Decision in the Heartland: The Civil War in the West (Reflections on the Civil War Era)

Decision in the Heartland: The Civil War in the West

Steven E. Woodworth

PRAEGER

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DECISION IN THE HEARTLAND

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DECISION IN THE HEARTLAND The Civil War in the West

ij STEVEN E. WOODWORTH

Reflections on the Civil War Era John David Smith, Series Editor

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Woodworth, Steven E. Decision in the heartland : the Civil War in the West / By Steven E. Woodworth. p. cm. — (Reflections on the Civil War era, ISSN 1939–649X) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 978–0–275–98759–6 (alk. paper) 1. Tennessee—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Campaigns. 2. Georgia—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Campaigns. 3. Mississippi River Valley—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Campaigns. 4. Military geography—United States—History—19th century. 5. United States—Strategic aspects. 6. Southern States—Strategic aspects. I. Title. E470.4.W65 2008 2007041298 973.7 45—dc22 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. C 2008 by Steven E. Woodworth Copyright 

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2007041298 ISBN: 978–0–275–98759–6 ISSN: 1939–649X First published in 2008 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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CONTENTS

Series Foreword Acknowledgments Introduction

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Chapter One: Forts Henry and Donelson

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Chapter Two: The Confederacy Strikes Back

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Chapter Three: The Presidents Take a Hand

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Chapter Four: From Deadlock to Decision

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Chapter Five: From Tullahoma to Missionary Ridge

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Chapter Six: Winter Interlude, 1864

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Chapter Seven: The Atlanta Campaign

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Chapter Eight: To Durham Station

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Notes Bibliographical Essay Index

139 155 159

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SERIES FOREWORD

“Like Ol’ Man River,” the distinguished Civil War historian Peter J. Parish wrote in 1998, “Civil War historiography just keeps rolling along. It changes course occasionally, leaving behind bayous of stagnant argument, while it carves out new lines of inquiry and debate.” Since Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s men stacked their guns at Appomattox Court House in April 1865, historians and partisans have been fighting a war of words over the causes, battles, results, and broad meaning of the internecine conflict that cost more than 620,000 American lives. Writers have contributed between 50,000 and 60,000 books and pamphlets on the topic. Viewed in terms of defining American freedom and nationalism, western expansion and economic development, the Civil War quite literally launched modern America. “The Civil War,” Kentucky poet, novelist, and literary critic Robert Penn Warren explained, “is for the American imagination, the great single event of our history. Without too much wrenching, it may, in fact, be said to be American history.” The books in Praeger’s Reflections on the Civil War Era series examine pivotal aspects of the American Civil War. Topics range from examinations of military campaigns and local conditions, to analyses of institutional, intellectual, and social history. Questions of class, gender, and race run through each volume in the series. Authors, veteran experts in their respective fields provide concise, informed, and readable syntheses— fresh looks at familiar topics with new source material and original arguments.

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Series Foreword

“Like all great conflicts,” Parish noted in 1999, “the American Civil War reflected the society and the age in which it was fought.” Books in Reflections on the Civil War Era series interpret the war as a salient event in the hammering out and understanding of American identity before, during, and after the secession crisis of 1860–1861. Readers will find the volumes valuable guides as they chart the troubled waters of mid-nineteenth-century American life. John David Smith Charles H. Stone Distinguished Professor of American History The University of North Carolina at Charlotte

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my appreciation to Professor John David Smith of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte for suggesting this topic and urging me to write on it. I’m also very grateful to Mr. Edmund Pendleton Cranz of Fort Worth, Texas, and Dr. John R. Lundberg for the use of the Khleber and Minerva Van Zandt Letters. As always, my wife, Leah, has been very supportive throughout the process.

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INTRODUCTION

In the public mind, the Civil War still equals Gettysburg. The eastern theater and its greatest indecisive battle still loom large in the American imagination. Numerous books and now a movie or two depict the clash in Pennsylvania as the “high-water mark of the Confederacy” and the conflict east of the Appalachians as practically the entire war. Undergraduates still ask if it is not true, after all, that Gettysburg was the one battle that decided the outcome of the entire war. Despite the fact that scholars specializing in Civil War military history have, with few exceptions, come increasingly to the opinion that the war was decided west of the Appalachians, the public misconception that the real Civil War was fought in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania does not appear likely to go away soon. Yet, for those who believe this, it might be a good idea to ask why the war turned out the way it did. The almost unbroken string of Confederate victories in Virginia from the Seven Days to Chancellorsville, followed by Lee’s tenacious defense of Richmond during the Overland Campaign surely ought to have been enough to secure victory—if the eastern theater had been the focus of the war. How could the North have maintained its will to go on fighting in the face of Lee’s repeated successes at Union expense? In fact, Union morale was largely sustained by the steady progress and repeated victories of its western armies, who, while the Army of the Potomac faced futility in Virginia, were conquering territory, seizing strategic assets, and battering Rebel armies into submission in the broad heartland of the country west of the Appalachians. It was there, in the nation’s midsection, that the truly

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Introduction

decisive campaigns of the Civil War were waged. In the end, Lee’s valiant efforts on the Virginia periphery of the conflict, though of enormous benefit to Confederate morale and some discouragement to the North, nevertheless turned out to be almost militarily irrelevant in the end. When Lee finally suffered final defeat to Grant and the eastern Union armies in April 1865, the outcome of that particular struggle was almost beyond mattering. The western Union armies were even then south of Lee, little more than 100 miles away, and would have been on him in another week or two—and then the outcome would not have been in doubt for a moment. Lee had done well in defending his sector of the Confederacy, but once the vast interior of the country had been swept by the Federals, his fate, and that of his army, were sealed. Civil War historian Thomas Lawrence Connelly referred to the western theater of the war, especially Tennessee, as the Confederate heartland. In reality, the entire swath of country between the Appalachians and the Mississippi formed the heartland of the United States in the 1860s. Populous enough to sway either elections or a civil war, agriculturally rich far beyond the scope of the narrow eastern seaboard states, and, in places like Cleveland, Ohio, and Nashville, Tennessee, among many others, beginning to develop an industrial base, the midsection of the country represented both its future and the decisive weight in its present. As William Tecumseh Sherman wrote in 1864 regarding the broad expanse of the continent that drained into the Mississippi River, “The Atlantic slope and Pacific shores will follow its destiny as sure as the limbs of a tree live or die with the main trunk! Here lies the seat of the coming empire, and from the West, when our task is done, we will make short work of Charleston and Richmond, and the impoverished coast of the Atlantic.”1 And so he did. For the sake of clear definition, the western theater of the Civil War, what I am here calling the “heartland,” includes more than just the territory east of the Mississippi that is drained by the Mississippi. For my purposes, the western theater includes— as it did in practical terms during the war—all of the land east of the Mississippi that ultimately drains into the Gulf of Mexico rather than directly into the open Atlantic via the eastern seaboard. Thus, for example, Atlanta, in the valley of the Chattahoochee, is part of the heartland, since the waters of the Chattahoochee find their way to the Gulf of Mexico via the Appalachicola. In addition to the action in these territories, I also include, as part of the story of the western theater, the actions of the western armies when, as Sherman had predicted, in late 1864 and early 1865 they moved into the states of the Atlantic slope to bring the war to a conclusion. On the other hand, I do not include the Trans-Mississippi west in the “heartland,” except perhaps for the narrow strip of natural levees on the Louisiana shore of the Mississippi where Grant’s army camped and maneuvered during the Vicksburg Campaign. Other than that, the Trans-Mississippi was simply too new, too sparsely populated, too far from anyplace that did have any strategic importance, to make much weight in the scales of victory or defeat for either side. If the Confederacy

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Introduction

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had won the war and established its independence, Trans-Mississippi actions might have been significant in determining which western territories would go to the Confederacy and which to the Union. Yet if the Union won in the heartland, between the Mississippi and the Appalachians, it would win the whole war, and none of the actions west of the river would matter. The decision would come in the heartland.

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One

ij FORTS HENRY AND DONELSON

Though its outcome was to be decided in the part of the country then known as the West, the Civil War started in the East, within sight of the Atlantic Ocean. Its opening shots came from Confederate guns near Charleston, South Carolina, firing against the tiny Federal garrison of Fort Sumter, in the middle of the harbor. In response President Abraham Lincoln recognized the fact that an insurrection existed too powerful to be suppressed by the normal processes of the judicial system, and in strict adherence to the Constitution he responded by calling for 75,000 state militia to enter Federal service for the purpose of suppressing the uprising. Like the rest of the northern states, the Northwest responded enthusiastically to Lincoln’s call. From villages like Keosauqua, Iowa, and West Union, Ohio, and larger towns like Chicago and Cleveland, men flocked to the colors, and organized themselves into named companies like the Peoria Zouave Cadets or the Eau Claire Eagles, the latter bringing with them as a mascot a live eagle they had named “Abe.” At a number of colleges, most of the male student body enlisted in companies with names like the “University Rifles,” “University Recruits,” or “University Guards,” sometimes with faculty members serving as officers. The smaller towns held recruitment rallies that partook of the flavor of religious revivals or camp meetings, complete with music, emotional public speaking, and appeals for young men to walk to the front of the assembly and sign the enlistment papers. If male enthusiasm for enlistment flagged, young women were often ready to add their pointed encouragement. At a recruitment rally in rural Wisconsin a pert lass turned on her beau, who was obviously

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reluctant to join. “John, if you do not enlist I’ll never let you kiss me again as long as I live!”1 With their ranks full, the various companies set out for the centralized camps that state authorities had designated. Departure from home was both exciting and traumatic. “Oh that departure!” recalled Illinois soldier Dietrich Smith regarding his own company’s leaving its hometown of Pekin. “As the Volenteers passed down court street to the levee”—where they would board an Illinois River steamer—“all was covered with people. The Band playing[,] some cheering[,] others crying.”2 Once the companies reached the rendezvous camps, they became lettered companies of numbered regiments. For example, the Eau Claire Eagles became Company C of the 8th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment. From the rendezvous camps the regiments headed sooner or later for one of the active military departments. A handful of the newly raised northwestern regiments shipped east to take part in the war in Virginia, but most of them headed due south to wage the war for the Union in the country’s heartland. The chief assembly points were the Ohio River towns of Cincinnati, Cairo, and, somewhat later, Louisville, as well as Benton Barracks near St. Louis, and while the bulk of the new troops were assembling at those places, a number of regiments found themselves distributed to odd places that appeared likely targets for sabotage by Confederate sympathizers in the lower Northwest. Two companies of the 8th Illinois Infantry Regiment spent weeks at the Illinois Central Railroad’s bridge over the Big Muddy River, just north of the town of Carbondale, while other troops pulled similarly mundane duty. While the states of the Northwest recruited and organized troops in the spring and summer of 1861, the Confederate states of the Southwest did the same. In some ways, the southerners may have had an advantage because their society was more militant and warlike than that of the North. Per capita, the South had more military academies, all more or less patterned after the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and southern white young men were more likely to attend one of those institutions than were their northern counterparts, even if they were not planning on a career in the military. The key to the cultural difference was the presence of slaves in the South and the need for white males to be prepared at all times to use lethal force to put down a revolt. This was most apparent in the armed and mounted slave patrols in which the white men of each district participated for the purpose of catching runaways. It was more subtle in the South’s code of honor, whereby white men continually demonstrated how different they were from slaves by violently responding to any perceived slight to their honor. Hence, many of the southerners who enlisted in Confederate regiments in 1861 had extensive experience with weapons and perhaps even a modicum of experience with lethal combat. A somewhat larger percentage of their officers had at least somewhat more military training than was the case in the North.3

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However significant this advantage may have been—and historians still debate its importance—it was less pronounced in the heartland of the country than it was in the East. This was true for several reasons. The young men who were even then joining the new regiments forming up from Ohio to Iowa and Minnesota were themselves scarcely a generation removed from the frontier. They were tough and resourceful and not entirely unacquainted with violence. Another factor that worked against the Confederates involved the allocation of many of the early southern regiments to Virginia. Those low-numbered regiments tended to contain a disproportionate number of men and officers who had at least some military training or experience. Most Confederate regiments in the West were composed of military innocents led by men almost, if not altogether, as ignorant as the privates in the ranks.4 For both Union and Confederate troops in the heartland, the summer of 1861 was almost a phony war, a time of declared hostilities but no actual combat. Both Lincoln and Davis found it expedient to respect Kentucky’s self-proclaimed neutrality, since violating it by marching troops into the state would likely drive many Kentuckians into the arms of the enemy. This was advantageous to the Confederacy, in effect providing an impenetrable shield against Union armies advancing toward the heartland of the South. Yet, Lincoln believed losing Kentucky would be even worse. “I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game,” he wrote to Orville Browning in September. “Kentucky gone, we can not hold Missouri, nor, as I think, Maryland. These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us.”5 So Union armies remained north of the Ohio, and their Rebel counterparts stayed south of the Kentucky–Tennessee line. Small pro-Union and pro-Confederate factions within Kentucky organized themselves into military companies with such tacit aid as the two governments could smuggle into the state, while the majority of Kentuckians ardently wished that the whole business would go away. While the armies in the heartland remained largely idle, those to the East and West of them fought battles that summer. Without the barrier of a neutral Kentucky between them, Federals and Rebels clashed in both Virginia and Missouri. On July 21, 1861, Union and Confederate troops fought at Bull Run near Manassas Junction, Virginia. The Rebels were victorious, and many of the Union troops fled from the battlefield in disorder. A major victory within thirty miles from Washington, D.C. should have offered the Confederates as good an opportunity as they would ever have of winning the war at a single stroke. Yet, the Confederate army was also badly disorganized by the battle, and the Federals had forces available for a defense of the national capital. As always in the eastern theater of the war, decisive victory—for one side or the other—seemed tantalizingly close but never quite within reach. In Missouri on August 10, Rebels and Federals clashed at Wilson’s Creek, near Springfield. The Confederates were triumphant here as well and temporarily gained the upper hand in the western part of the state—but that was all. Battles in western Missouri or Arkansas might give the winner some degree of control in those

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areas, for the time being, but they were never going to decide the outcome of the war or even exert a strong influence unless one side or the other damaged its own cause by sending in troops that should have been committed elsewhere. In short, the battles of the summer of 1861 gave the first indications that decisive results were highly unlikely either east of the Appalachians or west of the Mississippi. It would take time for leaders to recognize that fact, and some never would. Even as the first round of battles were being fought on the outer edges of the war zone, East and West, both sides continued making their preparations for prolonged warfare, and these preparations were redoubled as the summer battles proved indecisive. Even before Bull Run, Lincoln had called for 500,000 volunteers, not for three months but for three years. Many of the original ninety-day regiments reenlisted for the longer term, and all over the Northwest other regiments continued organizing, rendezvousing, and marching off to the anticipated fighting fronts throughout the summer and fall and into the winter. As they did, they came under the command of one of two separate Union department commands in the West, both of which answered directly to Washington. John C. Fr´emont’s Department of the West stretched westward from the Cumberland River, across the Mississippi, to include Missouri. East of the Cumberland but west of the Appalachians lay the Department of Kentucky, renamed in August the Department of the Cumberland, and commanded by native Kentuckian and hero of Fort Sumter, Robert Anderson. On the other side of the lines, Jefferson Davis busied himself arranging for the defenses of the Mississippi Valley and other sectors of the Confederacy, assigning generals and defining the boundaries of military departments. In the region between the Mississippi and the Appalachians, Confederate defensive arrangements were shaped by the actions of Tennessee governor Isham G. Harris. Like ardent secessionists throughout the southern states, Harris had worked hard to manipulate the people of his state into leaving the Union and joining the Confederacy. It had not been easy. The people of Tennessee had resoundingly rejected secession in February 1861. After the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in April guaranteed that there would be war between the Union and the rebellious states, Harris managed to get another referendum scheduled for June. In order to influence its outcome, he trumpeted the danger of a Union “invasion” down the Mississippi River, ignoring the fact that there would be no invasion if the state did not join the rebellion.6 The governor organized an independent state army for Tennessee—twenty-four infantry regiments, ten batteries of artillery, and various other assets—and deployed most of it along the Mississippi, where he started construction on several forts. With Kentucky neutral, the river was the only possible avenue of Union approach, and Harris made sure Tennessee voters were well aware of it. He also entered into an “alliance” with the Confederacy, then gained the state’s formal admission to the slaveholders’ republic weeks before the voters of Tennessee could have their say at the

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polls. When they finally did, they had little choice but to ratify the decision Governor Harris had already effectively made for them.7 With Tennessee’s admission to the Confederacy, responsibility for its defense, and command of its army, passed to Jefferson Davis. The Confederate president did not believe the Federals would advance during the summer of 1861, if for no other reason than that the hot climate would deter them. That gave him a few weeks to make preparations. One necessary adjustment was finding a good commander. Along with the Tennessee army, the Confederacy had inherited that army’s commanding general, Gideon J. Pillow. A successful trial lawyer and old crony of then president James K. Polk, Pillow had won an appointment as a general in the Mexican War but had not been confirmed by the Senate. His most famous Mexican War exploit had been having a system of entrenchments constructed backward. Now he was a general again by virtue of Isham Harris’s appointment, but as headstrong and militarily incompetent as ever.8 Political considerations made it inexpedient for Davis to sack Pillow, so he decided to appoint a higher-ranking general to supervise him instead. That general was Leonidas Polk, an Episcopal bishop whom Davis appointed a major general directly from civilian life. Polk had graduated from West Point in 1827 and immediately resigned from the army to pursue a career as an Episcopal priest, never paying any attention to military affairs from that day until the summer of 1861. Davis may have believed that appointing the popular clergyman would garner additional support for the Confederate cause, but he and Polk had been at West Point together, and Davis never got over his profound respect for the older cadet who had gone on to become a bishop. He made the appointment of his old crony in late June, and the bishop-general arrived at Memphis, his new headquarters, the following month.9 Throughout the war, Jefferson Davis had chronic problems with his generals in the West, and those difficulties got off to an early start this very summer. Pillow was incensed at having Polk appointed over him and threatened to resign. Unfortunately for the Confederacy, he did not make good on that threat. Instead, by the end of August he had talked Polk into adopting one of his pet projects, occupying the Mississippi River town of Columbus, Kentucky. The series of bluffs on which the town was built, known as the Iron Banks and Chalk Bluffs, represented the only high ground immediately adjacent to the river for 150 miles south, all the way to Memphis. Columbus was thus the best place to build a fort to keep the Yankees from coming down the Mississippi. The problem, of course, was that occupying Columbus meant violating Kentucky’s neutrality, with potentially serious political consequences. Polk, who knew that Davis was pledged to respect Kentucky’s neutrality, weighed the political and military factors and decided that military considerations had to prevail. On September 3, 1861, without notifying Davis, Polk sent Pillow’s troops up the river on steamboats to Hickman, Kentucky, south of Columbus. There they

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landed and marched overland to the coveted town on the bluffs, which they occupied without opposition. Davis first learned of the incursion in a frantic telegram from Isham Harris, who had been working very hard to lure Kentucky into the Confederacy. Harris had reason to be alarmed about the foray into Kentucky, because he knew better than anyone else that Tennessee’s frontier with Kentucky was all but undefended. He urgently begged the Confederate president to withdraw the troops from the Bluegrass state before it was too late. Davis immediately saw the wisdom of this and ordered secretary of war Leroy P. Walker to order Polk out of Kentucky. Walker complied, but Polk did not. Instead, he sent Davis a telegram claiming that he knew best and the movement was a military necessity. It was vintage Polk. Davis’s reply was equally characteristic. “The necessity must justify the action,” he wrote as he flip-flopped to a position of support for the incursion into Kentucky.10 The result was as bad as Harris had feared. Public opinion in the Bluegrass state swung in favor of the Union. Despite the efforts of secessionist Governor Beriah Magoffin, the state legislature passed a resolution ordering the Confederates out of the state and inviting Union troops to enter Kentucky and help drive the Rebels out. Several thousand Kentuckians still opted to fight for the Confederacy, but five times as many would ultimately fight for the Union. The Confederate political disaster in Kentucky was all the more significant since it apparently headed off a comparable Union political disaster. On August 30, 1861, John C. Fr´emont, commanding the Union Department of the West, issued a proclamation confiscating the property of all Rebels in Missouri, freeing their slaves, and threatening firing squads for any armed Rebels found behind Union lines. It may have been just, but it could hardly have been more politically inexpedient for the Union cause in the western border states. To make matters worse, Fr´emont gave orders for a detachment of his troops to occupy Columbus, and had Polk delayed another few days at most, the Federals would have arrived before him. Lincoln lost no time revoking Fr´emont’s proclamation, but nothing the president could have done would have repaired the political damage of a major Union incursion into Kentucky. Now thanks to Polk, it was not Lincoln but Davis who faced that problem.11 To crown his accomplishment, Polk neglected to secure the full military benefits of the movement for which he had delivered Kentucky to the Union. Though he occupied and subsequently fortified Columbus, he did not seize the town of Paducah, located forty miles northeast of Columbus, at the point where the Tennessee River flowed into the Ohio. Holding Paducah would have secured control of the Tennessee River, which roughly paralleled the Mississippi fifty to one hundred miles east of it throughout the western portions of Kentucky and Tennessee. A Union advance southward, up the Tennessee River, would outflank the Confederate defenders of Columbus, forcing them to abandon the Iron Banks and Chalk Bluffs or else face

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encirclement and capture. Hence, Columbus, without Paducah, was of limited value. Polk intended to take Paducah, but he took his time about doing it. The day after Polk’s troops occupied Columbus, a new Union general took over what was called the District of Southeastern Missouri—within Fr´emont’s department and under his command—with headquarters at Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio River flowed into the Mississippi. Ulysses S. Grant had recently been promoted to brigadier general and did not yet have an appropriate uniform when Fr´emont assigned him to take over the district on the periphery of what Fr´emont saw as the main area of operations in central and southwest Missouri. Fr´emont’s order assigning Grant was dated August 28, 1861, and by the time Grant attended to some tasks Fr´emont had given him in southeast Missouri and arrived in Cairo, it was September 4. Over the next twenty-four hours Grant received and digested news of the Confederate occupation of Columbus and then acted swiftly and decisively. Using Fr´emont’s previous orders to move into Kentucky and recognizing that Polk’s move now allowed him to do so free of political charge. Grant wrote to the Kentucky legislature stating that the Confederates had entered the state and that he would now be forced to respond. Then he dispatched two regiments and two gunboats for Paducah, and by the morning of September 6, the town was his.12 With that, Grant had virtually cancelled all of the military advantage Polk had gained by taking Columbus. That fact, however, was not immediately apparent to very many people, perhaps not even completely clear to Grant himself at that time. No major operations followed immediately on the heels of the Columbus–Paducah episode. Each side continued to raise and drill troops and to consolidate its positions, the Federals at Cairo and Paducah, and the Confederates at Columbus, where Polk focused all available resources to create a powerful fortress. Both sides experienced some command shake-ups during the autumn months. Only a few days after Polk’s occupation of Columbus, Davis assigned Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston the command of a large department encompassing all northwardfacing Confederate defenses from the Appalachians to the Great Plains and including Polk’s Mississippi Valley command. Johnston was another of Davis’s old West Point cronies, and perhaps the only man in whom he felt more implicit confidence than he did in Polk. He was also one of the most highly respected officers in the prewar U.S. army. Polk responded much as Pillow had done a few months before and offered his resignation. Davis talked him out of it, and the bishop-general stayed on, commanding his district within Johnston’s department.13 With Kentucky’s neutrality now a thing of the past, Johnston had Polk maintain his position at Columbus with 12,000 men. The new department commander directed another force of Confederates, about 15,000 men under the command of Brig. Gen. Simon B. Buckner, to advance from Nashville and occupy Bowling Green, Kentucky, where Johnston also made his headquarters. He sent orders for a small Confederate

