhead movement and coined its slogan, subsequently repeated with various mutations, about maintaining the “Constitution as it is and the Union as it was.”
In a major public speech on May 1, 1863, the newly unemployed former congressman denounced “King Lincoln” and called for his ouster from the White House. The war, Vallandigham complained, was not for the Union but for the freedom of the slaves and therefore not worth fighting. Several days later Burnside had Vallandigham arrested for violation of General Order Number Thirty-Eight. In response, a Copperhead mob turned out and burned the offices of Dayton’s pro-Republican newspaper, the Journal, rival of the pro-Vallandigham Democratic Empire. A military tribunal tried and convicted Vallandigham for violation of Burnside’s order, sentencing him to two years’ imprisonment. A federal district court upheld the validity of the military trial and conviction, as did the Supreme Court, several months later. Meanwhile, Lincoln decided to commute Vallandigham’s sentence to banishment to the Confederacy. If Vallandigham wished to side with the Rebels, to the Rebels he would go, where he could, if he were man enough, shoulder a musket and fight for the beliefs he had been espousing for many months.
Instead, after Union troops had seen him through the lines under flag of truce in Tennessee, Vallandigham traveled to the coast and left the Confederacy on a blockade-runner to Bermuda, whence he took ship for Canada. Arriving in Windsor, Ontario, he declared himself a candidate for governor of Ohio in the election that fall, calling for Ohio to secede from the Union if Lincoln did not at once recognize Confederate independence. The Ohio Democrats gave him their nomination, while the Republicans nominated staunch “war Democrat” John Brough. The result was an overwhelming landslide victory for Brough. Subsequently, Vallandigham reappeared in Ohio, showing up at a number of public events, but the authorities ignored him.
Meanwhile, Burnside had had a run-in with another prominent Copperhead. Wilbur F. Storey, the virulently Copperhead editor of the Chicago Times, enraged Burnside by his paper’s unrelenting hostility to the Lincoln administration and the Union war effort. On June 1 Burnside issued an order stating, “On account of the repeated expression of disloyal and incendiary sentiments, the publication of the newspaper known as the Chicago Times is hereby suppressed.” An immediate furor arose, and Lincoln revoked Burnside’s order.
Meanwhile, back on the fighting fronts, the late summer of 1863 saw lulls in both regions that had been the scenes of heavy action during the late spring and early summer. In the Mississippi Valley, Grant’s army consolidated the vast gains of the Vicksburg Campaign, and the authorities in Washington diverted a significant portion of Grant’s strength, the Thirteen Corps, to Bank’s Department of the Gulf.
As Grant later noted ruefully, the troops were sent where they could do the least good. He would have liked to have resumed the offensive with a drive against Mobile, but Lincoln and his advisers in Washington were eager to establish a Union presence in Texas, where the French emperor Napoleon III was in process of setting up a subservient regime under the rule of puppet emperor Maximilian, a clear violation of the Monroe Doctrine. In theory, Napoleon would be impressed by the arrival of Union troops in the vicinity of the border and would abandon his Mexican adventure. As it turned out, all such efforts, like any other plans that placed troops under the command of the dismal Banks, were doomed to failure. The quickest way to get the French out of Mexico would be for the United States to triumph over the rebellion and then turn its undistracted attention to Maximilian and his French master.
The other sector that had seen heavy fighting during the early summer was the eastern theater, where Lee’s Pennsylvania gambit had failed at Gettysburg. Though somewhat reduced in numbers, Lee’s army was in a much better state of supply than it had been at the beginning of the summer thanks to the abundant booty it had plundered from the Pennsylvania countryside during the Gettysburg Campaign. On the other side of the lines, Meade was cautious as ever. Lee was first to take the offensive again, moving deftly around Meade’s flank and marching north to threaten Washington as well as Meade’s supply line. Cautiously but with equal deftness, Meade fell back, denying Lee the advantage he had sought. Hoping to catch and damage Meade’s army as it withdrew, A. P. Hill, commanding Lee’s Third Corps, struck incautiously at a Union column near Bristoe Station, Virginia. A brief reconnaissance would have revealed far more Federals present than Hill had imagined and in a very strong position. Hill’s corps suffered a bloody repulse, and Lee, seeing that the campaign would accomplish nothing, ordered his troops back to their camps south of the Rapidan and Rappahannock. Thus, for a fifth time since the eastern armies had established themselves on opposite sides of those rivers, an offensive foray by one side or the other had ended in a failure that left the strategic situation in Virginia unaltered.