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force of about 8,000 men in East Tennessee under the command of Brig. Gen. Felix K. Zollicoffer to move northward across the Kentucky line as well. The only Confederate defenses on the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers were one fort on each river where they flowed nearly parallel to one another about a dozen miles apart just south of the Kentucky line. The forts, Henry on the Tennessee and Donelson on the Cumberland, were among the few provisions Isham Harris had made for the defense of Tennessee’s northern frontier during the time he directed the state’s independent preparations for war. The combined strength of the forts’ garrisons totaled about 4,000 men. Work on the two sites had proceeded fitfully throughout the summer, and although the ideal location for the defense of the two rivers would have been a number of miles to the north, in Kentucky, where they approached even closer to one another, Johnston was reluctant to write off the work that had already been put into the two forts and start from scratch at a new location only a few miles from the Federals at Paducah and, shortly thereafter, Smithland, at the mouth of the Cumberland. Hence, he ordered Polk to push the work on both forts rapidly to completion. They would comprise the only part of his line that remained in Tennessee while the other three components advanced into southern Kentucky.14 Advancing his forces into Kentucky was a bold move and probably about as wise as any Johnston could have made, for its very boldness helped to mask the shocking weakness of Confederate forces west of the Appalachians. In his whole department Johnston had perhaps 40,000 armed troops. He could have recruited more but for the time being could not obtain rifles or muskets to arm them. Throughout the autumn of 1861, bluff was a major component of Confederate defenses in the heartland.15 Yet, Johnston was not the only general who had problems that autumn, and a large part of the reason his bluff worked was that the Union armies were not ready to call it. Though already more than twice as numerous as Johnston’s total force, Union troops in the western theater were divided covering a number of sensitive targets like St. Louis, Cairo, and Louisville, and they needed more time for training, organization, and supply before they could undertake the difficult task of advancing into a countryside controlled by the enemy to meet the foe on ground of his choosing. And, like their counterparts in gray, the Union armies were experiencing some command shake-ups that fall. Anderson asked to be relieved for reasons of health at the end of summer, and Lincoln assigned Brig. Gen. William T. Sherman to succeed him. The brother of a prominent Republican senator, Sherman was a strategic genius but was high-strung, nervous, and talkative. He also found newspaper reporters annoying and denounced them as meddling busybodies. When he stated in his usual forceful manner the as yet little suspected fact that it was going to take hundreds of thousands of men to put down the rebellion, the reporters decided it was payback time and solemnly informed their readers that Gen. Sherman had gone insane. In early November 1861 Lincoln replaced him with Brig. Gen. Don Carlos Buell.

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Lincoln had high hopes for the new commander of the Department of the Cumberland, now renamed the Department of the Ohio. George B. McClellan then commanded all Union armies from his headquarters in Washington, and the country at large still held him to be the epitome of vigorous and scientific warfare—a view that was true on the latter point but not on the former. Buell was his prot´eg´e and was reputed to embody the same qualities, which, as it turned out, he did—the very same ones as McClellan. Lincoln was eager for Union forces to reach East Tennessee, where the Confederate army had its collective boot on the neck of the Union-loyal population. Buell was supposed to take his army there and liberate the east Tennesseeans. Over the weeks that followed, however, Buell proved querulous, fussy, and unwilling to advance—just like his mentor McClellan, but without the charm. He claimed, with some justification, that it would be exceedingly difficult to march and supply an army through eastern Kentucky and into East Tennessee. Instead of that, he proposed that he should be given authority over the neighboring Department of the West and allowed to make his advance there. About the same time Lincoln assigned Buell to the Department of the Ohio, he also replaced Fr´emont as commander of the Department of the West. The “Pathfinder” was an inefficient general who had surrounded himself with an elaborate staff of European officers in gaudy uniforms who were not only inefficient but also, in many cases, corrupt. Fr´emont made political headaches for Lincoln but did not seem eager to close with the enemy, and by early November, Lincoln had enough and replaced him with Henry W. Halleck. Years before the war, Halleck had translated some French strategy books and written one of his own, earning a reputation for erudition in the prewar army. He had later left the army and worked as a lawyer in California during the 1850s before returning to uniform at the outbreak of present hostilities.16 Interestingly enough, Halleck’s ideas of strategy were similar to Buell’s. Like Buell, he believed the West needed a unified command, though he naturally believed that he, not Buell, was the one who should exercise it. More significantly, however, he also agreed with Buell that the best axis for a Union advance in the West was along the line of the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers. Others had the same idea. Engineer officer Col. Charles Whittlesey suggested it to Halleck as early as November 20, 1861. Nor was the concept limited to high-ranking generals, engineer officers, McClellan clones, or people who had written textbooks on strategy. It was, in fact, one of the most self-evident propositions in the whole war. Anyone with a map and the most rudimentary ideas of strategy could easily see that the two rivers presented the single most favorable route for an initial drive into the southern states. Indeed, a woman in Maryland, Anna E. Carroll, wrote a letter to Lincoln suggesting such a movement and then spent the next thirty years lobbying Congress to reimburse her for the generals’ theft of her intellectual property.17

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Decision in the Heartland

“Everything is very simple in war,” wrote the famous German philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz, “but the simplest thing is difficult.” None of the Americans of the Civil War generation had read Clausewitz, but his timeless observations applied to what they were doing just as well as they did to the Napoleonic wars that inspired Clausewitz to write. In the case of the strategy to be used in the West, seeing what needed to be done was simple, but doing it was difficult. Neither Buell nor Halleck felt he was ready to proceed with the plan, in part because the authorities in Washington refused to give either of them command over the other and in part because both were fastidious generals who did not want to advance until all of their preparations were perfect.18 Grant was not that sort of general. During the fall months of 1861 his district within Fr´emont’s Department of the West did not include the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, but he was eager to advance in the sector that was his. In early November he tried a foray against a Confederate camp at Belmont, Missouri, just across the river from Columbus, apparently hoping to use a victory there to pry the Rebels out of the bluff-top fortress. Grant’s inexperienced soldiers fought well and captured the camp but then lost their cohesion in celebrating their victory. Confederate reinforcements crossed the river, and Grant and his men had all they could do to fight their way back to their steamboats and make good their escape. Both sides claimed victory, and the front remained unchanged. Shortly after the turn of the year, the quietness along the western rivers gave way to action, largely due to the persistent urging of Abraham Lincoln. The president was dissatisfied with the inaction of his generals on all fronts, especially McClellan’s very own sitzkrieg along the Potomac, and Lincoln never gave up his persistent urging that his generals do something for the suffering patriots of East Tennessee. In December 1861 Buell finally put some small detachments of his force on the march toward East Tennessee. Brig. Gen. George H. Thomas’s division and a brigade under Brig. Gen. Albin Schoepf were to march into southeastern Kentucky by separate roads and then combine and attack Zollicoffer’s force at Mill Springs.19 The opposing commanders in southeastern Kentucky were very different men. Thomas was an 1840 West Point graduate and career army officer from Virginia who had remained loyal to the Union. Sturdy, steady, and stolid, Thomas had earned the prewar army nickname “Old Slow Trot.” Zollicoffer was a Nashville newspaper editor and Whig politician whom Davis had made into a general in order to satisfy Isham Harris’ desire that each of Tennessee’s two political parties have its fair share of generals, especially the Whigs, who had not been in the forefront of the stampede for secession. While Thomas was stolid, Zollicoffer was impetuous. After moving into Kentucky the previous September on Johnston’s orders, he had incautiously advanced to Mill Springs on the north bank of the upper Cumberland River. Davis had assigned Zollicoffer to suppress Unionists in East Tennessee and had never meant him to command an army in the face of the enemy. So he hastened to

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appoint a more experienced officer to oversee the former newspaper editor just as he had assigned Polk to ride herd on Pillow. In this case the more experienced officer was another Davis crony, George B. Crittenden, an 1832 West Point graduate with a checkered prewar career. He arrived in his new district in time to find Zollicoffer in a vulnerable position with his back to the rain-swollen Cumberland, while Thomas’s and Schoepf’s forces approached. Crittenden decided their only chance was to attack and defeat Thomas before Schoepf could join him and so ordered Zollicoffer to advance. Early on the morning of January 19, 1862, Zollicoffer struck Thomas’s camp at Logan’s Crossroads, Kentucky, in a drizzling rain. The journalist-turned-general badly mismanaged the attack before blundering into Union lines in the poor visibility and getting shot. Crittenden was too drunk to be of much help. Thomas was always solid as a rock on the defensive, and his men fought stoutly. A key defensive stand by the 2nd Minnesota Regiment helped stop the Confederate advance, and a headlong bayonet charge by the ethnically German 9th Ohio Regiment sent the Rebels flying in a disorderly rout all the way back to the Cumberland. There the frightened soldiers proved adept at finding transportation across the stream and continued their flight southward all the way into Tennessee.20 The defeat at Logan’s Crossroads, or Mill Springs, as the Confederates called it, could have been disastrous. The Union’s path to Cumberland Gap and beyond it, East Tennessee, lay wide open. All that prevented such an advance was the fact that supplying a Union expedition through the hills of eastern Kentucky and into East Tennessee would have been a nightmarish undertaking, especially amid the cold rains of winter. Buell was the last man to press on boldly to the limits of the possible; so instead he informed Washington that no further advance was feasible along that line and East Tennessee would remain in Rebel hands. Then, within three weeks of Logan’s Crossroads, further developments in the western theater made the wide-open road to Cumberland Gap seem like the least of the Confederacy’s worries. While Thomas and Schoepf were making their abortive forays into southeastern Kentucky, Halleck’s forces staged a diversion in western Kentucky to prevent Confederates there from reinforcing Zollicoffer and Crittenden. All of the forces engaged in the diversion belonged to Grant’s recently enlarged district—one column out of Cairo under Grant’s personal command and another column from Paducah under Grant’s subordinate Brig. Gen. Charles F. Smith, who had been the commandant of cadets when Grant was a West Point cadet. During the course of the difficult operation amid the cold, fog, rain, and mud of January, an engineer officer attached to Smith’s column made long-distance observations of Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and returned with a report that it could be successfully attacked.21 That report prompted Grant to renew his pleas to Halleck to be allowed to launch an offensive up the Tennessee River. Those pleas would probably have been rejected like his previous ones had it not been for two messages Halleck had recently received.

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Decision in the Heartland

One was a circular to all Union department and army commanders from Lincoln himself. Entitled General War Order Number One, it directed “That the 22[n]d day of February, 1862, be the day for a general movement of the land and naval forces of the United States against the insurgent forces.” Lincoln was tired of waiting and wanted his generals to get moving. The other message was from McClellan and said information from a Confederate prisoner taken in Virginia indicated that Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard was under orders to go West with fifteen regiments from the Confederate army in Virginia.22 In fact, the prisoner was wrong. Beauregard was coming but with only a few staff officers. As for Lincoln’s order, no one paid much attention to it, but, coupled with the information that his foe might soon receive reinforcements, it may have given Halleck the extra prod he needed. Uncharacteristically he agreed to allow Grant to make the attack. “Make your preparations to take and hold Fort Henry,” he wired Grant on January 30, 1862.23 Grant’s army, 17,000 strong, departed from Cairo and Paducah on steamboats on February 3, and began disembarking a few miles downstream from Fort Henry on the following afternoon. By the morning of February 6, Grant had most of his force on hand and gave orders for an advance against the fort at 10:00 a.m. simultaneous with an attack by a cooperating squadron of gunboats under the command of Flag Officer Andrew H. Foote. The gunboats were a new thing on western waters, squat ironclad vessels mounting thirteen heavy guns each, recently constructed near St. Louis. Foote was very much an old-fashioned tough-as-oak seadog in the best tradition of Prebble and Decatur, and at the hour appointed he led his squadron forward, guns blazing. By 1:55 p.m. he had closed the range to scarcely 200 yards, and the Rebels had had enough. Grant’s troops were still slogging over the muddy terrain trying to reach their positions around the fort. So most of the 2,000-man Rebel garrison was able to flee toward Fort Donelson. A few dozen Confederate artillerists stayed behind to surrender with the fort’s commander, Brig. Gen. Lloyd Tilghman.24 The fort had proven too weak to resist even the bombardment by the gunboats. Until three weeks before, Albert Sidney Johnston had believed that Polk was obeying the orders he had given to continue strengthening forts Henry and Donelson. Only after Grant’s mid-January diversionary expedition had the Confederate department commander discovered that his old West Point roommate Polk had simply ignored his orders and instead concentrated most of the district’s available manpower and heavy artillery, as well as every last trained engineer officer, at Columbus itself. By then it was too late to put Fort Henry in a defensible condition, even if he could have induced Polk to obey orders, which, it turned out, he could not, even at that late date.25 The fall of Fort Henry resounded like a thunderclap through the Confederate high command. The Tennessee River was now open to Union gunboats and transports all

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the way to Florence, Alabama, bisecting Tennessee and rendering the western third of the state untenable. Columbus was outflanked and would have to be evacuated. Below it, only much weaker fortifications guarded the Mississippi, and they could in any case be outflanked via the Tennessee River all the way down to Memphis, where the Confederates had built no fortifications at all. Proceeding along the Tennessee River, Union forces could approach within twenty miles of the key northern Mississippi railroad junction of Corinth, where the tracks of the north-south Mobile & Ohio Railroad crossed those of the east–west Memphis & Charleston line, one of the most important railroads in the South and the region’s only continuous east–west link. And all of this promised to be merely the beginning of sorrows for the Confederates in the West. If Fort Henry could not hold, odds were that Fort Donelson on the Cumberland would also fall in short order. If it did, Union forces could ply the Cumberland all the way to Nashville, depriving the Confederacy of a major center for the production of war materials as well as the surrounding rich agricultural district. Worse, the arrival of Union gunboats at Nashville within the next couple of weeks would cut off Johnston’s army at Bowling Green, Kentucky, forcing it to disperse and attempt to flee into the hills of East Tennessee and signaling what would almost certainly be the complete collapse of organized Confederate resistance west of the Appalachians. To meet these threats Johnston conferred with the newly arrived Beauregard and issued orders that put all of his troops in motion. Beauregard assumed command over Polk and all Confederate forces west of the Tennessee River, where he would supervise the inevitable retreat to the vicinity of the Mississippi–Tennessee line. The force at Bowling Green would also retreat, marching southward to cross the Cumberland at Nashville. Johnston also dispatched reinforcements to Fort Donelson to raise the garrison there to more than 20,000 men, apparently in order to insure that the garrison could hold the fort until the Union gunboats hammered its water batteries into silence and then would be powerful enough to cut its way out and rejoin him south of Nashville. All of the Confederate forces would then rendezvous at Corinth.26 While the Confederates braced themselves for the next blow, Grant was only too eager to give it. In his dispatch notifying Halleck of the capture of Fort Henry he added, “I shall take and destroy Fort Donelson on the 8th and return to Fort Henry.” What prevented him from doing so was the weather. “Rain, snow, & sleet,” wrote an Illinois colonel to his wife, “the whole country,” he said, was nothing but “mud & slush. The roads impassable almost for horses. Movements with artillery impossible.” Besides, Flag Officer Foote’s gunboats were temporarily laid up for several days for repairs at Cairo. So, vexed and impatient, Grant had to wait.27 By February 12, the gunboats were ready and the roads were dry enough—just barely—to allow the march on Fort Donelson to begin. The weather was balmy, even hot, and the road was muddy and difficult. “Many an overcoat was thrown away as a useless burden,” recalled an Illinois lieutenant. It seemed unlikely they

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Decision in the Heartland

would need the cloaks again before fall, and scarcely a man in Grant’s army thought the war would last that long. After brief skirmishing at the head of the column, Grant’s 15,000 men moved into position around Fort Donelson that afternoon, outnumbered significantly by the garrison. Minor fighting flared at several places along the lines on February 13, but both sides were waiting for the gunboats to deliver the decisive blow, which was scheduled for two o’clock on the afternoon of Valentine’s Day.28 Rain fell on the thirteenth, and that evening the thermometer plunged almost to the single digits. “Oh, how we did suffer from cold,” recalled an Iowa sergeant. “Our blankets froze stiff around us.” The rain gave way to snow, and soon the huddled men in frozen blankets—or in some cases without blankets or overcoats, having thrown them away on the march—were covered with several inches of the white powder. It was, an Illinois soldier later wrote, “the hardest night I yet experienced.”29 At last February 14, dawned, and at the time appointed, Flag Officer Foote led his gunboats forward and attacked the batteries of Fort Donelson. This fort, however, proved to be quite different from its hapless sister on the Tennessee. Located on a commanding bluff, the guns of Fort Donelson could deliver deadly plunging fire onto the unarmored decks of the gunboats. One by one the Confederates’ heavy cannon knocked out all four gunboats and sent them drifting helplessly back downstream. A tremendous cheer went up from the Rebel lines, and, listening on the inland side of the fort, Grant and his men knew what it meant. Grant’s first plan for taking the fort had failed, but he was not about to give up. He would simply have to make arrangements to besiege Donelson and perhaps try an infantry assault. He had already received enough reinforcements to bring his numbers up to rough parity with the Confederates inside the fort, but he would probably need more. As always, Grant would persist. Inside the fort about that time, the top Confederate commanders were forming their own plan to avoid a prolonged siege. Despite the victory of their water batteries in beating off the Union gunboats that afternoon, brigadier generals John B. Floyd, Gideon J. Pillow, and Simon B. Buckner decided the time had come for the garrison to abandon Fort Donelson, break out, and make its way southeastward to join Johnston somewhere south of Nashville. They made their plans to pull as many troops as possible off the northern and central portions of their defenses and mass them for a predawn assault to the south, where success would open an escape route to Nashville via the river road. During a second straight night of snow and extreme cold, the Confederate troops tramped toward their new positions, while the Federals, without tents and many without overcoats or fires, struggled to avoid freezing. Some jogged or marched back and forth all night in their attempts to keep warm.30 Sometime before daybreak on February 15, Grant received a message from Flag Officer Foote, asking him to visit the flagship for consultation. Foote had been wounded in the previous day’s fight, and was unable to travel to Grant’s headquarters.

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What Foote had to tell Grant was that his squadron was too badly damaged to participate further in the siege of Fort Donelson and needed to return to Cairo for repairs. Appreciating Foote’s stalwart support hitherto, Grant had his horse saddled, mounted up, and set off on the rutted and icy road leading to the steamboat landing, several miles north of the fort. He left orders for his three division commanders not to initiate any action while he was gone. His top-ranking division commander was John A. McClernand, a political general of somewhat questionable abilities, who by the vagaries of the new volunteer army outranked Charles F. Smith, Grant’s old West Point commandant and one of the most respected officers in the prewar regular army. Rather than place Smith under McClernand’s orders, Grant left no one in command at all.31 Grant had no sooner ridden away to the north of Fort Donelson than the Confederate attack began at the opposite end of the lines, south of the fort. The Confederates struck McClernand’s division, which was outnumbered and badly spread out, and in several hours of intense fighting drove it completely back on Brig. Gen. Lew Wallace’s division in the Union center. Throughout most of the morning Wallace and Smith declined to reinforce McClernand on the basis of Grant’s orders not to initiate action. Late in the morning Wallace sent McClernand a brigade, though it was not enough to halt the Confederate advance. The Rebels’ drive continued until it encountered the rest of Wallace’s division in the Union center around noon. Wallace’s troops stood firm. The exhausted Confederates could not budge them, and a brief lull ensued in the fighting.32 Despite the repulse by Wallace’s division, the Confederates had achieved their purpose. The road to the south stood wide open, but the Confederate generals were in some disagreement about what to do next. Buckner wanted to start the march at once, but Pillow apparently thought they had won such a complete victory that they would have plenty of time to prepare and start the march the following morning. Floyd, who as senior brigadier, had command of the fort and garrison, waffled under the contrary arguments of his two subordinates and finally sided with Pillow. The whole garrison would withdraw into the fortifications save for a small contingent left to guard the escape route.33 Meanwhile, Grant had arrived on the battlefield. Quickly taking stock of the situation, he ordered an immediate counterattack by Smith and Wallace’s divisions. Wallace’s men pushed back into the sector from which McClernand’s division had been driven that morning, defeated the Confederate holding force, and retook the key road the Rebels had fought all morning to gain. Smith’s division struck the northern portion of the entrenchments of Fort Donelson, where the defenders had been thinned to strengthen the breakout attack and the bulk of the Confederates had not yet returned to their preattack positions. The doughty old regular, long white mustache waving in the breeze, led his men in a charge that surged over the breastworks. As darkness gathered, Buckner’s troops returned from the battle south of

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the fort in time to prevent Smith from overrunning the entire Confederate position, but the Federals remained firmly in control of high ground that would give them good leverage for another attack the following morning.34 Shortly after midnight on the next morning, February 16, Floyd, Pillow, and Buckner met at Pillow’s headquarters within the lines of Fort Donelson and were soon joined by Col. Nathan Bedford Forrest, commanding the Confederate cavalry. Pillow wanted to proceed with the plan to cut their way out of the fort that morning, and Forrest assured them it could be done. Buckner thought the attempt would result in 75 percent casualties, denied that they could hold the fort longer than thirty minutes once the Federals attacked, and insisted that it was their duty to surrender. Floyd was a Virginia politician whom Jefferson Davis had made a general to please his Old Dominion constituency, and he was now far out of his depth. He quickly caved in to Buckner’s defeatism, but he had a problem. As U.S. secretary of war at the time of secession, Floyd had been involved both in financial graft and in transferring heavy cannon to southern arsenals on the eve of the war in a way that looked almost like making deliveries to the nascent rebellion. He now feared that if he were captured, he would face trial for treason. Buckner said that should not influence his decision, that if he, Buckner were in command, he would do the noble thing and surrender at once with his men. Floyd picked up on this and asked Buckner if he would allow Floyd to escape with his own brigade after taking command. Buckner said he would if Floyd left before negotiations opened. So Floyd passed the command to Pillow, who passed it to Buckner, who sent for a white flag and a bugler to sound parley.35 Floyd, Pillow, and Forrest lost no time in making their escapes. Forrest, at least, had the authorization of his superior officer, Pillow, for his breakout attempt, and he took most of his cavalry command with him, as well as a few infantry who tagged along. They crossed a flooded backwater saddle-skirt-deep in ice-cold water but successfully evaded Union forces and reached Nashville. Floyd commandeered two steamboats that arrived before dawn and used them to ferry four of his five regiments to safety on the opposite bank of the Cumberland. Pillow had to make do with a twelve-foot flat boat, in which he and his staff paddled across the river.36 Meanwhile, Buckner composed a note to Grant suggesting that they negotiate terms for the surrender of the fort. Grant, on the advice of his old West Point commandant, replied, “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.”37 In his reply, Buckner complained that Grant’s terms were “unchivalrous,” but he had no choice but to accept. The fort surrendered and Grant’s troops marched in. Between the commands of Floyd and Forrest and various other Confederates who slipped away through the somewhat porous Union lines and the considerable confusion following the surrender, a fair number of the defenders managed to escape captivity. Nevertheless, Grant’s total bag of prisoners came to some 15,000 Rebels.38

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News of the momentous events at Fort Donelson spread at varying speeds and produced varying reactions depending on the loyalties of the hearers. When word reached Chicago, the Board of Trade suspended business for the day in order to celebrate. Similar jubilation broke out in towns and villages across the Midwest in response to news of the victory, and well-wishers, hearing that Grant had directed the counterattack with a cigar (a gift from Foote) clamped between his teeth, sent him hundreds of cigars. To make use of them, the general laid aside his accustomed meerschaum and became a cigar smoker.39 News traveled more slowly in the South, especially the southwest. In Marshall, Texas, 500 miles from Fort Donelson and one month after its fall, twenty-twoyear-old mother of three, Minerva Van Zandt, was still wondering what might have become of her husband, twenty-six-year-old Khleber, who was a captain in the 7th Texas Infantry Regiment. “We heard of a big battle in Tennessee yesterday morning,” she wrote on March 15, 1862, “but whether it is true or not we don’t know. I have been very uneasy for the last day or two.” Khleber had survived the battle unscathed, but he was even then on his way to the Union prisoner-of-war camp at Johnson’s Island, Ohio.40 The twin Union victories at forts Henry and Donelson struck a devastating blow to Confederate fortunes in the heartland. They opened the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers to their respective heads of navigation, allowing the Union to take advantage of its overwhelming naval superiority to make those streams highways of Union advance and barriers to Confederate mobility. This rid Kentucky of all Confederate presence and delivered more than half the territory of Tennessee into Union control, at least potentially, outflanking the defenses of the Mississippi all the way down to Memphis. It would allow Union forces to advance unhindered to within twenty miles of the vital Memphis & Charleston Railroad, on the very edge of the Deep South, heart of the region’s devotion to the Confederate cause. Albert Sidney Johnston would now have to make his best effort at undoing the disaster his department had just suffered, and as a crowning consequence of the battles just concluded, he would have to do it with 15,000 less men than he had had before. The first phase of the war illustrated several reasons why the region between the Appalachians and the Mississippi was going to be the scene of the war’s decisive action. It was centrally located, large enough to allow effective maneuvering, and contained major rivers that flowed deep into—or out of—the heartland of the Confederacy. Union superiority in gunboats made those rivers into highways of invasion and subsequently into unbreakable Union supply lines. Joint operations would open a world of opportunities for the Union’s western commanders. The western theater also contained, in the person of Ulysses S. Grant, the war’s most effective Union general, while the Confederacy had chronic difficulties with its western generals, and these became apparent early on in the persons of Pillow, Polk,

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and Floyd. The contrast was to become, if anything, more pronounced as the war progressed and the quality of Union leadership in the West improved at all levels. The capture of forts Henry and Donelson represents the greatest actual turning point of the war. Prior to that time, the Confederacy was more or less holding its own. Zollicoffer’s defeat at Mill Springs was effectively unexploitable, and Confederate arms had otherwise been successful. The fall of the forts was the first and greatest Rebel disaster. It cost the Confederacy control of a large region, valuable both for agriculture and industrial production, and it opened the way for still deeper Union penetration of the southern heartland. Thereafter the story of the Civil War in the western theater was to be one of repeated Confederate attempts to reverse the results of that disaster and of the Union’s attempts to exploit its gains still further.

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Two

ij THE CONFEDERACY STRIKES BACK

After the Rebel disasters at Forts Henry and Donelson it was vital for Confederates in the West to reclaim the initiative and, if possible, roll back the tide of Union advances. While Albert Sidney Johnston labored to concentrate his troops at Corinth, Mississippi, Jefferson Davis ordered reinforcements to that vital rail junction town from the gulf coast, especially from Pensacola, where a garrison of more than 10,000 men under the command of Maj. Gen. Braxton Bragg had been watching a small force of Federals at Fort Pickens, just offshore. Bragg was an excellent disciplinarian, and his relatively well-trained troops were a welcome addition to Johnston’s rapidly assembling army.1 That Johnston had time to concentrate his forces at Corinth was largely thanks to two Union generals, and Grant was not one of them. The victor of Fort Donelson would have liked to push on rapidly and maintain the initiative, but his superior, Henry Halleck, had other ideas. Halleck had little concept of the value of momentum in war, and he was desperately jealous of Grant’s newfound fame. In dispatches to Washington he claimed Grant’s success as his own and used it to wangle a promotion to overall command of Union forces in the West, both his own former command and Buell’s Army of the Ohio. He planned to concentrate both forces on the Tennessee River as close as possible to Corinth, together with additional troops that had been advancing along the Mississippi in cooperation with the navy. With this combined behemoth of an army, he, Henry Halleck, would take the field and personally lead the march on Corinth.2

19

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Operations would therefore have to await the arrival of the various forces, and here Buell made himself the second general to donate valuable time to Sidney Johnston. Halleck suggested that Buell load his troops on steamboats at Nashville and ship them down the Cumberland and Ohio and then up the Tennessee to the staging point somewhere near the Tennessee-Mississippi line. Instead, Buell insisted on the much slower option of marching his army from Nashville to the Tennessee River near Corinth. Halleck gave in, and with the perennially slow Buell in charge of the operation it turned out to take even longer than might have been expected. Meanwhile, Halleck dispatched Grant’s victorious army, which would eventually be called the Army of the Tennessee, up the river of that name to take a position in southern Tennessee and cut the railroad connections of Corinth to the north and east while waiting for the arrival of Buell and the rest. Halleck did not, however, intend it to be Grant’s army anymore. Left to himself in command of an army, that upstart general was liable to fool around and win the war before Halleck could gain sufficient glory for doing so in the scientific way. So Halleck reported to Washington that Grant was abusing alcohol, though he knew this to be false. In return he received permission to court-martial Grant. That was more than Halleck wanted, since a court-martial would have exposed his own duplicity. Instead, he simply relieved Grant of command and sent the Army of the Tennessee up the river on its transports under the command of C.F. Smith.3 Grant might have remained sidelined save for two additional developments. One of these was that Smith slipped while climbing into a small boat, scraped his shin, and got blood poisoning that forced him to relinquish command. The other was that Grant’s hometown Congressman, Elihu B. Washburne, went to bat for him with the Lincoln administration, which then demanded that Halleck either present concrete charges backed by evidence or else drop the matter. Old Brains had no choice but to accept the latter alternative and in late March 1862 ordered Grant to resume command of his army.4 By that time the Army of the Tennessee was encamped on the banks of the Tennessee River in the southern part of the state, Lew Wallace’s Third Division at Crump’s Landing while the rest of the army, now totaling five more divisions with the addition of fresh troops, was encamped at Pittsburg Landing, five miles upstream (south). Both were on the west bank of the river, the side nearest Corinth, which lay only about twenty miles south-southwest of Pittsburg Landing. To facilitate contact with Buell, whose army was still plodding down from Nashville, army headquarters remained at the town of Savannah, Tennessee, on the east bank, five miles downstream (north) of Crump’s Landing and ten from Pittsburg. During the first days of April 1862, Grant learned that Buell was getting close. The first of his troops arrived at Savannah on the evening of April 5. Meanwhile, Albert Sidney Johnston had assembled an army of a little more than 40,000 men at Corinth and was determined to attack Grant before Buell could join

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him. On April 2, having received reports from his scouts that Buell was getting close to a junction with Grant, Johnston gave orders for his own army to march on Pittsburg Landing early the next morning. His plan was to reach the vicinity of the landing in a single day’s march of almost twenty miles, then attack the Federals at dawn on the morning of April 4, but that schedule immediately began to go awry. The troops and their officers were inexperienced, the roads were muddy, and Johnston’s second-in-command, Beauregard, had issued a set of unduly complicated march orders. Johnston had to postpone the attack from the 4th to the 5th and finally the 6th. By the evening of April 5, Beauregard was fretting that the element of surprise had been lost and urging Johnston to abandon the attack and return to Corinth, but the Confederate commander remained resolute.5 In fact, Beauregard was partially right. By the evening of April 5, the front-line Union troops and their immediate commanding officers at the regiment and brigade levels were acutely aware of the presence of a large Confederate force lurking just beyond their pickets. Numerous patrols had spotted the enemy, and on the evening of April 4, Confederates raided a Union outpost and a brief skirmish followed. The Federals captured several Rebels, and as they marched the chagrined gray-coats to the rear, one of them tauntingly asked if there were many more Rebels left out in the woods. “Yes, more than you’uns have ever seen,” spat the Confederate, “and if you all ain’t mighty careful, they’ll run you into hell or the river before tomorrow night.”6 Union headquarters, however, refused to accept the idea that a major Confederate force was nearby. Grant and his chief subordinate Sherman, who commanded one of the new divisions on the perimeter of the Union encampment, were convinced that the Confederates would not venture outside the fortifications of Corinth, and they dismissed reports of enemy activity nearby. Compounding the problem, Halleck’s orders to Grant were so adamant about not bringing on a battle that they virtually banned the sort of aggressive patrolling that would have been necessary in order for Grant or Sherman to learn that the enemy was present and in what force. Without such reconnaissance, the temptation was overwhelming to assume that the enemy was acting in the expected way. “I do not apprehend anything like an attack on our position,” Sherman wrote in a dispatch to Grant on April 5. Grant duly reported to Halleck, “I have scarcely the faintest idea of an attack (general one) being made upon us.”7 On the morning of Sunday, April 6, the Confederate army moved into its final positions in preparation for the assault. Johnston’s plan had been to strike most heavily against the Union left, tear the Federal line loose from the river, and drive Grant into a pocket formed by the swamps of Snake and Owl Creeks, north of Pittsburg Landing. He had allowed Beauregard to draw up the attack orders, however, and the secondin-command had arranged the Confederate army’s four small corps in tandem, one behind the other, each of the first three stretched across the whole battlefield. This arrangement made Johnston’s plan almost impossible and assured that command and control would break down almost immediately in the Confederate army, with

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various units mixed together and troops receiving orders from officers they did not know. Tactically the Confederate army would now have to wage the battle as a straightforward shoving match, in which victory would consist of pushing Grant’s army into the river.8 In the predawn hours a Union patrol collided with the Confederate attack formations and the battle was joined. The Confederates advanced relentlessly against the Union defenders all across the battlefield. Each Union brigade had time to get into line of battle before the Rebels struck, but Grant’s army did not have time to form a unified and coherent defensive line. On top of that, Johnston had the advantage in numbers over the five Union divisions encamped at Pittsburg Landing. The other division, Lew Wallace’s, spent the day wandering around trying to get onto the right road to reach the rest of the army. Fighting raged with unprecedented ferocity throughout the day. Here many of the bluecoats heard the Rebel yell for the first time. Ohio infantryman Thomas Connelly referred to it contemptuously as “their cornbread yelp,” but Ohio artillerist Andrew Hickenlooper recalled that the sound caused “an involuntary thrill of terror to pass like an electric shock through even the bravest hearts.”9 The Federals made stubborn stands near landmarks such as the Peach Orchard and Shiloh Church. Johnston fell mortally wounded leading a charge against the Peach Orchard around 2:30 p.m. By 6:00 p.m. the Rebels had driven what was left of Grant’s army to a final defensive position on the last ridge overlooking Pittsburg Landing. The Union line was finally continuous and well connected. The Federals were battered but apparently still full of fight. The Confederates were disorganized by their daylong battle but had before them a never-equaled opportunity—even if it was a very long shot—to annihilate a Union army. If the final line of defense could be broken, the fleeing fugitives of Grant’s army would have no place to rally and no escape. Most would have to surrender. As the front-line Confederate commanders were forming their troops for a twilight assault, orders arrived from Beauregard, who was at his headquarters well to the rear, directing the Confederates to break off the attack and fall back. The final assault would probably have failed, but, given the stakes, it would undoubtedly have been worth trying. As darkness gathered and the firing diminished, the first of Buell’s troops arrived on the east bank of the Tennessee and began ferrying across, a few regiments at a time, in the available steamboats. The ferrying operation continued all night, and by morning three of Buell’s divisions were on the west bank. Grant would command the combined forces, since he outranked Buell. Shortly after nightfall, Lew Wallace’s division finally found its way onto the battlefield. With these reinforcements Grant determined to renew the battle the next day, despite the misgivings of many of his subordinates whose thoughts were more of retreat than attack. Events proved Grant right, however, as the Union assault, spearheaded by the four fresh divisions, drove the wearied Confederates two miles back across

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the previous day’s battlefield until the contending armies were practically back to the positions they had held when the conflict had opened the morning before. At that point, about the middle of the afternoon, Beauregard decided his men had had enough and ordered a retreat back to Corinth. Grant’s army was too badly damaged to make more than a brief and partial pursuit. The Battle of Pittsburg Landing, or Shiloh, as it came to be called, represented the first major Confederate effort to reverse the flow of operations in the western theater, which had been dramatically in favor of the Union since the fall of Fort Henry. It was the bloodiest battle of the war up to that point and saw more American battle deaths—3,478—than all of the republic’s previous wars combined. Grant, by his tenacity and that of his troops, had narrowly staved off defeat and thus managed to hang on to the Union’s gains in the West. A few days after the battle of Shiloh, Halleck arrived at Pittsburg Landing. The first campaign he launched was against Grant. This was possible because Grant was then taking severe criticism for the heavy losses at Shiloh, with newspapermen publishing bogus reports of the army being so thoroughly surprised that soldiers were bayoneted in their tents before they could so much as crawl out of their blankets. This was, of course, nonsense, but then as now, many na¨ıve citizens believed what they read in the newspapers. Halleck took advantage of the situation by reshuffling the organization of the various contingents he was bringing together at Corinth in such a way as to make Grant a completely superfluous second-in-command.10 With Grant sidelined, Halleck began a slow and cautious advance toward Corinth. He had brought together Grant’s Army of the Tennessee, Buell’s Army of the Ohio, and John Pope’s Army of the Mississippi, which had formerly been cooperating with the navy in clearing the river for which it was named. Now with a combined army that numbered more than 100,000 men, Halleck was still taking no chances. The army made every advance in line of battle, with swarms of skirmishers in front, and if the skirmishers exchanged a few shots with their Confederate counterparts, Halleck halted his vast host and set the men to digging elaborate entrenchments. His average daily advance was about 1,200 yards. Long before dawn each morning he had his men up and standing in the trenches, waiting for a Confederate dawn attack that never came. Beauregard was in no position to challenge Halleck directly. Despite reinforcements from the west side of the Mississippi, the Confederate army at Corinth was little more than half the size of Halleck’s Union juggernaut. If Halleck had been enterprising, he might have attempted to move quickly enough to trap Beauregard’s army at Corinth. If Beauregard had been enterprising, he might have attempted to threaten Halleck’s supply lines. Neither objective would have been easy, and neither was attempted. When Halleck’s glacial advance brought him to the outskirts of Corinth on May 30, 1862, Beauregard skillfully slipped away with his army, leaving the empty town to Halleck. It was a prize of moderate value. As a rail hub, it controlled

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transportation in southwestern Tennessee and northeastern Mississippi. Yet, within seven days of its fall, Union naval forces, advancing down the Mississippi River, captured Memphis, rendering the Memphis & Charleston Railroad, Corinth’s main east–west artery, much less significant to the Confederacy. Apart from Halleck and Beauregard themselves, neither side was satisfied with the campaign. Confederates felt they had abandoned valuable assets without a fight, while northerners were dismayed that the Rebel army had escaped to fight another day.11 Yet whatever disappointment the North may have felt was tempered by news of other successes. The operations that led to the fall of Memphis included the navy’s dramatic passage of the Confederate batteries at Island Number Ten (so called because it was the tenth island in the Mississippi downstream from the mouth of the Ohio) and the capture of the 7,000-man Confederate garrison at New Madrid—before Halleck transferred Pope’s army to join him for the advance on Corinth. At Memphis itself a flotilla of armed Confederate riverboats made a stand, only to be crushed by the Union gunboat squadron. The Federal gunboats could then range down the river all the way to Vicksburg, Mississippi, where they encountered the incongruous sight of the tall ships of the sea-going U.S. Navy more than 300 miles from salt water. A naval squadron under Flag Officer David G. Farragut had entered the mouth of the Mississippi in April. On the night of May 24, 1862, Farragut, from the deck of his flagship U.S.S. Hartford, boldly led his ships toward two powerful forts that the Confederates hoped would bar the ascent of the river. In a night lit by the flashes of hundreds of heavy guns and the glare of fire rafts that threatened to ignite Farragut’s wooden ships, the fleet came through, battered but intact. The next day it reached New Orleans, and the largest city in the South surrendered without a fight. A small Union army under Benjamin Butler occupied the city while Farragut led his ships up the river to link up with the gunboats coming down. They met at Vicksburg, which alone among Confederate river bastions successfully defied Union naval might. The tall ships soon had to return to more reliably deep water downstream, but the Union remained in control of all but a short segment of the Mississippi. Farther inland, a lull followed the fall of Corinth. Beauregard suffered ill health, which some of his fellow Confederates believed to be stress-induced. In mid-June he temporarily turned over command of the army, which was now at Tupelo, Mississippi, to Braxton Bragg and left for several weeks of health cure at a spa near Mobile, Alabama. When Jefferson Davis learned of this development, he made the arrangement permanent. Army commanders were not entitled to vacation. The summer of 1862 was hot and dry, and scarcity of water became an additional impediment to the movement of armies. They had to stay near large and reliable sources of water, and those were not as abundant as usual in the desiccated countryside. Bragg saw no prospect of a successful attack against the superior Union forces in northern Mississippi, and so for the time being his army remained encamped around Tupelo.12

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Halleck dispersed many of his troops to garrison various posts in northern Mississippi and West Tennessee and dispatched Buell with the rest, about 25,000 men, to move East along the Memphis & Charleston across northern Alabama to take Chattanooga, gateway to both East Tennessee and the interior of Georgia. Lincoln had long wanted to relieve the beleaguered Unionists of East Tennessee, and Halleck knew that such an advance would be the best way to prevent any of his troops from being transferred to Virginia, where George McClellan faced Robert E. Lee on the outskirts of Richmond. About the time Beauregard was heading for his southern Alabama rest cure, Buell’s Army of the Ohio plodded into the northern part of the state. The Memphis & Charleston was a tenuous supply line at best, little suited to support a rapid advance, and Confederate guerrillas further impeded Buell’s progress by burning bridges and otherwise tearing up the railroad whenever they could. The colorless general was in any case the most deliberate of commanders, “the slowest person I have ever had the misfortune to be associated with,” wrote a frustrated subordinate.13 In early July, Halleck transferred to Washington at the behest of officials there who mistakenly believed he had masterminded the western victories and could do the same on a national scale. In his new role as general-in-chief of all the Union armies, however, he quickly became what Lincoln aptly called “a first-rate clerk,” all but irrelevant to Union strategy and operations. Meanwhile, back in the West, Grant found himself in top command in northern Mississippi but unable to undertake offensive operations because Halleck had committed all his available troops to scattered garrisons. Besides, Halleck had severely criticized Grant and nearly removed him from command on each previous occasion when he had advanced and brought on a battle. For now, he would remain passive until he could figure out whether his superiors desired aggressive action or not. And all the while, Buell’s army continued to creep across northern Alabama, bedeviled by Confederate guerrillas.14 Yet, from the perspective of the Confederate general Edmund Kirby Smith, responsible for holding East Tennessee, Buell’s approach seemed inexorable. Simultaneously a smaller Union army under Gen. George Morgan threatened East Tennessee from the north via Cumberland Gap. Almost in despair of defending his department, Smith appealed to Bragg for help. Bragg sent what reinforcements he could spare from Mississippi, but Smith insisted they were not enough. If only Bragg would bring his whole army to defend Chattanooga, Smith pleaded, he would gladly waive departmental boundaries and take orders from Bragg, who in any case outranked him. Bragg contemplated the strategic situation in the West and came up with a plan. He would take most of his army to Chattanooga via roundabout rail connections through Mobile, Alabama—still the quickest way to travel. Then he and Kirby Smith would march northwest into Middle Tennessee, turning Buell and forcing him to battle on Confederate terms. That and their advantage in numbers would give them the victory, and with Buell out of the way they could advance the Confederacy’s

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standards to the Ohio River, regaining all that the South had lost in the debacles of Forts Henry and Donelson.15 Spurring Bragg to undertake such a daring plan were the examples of successful Confederate raids into Tennessee and Kentucky. During the summer of 1862 former Memphis slave trader Nathan Bedford Forrest and Kentucky planter John Hunt Morgan led bands of Rebel cavalry on daring forays that brought consternation to the Union high command and caught the imagination of the South. Forrest, the more ruthless and efficient of the two, raided into Middle Tennessee in July. That same month Morgan swept into Kentucky with a daring and a flair for the dramatic that brought him great personal popularity in the state. The raids did not threaten Union control of the Bluegrass state or most of its neighbor to the South, but they did convince many southerners that Kentuckians were ready to rise en masse and throw the Yankees out as soon as a Confederate army approached to help them. With this in mind, Bragg and Smith agreed to push forward into Kentucky after they had dispensed with Buell in Middle Tennessee. Bragg had to leave some of his force in Mississippi to counter possible Union threats there. He detached about 16,000 men under Maj. Gen. Sterling Price to watch Grant in the northern part of the state and a roughly equal force under Maj. Gen. Earl Van Dorn to guard Vicksburg. Unwisely, he left neither officer in overall command of the state. Van Dorn ranked Price but could give him no orders until their two forces actually combined. Bragg’s instructions to Price were to prevent Grant from detaching reinforcements to Buell and to follow Grant if he should move toward Middle Tennessee. Van Dorn was to operate in a similar manner but only if Vicksburg was secure. Overall, it was a clumsy arrangement that did nothing to provide for the cooperation of the Confederate forces that remained in Mississippi when Bragg moved east. Bragg had no difficulty getting the rest of his troops to Chattanooga ahead of Buell, but there he soon found himself in an awkward command situation remarkably like the one he had unwittingly left behind in Mississippi. On Bragg’s arrival in Chattanooga, he and Smith discussed their plans and renewed their agreement to operate with their combined forces against Buell. While Bragg waited for the last of his troops—slow-moving artillery and wagon trains that were coming by road across north Alabama rather than by rail via Mobile—to arrive in Chattanooga, Smith was to take two of Bragg’s best divisions along with his own command and move North to cover any possible Union advance from Cumberland Gap until the Confederates were ready to begin their combined offensive. No sooner had Smith departed Chattanooga, however, than he began to follow quite a different program. Against Bragg’s protests he took his own reinforced army, including Bragg’s best troops, bypassed the Federals at Cumberland Gap, and moved directly into Kentucky, leaving Bragg to deal with Buell as best he could. Bragg outranked Smith, but as with Van Dorn and Price in Mississippi, Bragg could give Smith orders only when they were together in person.