On the central fighting front, in Tennessee, where William S. Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland faced Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee, the situation was much different. Early summer there had brought no heavy fighting but rather the almost bloodless maneuvering of the Tullahoma Campaign, by which Rosecrans had expelled Bragg from Middle Tennessee. Handicapped by the near-mutinous state of his top generals, Bragg had fallen back all the way to Chattanooga, almost on the border with Georgia, while Rosecrans had halted his advance near Winchester, on the opposite (northwestern) side of the Cumberland Plateau.
Lincoln, Stanton, and Halleck had been almost at the end of their patience with Rosecrans over his six-month delay between the Battle of Stones River and the Tullahoma Campaign. When that campaign halted without a major battle and with Bragg’s army still intact, their annoyance began to grow once again. Rosecrans insisted on halting his army until its state of supply and equipment was once again as perfect as he could make it. Six weeks passed, and it was August 16 before the Army of the Cumberland once again marched out of its camps to follow up its previous advantage against Bragg.
While Rosecrans had used the six-week midsummer lull to refit his army, the Rebels too had been busy. For months a coterie of influential Confederates had been urging that the Confederacy’s best strategy was to concentrate its strength in the center for a decisive, war-changing blow that would crush Rosecrans and begin the unraveling of the Union’s effort to restore the southern states to their allegiance. Rosecrans’s success in the Tullahoma Campaign, with its inherent threat to Chattanooga, finally galvanized the government in Richmond into acting on that plan. Davis overruled Lee’s objections and ordered James Longstreet with two divisions of his First Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia to reinforce Bragg for a counterstroke against Rosecrans.
By the time Longstreet’s detachment got under way, Union troops under Burnside, now leading a one-corps Army of the Ohio, had advanced from Kentucky and captured Knoxville, Tennessee, cutting the direct rail connection between Virginia and Chattanooga. Longstreet’s troops therefore had to ride the trains all the way down the East Coast and then back north through Atlanta to join Bragg. This delayed their arrival until the second half of September, but their presence, along with that of various reinforcements Davis ordered to Bragg from other corners of the Confederacy, would raise the Army of Tennessee to nearly seventy thousand men, its greatest ever numerical strength and enough to claim a moderate advantage over Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland.
The reinforcements were not with Bragg when on August 16 Rosecrans launched his new campaign. As usual, the Army of the Cumberland’s commander had prepared meticulously, and his plan demonstrated how powerful a factor it was to be allowed to choose the time and place of action. Although his army had to cross several formidable barriers, Rosecrans’s possession of the initiative turned each of them to his advantage. The first barrier was the Cumberland Plateau, and immediately behind it lay the broad Tennessee River. For Bragg the problem was that the plateau was a barrier sufficient to prevent cavalry reconnaissance—especially reconnaissance directed by Bragg’s rather mediocre cavalry commanders—but nevertheless contained more gaps than his army could possibly hold in strength. As Bragg put it, “A mountain is like the wall of a house full of rat-holes. The rat lies hidden at his hole, ready to pop out when no one is watching.”
Complicating the problem for Bragg was Burnside’s possession of Knoxville and potential threat to move down the Tennessee Valley and link up with Rosecrans, a threat so severe that Bragg simply could not afford to permit it. He had to play Rosecrans strong to the northeast of Chattanooga even at the expense of leaving a weak side to the southwest of the town, where a Federal passage of the mountains and river would be less immediately disastrous. In the end, that was exactly where Rosecrans made his move, feinting elaborately upstream of Chattanooga, then pushing his army quickly across mountains and river below (southwest of) the town. By the time Bragg learned of Rosecrans’s advance, the Army of the Cumberland was already across the Tennessee River and pressing east toward the final barrier, the long ridge known as Lookout Mountain. Towering as much as 1,400 feet above the surrounding terrain, Lookout extended several score miles southwest from Chattanooga, where it loomed over the town, across the northwestern corner of Georgia and well into Alabama. Surmounted by a rocky escarpment known as the palisades, Lookout could be crossed only by tortuous mountain roads and then only where gaps in the palisades allowed passage.