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This division of leadership was the fault of Jefferson Davis, who had declined to create a unified command structure when Bragg took his army to Smith’s aid.16 Smith’s irresponsibility now forced Bragg’s hand. As soon as the last of Bragg’s forces arrived in Chattanooga, he had to follow Smith on an inside arc, keeping his army between Buell and Smith’s smaller force in Kentucky. If he did not, he ran the risk of allowing Buell to catch and destroy Smith and then turn on Bragg. Bragg did not have the manpower to attack Buell without Smith’s force, including as it did his own best units. He could only hope to parry any northward thrust by Buell and try to persuade Smith to come to his senses and join in the planned combined attack on Buell somewhere in Middle Tennessee. Smith, for his part, sent frequent messages to Bragg urging him to hurry up and deal with Buell. Meanwhile, he kept his own command marching blithely northwest, over the Cumberland Mountains and down into what he called “the long, rolling landscape” of the Bluegrass region of Kentucky.17 Whatever frustrations Bragg may have faced as he led his army across Tennessee in Smith’s wake, the movement was causing great consternation in the North. The late-summer Confederate offensive seemed to be the crowning misery of a frustrating season for the Union’s high command. After the string of dazzling successes in the West from Forts Henry and Donelson through the captures of Nashville, Memphis, and New Orleans, Union forces west of the Appalachians had accomplished no striking military success for the past three months, ever since Halleck’s hollow victory at Corinth. Now stagnation had given way to massive retreat. By early September 1862 Buell had abandoned northern Alabama and was rushing north to cover Nashville, calling loudly for reinforcements from Grant who sent them in large numbers, but this made it even more difficult for him to take the initiative with his remaining scattered forces. In Louisville and Cincinnati public anxiety approached the level of panic, as the governors of Indiana and Ohio mobilized their states’ militia, and citizens of all ages turned out to help dig entrenchments to protect their cities from the approaching Confederate hoards. To add to the dismal overall picture, the summer stalemate in the West had been accompanied by a summer of Union disasters in the East, where Robert E. Lee had taken command of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and defeated such second-rate Union commanders as George McClellan and John Pope, the latter a recent transfer from the West. Now simultaneous with the Confederate advance into Kentucky, though without any collaborative planning, Lee’s army crossed the Potomac into the Union-loyal state of Maryland, spreading further dismay and threatening Harrisburg, Baltimore, and Washington itself. Union hopes of victory, which had flourished in the springtime, now seemed to be withering under the late-summer sun. Even before the great Confederate offensive Lincoln had felt the need to call for 300,000 additional volunteers to help put down the rebellion, and this time Congress added the threat that if recruiting failed to produce the requisite number, conscription would follow.

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All across the North, a final surge of patriotic volunteering filled the ranks of the new regiments. In many cases the new recruits were men in their later twenties or early thirties, fathers with children and heavy responsibilities. Taylor Peirce, of Newton, Iowa, talked the matter over with his wife Katharine, who would be left to tend the farm and their three children if Taylor enlisted. Yet, as he put it, it seemed “the rebellion could not be put down without the government got more help.” Katharine knew other wives were shouldering the same heavy load of responsibility she now faced, and she would not have it said that her selfishness had kept her husband from doing his duty for the country. Peirce enlisted in the 22nd Iowa Regiment. Nearby in Iowa City, Sam Jones weighed the demands of duty. “Up to this time,” he later explained, “I had not thought it necessary that I should go. I had had a feeling that those who were enlisting were doing it because they delighted in the public martial display of the soldier life; but a feeling came over me at this time that I was needed in the defense of my country.” He asked himself if free government could survive and if that meant he would have to fight. The thought that came to him was, “We, the people, are the government.” With that, “I made up my mind to be a soldier and fight for my country.” He too became part of the 22nd.18 The 22nd Iowa, along with other regiments from all over the Midwest, was earmarked to reinforce the armies of Buell and Grant, and some of those regiments began arriving in time to meet the Confederate invasion of Kentucky. It was a force composed almost entirely of these inexperienced new regiments that first attempted to halt Smith’s advance into Kentucky. Smith’s Confederates had no sooner descended from the Cumberland Plateau onto the “long, rolling landscape” of the Bluegrass on August 29, 1862, than their cavalry, scouting ahead of the column, encountered a force of about 6,500 Union troops under the command of Brig. Gen. Mahlon D. Manson, south of the town of Richmond, Kentucky. After a brief skirmish both sides pulled back and camped for the night, Manson’s force in position to defend the town. The next morning Smith advanced with the division of Patrick R. Cleburne, on loan from Bragg, leading the way, and Thomas J. Churchill’s division in close support. Cleburne’s force encountered Manson’s line just outside Richmond. Brisk skirmishing began as Cleburne, already well on his way to becoming the best division commander in the western Confederate armies, carefully probed for a weakness in the Union deployments. After about two hours of low-intensity fighting, he decided to attack the Union right. He was in the act of giving the orders for this assault when a Union bullet struck him in one cheek and exited through the other. Spitting copious amounts of blood and unable to speak well enough to direct his troops, Cleburne had to hand over the command of his division to Brig. Gen. Preston Smith, and the Confederate attack was delayed. Kirby Smith himself arrived on the field and assumed the active direction of the fight, proceeding with Cleburne’s plan to move against the

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Union right. The attack was a smashing success, as the veteran Confederate troops overwhelmed the outnumbered and inexperienced Federals. As the Union troops fell back in disorder toward Richmond, Manson’s superior, Maj. Gen. William “Bull” Nelson arrived on the field. Nelson was a bombastic former naval lieutenant who stood six feet, five inches tall and tipped the scales at more than 300 pounds. He briefly rallied Manson’s fleeing troops on the outskirts of town, hewing vigorously at shirkers with the flat of his sword and shouting to the frightened recruits that if the Rebels could not hit a target his size, they could not hit anything at all. Presently a Rebel did hit him, putting a bullet in his thigh. Though not life-threatening, this wound put the giant Nelson out of the fight. The situation continued to deteriorate until the Union force went entirely to pieces, with every man intent only on saving himself. Few could. Union casualties came to some 1,000 killed or wounded and another 4,300 captured—in all, more than 80 percent of the total Union force engaged. The Confederates lost only 451 out of about 7,000 who got into the fight.19 The victory at Richmond opened the road to Lexington, heart of the Bluegrass, and on September 2, 1862, Smith’s Rebels marched into the town unopposed. The following day they occupied the state capital at Frankfort. These were heady times for the western Confederates. It seemed that at last all that had been lost in the string of defeats after forts Henry and Donelson would now be restored to Confederate control. Bragg, who was still far to the south, toiling northward over the Cumberland Plateau, caught the excitement too. In an order read to his troops while the army was in Sparta, Tennessee, on September 5, he announced, “Alabamians, your State is redeemed. Tennesseeans! Your capital and State are almost restored without firing a gun. You return conquerors. Kentuckians! The first great blow has been struck for your freedom.” The Kentuckians were both the goal and reliance of the bold Rebel advance into the Bluegrass State. In the Confederate version of reality, Kentucky was an oppressed state, ground under the heel of Lincoln’s despotism and awaiting only the appearance of a Confederate army to rise up en masse and throw off the abolitionist yoke. John Hunt Morgan’s popularity had done much to strengthen this impression in southern minds. One major goal of Smith’s advance into Kentucky, and hence of Bragg’s, was to give the Kentuckians the opportunity of enlisting in the Rebel army. The expectation that thousands of them would promptly do so was also the basis of the belief, on the part of Smith and Bragg, that they might be able to fight the Federals successfully in the state. Bragg brought with his army some 15,000 extra rifles, packed in wagons, ready to arm the recruits he expected in droves. Early reports were encouraging. From Lexington, Smith wrote on September 3 that his reception had been good in the Bluegrass and he expected 25,000 Kentuckians would flock to enlist in his army within the next few days.20

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Buell and Bragg moved northward through Tennessee and into Kentucky on more or less parallel tracks. Buell had a head start, having begun his march as soon as Smith’s Confederates broke for Kentucky, but Bragg marched faster and by September 14, as Buell’s troops were marching into Bowling Green, Kentucky, the main body of Bragg’s army was occupying the town of Glasgow, thirty-three miles to the East. Some of the lead Confederate units were another eleven miles farther north at Cave City, which lay squarely on the Louisville Road between Buell and his base of supplies at that Ohio River city. A Confederate brigadier moved another twelve miles up the road and made an unauthorized attack on a small Federal garrison at Munfordville, where the Louisville Road crossed the Green River. He was repulsed, so Bragg took his whole army there and gobbled up the small Union force. At Munfordville, Bragg had attained a position from which he could both cover Kirby Smith at Lexington and also threaten to cut Buell off from Louisville. It was a brilliant almostconclusion to one of the most remarkable long-range turning movements of the war.21 Having been turned and cut off from his base of supplies, Buell might have been expected to take desperate measures, either hurling his troops at Bragg in a frantic and probably doomed head-on assault or trying to slide around the Confederates and thus exposing his army to flank attack. He did neither. For once, Buell’s plodding approach to war actually worked in his favor. His army had a larger stock of supplies at Bowling Green than Bragg’s had at Munfordville. With no pressing need for supplies, Buell did what virtually all observers agreed he did best: nothing. Bragg, on the other hand, was living off the land and therefore could not remain stationary in one area for very long. Although his force was large enough to repulse and slaughter a head-on attack by Buell or to take the Federals in flank and on the march, it was not large enough to take the initiative and make an attack on Buell’s army standing on the defensive at Bowling Green. He might have been able to make such an assault if Smith would have joined him, but as always, that general declined to honor Bragg’s requests even so far as to send him some of the supplies his troops were piling up in the rich Bluegrass region. Instead Smith plied Bragg with more demands for the immediate defeat of Buell. Unable to attack or to remain where he was, Bragg was left with only the bitterly ironic alternative of retreating after having conducted a highly successful campaign. So he decided to fall back toward Smith and the supplies to be found in the Bluegrass region. On September 21, he marched his army from Munfordville to Bardstown, forty-nine miles to the northeast. This opened the way for Buell to reach Louisville, which he did on September 25, reestablishing contact with his base of supplies.22 With that, the Confederates had lost the military advantage that had allowed them to force Buell out of Alabama and shift the scene of action 300 miles north to the heart of Kentucky. Secure in Louisville, Buell was free to rest and refit his army, receive

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reinforcements, and build up supplies until he felt ready to deal with the invaders. The momentum of the campaign was beginning to shift subtly but distinctly against the Confederates as the dominance they had previously enjoyed began to slip away, and there seemed to be little Bragg or Smith could do about it. Rebel hopes faded a bit more with news that Lee’s invasion of Maryland had ended with a marginal defeat at Antietam, after which the Army of Northern Virginia had withdrawn into it namesake state. Most distressing, from Bragg’s and Smith’s point of view, was the fact that Kentuckians were not, after all, enlisting in the Rebel armies in any significant numbers. “The Kentuckians are slow and backward in rallying to our standard,” wrote a disgusted Smith in mid-September 1862, “their hearts are evidently with us, but their blue-grass and fat [cattle] are against us.” His point was that pro-Confederate Kentuckians did not want to expose themselves to possible Federal confiscation of their property by joining the Rebel army, especially if that army should subsequently fall back. Bragg was disgusted too. “Unless a change occurs soon,” he wrote, “we must abandon the garden spot of Kentucky to its cupidity. The love of ease and fear of pecuniary loss are the fruitful sources of evil.” What made this so dire for the Confederates was that once they had lost the leverage they had gained by turning Buell down in Alabama and threatening his supply lines all the way up in Kentucky, their only hope of military success lay in the massive augmentation of their numbers by Kentucky recruits. Now that hope too was growing dimmer each day, as the 15,000 extra rifles Bragg had hauled north remained unused in the army’s wagons.23 Even as the momentum of the campaign began to shift in favor of the Union, Washington’s frustration with Buell reached critical mass. His maddening slowness in crossing Alabama and then his unenterprising retreat all the way to Kentucky without making any effort to halt Bragg’s progress, along with his apparent willingness to allow the Confederate forces to remain in Kentucky indefinitely, was finally too much for the patience of Lincoln, Secretary of War Stanton, and General-in-Chief Halleck. An order went out relieving Buell of command and replacing him with his senior subordinate, George Thomas. The officer carrying the order reached Louisville on the morning of September 29, only hours after one of the most remarkable events in any army’s high command. William Nelson, coarse, brutal, and bullying as always, had quickly recovered from his Richmond wound but not from the humiliation of the defeat. Since some of the new regiments that had fought there were from Indiana, Nelson loudly denounced all Hoosiers as cowards and white trash. He insulted an Indiana general with the improbable name of Jefferson C. Davis. Davis had not been at Richmond, but insulting him was in keeping with Nelson’s new campaign of contempt for Hoosiers. When on the morning of September 29, Davis, accompanied by Indiana governor Oliver P. Morton, sought an apology from him in the lobby of the Galt House Hotel in Louisville, the hulking Nelson slapped Davis’s face, knocking him down, and then

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spoke menacingly to Morton before turning on his heel and stalking away. Davis borrowed a revolver from a friend and called after Nelson. Nelson turned and started toward the diminutive Davis. “Not another step, sir,” warned Davis, and then, with Nelson only three feet away, he shot him. The giant of a general was dead within the hour. In the confused situation—with an enemy army in Kentucky—no one had time for a court martial. Davis was never brought to trial and was soon commanding a division. Indeed, his action was generally approved among the rank and file of the army, especially the Hoosiers. Nelson’s body was hardly cold when the order arrived for Thomas to supercede Buell, but Thomas, apparently unwilling to untangle the mess that Buell had gotten into, refused the position. After an exchange of telegraph messages, Halleck withdrew the order, and Buell remained in command of the Army of the Ohio, much to the dismay of nearly all its personnel save for a small clique of Kentucky officers. More days passed while Buell reorganized his army and prepared it for battle. For the time, the momentum of the campaign remained balanced at dead center.24 Meanwhile, in Mississippi the forces Bragg had left behind were in the midst of an operation of their own, a belated third prong of the Confederacy’s grand late-summer counteroffensive. With the threat to Vicksburg temporarily lifted by withdrawal of the Union forces that had been threatening it, Van Dorn was free for operations elsewhere. Instead of turning immediately north, however, he dispatched former U.S. vice president John C. Breckinridge’s Confederate Kentucky brigade, supported by the ironclad gunboat C.S.S. Arkansas, to try to retake Baton Rouge. The Arkansas was a ramshackle affair cobbled together in a Mississippi cornfield, but she had given a good account of herself in action with Farragut’s warships and the river gunboats during the brief siege of Vicksburg earlier in the summer. Now, however, as she approached Baton Rouge her rickety engines failed in the presence of powerful U.S. Navy vessels. Her skipper had no choice but to scuttle the Confederacy’s chief naval asset on the Mississippi. Breckinridge found that his troops could not take Baton Rouge against combined Union naval and land opposition and had to give up the operation. The errand to Louisiana had not only cost the Confederacy a valuable warship but had also detained Breckinridge in the region until it was too late for him to join Bragg in Kentucky, where both he and his brigade might have been very useful in winning hearts and minds. Van Dorn at last turned his attention to northern Mississippi, where Price was already maneuvering toward Grant’s positions. At this point, however, the divided Confederate command arrangements in Mississippi began to produce their natural results. Van Dorn wanted to advance against Union posts in West Tennessee. Price felt Bragg’s orders required him to drive toward Middle Tennessee. Neither would yield to the other’s judgment, and because of the fractured command system, neither had to. So, for a time both maneuvered separately along their chosen lines of operation with great risk and little chance of gain.

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Price, under Bragg’s goading to prevent Grant from aiding Buell, advanced toward the Tennessee River at the extreme northeastern corner of Mississippi and threatened Iuka, the easternmost Union outpost in the state. The Federal commander, a befuddled colonel of volunteers, beat a hasty retreat, leaving a windfall of supplies for Price, who occupied the town on September 14, 1862. Grant was disgusted with the colonel’s failure but saw the new development as an opportunity to attack Price. Grant had been on the defensive lately, partly because Halleck had left his forces widely scattered and partly because his superiors, chiefly Halleck, seemed displeased with aggressive action. Now, however, Halleck, who was in a state of intense anxiety about affairs in Kentucky, was sending Grant messages urging him to attack any Confederate force that appeared likely to reinforce Bragg. Grant knew that Van Dorn was four days’ march from Iuka, so he made plans to deal with Price before Van Dorn could come up and join him.25 Assembling a maneuver force of some 17,000 men, Grant moved to attack Price. His subordinate, William S. Rosecrans, urged him to adopt a two-pronged attack plan, with Rosecrans leading a column of 9,000 to strike Iuka from the rear and trap Price while Grant, accompanying the other column under Edward O.C. Ord, attacked from the front. Since Rosecrans had been operating in the area for some weeks and was supposed to know the country well, Grant agreed. As the two columns approached Iuka, however, Rosecrans’s force took wrong turns, bogged down in the mud, and ran far behind schedule. Grant directed Ord to wait until he heard Rosecrans’s guns before attacking, lest Ord’s troops be slaughtered in an unsupported frontal attack.26 Instead as Rosecrans approached Iuka late on September 19, Price turned on him with a detachment of his force. In an hour and a half of intense fighting the Confederates stopped Rosecrans’s column and drove it back several hundred yards. Casualties were heavy in both armies. Yet, only a few miles away, on the other side of Iuka, the men of Ord’s column heard nothing, thanks to an atmospheric phenomenon sometimes called an acoustic shadow. This had allowed Price to fight Rosecrans’s column alone. That night, however, Price learned of the presence of Ord’s men and finally realized that he was in a potential trap. He would have been trapped indeed, save that Rosecrans had taken the wrong road and left an escape route open. During the night Price’s army used it, and in the morning Grant found Iuka abandoned and his trap empty.27 The clash at Iuka left Grant chagrined and Price chastened. The Confederate was now more willing to cooperate with Van Dorn, who in turn had been sobered by the realization that Grant had a significant maneuver force. Van Dorn too was therefore in a more cooperative mood. The two Confederate columns finally linked up southwest of Corinth, Mississippi, on September 28. With their forces thus combined Van Dorn was now formally in command and decided to attack the powerful Union garrison at Corinth as a prelude to a campaign into West Tennessee.28

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Hoping to confuse the Federals about his intended target, Van Dorn marched his army northward into Tennessee west of Corinth. Then he turned sharply to the southeast so as to approach the town from the rear. Grant was prepared, however, and had 18,000 men concentrated at Corinth under Rosecrans. When, at the last moment, Van Dorn’s target became clear, Grant started another 1,500 men on their way from Jackson and 5,400 from Bolivar, the latter advancing southward along the west bank of the Hatchie River and threatening to cut off Van Dorn’s retreat.29 Rosecrans was not as quick as Grant to discern the Rebels’ purpose, and he kept the forces around Corinth spread out until Van Dorn was quite close. Only when Van Dorn’s column plowed into his outpost line did Rosecrans realize that the Confederates were bound for Corinth, his headquarters. Hastily summoning his outlying forces, Rosecrans had to use most of the troops he had on hand to fight a delaying action throughout the day on October 3, 1862, while the remainder of his command hurried to join him. For that reason he deployed his available forces not in the prepared defenses of Corinth but rather several miles in advance, spread out too thin on ground they had no chance of holding. Even when his additional troops did arrive, Rosecrans got scarcely more than half his total force into the fight that day. Not until mid-afternoon was he sure that Van Dorn was not going to veer off at the last second to strike some target other than Corinth. His orders to the troops were confused and unrealistic. His men fought tenaciously, but Van Dorn’s Confederates, with a heavy advantage in numbers, handled them roughly and drove them back into the Corinth entrenchments. Casualties were fairly severe, including several experienced brigade commanders shot, as well as a number of soldiers who were laid low by heat exhaustion.30 Encouraged by his success on October 3, Van Dorn was eager to press the assault the following day. In an early morning artillery barrage, the Union guns held the advantage and pounded the Confederate batteries into silence. Then Van Dorn’s infantry renewed its attacks. On the right-center of the Union line the Confederates broke through and charged into the streets of Corinth itself. The Federals who had been driven back continued to fight for the town, street by street, while Rosecrans, in stark contrast to Grant’s performance at Shiloh, panicked, riding among his troops cursing them as cowards and shrilly declaring that the battle was lost. He ordered some of the army’s supply wagons burned, but the chaplain who had been placed in charge of that particular group of wagons, not recognizing Rosecrans, declared gamely, “We are not whipped, sir!” and began organizing his teamsters and convalescent soldiers for a desperate defense. That proved to be unnecessary. The Rebel attackers were exhausted and depleted. The Federals rallied, and by about 1:00 p.m. the line was restored.31 Undeterred, Van Dorn hurled more of his troops forward, this time aimed at the left-center of the Union line. Furious fighting raged around a Federal strong-point known as Battery Robinett. The Confederates briefly overran the earthwork before

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a Union counterattack drove them back out of it. Both sides fought with desperate stubbornness, and casualties were heavy, but in the end it was the bluecoats who held their ground, and the gray and butternut who streamed back in retreat. Van Dorn at last realized that he was defeated and gave orders for his army to withdraw, ending the Battle of Corinth. Losses amounted to about 4,838 Confederates and 2,520 Federals.32 Grant had hopes of trapping and destroying Van Dorn’s army after Corinth just as he had hoped to snare Price at Iuka. The opportunity lay in catching Van Dorn before he could get back across the Hatchie River. Corinth lay east of the river. Van Dorn’s road south lay to the west of it, and Grant’s column of 5,400 men, commanded by Gen. Stephen Hurlbut, was in position to block his crossing. Grant had given Rosecrans repeated orders to pursue the enemy aggressively, and hoped to crush Van Dorn between the two—Van Dorn advancing from the east and Hurlbut holding the river crossing to the west.33 Once again, however, as at Iuka, bringing the two arms of a pincers together on a battlefield proved to be impossible, at least when one arm was commanded by Rosecrans. Despite the arrival of reinforcements from Grant before the shooting ended, Rosecrans made no attempt at pursuit on the afternoon on which the battle ended. While Van Dorn’s battered army desperately marched toward safety, and Hurlbut’s division pressed equally hard to reach a blocking position on the Hatchie at Davis’s Bridge, Rosecrans was content to rest his troops. The next morning Hurlbut clashed with a brigade that Van Dorn sent ahead to try to hold the crossing and hurled it unceremoniously back across the river. Unfortunately for the Federals, Gen. E.O.C. Ord arrived on the scene at this point and superseded Hurlbut in command. Grant maintained an unshakeable confidence in Ord’s capacity that never quite seemed to be born out by any performance of Ord’s on the field of battle. On this occasion Ord tried to force a crossing of the Hatchie in the face of Van Dorn’s desperate army, brought Hurlbut’s troops into disarray, and got a number of them shot. Shortly, however, a Confederate bullet mercifully felled Ord—wounded—and command reverted to Hurlbut, who sorted out the mess. Ord’s blundering had unnecessarily lengthened the Union casualty list, but Hurlbut’s division remained solidly in control of Davis’s Bridge, the Hatchie River crossing that Van Dorn needed.34 Throughout the march to the Hatchie and the fight at the bridge, Hurlbut’s men had listened, when they could, for the sound of Rosecrans’s guns in Van Dorn’s rear, but they heard nothing from that direction because Rosecrans was not there. He had begun his pursuit that morning, but it was a leisurely affair that had some of his soldiers chafing with impatience. Despite renewed urgings from Grant in a dispatch received that day, Rosecrans made a plodding march and halted some thirteen miles short of the Hatchie. Without any significant pressure from the East, Van Dorn was able to turn and make his way southward along the east bank of the Hatchie until

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he found another crossing six miles from Davis’s Bridge, and thus his army escaped the destruction Grant had planned for it. Some of Grant’s subordinates thought their commander never afterward forgave Rosecrans for disobeying orders and letting Van Dorn get away. Be that as it may, by October 7, 1862, it was clear that nothing more could be accomplished by further pursuit—at least not without launching a major campaign into the interior of Mississippi—and since he knew his army was not prepared for such a campaign, Grant ordered the pursuit abandoned.35 The very next day, events in Kentucky finally came to a head. A week earlier, on October 1, Buell had marched his army out of Louisville, headed for the Bluegrass and a possible clash with Bragg. The Washington authorities thought it was high time. That same first day of October, Bragg and Smith had conferred with Richard C. Hawes, Confederate pretender to the governorship of Kentucky, and decided to march on Frankfort with most of Smith’s 28,000 men and there formally install Hawes in the office he coveted. By this means they hoped to make a further appeal for Kentuckians to rally and, failing that, to facilitate the enforcement of the Confederacy’s conscription law in the state. They would get the reluctant Kentuckians into their ranks by one means or another. The ceremony took place in the hall of the Kentucky house of representatives on October 4, 1862, but formal Confederate government of the Bluegrass state—or at least its capital city—lasted little more than four hours, as Bragg and the Confederates found it necessary to withdraw from Frankfort that same afternoon in the face of Buell’s steady advance.36 Over the next several days the opposing armies approached each other warily, like wrestlers, each of whom sought to grapple the other and take him to the mat. Both armies were spread over wide fronts. Bragg had Kirby Smith’s force north of the Kentucky River and his own original command, now temporarily under Leonidas Polk, south of it. Meanwhile Buell advanced his army in four separate columns on four different roads. Each general suffered a degree of uncertainty as to the whereabouts of his enemy’s main concentration, though because Buell had the initiative, Bragg had the harder task and struggled more to decipher the conflicting reports he received from his subordinates. Bragg was hard put to discern which of Buell’s thrusts was the main one and promised to have the greatest weight of numbers behind it. Thinking he had at last identified that column, Bragg prepared to strike it in front with Smith’s force while Polk descended on its flank. In fact, the column Bragg had in his crosshairs was not Buell’s main force at all, but the Confederates might still have done Buell serious damage by combining to destroy the exposed force.37 It was not to be. One of the more striking features of Leonidas Polk’s personality was that he did not like to be told what to do and often refused to do it. For a soldier it was an unfortunate trait, and this was neither the first nor the last occasion on which it was to be the Army of Tennessee’s undoing. Polk refused to obey Bragg’s

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order to advance, and Bragg had to call off the operation, fortunately in time to avoid an unsupported frontal assault by Smith’s command.38 Major elements of the contending armies finally collided, almost literally, near Perryville, Kentucky, on October 7, the day Grant called off the pursuit in Mississippi. A brief skirmish took place that evening near the Kentucky town. The next day, though neither Bragg nor Buell quite understood what was happening, their armies fought the climactic battle for Kentucky. Bragg believed that only a small fraction of the Union army was present at Perryville and ordered Polk, whose wing of his own forces immediately confronted the Federals at Perryville, to attack and disperse that Union contingent in preparation for a general concentration of all Confederate forces in Kentucky against what was in fact (though unbeknownst to Bragg) a smaller Union column advancing on Kirby Smith. Polk stubbornly refused to do so until Bragg arrived on the battlefield in person and gave the necessary orders himself. When the attack finally went in, it struck a division of relatively green Union troops and drove it back in fierce fighting. Half a mile or so beyond the original Union line the attackers ran into a brigade of more experienced Federals waiting in reserve, and the advance could go no farther. The attack had been fairly successful, and had come close to starting the unraveling of the whole Union army. That Bragg’s smaller force—about 20,000 men on the field of battle—could enjoy such a degree of success against Buell’s 54,000-man Union army was mostly due to the fact that Buell had no idea a battle was in progress. He had injured his leg in a fall from his horse the preceding day and his mobility was limited to wheeled conveyances. Yet, on the afternoon of the battle he saw no need to use even that means of transport. Instead, he had remained at his headquarters, making plans for an attack he intended to launch the following day. Another acoustic shadow, like the one that had kept the sounds of Rosecrans’s fight at Iuka from reaching the ears of Grant and Ord, apparently prevented Buell from hearing the sounds of the battle only a short distance away, and it is an indication of the command culture of Buell’s army that no one thought to send him word, nor did neighboring corps commanders act on their own initiative to support each other. As a consequence, much of Buell’s army never got into the fight, and Bragg won a limited local success.39 Yet, the Confederate success remained limited. Thanks to the hard fighting of some of Buell’s troops, particularly a brigade of Wisconsin and Illinois troops under the command of Milwaukee lawyer-turned-brigadier general John C. Starkweather, the Rebel onslaught failed to trigger the sort of chain-reaction disaster that might have caused Buell’s entire front to crumble. Instead, the fighting brought Bragg the information he had been lacking regarding the whereabouts of Buell’s main force, and this led the Confederate commander to realize that his position at Perryville was impossible. He retreated, hoping to unite the force under his immediate command with that of Kirby Smith, moving down from the

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Bluegrass region, but a few days were sufficient to show that the prospects for success were scant. Ultimately, the fall 1862 Confederate campaign into Kentucky, forced on Bragg by the irresponsibility of Kirby Smith, was always based on the assumption that Kentuckians would rise en masse in support of the Confederates. Absent that phenomenon, only an unusual sequence of events, a virtual fluke occurrence, would have allowed the Rebels to triumph and retain control of the state. Buell’s lackluster performance had provided several opportunities for at least the chance of such a victory, but various factors, including noncooperation from his own generals, had preventing Bragg from seizing any of those opportunities. After Perryville, Bragg led his army back to Tennessee. In the words of an Alabama soldier who made the march, the Rebels were “bare footed, dirty, filthy, and lousy.”40 Buell followed very slowly at first, then broke off the pursuit and took his army to Nashville. Spring, summer, and fall of 1862 had seen two major Confederate efforts to reverse the tide in the western theater. The first had been Albert Sidney Johnston’s counteroffensive at Shiloh. The second, Bragg’s and Kirby Smith’s disjointed advance all the way to the Blue Grass. Both had come surprisingly close to success, but both had ultimately failed. From the Confederate perspective, several reasons accounted for those failures. Shiloh had simply been too great a challenge. The men were still learning to soldier, and their officers, learning to lead and to plan. Johnston was still learning what he could and could not ask of a green volunteer army, and in that he was not much different from other generals at this stage of the war. In retrospect, he should have started his march to Pittsburg Landing a day or two earlier and should not have delegated so much authority to Beauregard. Beauregard should not have arranged the Confederate corps in tandem, one behind the other, and, although success was a long shot, he should not have cancelled the final attack on the evening of the first day of the battle. Yet, all of these mistakes—as well as the others made by junior officers and private soldiers—are fairly understandable within the context of the army’s experience by that time. Grant’s army had simply been too tough a proposition for Johnston’s cobbled together army of inexperienced soldiers. The failure of the Kentucky campaign, from a Confederate point of view, was due to a succession of far less excusable mistakes. Before Bragg ever left Mississippi, Jefferson Davis had refused him permission to cull the ranks of his general officers of subpar specimens like Polk and forced him to work with a group of incompetents and malcontents. Then Davis neglected to place Kirby Smith under Bragg’s orders and create a much-needed unified command for the operation, an omission Bragg had then repeated by leaving Price and Van Dorn to squabble with each other in Mississippi. Kirby Smith had compounded the trouble by behaving in an irresponsible manner, refusing to cooperate with Bragg and insisting that Bragg do the campaign’s heavy lifting in terms of combat. Polk too had played at least a bit part in the Confederacy’s grim Kentucky comedy of errors. The main factor, however, had been that the

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overwhelming majority of Kentuckians were not willing to fight for the Confederacy, and thus the campaign’s whole starting premise was fatally flawed. On the Union side, the two campaigns displayed the inadequacy of Buell, whom Lincoln would shortly send packing. He was woefully slow and unaggressive. A close analysis of the operations in the West that summer would have found Rosecrans and Halleck wanting as well, but those lessons escaped Lincoln for the time being. Rosecrans was intelligent, but he was also querulous and bordered on insubordinate. Worse, he lacked the emotional stability necessary in a general and had panicked badly at Corinth. His failure to close off Price’s retreat after Iuka or to pursue Van Dorn after Corinth also displayed serious shortcomings as a general. Halleck was also smart but temperamentally unsuited for high command. His vivid awareness of all that could go wrong made him overcautious, and his chief activity before being transferred east had been to interfere with Grant. Grant had done tolerably well during the season’s campaigning. Caught by surprise at Shiloh—though that was partially Halleck’s doing—Grant had fought tenaciously and refused to accept defeat when most other generals would have. His determination paid off in a victory the next day and also in building the Army of the Tennessee into a supremely confident and aggressive fighting force. Though he had failed to trap either Price or Van Dorn, his efforts showed exactly the kind of intelligent aggressiveness Lincoln was vainly seeking in his other generals. For the time being, however, Lincoln still did not recognize Grant’s ability and would continue to seek others to lead the western Union armies to victory. Overall, the seven months of fighting in the West from April to October 1862 had produced little tangible result. Such inconclusive operations would be typical of the eastern theater but were an exception in the West. In this case, October 1862 saw the Union forces controlling slightly less territory than they had during the spring. The Confederates had established fortresses at Vicksburg, Mississippi, and Port Hudson, Louisiana, giving them control of the intervening stretch of the Mississippi River. They had also temporarily expelled the Federals from northern Alabama and, by the time the forces had completed their withdrawal from Kentucky, established a Confederate presence, in the form of Bragg’s Army of Tennessee, in Middle Tennessee, in a position to threaten Nashville. Yet, they had not succeeded in reversing the results of Henry and Donelson. The Federals still controlled the major rivers, along with half of Tennessee and the northern tier of counties in Mississippi. Yet, even in its indecisive phase, the western theater was clearly the chief place in which truly decisive action could be expected, sooner or later. The movements of the armies during this phase had been broad and sweeping, with deep penetrations, sudden changes of momentum, and long retreats. Here in the West was the combination of broad, readily accessible geography, high-value targets, and aggressive generals that made for volatile operations and the potential for results that would shape the outcome of the war.

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One comparison illustrates the difference between the eastern and western theaters. During the summer and early fall of 1862, Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia had conducted some of its most dramatic operations and experienced its true high tide. It had marched almost 300 miles and shifted the scene of conflict, by October 1862, from the outskirts of Richmond to the northern Virginia piedmont, more than 100 miles to the northwest. Yet, during the same period Bragg’s Army of Tennessee had marched or ridden the rails a total of more than 1,300 miles and moved its base of operations some 200 miles from Tupelo, Mississippi, to Murfreesboro, Tennessee. It was the western theater that offered the opportunities for war-winning victories and defeats.

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ij THE PRESIDENTS TAKE A HAND

By late October 1862 it was clear that the Confederate offensives in the West—as in the East a few weeks before—had failed, and the Rebel tide was receding all across the continent. Van Dorn’s army had fallen back into northern Mississippi to lick its Corinth wounds, and Bragg’s and Kirby Smith’s forces were withdrawing from Kentucky the way they had come in, toiling over the difficult mountain roads, this time in the autumn rains. Yet, Lincoln was profoundly dissatisfied with the overall progress of the war. In Virginia, McClellan had allowed Lee to escape after the battle of Antietam, and once again the wily Confederate and his doughty army stood athwart the path to Richmond. In Kentucky, Buell had showed an equal lack of eagerness to come to grips with his retreating opponent. After a brief and half-hearted pursuit of Bragg, Buell had pulled his army back and set out for Nashville, methodical as ever. Lincoln was disgusted with both McClellan and Buell. Out in Mississippi, the situation seemed a bit better—but only a bit. Grant had showed his aggressiveness at Donelson and Shiloh and in his recent attempts to catch Price and Van Dorn. Yet, he seemed to be merely reacting to Confederate initiatives now, and the scene of conflict in the Mississippi Valley was exactly where it had been five months before. Lincoln may not have known and might not have cared that the reason for Grant’s recent passiveness had been the situation Halleck had left him. As far as the Union commander-in-chief was concerned, the key fact was that his armies were not advancing and the war appeared on the verge of stalemate.

41

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So it was that in the fall of 1862 Lincoln decided to infuse new, aggressive leadership into all three of the Union’s major armies. He replaced McClellan with Ambrose Burnside as commander of the Army of the Potomac. West of the Appalachians he sent Buell packing and in his stead chose not Thomas, who had turned down the command a few weeks before, but instead William S. Rosecrans, the victor of Corinth. Lincoln would not sack Grant, a general whom he admired as a fighter, but he would give his sanction to a bizarre arrangement in which another, presumably more hard-driving general—erstwhile Illinois Democratic politician John A. McClernand—would take over field command within Grant’s department and lead an expedition that would, Lincoln hoped, finally take Vicksburg. Lincoln had reason to feel some frustration at the overall lack of progress in the war. Since the heady days of spring when it appeared the Confederacy could not last out the summer, Union arms had made no further significant progress, and victory seemed further away than ever. Yet, all three of Lincoln’s choices to lead the nation’s armies were deeply flawed. Burnside was a loyal, good-hearted man whose actions as a general always somehow belied his actually quite considerable intelligence. As commander of the Army of the Potomac, he was a disaster that culminated in the pointless slaughter at Fredericksburg. Rosecrans was a brilliant man who performed admirably as a general as long as the enemy allowed him plenty of time and did nothing unexpected. McClernand was better than the average political general, another of the products of the Army of the Tennessee, which seemed to make solid fighting generals out of more amateurs than all the other Union armies combined. Yet, McClernand’s flaw was an overweening political ambition that knew no rest by night or day, in peace or war—that, along with the fact that he would soon be functioning at least one level of command above the limit of his competence. Lincoln was not the only commander-in-chief who was dissatisfied with the progress of his nation’s arms in recent months. Jefferson Davis might well have congratulated himself on his government’s survival during the past half year and taken pleasure in the fact that it was stronger now than it had been the preceding spring. Yet, Davis was almost as dismayed as Lincoln that the war seemed so far from a conclusion, and he was equally ready to revise his command arrangements. In Virginia, of course, no change was needed. Robert E. Lee, ably seconded by Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, had demonstrated himself to be one of the great commanders in the history of warfare and had over the course of the preceding six months almost single-handedly reversed the tide of the war and restored flagging Confederate morale.1 West of the Appalachians, however, the picture Davis saw was not nearly so pleasing. Bragg’s army had hardly regained Tennessee before a chorus of croakers took up the refrain that the commander of the Confederacy’s second largest army was incompetent, vacillating, and unfit to command a corporal’s guard. Part of this was Bragg’s own doing. When at the outset of the Kentucky campaign Davis had declined

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to allow him to clean house in his high command by ridding it of substandard generals, Bragg had spoken out publicly and bitterly against those officers he deemed unfit. He was as accurate in his assessments of the generals’ abilities as he was politically obtuse in thus openly alienating them and their sometimes extensive coteries of personal friends, all of whom now became Bragg’s inveterate enemies.2 Chief among the incompetents was Leonidas Polk. It was probably to shield Polk that Davis had refused Bragg permission to rid his army’s general officer ranks of “dead wood” before the march into Kentucky. Polk’s incapacity and self-willed disobedience of orders had hamstrung Bragg during the campaign, and Polk would never forgive him for it. The erstwhile bishop may have been of little account as a general, but he was a formidable influencer of people, and he now put his powers to work to stir up the Army of Tennessee’s generals against Bragg. His most significant convert was his fellow corps commander William J. Hardee. Unlike Polk, Hardee had a formidable reputation in the prewar U.S. army, both as a one-time West Point commandant of cadets and as author of the army’s updated 1855 infantry drill manual. He held regular classes of instruction for the generals in his corps, some of whom became quite adept, but along with his tactical lessons Hardee began to mix a large portion of ridicule of his commanding general, whose every action seemed to figure in Hardee’s lectures as a prime example of what a general ought not to do. In turning the officers of the Army of Tennessee against Bragg, Hardee had far more influence than Polk could ever have had.3 To make matters worse, the campaign that had just closed served to make Bragg the target of the rage of his army’s abnormally large contingent of Kentucky officers. Wooing Kentuckians was a burden that both sides had to bear. Ultimately, a large majority of white, male Kentuckians made use of their state’s border location as an opportunity to sit out the war entirely and soldier for neither side, but both the Union and the Confederacy were eager to attract as much support as they could in the divided Bluegrass State. Both Lincoln and Davis had therefore selected a disproportionately large number of Kentuckians as general officers, in hopes of attracting the allegiance of more citizens in that state. On the Union side it was the Kentucky clique that had provided most of the political support for keeping the ineffective Buell in command of the Army of the Ohio, while Kentuckian and Buell stalwart “Bull” Nelson had alienated soldiers from north of the Ohio until he had finally exhausted the patience of one particular Hoosier general—with spectacular result. The coterie of Kentucky officers within Bragg’s Army of Tennessee was deeply chagrined by the outcome of the campaign that had recently taken the army into their home state and back out again. Ultimately, the rationale for the campaign had been the Confederate assumption—which all of the Confederate Kentuckians had vigorously promoted—that the state would rise en masse in support of a Rebel invasion. In fact, the number of recruits the Confederate army had acquired during the recent foray had not even come close to replacing Confederate casualties in the

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campaign. Bitterly disappointed and humiliated by their state’s choice, Confederate Kentuckians desperately looked for a scapegoat, and Bragg was the ideal choice. As top-ranking Confederate officer in the operation, he was a natural target, but what made the Kentucky officers truly hate him was the fact that he stated openly—as usual with more candor than tact—that the reason for the campaign’s failure was the nonenlistment of Kentuckians. Of course, Bragg was not looking to take any undue blame for the recent failure either, and that was no doubt part of his reason for such plain statements. In any case, the facts of the matter were that the men of Kentucky had failed to rally to Bragg’s banner, and the Kentucky officers in his army never forgave him for it. With Bragg the target of vociferous criticism from noisy minorities both inside and outside the army, Jefferson Davis summoned the beleaguered commander of the Army of Tennessee to Richmond for consultation. In addition, Kirby Smith sought and received permission to visit the capital to tell his side of the story—and to announce to his commander-in-chief that he would henceforth refuse to serve under Bragg’s command. After separate conferences with the two generals, Davis seemed satisfied with them both. Bragg he sent back to Tennessee to resume command of his army, now encamped near Murfreesboro, threatening Union-held Nashville, and Kirby Smith he eventually transferred to the trans-Mississippi. Yet, Davis had more in mind than merely maintaining the command status quo west of the Appalachians. He had already begun to institute reforms aimed at correcting the problems revealed by the late summer and autumn campaigns, and he had more in mind. Even before confirming Bragg in command of the Army of Tennessee, Davis had removed the state of Mississippi from Bragg’s command responsibility and placed it under a general whom he transferred from South Carolina for the purpose and promoted to the rank of lieutenant general. John C. Pemberton was a Pennsylvanian by birth who chose to side with the Confederacy at the behest of his Virginia wife. Though a West-Point-trained professional officer, Pemberton had difficulty inspiring either his troops or the civilians he had to work with, and he had been decidedly unpopular in South Carolina. Davis had great admiration for a man of principle, and though historians might wonder if Pemberton was as much principled as he was henpecked, Davis saw the allegiance of a northern man like Pemberton as a clear demonstration of the abstract rightness of the Confederate cause. He had confidence enough in the Pennsylvanian to charge him with the defense of his own home state of Mississippi. No more would Price and Van Dorn dither about what course to take while their lack of cooperation courted disaster. They would now both serve under Pemberton, though Price would soon transfer west of the Mississippi. Nor would Van Dorn have a free hand to perpetrate another debacle like the battle of Corinth. Pemberton should see to that. The rearrangement in Mississippi by no means completed Davis’s plans for new modeling the high command in the West. He had a far more ambitious adjustment