Once again the initiative and the corresponding advantage belonged to Rosecrans. Moving his army in three widely separated columns to take advantage of as many far-flung gaps, the Union commander made it impossible for Bragg to discern the exact points of advance until it was too late to counter. With that, Rosecrans had successfully turned Bragg’s position in Chattanooga, threatening his supply line back toward Atlanta and putting him in immanent danger of being trapped against the Tennessee River just as Pemberton had allowed Grant to trap him against the Mississippi at Vicksburg four months before. Bragg was too canny to let that happen, so he took the only other option and put his army in retreat southward out of Chattanooga.
While one of his three corps moved in and occupied the key rail junction town, Rosecrans, traveling with his center corps twenty-four miles to the south, stood atop Lookout Mountain and observed the long cloud of rising dust to the south of Chattanooga that could mean only that Bragg was in retreat. Rosecrans’s reaction was to pursue, and he ordered all three of his corps—the Twenty-First at Chattanooga, the Fourteenth with him twenty-four miles to the south, and the Twentieth another eighteen miles farther south—to press eastward as rapidly as possible and tear into the flanks of the fleeing Rebel column.
The problem with all this was that Bragg’s army was not fleeing. The wily Confederate had shifted south twenty-five miles from Chattanooga to the town of La Fayette, Georgia, in order to escape Rosecrans’s trap, but he and his army were as yet far from defeated. On the contrary, the Rebels were at bay, looking for an opportunity to strike at their tormentors—and the long-awaited reinforcements were beginning to arrive. By pressing his campaign beyond Lookout Mountain, Rosecrans was following the pattern he had set after the Battle of Corinth eleven months before, trying to exploit momentum he did not have. This time, however, Grant was not on hand to stop him.
As Rosecrans pressed forward, Bragg soon found the opportunity he sought. On the evening of September 9, scouts brought him word that a Union division had crossed Lookout Mountain via Stevens Gap, twenty-four miles south of Chattanooga, and descended the west slope into a side valley known as McLemore’s Cove. If Bragg could have written the orders on which this column of Federals was marching, he could not have arranged the situation any more favorably for himself and his army. The Union division was temporarily isolated from its comrades still atop the mountain but only an easy ten miles from Bragg’s main point of concentration at La Fayette. Confederate forces found themselves perfectly positioned to strike the Federals simultaneously in the front and flank with overwhelming force. Better still, McLemore’s Cove was open to the northeast, thus easily admitting Bragg’s flanking column, but the cove was closed on the south, forming a cul-de-sac as if perfectly designed for trapping overaggressive Yankees.
Bragg immediately issued the orders that should have brought his army clamping down like the jaws of a nutcracker on the front and flank of the Union division, and over the next day and a half he reiterated them with increasing emphasis—all to no avail. Once again the dysfunctional high command of the Army of Tennessee came to the aid of the advancing Federals. Two of Bragg’s generals, Daniel Harvey Hill and Thomas C. Hindman, balked; produced a string of excuses; and finally refused to carry out Bragg’s orders. The Federals, who were in fact the vanguard of the Fourteenth Corps, finally discovered their danger and withdrew unscathed to the crest of Lookout. Too many of the Army of Tennessee’s generals had in their self-seeking combined to convince each other and many of their comrades that Bragg was so hopelessly incompetent that any order he gave had to be a disastrous mistake just because he gave it. The result in McLemore’s Cove had been the loss of what one of Bragg’s staff officers described as an opportunity “which comes to most generals only in their dreams.”1
Yet even with the opportunity in McLemore’s Cove gone, Bragg’s position was still amazingly good. With his army concentrated around La Fayette and steadily increasing as reinforcements arrived, he was closer to each of Rosecrans’s three separate corps than any of them was to one of the others. Centrally located and with good roads at his disposal, Bragg could strike at Union columns too weak to meet his massed troops and too widely separated to support each other. On September 12 Bragg accordingly issued orders for his troops to strike the isolated Twenty-First Corps, which had been moving south from Chattanooga as Rosecrans’s left wing. Again a Confederate general, this time Leonidas Polk, refused to carry out Bragg’s orders, and the opportunity went begging.
Over the course of the next week Rosecrans, at last aware of his danger, strove to draw his columns together and reunite his army, sidling the Twentieth and Fourteenth corps northward to join and ultimately leapfrog past the Twenty-First Corps’s position near Lee and Gordon’s Mill, where the main Chattanooga–La Fayette Road crossed Chickamauga Creek. Meanwhile Bragg awaited the rest of his reinforcements and did some sidling of his own, sliding his army north opposite Rosecrans’s. If Bragg could move faster than his adversary, he could get north of the Federals and then lunge west, blocking their path to Chattanooga and positioning his army to drive the outnumbered bluecoats southward toward the open maw of McLemore’s Cove, from which the Army of the Cumberland could not hope to escape.