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in mind. Just as Pemberton was to provide unity of command for Confederate forces in Mississippi, so Davis wanted to insure cooperation for all Confederate armies operating between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River. He had found in the fall campaigns that he simply could not enforce such concert of action from Richmond. He could not get the information he needed to make decisions, and by the time the information did reach him, and his decision found its way back to the western fighting fronts, the rapidly changing military situation would have made both information and decision woefully out of date. Instead, he hoped to achieve his purpose through the appointment of a top-ranking general to command the entire theater—Bragg’s army and Pemberton’s, and whatever other Confederate forces might operate in East Tennessee, at Mobile, or elsewhere in the vast region. This general could make his headquarters wherever he saw fit, visit his subordinate commanders frequently, or even take command of one of the armies for a crucial battle. The concept had much to recommend it, but Davis’s choice of a general proved unfortunate. Joseph E. Johnston was a curious selection for several reasons. Obsessed with rank in the old prewar U.S. army, Johnston had pulled political strings to have himself made quartermaster general—with the rank of brigadier general—shortly before the war, thus finally edging ahead of his distant cousin and West Point classmate Robert E. Lee. When in 1861 the Confederate congress passed a law guaranteeing that officers leaving the U.S. army and joining the Confederate would have the same relative rank as they had held in the previous service, Johnston was delighted, believing he would therefore be the highest ranking general in the new republic. He overlooked, however, the law’s stipulation that staff rank—such as Johnston’s quartermaster general appointment—would count only for staff appointments in the Confederate service. Since Johnston wanted a field appointment in the new army, his rank was to be based on his previous highest field rank, and that put him fourth on the list of the Confederacy’s five full generals, right behind Lee. When in September 1861 Johnston heard of the order in which Davis had ranked the Confederacy’s generals, he was furious and fired off an abusive fifteen-page letter to his commander-in-chief, denouncing Davis in sarcastic terms and stating that as far as he, Johnston, was concerned, he still outranked everybody else in a gray uniform. Davis let it pass with a short rebuke, leaving Johnston in his then current position as commander of the Confederacy’s army in Virginia. Johnston’s remaining tenure in that position was not pleasant in terms of civil– military relations or, indeed, in practically any other terms that one might conceive. Johnston stubbornly kept Davis in ignorance of his situation and plans, and on more than one occasion withdrew abruptly from positions Davis believed were still defensible, abandoning to the enemy not only territory but also irreplaceable equipment and supplies as well as the Gosport Navy Yard and the Confederacy’s most powerful warship, C.S.S. Virginia. Without fighting a major battle he retreated to the very outskirts of Richmond, and so poorly did he keep his superior informed of his actions,

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that the president, riding out to visit him, would have ridden unwittingly into Union lines had Confederate soldiers not called out to warn him that the army had made yet another surprise retreat during the preceding night. Goaded at last by Davis into taking the offensive, Johnston fought the Battle of Seven Pines (or Fair Oaks, as the Yankees called it) on May 31, 1862. It was a dismally mismanaged affair, and about the only thing that can be said in defense of Johnston’s conduct of it is that most of the blundering was the work of a subordinate to whom Johnston had entrusted far too much authority. Late in the day, frustrated with the lack of progress in his battle plans, and embarrassed by the arrival at his headquarters of both Davis and the president’s top military advisor, Lee, Johnston rode out to see the fighting for himself and promptly received a severe wound. That injury kept Johnston out of service for more than five months, during which time Davis assigned Lee to take over the Confederate army in Virginia and that general won a series of victories that saved Richmond, astonished the world, and boosted Confederate morale that had been sagging because of Union victories in the West. By the late autumn of 1862 when Johnston felt himself more or less ready to return to duty, the position he most coveted was solidly Lee’s and appeared likely to continue so. Under the circumstances, Davis might well have given Johnston several more months to regain his strength. Indeed, for the best interests of the Confederacy he probably ought to have given Johnston several years of undisturbed rest. That he did not was a factor of one of the most impressive strengths Davis had brought with him to the Confederate presidency. As a West Point graduate and former army officer and secretary of war, Davis knew the attainments and reputations of the officers in the prewar U.S. army. Johnston had a very strong reputation before the war, and Davis seemed unable to forget it or to revise his estimate of this obviously obnoxious general’s command abilities. So as soon as Johnston was marginally able to take the field again, Davis placed him in command of the entire western theater, from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River. Johnston immediately balked. He wanted to command a field army, not a theater. The area was too big. Communication was too slow. No one could exercise such a command. Besides, the concept was all wrong. Pemberton’s army should be paired not with Bragg’s but rather with that of Theophilus Holmes, on the west bank of the Mississippi. Johnston had a good point with this last objection, or at least part of a point. Actually Davis should have avoided dividing two separate commands along the line of the Mississippi because the river was an obvious avenue of Union advance that could best be resisted by a unified effort on both banks. The correct arrangement would therefore have been to add the trans-Mississippi to Johnston’s responsibility, thus placing all the trans-Appalachian forces under a single commander. That, however, was not what Johnston wanted and not what Davis had ordered.

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No sooner had Johnston received his orders than he began complaining to anyone who would listen and to some who would not—notably Jefferson Davis—that the assignment was all wrong and that he did not want it. Privately he claimed that Davis, who had ranked him below Lee and then had given his army to Lee, had assigned him the western command merely in order to ruin him. It was not an auspicious beginning for Davis’s new unified western command. Johnston had scarcely settled into his new command when Lincoln’s fall shake-up of the Union high command began to produce results—of a sort. John McClernand had politicked long and hard to wangle the command of the Mississippi River expedition. He had traveled to Washington under false pretenses and engaged the support of powerful war governors, especially Richard Yates of his own Illinois. He had plied Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton with promises not only of capable leadership along the Mississippi but also of practical miracles in boosting recruitment in the Midwest, something both Union leaders were much concerned about at the time. Indeed, in the midst of a season when Democrats were scoring gains in Congress with their persistent antiwar carping, any prominent Democrat who claimed to be in favor of the vigorous prosecution of the war—and to be able to rally his fellow Democrats for that cause—would be sure of having Lincoln’s ear. In the end, it got McClernand the orders he wanted from Lincoln, directions to aid the recruiting of new troops in the Midwest and then to lead the expedition that was to take Vicksburg and open the Mississippi. Having done so much good old-fashioned political work to get the job, McClernand seemed to feel he was entitled to a vacation before starting on it. Returning to Illinois, he helped a bit with the organizing of some of the new regiments though not at all with recruiting. Instead of focusing on the preparations, McClernand, who was a widower, married and made plans to take the new Mrs. McClernand with him on what promised to be a combination honeymoon trip and victorious campaign. He was in for a surprise. Beyond writing McClernand a letter authorizing him to head the new expedition, Lincoln had left the drafting of the formal military orders to his General-in-Chief, Henry Halleck. Halleck had not been much of a success as general-in-chief, and Lincoln had quipped that he amounted to little more than “a first-rate clerk.” Now, however, Halleck got a chance to show just how first-rate he could be at such bureaucratic maneuverings. He had not been a fan of Grant’s the previous spring, but Grant looked like a paragon of professionalism compared to the upstart McClernand. So the order that Halleck drew up had a few subtle points that should have been of interest to a lawyer like McClernand. It stipulated that the commander of the department within which McClernand was to operate—Grant—would still have overall command and could make his headquarters anywhere he wanted—for example, with McClernand’s expedition. It went on to state that McClernand’s expedition was to consist of whatever troops Grant did not need for other operations within his department. In short, the way Halleck wrote the

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orders, McClernand had secured only the right to serve as a general within Grant’s army—and he had that much before he started his lobbying campaign. Grant had learned of McClernand’s scheme gradually, in bits and pieces, and he had only a vague sense of what it was that Halleck was doing on his behalf and the country’s. Halleck was not about to spell it out on paper, and Grant had to pump him with queries, which received highly circumspect replies. By the time Grant figured it out, regiments of new troops from the Midwest were arriving in Memphis with orders to report to Gen. McClernand. Grant realized that the official orders from Halleck left him, Grant, firmly in control, but he was also politically astute enough to recognize that Lincoln was eager—even determined—to see an aggressive movement down the river against Vicksburg. Grant would therefore see to it that the president would get his wish, but it would be with commanders who had gotten their rank the hard way—by earning it on the field of battle. At this time it was early December 1862, and Grant had already begun a campaign into the interior of Mississippi, advancing rapidly down the Mississippi Central Railroad some sixty-three miles into the state, across the Tallahatchie River and into the north Mississippi town of Abbeville. Pemberton’s Confederate army had retreated in front of him without accepting battle. Grant decided that to forestall McClernand and gratify Lincoln he would have to modify his plan. He decided to detach Sherman with one division to march back to Memphis, pick up such new levies as might be on hand there waiting for McClernand’s expedition, and then proceed down the river in steamboats on an expedition of his own. Grant would continue to advance slowly down the middle of the state, keeping Pemberton’s attention, and if all went well, Sherman would reach and seize a sparsely defended Vicksburg.4 While Grant and Sherman were preparing for the new two-pronged campaign against Vicksburg, McClernand was fretting back in Illinois. He had somehow conceived the idea that he could not proceed with his expedition until he received specific orders from the war department directing him to do so. He therefore bombarded Stanton and Lincoln with plaintive requests for such orders. Stanton replied that McClernand was free to begin any time he felt ready, and the newly wed politician– general finally headed down the river, though not without suspicions that someone was trying to do him out of his cherished independent command. His worst fears were confirmed when he reached Memphis and found no army awaiting him there. Sherman had taken them all down the river some days before. Saddened to think that at a time when the republic was fighting for its survival, some men would resort of political maneuvering in order to get command of an expedition, McClernand set out in pursuit. Meanwhile, Jefferson Davis was becoming increasingly concerned about developments in the West. He believed Vicksburg was severely threatened by the dual approach of Grant, and he wanted Johnston to do something about it. Davis’s own

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plantation was located on the banks of the Mississippi, a few miles below Vicksburg, but more than parochial concern weighed on the Confederate president. He recognized the strategic importance of the Mississippi River, even if he had not arranged the western departments in the best way for its defense. He wanted energetic action from Johnston to see that the river—and more specifically Vicksburg—remained in Confederate hands. The president was therefore increasingly disturbed when, in the face of the Union threat to Vicksburg, Johnston took no action at all. That general asserted, with Bragg’s agreement, that cavalry raids recently dispatched to disrupt Grant’s supply lines would be sufficient to turn back the Union offensive in Mississippi. Bragg had recently launched a body of horsemen under the command of the redoubtable raider Nathan Bedford Forrest on a foray into West Tennessee, deep in Grant’s rear, and Pemberton had lately sent his own cavalry under the command of Earl Van Dorn to strike at Grant’s supply line in northern Mississippi. Davis was unsatisfied with such steps, believing they would never succeed in thwarting Grant, and he wanted Johnston to transfer a significant portion of Bragg’s infantry to Mississippi for the showdown battle he thought was in the offing there. Bragg warned that with a reduced force he would not be able to hold back the Union army of William S. Rosecrans, now ensconced in Nashville, and Johnston backed him up. Still anxious to augment Pemberton’s combat strength, Davis appealed to transMississippi commander Theophilus Holmes for troops, but Holmes declined, offering a litany of inconsequential excuses. Davis did not press the point, partially because Holmes was an old crony, and partially because a recent spat between Davis and Secretary of War George W. Randolph had made it a matter of pride for the president not to order troops across the Mississippi. In response to Holmes’s stubborn refusal to help, Davis turned his attention back to Bragg’s army as the only possible source of reinforcements. Johnston was not functioning in the way Davis had hoped, and the president became convinced that the only way he could intervene in the situation would be to travel to the western theater in person. Accordingly, he departed Richmond in early December 1862 and traveled first to his home state of Mississippi—his first visit to the state since leaving to assume the Confederate presidency a year and ten months before. The people received him warmly, and he made a rousing speech in the statehouse at Jackson urging determination and self-reliance in waging the war. He proceeded to visit Vicksburg and confer with Pemberton, and he left Mississippi more convinced than ever that it needed more troops. His next destination was in Tennessee to visit Bragg’s headquarters at Murfreesboro and confer with him and Johnston. He was impressed with the state of drill and discipline in Bragg’s Army of Tennessee, made more speeches, and also enjoyed some lighter moments, celebrating Christmas and attending the wedding of renowned cavalry raider John Hunt Morgan to Kentucky belle Matty Reedy.

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Most significantly, however, Davis gave orders for the transfer of 10,000 infantry— about one-fourth of Bragg’s total infantry strength—to depart at once for Mississippi. To Bragg’s warning that he could not hold his ground at Murfreesboro with such a weakened force, Davis replied that he should fight, if he had to, and then if necessary fall back beyond the Tennessee River. That river crossed Bragg’s line of supply and communications at Chattanooga, just a handful of miles from the Georgia line, so falling back beyond the river would entail abandoning the entire state of Tennessee. Davis believed, probably correctly, that it was more important to hold Mississippi. Both Bragg and Johnston had grave misgivings, but Bragg was prompt as always in obedience to orders. The troops were on their way within a matter of days. By this time, indeed, by the time Davis had given the order, the threat in Mississippi was already all but over. Contrary to Davis’s expectation, the cavalry raids had in fact accomplished their purpose. Forrest had created havoc in West Tennessee, tearing up railroad tracks, cutting telegraph lines, and spreading general pandemonium. On December 21, 1862, Van Dorn struck an even harder blow, attacking Grant’s supply depot at Holly Springs, Mississippi. Thanks in large part to an incompetent and badly frightened Union officer in command of the post, Van Dorn succeeded in taking and destroying it. With that, he had cut Grant’s supply line and destroyed his stockpiles. Grant’s troops had been living partially off the land during this campaign, but he could not hope to face Pemberton’s army without a far more reliable source of supplies. Frustrated but stymied, Grant had no choice but to turn back and march his army northward. Sherman received sketchy and unconfirmed reports of the Holly Springs’ debacle just as his expedition was departing Memphis, but he was unaware that Grant had been forced to retreat. He proceeded to Vicksburg and set about to attack it in the most direct way possible, via an advance along the east bank of the river from the north. His effort served to demonstrate why Vicksburg was such a naturally strong position. The interior of Mississippi was a plateau about 100–200 feet above the river. Vicksburg was the northernmost point at which the river’s waters washed the base of the plateau. North of Vicksburg the edge of the plateau slanted to the northeast, away from the river, and the land along the river and for scores of miles inland was low, flat, swampy, and laced with the meandering channels and backwaters of seemingly innumerable bayous. Sherman launched his attack on December 29, 1862, in what came to be known as the Battle of Chickasaw Bayou. The terrain funneled his advancing troops into a few predictable and easily defensible pathways, and the Confederates entrenched atop the bluffs had no difficulty in handing the Federals a lopsided defeat that cost 1,776 casualties against a mere handful of Rebel losses. “That was a terrible slaughter,” recalled one of the Federals who made the charge, “too gruesome to be described, much less understood.” Another Union soldier summed up the final result of the

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battle with the laconic observation, “We had bitten off a bigger chunk than we could chaw.”5 With the dramatic natural advantages afforded by the terrain of the Chickasaw bottoms and the Walnut Hills that loomed over them, Pemberton could probably have held Vicksburg even without the additional troops, by then arriving by the trainload every few hours, who had been released by Grant’s retreat from the center of the state. Pemberton certainly did not need any of the 10,000 troops that were still on the way to him from Bragg. As it turned out, Bragg did. Operational secrecy was almost unknown during the Civil War, and this lack was never more apparent than when the Chattanooga Daily Rebel printed news of the transfer of troops from Bragg to Pemberton while it was still in progress. Few of the Daily Rebel’s readers perused the columns of that issue with more interest than did William Rosecrans when a copy of the newspaper found its way into Union lines at Nashville only a couple of days later. Like Burnside in Virginia and the odd duo of Grant and McClernand in Mississippi, Rosecrans could not help but be very clear about what Lincoln wanted from him that season, and it most emphatically did not include resting quietly in winter quarters. The president wanted aggressive advances, and the dramatic weakening of Bragg’s army gave Rosecrans the opportunity to give Lincoln exactly what he wanted. Within days after receiving the news, Rosecrans had his Army of the Cumberland on the march for Murfreesboro. Bragg received ample warning of his enemy’s approach, as Confederate cavalry not only reported the movement but also slowed and harassed Rosecrans’ columns. The Confederate general drew up his army to cover the town of Murfreesboro against advance along the turnpike or railroad approaching from the north-northwest, the direction of Nashville. This necessitated straddling Stone’s River, but it was a shallow stream, normally easily fordable in any number of places. Besides, Bragg did not intend to await Rosecrans’s attack but rather to cover his own weakness by seizing the initiative and attacking the Army of the Cumberland first. Rosecrans arrived and took position north of Murfreesboro on December 30, 1862. That evening one of the war’s strange episodes of cross-the-lines camaraderie occurred when bands on both sides took turns serenading the troops, and then all, joined by thousands of singing soldiers, concluded with a massed rendition of “Home, Sweet Home.” The next morning each commanding general planned to mass forces on his right and attack the other’s left flank, but Bragg struck first, collapsing the right half of Rosecrans’s line. Many of the Federals, especially in the division of Maj. Gen. Phillip H. Sheridan, put up stiff fights, but they were outflanked and outnumbered at the point of attack. By late afternoon Bragg had folded the Army of the Cumberland back on itself like a half-shut jackknife, and it seemed that one more push might snap the knife shut completely, tearing loose Rosecrans’s grip on the turnpike and railroad,

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his lines of communication and retreat. The problem for Bragg was that by this time he could not give that final push. A blunder that morning by Confederate division commander John P. McCown (one of the “dead-wood” officers Bragg had tried to get rid of before the Kentucky campaign) had necessitated the commitment of Bragg’s reserve division early on, and now he had nothing left to throw at Rosecrans. Nothing, that is, with the possible exception of the division of John C. Breckinridge. Breckinridge was a political general, former vice president of the United States, and a Kentuckian. As political generals went, he was not the worst of the lot, but he tended to be inconsistent. Bragg had left Breckinridge’s division to hold the east bank of Stone’s River while the rest of the army fought on the west side. Now he sent to the former vice president to know if he could spare some or all of his force for the final push that might bring victory west of the river. Breckinridge, who was not having one of his better days, replied equivocally, then waffled and complained he was about to be attacked himself. This was nonsense, but by the time Breckinridge figured out that there were no Union troops on his side of the river, it had grown very late. With darkness coming on, Bragg had no time to move Breckinridge’s reinforcements all the way to the far end of the Confederate line and inside launched them at the angle in the Union line—the hinge of the jackknife. To make matters worse, Breckinridge released his brigades one by one. Bragg, who did not know that any further reinforcements would be following each brigade but did know that daylight was waning, launched them into battle as soon as they arrived west of the river. The result was that they hit one of the strongest parts of the Union line—a sector known as the Round Forest—and did so in piecemeal fashion. The fighting was furious, but Rosecrans’s men beat back the final Confederate attacks. For Rosecrans it had been a glorious but harrowing day. Caught by surprise, his army almost routed, the Union commander had reacted better than he had at Corinth, repeatedly riding his lines and encouraging his men to keep up the fight. In many ways it was his finest hour of the war. At the height of the fighting a shell decapitated Rosecrans’s chief-of-staff only a few yards from him, spattering him with gore. After the guns fell mostly silent that evening, Rosecrans and his corps commanders held a late-night council of war and decided to maintain their position the following day. New Year’s Day 1863, the day the permanent Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, was a day of eerie quite on the battlefield that the Federals would soon be calling Stone’s River and the Confederates Murfreesboro. Though both armies remained on the field, neither commander felt strong enough to attack the other, and only minor skirmishing took place. January 2 brought an anticlimactic finale to the battle. The Federals occupied a key hill on the east side of the river. Bragg directed Breckinridge to drive them off it. Breckinridge protested that it could not be done. Bragg insisted that it must. In manifest bad humor the Kentuckian led the attack, which overran the hill but then overpursued and was hit hard by massed Union artillery firing across the river. A Union counterattack then reclaimed the hill,

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driving Breckinridge back to his starting point. The Federals might have prevailed anyway, but the episode further alienated Bragg and Breckinridge and the poison of discontent continued to spread within the Army of Tennessee’s officer corps. That night several of Bragg’s officers sent him a note urging that the army should retreat. Awakened from sleep to receive this unwelcome missive, Bragg refused out of hand. Several hours later, however, after insistent pressure from more of his officers, including corps commanders Polk and Hardee, Bragg reluctantly gave the orders to retreat. He did not, as Davis had earlier suggested, fall back behind the Tennessee River but rather only as far as the Duck River and the towns of Shelbyville and Tullahoma, where he made his new headquarters. His forward outposts were north of the Duck, along a chain of hills known as the Highland Rim, about thirty miles from Murfreesboro.6 Back at Murfreesboro, Rosecrans’s army licked its wounds and congratulated itself as best it could on a costly victory, the final margin of which had been that they remained on the field of battle after their foes left. The Battle of Stone’s River, or Murfreesboro as the Rebels would call it, had the dubious distinction among Civil War battles of having the highest percentage of its participants become casualties. Back in Washington, Lincoln breathed a sigh of relief on learning that Rosecrans had won a victory, however marginal it might have been. After Burnside’s debacle at Fredericksburg on December 13, Grant’s retreat from central Mississippi, and Sherman’s small-scale repetition of the Fredericksburg fiasco at Chickasaw Bayou on the twenty-ninth, Union morale was sagging. The year-end disasters capped six months of disappointment and compounded recent dissatisfaction with the Lincoln administration over everything from the Emancipation Proclamation to the conduct of the war. Lincoln could hardly have failed to feel the added personal sting of knowing that the recent campaigns had been launched at his urging and led by commanders whom he had chosen as replacements for their too slow and too cautious predecessors. If Lincoln had cause for dissatisfaction with the results of his own efforts to exercise a more direct influence on the war, so too did Jefferson Davis. The unified command he had established in the western theater had failed to function in its first major test. Johnston was obviously dissatisfied with the job and was not exercising it in the way Davis had envisioned. Indeed, whether as a result of Johnston’s continuing bitterness about rank or simply because of differences in mental processes, the two had such different outlooks on the strategic situation that they could not work together for the benefit of the Confederacy. Davis’s worst blunder in the episode was in appointing Johnston in the first place; his worst blunder after it was in not responding to the December 1862 campaigns in the West by shelving the recalcitrant general permanently. The transfer of troops from Bragg to Pemberton had not worked out well. Bragg had been correct that the cavalry could do the job, thanks in large part to the natural impregnability of Vicksburg. The key to the campaign was the vulnerability of the long

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railroad supply line Federals would need for any approach to Vicksburg via northern Mississippi, and without some such way of getting onto the plateau behind Vicksburg they could never take the town. The approach to the bluffs via the Chickasaw Bayou bottoms was completely impossible, as Sherman had demonstrated. And while Pemberton had not needed the additional troops, Bragg certainly had. His aggressiveness and good planning, combined with Rosecrans’s slowness in launching his own attack, had nearly secured a Confederate victory against long numerical odds. It is hard to imagine that Bragg would not have triumphed if he had had one third again as many infantry as he did. Davis, of course, did not have the advantage of hindsight in making his decision to reinforce Pemberton. Johnston was already proving a poor choice to coordinate the western theater, and when Davis had tried to direct operations over the shoulder of his reluctant general, it is not surprising that he had had to act without a thorough knowledge of the strategic situation or that the results had been unsatisfactory. Both presidents had acted out of frustration in late 1862, hoping to improve the performance of their forces in the West. Both had good reason to look with even greater frustration on the results of their handiwork after the turn of the year. Yet, for Lincoln, there was a ray of light, if he could perceive it, in midst of the gloom of the disappointing reports from the western front, even beyond the scant comfort he could take in the victory-by-default that was Stone’s River. Whatever else he had done, and whether it had been by his own choice or Halleck’s cunning, he had, after all, left Ulysses Grant in what was about to become the most important departmental command in the war, a place where exceptional talent and resolution could pay off for the country with decisive victory. Lincoln probably did not realize yet, just how fortunate he was in this. For Davis the opposite was true. His great combined western department was under the command of a general who disapproved of it and did not wish to use it in the way Davis meant it to be used. Clearly that general had been a bad choice for the assignment and should not have been left in command of it once his unsuitability had been exposed. Yet, Davis continued to consider him one of the Confederacy’s most capable commanders. Personnel decisions always seemed to be Davis’s weakest suit, and, in the end, they probably mattered the most.