By the evening of September 17, Bragg believed that goal had been achieved and gave the order for his army to advance westward, cross Chickamauga Creek, and then swing south to destroy the Federals. The next day his columns met stubborn and skillful resistance from Rosecrans’s cavalry screen and managed the crossing of the creek only late in the day but still several miles north of Rosecrans’s left (northern) flank. As George H. Thomas’s Fourteenth Corps reached Rosecrans’s temporary headquarters that evening at the Gordon-Lee Mansion, not far from Lee and Gordon’s Mill, after a hard day’s march the Union commander considered the reports from his cavalry of Confederates forcing the crossings of Chickamauga Creek north of him and ordered Thomas to give his men a short break and then get them back on the road for a night march all the way to the farmstead of a settler named Kelly, five miles north of Lee and Gordon’s Mill.
Thomas’s weary soldiers stumbled through the darkness on rough roads, less than half lit by the smoky light of occasional fence-rail bonfires set by the leading elements of the column, but their night of marching was decisive. When the battle opened the next morning, September 19, the Fourteenth Corps was as far north as any major element of Bragg’s army, and what precipitated the first clash of what was to become the Battle of Chickamauga was Federals probing eastward from the Kelly Farm and encountering Confederate cavalry guarding the flank and rear of Bragg’s army as it faced south ready, as Bragg supposed, to drive the Army of the Cumberland into McLemore’s Cove. A day of confused but intense fighting followed as Rosecrans shifted more and more troops north to support Thomas and Bragg turned unit after unit of his army and sent them driving to the west rather than to the south. With a dense forest canopy extending over most of the battlefield, both commanders could often do little more than order their arriving divisions to march toward the sound of the firing.
The day ended with the Army of the Cumberland holding its own, including the vital Chattanooga–La Fayette Road and Dry Valley Road, both giving access to Chattanooga. Rosecrans met with his generals that night and announced that he would not retreat the next day but would keep the left wing as strong as possible while the right wing continued to draw in on the left. Bragg too was determined to continue the fight the next day. That night he received further reinforcements, bringing his total strength to sixty-eight thousand versus Rosecrans’s sixty-two thousand, minus the losses of the first day.
Less auspiciously, Bragg’s reinforcements also included James Longstreet. Convinced that he was the Confederacy’s greatest general, Longstreet had found it galling enough serving under his imagined inferior Lee. He was incensed at having to serve under Bragg and doubly so when Bragg let a little thing like a battle distract him to the point of sending no welcoming party to meet Longstreet at the nearest railway stop, Catoosa Platform. When Longstreet finally arrived at Bragg’s headquarters late that night, Bragg felt compelled to reorganize his army in the middle of the night, midway through a major battle, in order to give Longstreet a command befitting his seniority if not his self-image. Bragg divided his army into two wings, the right under Polk, the left under Longstreet. The right would lead off the attack “at day-dawn,” and then the assault would extend farther and farther to the left until the whole army was engaged. They would bend back the Union left and drive the Army of the Cumberland into McLemore’s Cove.
Once again the Army of Tennessee’s high command malfunctioned. Polk, whose wing was to open the attack, failed during the night to notify his subordinate commanders that an attack was even scheduled, so when day dawned on the morning of September 20, the units of the Confederate right wing were out of position and completely unprepared for action. Instead of making haste to remedy his lack of preparation, Polk took a leisurely breakfast. After more than three hours and several increasingly irate messages and finally the personal intervention of the army commander, the assault finally began around 9:30 a.m., though it was still badly coordinated.
During the interval between the time the attack was supposed to have gone in and the time it finally did, the Federals in front of it, belonging to George Thomas’s very heavily reinforced Fourteenth Corps, made use of the time to build log breastworks. Such improvised field fortifications were coming into increasingly wide use during the course of 1863. They changed the whole equation of battle, multiplying the defenders’ strength by a factor of three or more. Polk’s stumbling assaults broke in slaughter in front of Thomas’s breastworks.
Noon was approaching when Longstreet’s turn came. With more time to prepare, he had (whether by accident or design is unclear) arranged the eight brigades of the center of his wing in a column of attack five brigades deep on a two-brigade front and had aimed it at the Union right center, where the two-brigade division of Brigadier General Thomas J. Wood held the line.
At least, Wood was supposed to hold that sector of the line. In fact, at the moment Longstreet advanced, Wood’s brigades were not in line. Longstreet and his Confederates could not have known it, but a misunderstanding had occurred at Rosecrans’s headquarters about the actual arrangement of the Army of the Cumberland’s units. Rosecrans, who thanks to his nervous nature had in recent days been unnecessarily depriving himself of rest and nourishment, became confused and, thinking a gap existed in his lines, ordered Wood to march his division to a different part of the field and close the gap. In fact, no gap had existed—until Wood pulled his brigades out of line in obedience to Rosecrans’s order. And just then, before Union officers could remedy the sudden disruption of their army’s line, Longstreet’s column of attack roared through the gap, splitting the Army of Cumberland in two within minutes.
Following up his success, Longstreet drove the severed right wing of the Army of the Cumberland off the battlefield after short but bitter fighting, but the defeated Federal units were able to withdraw via the Dry Valley Road behind the cover of Thomas’s still-intact left wing. While still holding his lines on the left, Thomas was able to use his reserves and some rallied formations from the Union center to cobble together a line on a chain of hills blocking any Confederate advance northward in pursuit of the retreating Union right. There he held on through hours of intense fighting until retreating on Rosecrans’s orders late in the evening. Rosecrans sent the orders from Chattanooga, to which he had fled shortly after Longstreet’s breakthrough.
Chickamauga was the first Confederate victory in the western theater of the war, but it was not the decisive victory the Confederacy had needed and on which it had gambled in weakening other regions to reinforce Bragg. Because it had been the Union right that broke, while the left wing held firm, the battle offered Bragg no opportunity for exploitation or pursuit. Thomas’s wing, reinforced by now with much of the rest of the Army of the Cumberland, continued to cover the retreat, taking a strong defensive position so that any attempt by Bragg to advance toward Chattanooga would have ended in slaughter. So too would any Confederate attack on the heavily fortified Union lines just outside the town of Chattanooga, into which Rosecrans had withdrawn his army within little more than twenty-four hours after the end of the fighting in the valley of Chickamauga Creek. Then Rosecrans transformed the situation into one that did, after all, offer decisive results to Bragg.
The Army of the Cumberland was still full of fight, but its commander was a beaten man. His army in Chattanooga depended for its supplies on the road and rail corridor via the Tennessee River Gorge downstream from the town, yet Rosecrans ordered his troops to withdraw without a fight from the high ground that commanded that route. That high ground was the northern extremity of Lookout Mountain, towering 1,400 feet above Chattanooga and, more important, dominating the Tennessee River, which lapped the toe of the mountain. Confederates on Lookout and in the adjoining Lookout Valley to the west of the mountain could prevent supplies from reaching the bluecoats in Chattanooga via boats on the river, wagons on the road that hugged its bank, or trains on the railroad track that ran beside it. Bragg advanced in the days after the Battle of Chickamauga, occupied the high ground, and placed Rosecrans’s army in a state of siege almost as severe as that which Grant had successfully laid to Pemberton’s army in Vicksburg a few months before. Rations were soon desperately short in the camps of the Army of the Cumberland, and the army’s horses and mules died in droves from starvation.
In Washington, Rosecrans’s defeat at Chickamauga had aroused concern. His behavior after the battle, acting, in Lincoln’s words, “confused and stunned, like a duck hit on the head,” excited consternation, especially on the part of the excitable secretary of war. Lincoln and Stanton quickly made arrangements to send relief to beleaguered Chattanooga. They dispatched two corps of the Army of the Potomac, the Eleventh and Twelfth under the command of Joseph Hooker, by rail as reinforcements, and, far more important, they assigned Grant to take overall command of all Union forces west of the Appalachians and to go to Chattanooga at once and set the situation there to rights.
Grant arrived in the town on October 23 via the same route that was bringing the Army of the Cumberland its thin trickle of supplies, a rough track that made a sixty-mile roundabout trip through the mountains. Arriving cold and wet in a howling storm after the long, muddy ride, Grant received a chilly welcome from Thomas, who on Grant’s orders had recently assumed command of the Army of the Cumberland in place of Rosecrans. Thomas sympathized with Rosecrans and resented having to take orders from Grant. Undeterred, Grant set to work to break the siege. First, he ordered his old lieutenant Sherman, now leading Grant’s former command, the Army of the Tennessee, to bring four divisions of the victorious veterans of Vicksburg across northern Alabama and southern Tennessee to join the force around Chattanooga.