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ij FROM DEADLOCK TO DECISION

It was a few days after the setback at Chickasaw Bayou that McClernand caught up with what he had thought was supposed to be his expedition. To his dismay, Sherman had just implemented the very plan McClernand had been advocating all along, and the result had been a bloody failure. At a loss as to what to do next, McClernand was very receptive when Sherman—now in a subordinate role—together with commander of the Mississippi naval squadron Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter, suggested that their combined force should proceed about 150 miles up the Mississippi and then a short distance up the Arkansas River to attack Confederate Fort Hindman at a location traditionally known as Arkansas Post. With overwhelming land and naval force, the movement was a quick success, capturing Fort Hindman and its small garrison on January 11, 1863. McClernand was ebullient, rhapsodizing, “My star is ever in the ascendant.” Grant was not so sure. Arriving back in Memphis after the retreat up the Mississippi Central, he learned of the Arkansas Post operation and considered it an ill-conceived diversion from the real goal of capturing Vicksburg. When Grant joined the river expedition in person a few days later, Sherman explained that the Arkansas Post excursion had been his idea and Porter’s and that Fort Hindman had indeed posed a threat to the Union supply line down the Mississippi. Grant was mollified, but he nevertheless took the expedition back down the river to Milliken’s Bend, a few miles above Vicksburg and there encamped with the determination to stay until Vicksburg was his. McClernand was furious at finding his scheme for an independent command

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thus thwarted by Grant’s presence and plied Lincoln with letters filled with angry complaints, to no effect. This time Lincoln was going to let the professional—at least a proven fighting professional like Grant—get on with his business as he saw fit.1 Over the weeks that followed, Grant gradually brought most of the rest of his force down from Memphis to join the growing chain of Union encampments along the Louisiana shore above Vicksburg. The Thirteenth Corps, as McClernand’s command was now styled, remained at Milliken’s Bend. Sherman’s own Fifteenth Corps encamped a few miles closer to Vicksburg at Young’s Point, and the Seventeenth Corps, commanded by the bright, young James B. McPherson, encamped some distance upstream at Lake Providence, Louisiana. The weeks they spent in the camps along the Mississippi above Vicksburg were some of the most difficult in the war for Grant’s soldiers. Rain fell often. “It rained nearly every day for weeks,” recalled an Ohioan. Temperatures were surprisingly cold for the latitude. Memphis, only 200 miles or so north of the camps, experienced several heavy snowfalls that year. Another Ohio soldier, this one in Sherman’s corps, the closest to Vicksburg, noted in his diary on January 26, 1863, “The mud froze hard, Ice 3/4 of an inch thick.” The ground where the soldiers were encamped was low and poorly drained. A supply wagon could mire to its wheel hubs with only a single barrel of hardtack on board. The men lived in mud and often had to wade through waist-deep icy water for hundreds of yards when they went to fetch firewood or rations. “The driest place I could find to sleep last night was mud four inches deep,” wrote an Iowa soldier. The drinking water soon became contaminated, and thousands grew sick. Many died. One soldier recalled, “There was hardly an hour of the day but what we could hear the drums beating the dead march as some pour comrade was carried to his last resting place.”2 Yet, even worse for the soldiers’ morale was the discouraging news they heard from the outside world. Nowhere, it seemed, had Union armies been successful in recent times, and many northerners were beginning to declare that the war was hopeless and could end only in a negotiated peace—and that meant defeat for the Union. “Our cause never looked darker than at the present time,” wrote an Indiana soldier. “Completely whipped everywhere, outgeneraled and outwitted in the east and in the west we are all completely disgusted and despair of ultimate success.” In January an Iowan confided his feelings in his diary: “The times look gloomy and the darkness that surrounds the Republic can almost be felt. Shall I ever forget how dark and intensely hopeless every feature of our struggle looks now. The eastern army is totally routed and the enemy is strong and defiant everywhere.” He hoped that perhaps this might be the dark hour before the dawn. “I know it cannot get much darker.”3 A few men deserted, but the overwhelming majority of Grant’s troops soldiered on. Gradually, as spring approached, their confidence in Grant and the Union cause returned. For Grant the tactical problem during these winter months was to find a way to get at Vicksburg from a position on the plateau behind it. The Yazoo River flowed for

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miles along the base of the plateau northeast of Vicksburg. Proceeding directly up the Yazoo was forbidden by the Rebel batteries that frowned down on its lower reaches from the bluff tops adjacent to Vicksburg, but if Grant could get the naval squadron and his own army-leased transports into the Yazoo well above Vicksburg, his men could gain the bluff tops where they were not defended. So detachments of Grant’s men and Porter’s fresh-water sailors tried two different schemes for getting into the Yazoo farther upstream. Both involved taking ironclad gunboats of several hundred tons displacement, as well as full-sized riverboats, through narrow, winding channels in the swamps. Sailors steered the vessels by pushing poles against trees and the banks while others stood by with brooms and swept overboard the snakes, possums, and other fauna the tumbled to the decks as the smoke stacks crashed through the canopy of heavy tree limbs overhead. In each case, relatively inconsiderable Rebel resistance succeeded in turning back the expeditions, caught as they were in a swampy netherworld between land and water where neither Porter’s warships nor Grant’s foot soldiers could make their weight felt. Alternatively, if Grant could contrive to get the warships and transports into the stretch of the Mississippi below Vicksburg he could cross his army from Louisiana to Mississippi and reach the top of the plateau there. Once again, the direct route seemed to be ruled out, as the Confederates had laid out the main batteries of Vicksburg, with dozens of heavy guns, with the express purpose of sinking any vessel that tried to make its way through the hairpin turn the river made at the foot of Vicksburg’s bluff. Here too ingenuity came into play. Grant had his men renew efforts to dig a canal across the point of land opposite Vicksburg, a project briefly begun and then abandoned by a brigade of Union troops that the summer before had reached this point from New Orleans. If all went as planned, the Mississippi would change its course from the roundabout loop that took it to the foot of the Vicksburg bluffs and in preference choose the shorter course offered by Grant’s shovel-wielding soldiers—a course less susceptible to Vicksburg’s guns. Lincoln was excited by reports he read of the canal’s progress, but experienced river men who were on the scene held out little hope of success, and they turned out to be right. Grant kept his details digging anyway. It kept Lincoln happy and the soldiers occupied. Another chance of getting the fleets past Vicksburg seemed for a time to beckon from Lake Providence, where McPherson, a highly skilled engineer, was encamped with his Seventeenth Corps. The lake, fifty miles above Vicksburg, was an old channel of the river, long ago cut off by sediment. Theoretically, a cut in the levee would deepen the lake enough to allow boats passage from it into a series of interconnecting bayous leading eventually into the Red River and thence into the Mississippi below Vicksburg. That, in turn, would enable Grant to put his army across the river and on top of the plateau south of Vicksburg, in position to move on the Confederate stronghold from the rear. McPherson had his men make the cut, and for a time

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prospects seemed promising. Yet, though the rising river water inundated scores of square miles of Louisiana, its level did not reach a depth sufficient to make the proposed waterway navigable. By late March Grant had decided that only one course remained open to him if he was to take Vicksburg. The only way to get his army onto the heights back of the town was to get the gunboats and transports into the stretch of river below Vicksburg, and the only way to accomplish that would be to have them run directly past the batteries. Grant asked Porter, and the admiral said he thought his ships could do it but that Grant had better be certain of what he was undertaking. Running the fleet downstream past the batteries, with the Mississippi’s current adding to the vessels’ speed, would be one thing, but running them back up the river under the guns would be another thing entirely. Breasting the river’s current on an upstream run would keep them in the sights of the Rebel cannon too long and probably lead to their destruction. In short, once the fleet was below Vicksburg, it was going to stay there and would be unavailable to help Grant in any future scheme, should this one fail to work out. Undeterred, Grant told Porter to go ahead.4 So on the night of April 16, 1863, Porter took the fleet past Vicksburg. Despite his efforts at stealth, the Rebels detected the movement early on and set fire to barrels of tar and even abandoned houses in order to illuminate the river. Big guns roared all along the Vicksburg waterfront as the unwieldy gunboats struggled through the eddies of the current in front of the town. The naval gunners fired back as rapidly as they could, hoping to force the Confederates at the batteries to take cover and slacken their fire, and the tactic worked to a considerable degree. The shore batteries destroyed one unarmored transport that had accompanied the fleet, but the rest of the vessels—six gunboats, another transport, and an unarmored fast ram—all made it through and within a matter of hours had made contact below Vicksburg with advance elements of Grant’s army that had already been working their way through the swamps and bayous and along the natural levees on the west side of the river.5 Six nights later Grant sent six of his transports past the batteries. The transports were civilian vessels leased by the army, and their civilian crews, though tough river men, drew the line at undertaking anything as suicidal as what Grant now demanded. So Grant sought volunteers from within a single division, John A. Logan’s, and soon had enough men to crew the transports several times over. In some regiments the men actually drew straws to see which lucky ones would get to make the run. The winners got the ride of a lifetime. The Confederates were even better prepared than they had been six nights before. So bright was the illumination as the vessels passed Vicksburg that a member of Grant’s staff, who was accompanying the operation, noted that a man could have read a newspaper on the open upper deck of the lead vessel. The unarmed transports could not defend themselves, and the Confederate cannon pounded them mercilessly. Each of the six vessels took dozens of hits, but only one sank. The others, all more or less battered and some drifting helplessly with the

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current, somehow made it past Vicksburg and also joined up with Grant’s growing vanguard on the Louisiana shore some miles below the town. Within a week or so, Union engineers had the transports patched up and ready for service again, just in time for the next stage of Grant’s operation.6 Grant hoped to land his army on the eastern shore of the river at the village of Grand Gulf, Mississippi, and on April 29 Porter’s gunboats went to work to suppress the Confederate batteries there. After several hours of fighting, however, the gunboats proved unable to do so, and Grant had to revise his plans and shift his army still farther down the river. The next day Grant’s troops began landing at Bruinsburg, Mississippi, and by nightfall they were pressing inland, up the bluffs and onto the plateau. Around midnight the head of Grant’s column made contact with elements of Pemberton’s forces near Port Gibson, Mississippi. These Confederates belonged to the command of Maj. Gen. John Bowen and were guarding the Confederate left flank below Grand Gulf. With the coming of daylight, on May 1, Grant’s troops drove forward against the Confederate defenders. The resulting battle of Port Gibson lasted most of the day, and the chief reason was the difficult terrain. Here, near the western edge of Mississippi’s interior plateau, the loess soil was deeply cut by seemingly innumerable steep-sided ravines, rendering the landscape one of sinuous, relatively narrow, flat-topped ridges—all on a level with each other and generally cultivated— separated by equally sinuous and narrow declivities, choked with vines, briars, and cane. Attacking solely along the narrow ridge that carried the road would have been offering the outnumbered Confederates a perfect Thermopylae of a defensive position, but moving organized bodies of troops across the maze of ravines on either side would have taken most of the day even had no Rebels been present to contest their progress. By evening, however, the Union commanders had succeeded in bringing their superior numbers to bear, driving the Confederates from the field, and taking possession of Port Gibson. The Rebel garrison at Grand Gulf pulled out at the same time, giving Grant and Porter the river port they needed to support further operations in the interior of Mississippi. Grant quickly decided that those operations would not include a move south to join Nathaniel Banks’s army, then preparing to move from its base in the Union-held enclave around New Orleans (a prize the navy had taken a year before) against the subsidiary Confederate stronghold at Port Hudson, Louisiana, Banks was ill -prepared for cooperation with Grant, and since he outranked Grant, while being incompetent to command a corporal’s guard, joining forces with him would have been the surest way to stymie the Union’s efforts in the Mississippi Valley. But while his army would not be marching south to join Banks, neither would it march directly north on the shortest route to attack Vicksburg. To do so would have been to move through more of the same kind of terrain the army had struggled with

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on May 1, with abundant opportunity for Pemberton to defeat his approach or delay it almost indefinitely. Instead, Grant planned to advance northeastward, keeping the Big Black River on his left, between his army and Pemberton’s, until he reached a position east or east-southeast of Vicksburg. Then he would turn and move on the fortress city directly from the rear. Watching Grant’s movements—through the medium of scouts’ reports—was Confederate brigadier general John Gregg. Gregg’s brigade constituted the garrison of Jackson, Mississippi, and as such was sitting on the sidelines of the campaign that was now progressing in the countryside between the Magnolia State’s capital and its chief Mississippi River port, some forty-five miles to the west. Gregg’s orders from Pemberton were to look for an opportunity to strike at Grant’s flanks, and he believed he perceived such a chance when scouts reported a column of Union troops, apparently marching separately from Grant’s main body, approaching the town of Raymond, Mississippi, about fifteen miles southwest of Jackson. Gregg’s attack struck the head of McPherson’s column while it was nooning along the banks of shallow Fourteen Mile Creek about three miles southwest of Raymond. Gregg’s single large brigade was outnumbered by McPherson’s three-division army corps, but the Confederates did not know it yet. Nor did it matter at first, as the fight initially pitted Gregg’s men against the single, smaller brigade at the head of McPherson’s column. The second brigade in the Union column had difficulty deploying in the dense thickets southeast of the road, and the rest of the corps was strung out for some distance behind, since they had been maintaining long march intervals on this day of intense heat and humidity made worse by the choking dust clouds kicked up by the marching column. This fact, coupled with the element of surprise, gave Gregg’s Confederates an initial advantage. The fight raged fiercely for some time. Near its center, the 20th Ohio, holding the bed of Fourteen Mile Creek, slugged it out toe-to-toe with the equally determined 7th Texas. Neither side was willing to give an inch, and the fighting was sometimes so close that it became hand-to-hand. Eventually the arrival of ever increasing numbers of Union troops tipped the balance, and Gregg’s defeated Confederates had no choice but retreat.7 With the Battle of Raymond, Grant had won his second victory of the campaign. Once again his troops had been more numerous on the battlefield despite the fact that the Confederates had more men in Mississippi than he did. The battle made him think, however, about the significance of Jackson. It represented a potential source of danger that would be in his rear once he turned against Vicksburg, and Jackson could serve as a base for Confederate reinforcements arriving from the east. So Grant decided to neutralize the Mississippi capital, along with its Confederate garrison, and gave orders for Sherman and McPherson to turn their corps toward the city while McClernand kept an eye on Pemberton’s forces to the west.8

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Meanwhile, Jefferson Davis was becoming increasingly concerned about the deteriorating situation in his home state. Since Johnston was once again doing nothing about the growing crisis in his area of command, Davis sent him a direct order to go to Mississippi and exercise personal command there. Johnston arrived on the evening of May 13, 1863, and immediately telegraphed Davis, “I am too late.”9 The immediate impetus for Johnston’s gloomy dispatch was the fact that by that time Grant’s army was squarely between him, in Jackson, and Pemberton, near Vicksburg. Dire as the situation was for the Confederates, it was far from hopeless, nor did Johnston behave as if nothing remained to be done. He merely wanted to register in Richmond the claim that the situation was hopeless and therefore whatever might go wrong in this campaign, none of it was to be laid to his account. That done, he dispatched a courier with orders for Pemberton to march east and attack Grant from the rear while Johnston faced him in front at Jackson. Receiving the message, Pemberton began to comply, albeit somewhat hesitantly.10 The Confederates were not to be allowed to implement their plans or to seize the initiative (not that Pemberton or Johnston seemed especially inclined to seize anything). Grant’s army appeared on the outskirts of Jackson on the morning of May 14 in a pouring rainstorm. Badly outnumbered, Johnston decided to retreat and ordered his forces to fight a rearguard action while their supply wagons made off to the north. After a short, sharp fight, Grant’s triumphant Federals marched into the capital of the Magnolia State. With that, Grant had won his third victory—and easiest so far—since crossing the Mississippi River.11 Grant assigned Sherman’s corps to spend the next two days neutralizing Jackson. They tore up railroads, burned depots, factories that made war materials, an arsenal, an iron foundry, and one hotel whose hapless owner had previously insulted Union prisoners of war, only to find them—since then exchanged and returned to service—now back in town and with weapons in their hands. Private houses remained untouched, and even the statehouse escaped the flames, though some of Sherman’s off-duty soldiers did enter the chambers of the Mississippi legislature, constitute themselves as that body, and proceed to transact various farcical business.12 While Sherman’s men were getting down to the hard work of destroying Jackson’s military and industrial capacity, Johnston continued to make at least some efforts toward bringing about coordinated action by his own and Pemberton’s forces. He wrote a dispatch to Pemberton ordering him to attack Grant at Clinton, just west of Jackson, the next day, promising to join him there in time for the battle. To make sure the message got through, Johnston sent three copies one with each of three different couriers. Unfortunately for the Confederates, one of those couriers was a Union spy who took the message straight to Grant. Thus forewarned, Grant determined to move rapidly west from Jackson so as to strike Pemberton before Johnston had time to join him. McPherson would march toward Vicksburg the next morning, May 16, and

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join McClernand in going for Pemberton, while Sherman finished his business in Jackson and then brought up the rear.13 The Confederate leaders presented a woeful contrast to Grant’s resolute decisiveness. Having ordered Pemberton to join him in attacking Grant at Clinton, Johnston, almost inexplicably, proceeded to take his own small force farther north, away from Grant, Pemberton, and the scene of the battle he had ordered for the next day. Pemberton, for his part, moved in his customary slow, halting manner in the general direction Johnston had ordered. By mid-morning he had changed his mind about attacking Grant and was in the rather awkward process of turning his column around to head back west a few miles and catch a road that would lead north to where he hoped he could finally link up with Johnston. That was his state when Grant’s army caught him, and Pemberton had no choice but to deploy his army along a low ridge and accept battle with flooded Baker’s Creek behind him and Grant’s hard-driving columns in front. The highest point on the ridge where the Rebels deployed was called Champion’s Hill, after the name of the local farmer who owned it. Grant struck hard at Pemberton’s left flank, which began to crumble. Pemberton summoned help from the unengaged right wing of his army but, in what amounted to mutiny, the officer in command of that sector, Maj. Gen. W. W. Loring, refused Pemberton’s orders. Loring despised and resented Pemberton as he had despised and resented every officer placed over him during the war, including, in the early days, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Pemberton was no Lee or Jackson, and he was going to need all the help he could get if he was going to have any hope of holding his ground against Grant. He received a considerable amount of help from two generals, one Confederate and one Union. The first of these was Confederate Maj. Gen. John Bowen. Like his friend Loring, Bowen had at first refused Pemberton’s orders. He was himself an aggressive, capable officer and was not impressed with Pemberton. His conscience soon got the better of him, however, and he belatedly brought his hard-hitting division over from the right to shore up the collapsing Confederate left.14 The other general whose actions proved helpful to Pemberton that day was Union Maj. Gen. John C. McClernand. His Thirteenth Corps, which lay in front of the Confederate center and right, represented about half of Grant’s available force for this battle. McClernand’s help to Pemberton, presumably unwitting, lay in doing nothing at all. Grant had been concerned that McClernand might go glory-hunting this day and so had ordered him not to bring on a battle. More resentful of Grant than ever, McClernand willfully misconstrued his orders to mean that he was to sit idly by while McPherson’s Seventeenth Corps fought a desperate battle only a few hundred yards in front of the Thirteenth Corps’s skirmishers. Grant sent him a series of messages ordering immediate attack, but the two Union corps were separated by rugged terrain, and it took couriers several hours to reach McClernand. That general’s idleness was an enormous boon to Pemberton, who was thus granted the

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luxury of at least attempting to get his unengaged right wing to reinforce his crumbling left.15 The arrival of Bowen’s division on the Confederate left turned the tide of the battle, as Bowen’s men drove back Grant’s attackers, tired and disorganized as they were by this time. Now it was Grant’s turn to seek desperately for reinforcements to shore up his wavering line. With McClernand still sulking in his tent, at least figuratively, Grant had to shift a brigade from his own right to left and also throw in the last two brigades of McPherson’s corps as rapidly as they could arrive at the scene of the fighting on the double-quick. Grant’s troops who were already engaged fought tenaciously and quickly rallied, so that, with the aid of the reinforcements, they were able to turn the tide of the battle a second time, hurling Bowen back across Champion’s Hill. With that, Pemberton’s front collapsed entirely, and his army streamed westward in full retreat.16 Had that retreat begun several hours earlier, at the time the Battle of Champion’s Hill began, it would have been the end for Pemberton and his army, for they would have been trapped by the floodwaters of Baker’s Creek, which were not only unfordable but had also washed out the only bridge to which Pemberton’s Confederates now had access. By the time the battle ended, however, that situation had changed. The creek level had subsided to the point that one of the fords was usable, and Confederate engineers had used the time their army had won to repair the bridge. Now, by both routes, that army poured back toward Vicksburg. Loring, after briefly covering the retreat with his intact division, pealed off from the rest of the army, without notifying Pemberton, and several days later joined Johnston’s force still lurking north of Jackson. Grant ordered his army to pursue Pemberton toward Vicksburg early the next morning, May 17, with McClernand’s well-rested corps in the lead. The political general showed no lack of energy this day, and he caught up with Pemberton shortly after sunrise where the latter had turned at bay the evening before on the east bank of the Big Black River. Pemberton had previously had a system of breastworks built here covering the bridge over the Big Black. His reason for holding the position now was in order to provide an opportunity for Loring’s division to rejoin the army and get safely across the Big Black ahead of Grant. He figured his force of two divisions on the east bank could hold the bridgehead until Loring’s division arrived and then retreat with it to join the rest of the army in regrouping behind the barrier of the Big Black.17 Unknown to Pemberton, of course, Loring was not coming at all. Instead, McClernand’s corps arrived, deployed, and prepared to attack. After a brief artillery duel, the Federals launched a headlong infantry charge that swept over the Confederate breastworks, sending some of the defenders fleeing while others simply threw down their rifles and surrendered. Grant was on the battlefield in time to watch the successful assault, culmination of his army’s fifth victory in the space of seventeen days. Pemberton’s battered army, minus the forty-five guns and more than 6,000 men it