Then Grant implemented a plan to reopen the supply line into Chattanooga through the Tennessee River Gorge. Part of the scheme had been developed by Rosecrans’s staff before his relief, but Rosecrans had not thought the time right for implementing it. Grant excelled at recognizing good plans and making them happen. In a skillfully executed night assault, Union troops descended the Tennessee by boat and seized key terrain in Lookout Valley, aided by the fact that Longstreet, who commanded the Confederate troops in this sector, had devoted only a tiny fraction of his available force to holding that vital position. The detachment that had come west from the Army of the Potomac, commanded by former Army of the Potomac commander Joseph Hooker, then moved in from the railhead at Bridgeport, Alabama, and linked up with the Federals who had taken Lookout Valley, strengthening the Union grip on the Tennessee River Gorge. With that, the “Cracker Line,” as the Union soldiers called it, was open, and supplies, including the ubiquitous hardtack “cracker” that was the mainstay of the Union soldier’s diet, began to flow into the town in vast amounts.
This changed the entire operational equation around Chattanooga and throughout the western theater of the war. From holding a stranglehold on the Army of the Cumberland in Chattanooga, Bragg had gone literally overnight to simply sitting in front of a fully supplied opposing force that now outnumbered his own. He immediately ordered Longstreet to gather his forces and counterattack to regain Lookout Valley and reestablish the siege, but that general, who had seemed so impressive in Virginia when Lee had told him what to do, blundered again, using only a couple of brigades and managing the fight so badly that the attack fizzled almost as soon as it got started.
Few options remained open to Bragg. A frontal assault on the fortified lines around Chattanooga would play directly into Grant’s hands. Retreating toward Atlanta was unacceptable to the Confederate government. Waiting passively in place to see what Grant would do promised to be as disastrous a policy for Bragg as it had been for Pemberton a few months before. A move westward to turn Grant’s right flank would take the Confederates directly into the path of Sherman’s oncoming force.
That left only a move to the northeast to turn Grant’s left flank. It would be risky, of course, but so was everything else Bragg could do. It would require getting rid of Burnside’s small Union force at Knoxville, but Burnside was known not to be one of the more formidable Union generals. Besides it would open the way for a turning movement that might repeat the northward campaign that had shifted the scene of conflict all the way into Kentucky the preceding year, and it would also reopen the direct rail connection to Virginia. Lee had been clamoring for the return of Longstreet’s detachment, and Davis usually listened to Lee. Bragg, for his part, was more than willing to part with Longstreet, at least, after that general’s recent performances. Using Longstreet’s divisions to clear East Tennessee as the first phase of the army’s turning movement would thus have the added benefit of getting Longstreet away from Chattanooga and of getting his troops halfway back to Virginia and thus pleasing the Confederate government in Richmond.
So Bragg ordered Longstreet to take his detachment up the Tennessee Valley to Knoxville, destroying or driving off Burnside’s force. Burnside proved as unskillful as expected, and Longstreet had an opportunity of trapping the Union force before it could fall back into the Knoxville defenses. Longstreet, however, matched Burnside blunder for blunder and let the Federals escape. Then he settled in for an inept siege of Knoxville.
By November 24 Grant’s preparations at Chattanooga were complete. On that day, Sherman’s command made a river crossing above the town and moved quickly to take up a position threatening Bragg’s right flank on the northern end of Missionary Ridge, a six-hundred-foot-high landform on the east side of Chattanooga. By nightfall Sherman’s troops were poised to advance against Bragg’s flank on the ridge. Simultaneously, Hooker’s command successfully stormed Lookout Mountain, pushing back the Confederate left flank to Missionary Ridge so that Bragg’s entire line ran along the ridge.
Sherman opened the ball the next morning with his attack on the Confederate right, which Grant was counting on as his main blow. The mountainous terrain around Chattanooga was new to both armies and to their commanders, and the massive terrain features had much different tactical effects than did analogous features in the gently rolling terrain in which they had previously fought. Ridges like Lookout Mountain had proved surprisingly vulnerable to direct assault. Now Missionary Ridge turned out to be a much stronger position against a flank attack than anyone had previously imagined. That factor, along with the presence of Bragg’s best division commander, Major General Patrick R. Cleburne, on the Confederate right was enough to stop Sherman’s assault in its tracks.
Grant had anticipated subsidiary pushes from Hooker against the Confederate left flank at the other end of the ridge and from Thomas, with the Army of the Cumberland, against the enemy’s center. Grant had not expected much from these efforts beyond diversion of the enemy, and so far they had not delivered even that. Hooker’s attack against the south end of Missionary Ridge was delayed by an unbridged creek on the way there, and Thomas showed no inclination to make so much as a threatening movement on his front.
Grant’s headquarters were near the center of the line, and so in mid-afternoon he approached Thomas and asked if he thought it would be a good idea to threaten the Rebel center. Thomas, who was scrutinizing the Confederate line through his field glasses, ignored Grant, though he could hardly have failed to hear him. Some minutes later Grant simply ordered Thomas to advance his army and take the first Confederate line of rifle pits, which was at the base of Missionary Ridge. Some time later when the Army of the Cumberland still did not advance, Grant again prodded Thomas, who lamely explained that he had given the order but did not know why it was not being carried out. Finally, late in the afternoon Thomas’s army did advance, though he had neglected to see to it that his division commanders knew their objective. Some units thought they were driving for the top of the ridge, others that they were to stop after taking the first Confederate line at its base. Still others had no idea where they were to stop.
Fortunately for Thomas’s men, the Confederate entrenchments at the base of the ridge were lightly manned, and about half of the units in them had orders to retreat after two volleys. Their hasty departure was demoralizing to the remainder of the Confederates on that line, who had no idea of any such orders. Thus, the first Confederate line fell easily into Union hands. Confusion then reigned in Union ranks as some units started immediately up the ridge and others halted uncertainly. Eventually, division, brigade, and even regimental commanders, recognizing that their troops were taking heavy fire from the crest of the ridge, made the decision to advance, and all five attacking divisions went up the slope, though now in very ragged formation.
Like Lookout Mountain the day before, Missionary Ridge proved surprisingly vulnerable to direct attack, its steep slope and rugged folds providing much cover for advancing attackers. Eager to avenge their defeat at Chickamauga, Thomas’s troops pressed doggedly upward and broke the Confederate line in several places virtually simultaneously. At almost the same time, Hooker finally got his troops onto the south end of the ridge, adding to the Confederate discomfiture. Resistance quickly collapsed, with all of Bragg’s army in headlong flight except for Cleburne’s still-resolute division, which covered the rest of the army’s retreat much as Thomas’s command had done for the Army of the Cumberland after Chickamauga. That, along with the rapid approach of night, precluded effective pursuit and allowed Bragg’s army to escape, minus several thousand prisoners and several dozen cannon left in the hands of the exultant Federals.
Up in Knoxville, Longstreet heard of Bragg’s defeat and made an attempt to storm a key Union fort near the city. Like almost everything Longstreet did during his western sojourn, the attack was woefully mismanaged and developed into a resounding failure. Grant, in the wake of his Chattanooga victory, dispatched Sherman and his hard-marching troops to deal with Longstreet. As Sherman’s troops neared Knoxville, Longstreet broke off the siege and retreated northeastward into Virginia. Never again would Longstreet or any large detachment of troops from the Army of Northern Virginia serve in the war’s western theater, and never again would the Confederacy make such a concerted effort to turn the tide of the war in this decisive theater and regain all that it had lost since the debacles at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson.
Grant’s resounding victory at Chattanooga capped a six-month period of dramatic Union successes including the culmination of the vast and complicated Vicksburg Campaign as well as victories at Gettysburg, Tullahoma, and Chattanooga with only the temporary setback of Chickamauga. In response to these encouraging developments, pointing to eventual restoration of the Union and an end to slavery, Lincoln issued a proclamation establishing November 26 as a nationwide day of thanksgiving to God. This nationalized a holiday that had been traditional for many years in the New England states as well as in some of their western progeny. Peace did not seem as distant as it had only a few months before.
On November 19 Lincoln had delivered “a few appropriate remarks” (so read the note inviting him to speak) at the dedication of a new National Cemetery at Gettysburg, established to accommodate the many thousands of Union dead from the preceding summer’s battle. In one of the most eloquent speeches ever made in the English language, Lincoln explained in clear and forceful language and with striking brevity why the North was fighting and why it must fight on to final victory. “Four score and seven years ago,” the president began, referring to the writing of the Declaration of Independence,
our fathers brought forth on this continent 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 can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not 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.2