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had lost at Champion’s Hill and Big Black Bridge, hurried to reach the temporary safety of the Vicksburg fortifications.18 Although Pemberton’s fleeing troops had managed to burn the bridge over the Big Black, Grant’s men soon had a replacement built—in fact, several of them—and were crossing the Big Black not only on the route of the main Jackson-Vicksburg road but also at several other locations to the north of it. All through the night that followed, Federals tramped across swaying pontoon bridges and various make-shift spans. By the evening of May 18, Grant’s army had invested Vicksburg along most of the line of its landward fortifications and had made contact with those elements of the gunboat fleet that had remained above Vicksburg. The campaign was complete, and Pemberton, along with a Confederate army that still numbered more than 30,000 men, was trapped in Vicksburg.19 Grant believed Pemberton’s army would be demoralized by the five drubbings it had taken in less than three weeks, culminating in the one-sided rout it had suffered at Big Black Bridge. So he ordered an assault on the Confederate works on May 19, the day after his army had arrived outside Vicksburg. The attack failed. The terrain around Vicksburg was much like that through which the army had struggled at Port Gibson—narrow, sinuous, flat-topped ridges interspersed with narrow, sinuous, vineand cane-choked ravines. Many of Grant’s units found that they had all they could do to find the Confederate lines, let alone attack them. As a result the assault turned out to be a partial effort and very poorly coordinated.20 Grant remained convinced that a large, coordinated assault would carry the Confederate fortifications, removing the need for a long, drawn-out siege that would expose his army both to the risk of a possible Confederate relief attempt and the still greater danger posed by summer illnesses in the Mississippi heat and humidity. He ordered thorough preparations and a coordinated assault scheduled for 10:00 a.m. May 22.21 What Grant had not taken into account was the fact that Pemberton had maintained large troop reserves in Vicksburg—troops who were well rested and had not experienced the defeats of the campaign just ended. It was conceivable that the survivors of Pemberton’s battered field army would have spread demoralization to the unbloodied troops of the Vicksburg garrison, but in fact the process that played out during the first few days inside the Vicksburg fortifications was just the reverse of that, as the veterans of Champion’s Hill and Big Black Bridge quickly regained their confidence. An added factor in this process was the natural strength of Vicksburg as a defensive position and the added strength of its extensive fortifications. Behind such defenses even the shakiest of troops could soon come to think of themselves as all but invincible. And with good reason. Grant’s assault went in as scheduled on May 22 fully coordinated this time, with scaling ladders and specially detailed pioneer parties assigned to overcome obstructions. Before the advance, a thunderous artillery bombardment

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prepared the way. At the appointed hour, the Union infantry advanced with determination and the confidence they had won on recent battlefields, but to no avail. Casualties were high, and progress negligible. In McClernand’s sector elements of the 22nd Iowa Regiment succeeded in fighting their way into a corner of one of the Confederate forts, but they could go no farther. Even there, the Rebel line was in no danger of breaking. McClernand, who had failed to retain a reserve to exploit a potential breakthrough, sent urgent dispatches to Grant, calling for reinforcements and a renewal of the assault along the rest of the army’s line so as to prevent the Confederates from reinforcing his own sector. Grant complied, but the additional effort accomplished nothing beyond the lengthening of the casualty lists. These were long enough in any case—including some 3,199 Union soldiers. Nothing remained for Grant and his men but to settle down to the long, slow processes of a siege. The day after the assault the Federals began work digging approach trenches that would gradually zigzag their way closer and closer to the Confederate parapets. The labor continued through the next six weeks, until in many sectors only the thickness of the earthen parapet—perhaps ten feet or so—separated Union and Confederate lines. Sharpshooting was constant, and when the lines grew close, both sides tossed grenades. Troops of Logan’s division tunneled under a Confederate fort in their sector and detonated 2,200 pounds of gunpowder beneath it, blowing a forty-foot-wide crater in one of its corners. Yet, the Confederates rallied and repulsed the localized infantry assault that followed the explosion.22 Inside Vicksburg rations grew short for both soldiers and civilians. The latter took to living in caves dug out of the steep hillsides, in order to find protection from the almost incessant bombardment of the Union siege artillery and the cannon and mortars of the fleet in the river. Even the local newspaper felt the pinch when stocks of newsprint ran low and was reduced to publishing on sheets of unused wallpaper during the final stages of the siege. Far off in Richmond, Jefferson Davis wanted Joseph Johnston to attack Grant and raise the siege of Vicksburg. In late May he sent Johnston reinforcements that raised his strength to approximately 25,000 or 30,000 men, and throughout June he repeatedly urged the general to take action. Yet, Johnston did nothing but complain that he still did not have enough men and entered into a pointless epistolary squabble with Davis as to how many men he actually had. As Davis pointed out, “We cannot hope for numerical equality and time will probably increase the disparity.” In fact, at the end of May the combined forces of Pemberton and Johnston still outnumbered Grant. The latter had 50,000 men around Vicksburg, while Pemberton had 31,000 inside and Johnston had at least 23,000 outside. By mid-June, however, Union reinforcements had boosted Grant’s numbers to 77,000, while Johnston’s had not increased appreciably. Meanwhile, Johnston’s plaintive dispatches to Richmond begged for “such reinforcements as will give guarantee of success”—as if any such thing were possible. In the end, Johnston did nothing.23

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The end came on July 4, 1863. The previous day Pemberton had requested a meeting with Grant to discuss surrender terms. At first the two could reach no agreement on terms, and Pemberton was disposed to break off negotiations and have his army hold out until the inevitable final assault—which, unbeknownst to him, Grant had scheduled only four days hence. With Grant’s heavy columns massed virtually at the outer base of the Confederate parapets, there could be no hope of holding the line. Several of Pemberton’s subordinates prevailed on him to take a more reasonable view of the matter, and at last he agreed to what were still very generous terms from Grant. The garrison would surrender as prisoners of war but would be immediately paroled to take no further part in the war until duly exchanged. At ten o’clock on the morning of Independence Day, as per agreement, the white flags went up all along the Vicksburg lines, and the Rebels marched out and stacked their arms. Grant and his staff rode at the head of a column of Union troops moving in to occupy the battered fortress city. At the head of the column was the 45th Illinois, which had fought hard and taken heavy losses in the big assault of May 22, as well as in the attack on the crater. “This was the most glorious Fourth of July we ever spent,” wrote a soldier of the 45th, “and the proudest day of our lives.” Before noon the 45th’s bullet-torn United States flag was waving over the cupola of the Warren County courthouse in the heart of Vicksburg. Seeing it go up, the gunboat fleet in the river weighed anchor and steamed toward the Vicksburg waterfront, every flag flying, steam whistles shrilling, and guns booming a salute.24 The news reached the Midwestern hometowns of Grant’s troops several days later, and in town after town it was the signal for exuberant celebration—bands, fireworks, cannon salutes, or cowbells beaten with sticks—as local taste or resources might dictate. Five days after Vicksburg, Port Hudson, similarly besieged by Banks, also surrendered. The Louisiana stronghold, last Confederate outpost on the Mississippi River, was hopeless without Vicksburg. The news reached Washington, and a few weeks later the Midwesterner who lived in the White House was moved to write, “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea,” and to add, a few sentences later, “Peace does not appear so distant as it did.”25 If the Civil War had had a single decisive battle, it would have been that for Vicksburg. The fall of the city that had been called the Gibraltar of the West gave the Union complete control of the Mississippi River. The restored flow of commerce down the Father of Waters eased the economic pressures on midwestern farmers, while the loss of the river effectively severed the Confederacy from its trans-Mississippi states— Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. A steady flow of beef, leather, and other valuable commodities had found its way over the river and into the eastern Confederacy up until military operations closing in on Vicksburg had impinged it a few months before. The loss of communication with the trans-Mississippi also demoralized soldiers from those states fighting in the Confederate armies in Tennessee and Virginia, and desertion rates began to creep upward.

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The campaign had been Grant’s most brilliant. Over the preceding months he had displayed tenacity, resourcefulness, and a willingness to undertake whatever measures were necessary to achieve his purpose. During the nineteen-day maneuver phase in the interior of Mississippi he had been nothing short of dazzling, outmaneuvering the more numerous Confederate forces so thoroughly that in the five battles fought in the interior of the state, Grant always had a significant advantage in troops present at the point of combat despite the Confederates’ overall advantage—at that time— in troops within the state of Mississippi. His conduct of the campaign was almost the classic case in American military history of a general perceiving the operational situation, assessing what he needed to do about it, deciding how to do it, issuing the necessary orders, and seeing that they were carried out—all while his opponent was still struggling with the first one or two of those steps. From the Confederate side, the campaign had been nothing short of dismal. Neither Pemberton nor Johnston was a match for Grant, and the old aphorism that, on a battlefield, one bad general was better than two good ones, was amply born out in Mississippi in 1863. In that case, two mediocre generals proved to be woefully outclassed by a single great one. Davis failed to compel Johnston to act when action was the Confederacy’s only hope of hanging on to the Mississippi. Likewise, he failed to compel Kirby Smith, now commanding the Confederacy’s trans-Mississippi department, to operate from his side of the river in such a way as to hinder Grant’s efforts. Thus, given his discretion, Smith did as little to help Pemberton as he had done to help Bragg in Kentucky the year before. Loring’s mutiny contributed to Pemberton’s discomfiture, yet Loring went unpunished, while Confederate public opinion was so virulent against Pemberton that he could not subsequently serve as a general and had to take a demotion to major. There was hardly a bright spot in the whole affair for the Confederacy except perhaps the sterling performance of Maj. Gen. John Bowen. He died of disease a few days after the surrender of Vicksburg. Before the fall of Vicksburg, it had remained to be determined whether the Union was capable of the military suppression of the Confederacy. After it, no doubt remained that the Union could do so, if it maintained its will to persevere. All that remained to be determined was what the cost would be and whether Union will would last.

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Five

ij FROM TULLAHOMA TO MISSIONARY RIDGE

While Grant’s Army of the Tennessee had grappled its Confederate counterpart for the ownership of Vicksburg and the control of the continent’s midsection, the Union’s other primary western fighting force, the Army of the Cumberland, had sat idly in its camps in Middle Tennessee. This was not at all what Lincoln and Halleck had wanted, but they had found it very difficult to work their will with the stubborn commander of the Army of the Cumberland. After the hard-fought battle of Stone’s River, William S. Rosecrans had determined to put his army into top fighting trim before advancing to meet Braxton Bragg and the Confederate Army of Tennessee again. Rosecrans also wanted to make sure that he had ample supplies on hand and thorough arrangements for getting them to his troops. These were necessary and proper concerns for the commander of an army, and for the first few months the authorities in Washington gave him their full support. “There is nothing,” wrote Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton in the afterglow of Stone’s River, “within my power to grant to yourself or your heroic command that will not be cheerfully given.”1 Rosecrans put that promise to the test, with incessant demands for horses, mules, wagons, weapons of various sorts and all manner of supplies, and generally he got what he asked for. What really tried the patience of the Union high command was that after months of preparation Rosecrans still did not advance. April 1863 passed and May came. To the West, Grant’s Army of the Tennessee marched to glory in the Vicksburg campaign. To the East Joseph Hooker’s Army of the Potomac marched to

69

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another dismal failure in the Chancellorsville campaign. Yet Rosecrans’s now superbly equipped and supplied host never stirred from its camp. Some detail of preparation, some additional provision of supply, always required attention before the Army of the Cumberland could advance. Rosecrans even ventured to lecture his superior that it was good strategy for his own army to sit idle while the other two major forces waged active campaigns, despite the fact that Bragg, whose army opposed Rosecrans, had detached thousands of troops to reinforce the army with which Joe Johnston was supposed to relieve Vicksburg. In Washington, impatience reached almost the pitch of relieving Rosecrans of his command. The authorities forbore, however, and finally on June 24, 1863, the Army of the Cumberland began to advance. What followed was almost an anticlimax. Within the space of nine days, most of them notable for torrential rains, Rosecrans succeeded in maneuvering Bragg’s army almost all the way out of the state of Tennessee. Turned by Rosecrans’s elaborate system of feints and multiple, widely separated columns of troops, Bragg fell back from the chain of hills known as the Highland Rim, then from defensive positions immediately around Tullahoma, and finally back over the Cumberland Plateau and into Chattanooga, only a half dozen miles from the Georgia line. Rosecrans did not, however, succeed in trapping, destroying, or even significantly damaging Bragg’s army, a failure for which he blamed the incessant rain, which presumably slowed the pursuing Union army more than it did the fleeing Confederates. The success that attended Rosecrans’s late-June offensive, as well as the very fact that he had been able to remain idle without Rebel harassment for the six months prior, owed much to the problems that had been ongoing within the high command of the Confederate Army of Tennessee during that time. Bragg and his top generals were scarcely on speaking terms. After the disappointing near-victory at Stone’s River—which the Rebels called the Battle of Murfreesboro—the conflict between Bragg and his generals had reached crisis proportions. The bitterness had begun after the Kentucky campaign. Partially it came from Kentucky generals blaming Bragg for their home state’s failure to support the Confederacy. Partially its source was to be found in blundering generals, Polk foremost among them, who blamed Bragg for their own incompetence. In the months that followed, they brought more generals into their malcontent faction. Polk won over the army’s only other corps commander, William J. Hardee, and Hardee, who was a former West Point commandant of cadets and author of the army’s prewar tactics manual, was very effective in winning over his subordinate generals. A few days after the Confederate retreat from Stone’s River, an article had appeared in the Chattanooga Daily Rebel criticizing Bragg for having retreated against the advice of all his generals. This was particularly galling for Bragg since it was exactly opposite of the truth. Yet the article contained enough information to indicate that it came from an officer within the army. In fact, the culprit was staff surgeon D.W. Yandell. Not knowing that, however, Bragg determined to poll his generals and, at the very

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least, set the record straight as to who had first broached the idea of retreat. He therefore penned a circular dispatch addressed to all his generals, asking whether they had approved of the decision to retreat from Murfreesboro. Then, apparently letting his righteous indignation run away with him, he proceeded from the ill-advised to the downright foolish. He added that he would gladly resign the command of the army if he found he had lost the confidence of his generals. His staff was aghast and urged him to remove the second part of the circular. He did but failed to adjust all of the wording. The result was an ambiguous message that Bragg’s enemies in the officer corps could construe as an invitation to take free swipes at him. General after general grudgingly admitted that he had indeed counseled retreat from Murfreesboro but then launched into a statement of how the army had utterly lost confidence in Bragg and for the good of the Confederacy he ought to resign. Jefferson Davis was coming to be of the same opinion. Learning of the bizarre pass to which matters had come in the Confederacy’s second largest army, Davis fired off a dispatch to Johnston, directing him to repair to Bragg’s headquarters in Tullahoma at once and determine whether that general should retain command of the Army of Tennessee. He also reminded Johnston that whenever he, Johnston, was present with the army, he in fact held the command by virtue of his position as theater commander. The obvious presumption was that Johnston, who had long been complaining that he preferred the command of an individual army to that of a theater containing two major armies, would avail himself of the opportunity to realize that wish by dismissing Bragg. Once again, however, as he always managed to do throughout the war, Johnston found a way to disappoint the president. Having inspected the Army of Tennessee, he promptly dispatched Richmond that the army was in a splendid state of discipline, training, and supply, shipshape and fit to fight. Indeed, that Bragg was a first-rate administrator even his worst enemies conceded, at least in their fairer moments. It was not surprising, therefore, that Johnston found the army in good shape. However, Johnston then added to his dispatch a statement that if Bragg was to be removed, Johnston was unwilling to serve as his replacement. This bit of perversity must have dumbfounded Davis. Johnston’s rationale for such a statement was that since he had inspected Bragg’s army, if he were to end up in command of it, it might appear that he had been angling for the job at Bragg’s expense. Johnston was sensitive about appearances. Perhaps more to the point in this case, he was also eager to thwart Jefferson Davis in any way he could. Over the next few weeks Davis tried various ploys to get Johnston to relieve Bragg and take over command of the Army of Tennessee himself. When several attempts at persuasion failed, the president ordered Johnston to send Bragg to Richmond for consultation, which would have accomplished the desired purpose. Johnston saw through the ploy and replied that Bragg’s wife lay sick, dying the physicians said, in a nearby hospital, and it would be cruelty to send him away from her now. Several

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weeks later, when Elise Bragg had rallied and was out of danger, Davis repeated his order, but this time Johnston replied that he was not in such good health himself and, being physically incapable of taking command of the army, he could not spare Bragg for a trip to Richmond. At last Davis gave up and left Bragg, a general in whom he did not have full confidence, in command of the Confederacy’s second largest army. When the crisis came in Mississippi and Davis ordered Johnston there, Bragg was left once again in independent command. Meanwhile, relations between Bragg and his generals had continued to deteriorate. Hardee despised Bragg but was at least civil to him. Polk did his best to avoid situations that would require him to speak to Bragg, and when he did address his commanding officer, the bishop was insolent and scarcely concealed his contempt. Thus, the Army of Tennessee had remained idle for six months while its generals bickered, allowing Rosecrans the luxury of his own delays. And near the end of June when Rosecrans advanced, Bragg’s army was almost palsied by its generals’ contentions. Polk and Hardee, the two corps commanders, knew nothing of their commander’s plans and were in no position—or frame of mind—to carry them out. They immediately began urging Bragg to retreat, convinced by their own propaganda that the army was doomed in any encounter with the enemy when it had Bragg at the helm. Reluctantly Bragg complied and fell back to Chattanooga. Rosecrans was exuberant about his quick success, urging the war department in Washington that his triumph not be overlooked in the midst of the current Vicksburg– Gettysburg euphoria, merely because it was “not written in letters of blood.” To be sure, Rosecrans had struck the Confederacy a painful blow and one that hurt it worse in some ways than the nearly simultaneous Battle of Gettysburg. The Tullahoma Campaign cost the Confederacy a large swath of valuable territory, and with it went perhaps as many as several thousand soldiers who decided to give up the war and desert once their homes came within Union lines. The loss of territory, as always, was demoralizing to Confederates in general and especially to those within the region. And while the Gettysburg Campaign significantly eased Confederate supply problems in the East, Tullahoma exacerbated those problems in the West. On the other hand, Gettysburg subtracted, at least temporarily and in some cases permanently, 28,000 troops from the Confederate army—far more than even the desertions sparked by Tullahoma. Also, as Rosecrans had feared, his almost bloodless victory was largely overlooked in the fanfare surrounding the grand Union triumphs at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, both of which made far more impact on public opinion, both North and South, than did the nearly simultaneous maneuvers in Tennessee. Most significantly, Bragg’s Army of Tennessee remained a potentially dangerous force—if its generals could ever agree to fight the enemy more than each other. Rosecrans and his superiors in Washington became still more displeased with each other during the six weeks that followed the end of the Tullahoma Campaign, as the general seemed to go back into the mode he had been in for the preceding

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six months—resting, organizing, equipping, and stockpiling supplies but neither fighting nor advancing. Once again letters to Rosecrans from Halleck and Stanton urged action and asked pointedly how long it would be before the Army of the Cumberland advanced to follow up its impressive but incomplete success in the Tullahoma Campaign.2 Further complaints from Washington were cut short when on August 16, 1863, Rosecrans began another advance, this one aimed at the challenging task of crossing the Cumberland Plateau and the Tennessee River to force Bragg out of Chattanooga. Once again Rosecrans moved his army in several widely separated columns, with elaborate feints designed to deflect Bragg’s attention while the main thrusts crossed mountains and river where least expected. As a further advantage to Rosecrans, Union general Ambrose Burnside was simultaneously advancing with a small army from Camp Dick Robinson, Kentucky, through Cumberland Gap and toward the East Tennessee city of Knoxville. This threat to the Army of Tennessee’s northeastern flank helped pin down Bragg’s forces and distract his attention. Thus aided, Rosecrans had by early September succeeded in crossing a mountain range and the Tennessee River to the southwest of Bragg’s headquarters at Chattanooga, and he had done so without encountering significant resistance from the badly confused Confederates. Ahead of him lay the towering parallel ridges of Sand Mountain and Lookout Mountain, and once again Rosecrans kept his army distributed in multiple columns, widely spread, as they moved to negotiate these obstacles. That method had worked well for him in the advance on Tullahoma and in the first phase of the present campaign. Besides, in this case geography almost demanded it. Though a fit and active man might cross Lookout Mountain at more or less any point, hiking its tree-clad slopes and scrambling up the low rocky cliff that rimmed its crest, an army, with its artillery, supply wagons, and various other impedimenta, could cross it only at certain well-defined points. To funnel the entire Army of the Cumberland through one of these passes would be not only slow but also dangerous, offering Bragg the opportunity to defeat the head of the column before the tail could come to its aid. Spreading the army into separate columns seemed dangerous, courting as it did something of the same potential for isolated disaster, but it was the lesser of the evils that could not be avoided when attempting to cross such a formidable barrier in the face of the enemy. Rosecrans sent Maj. Gen. Thomas L. Crittenden’s Twenty-first Corps through the same gap the Tennessee River took, around the nose of Lookout Mountain where it loomed over Chattanooga and the winding river below. Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas’s Fourteenth Corps headed for Stevens Gap, twenty-four miles to the southwest, and Maj. Gen. Alexander McCook’s Twentieth Corps marched for Winston’s Gap, another eighteen miles to the southwest and a total of forty-two miles—actually farther by the tortuous mountain roads—from Crittenden, on the army’s other flank. Once again Rosecrans’s spread formation presented more potential avenues of advance

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than Bragg could effectively cover. “A mountain,” observed Bragg, “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.”3 And that is just what Rosecrans did. Before the Confederate general could counter the movement, Union forces had topped Lookout Mountain and were flowing down the eastern side. By that time there was nothing Bragg could do to hang on to Chattanooga, and if he had kept his army in it he would have been offering it up for entrapment and capture like Pemberton’s in Vicksburg, assuming Rosecrans should prove as skillful and enterprising as Grant. So Bragg put his troops in motion, marching south out of Chattanooga and out of Tennessee. From the crest of Lookout Mountain on September 8, Rosecrans and the men of his center column, with which he was riding, saw, “far off to the east, long lines of dust trending slowly to the south,” and knew that Bragg was on the retreat. Determined to catch Bragg this time, he ordered his three corps to press forward rapidly in the widely spread formation. If all went well, he would catch Bragg’s army strung out in column in headlong retreat, vulnerable and demoralized, and would tear it to shreds.4 Yet though he knew roughly where Bragg was and also knew the Confederate was retreating, there were other things about Bragg’s army of which Rosecrans was not aware. As Confederate fortunes had deteriorated in this middle sector of the conflict, the Richmond authorities had given increasingly urgent thought to how the tide might be reversed. For months a coterie of Confederate politicians and generals had been urging a massive concentration and a mighty counterblow against Rosecrans. Now Davis decided the time had come for something of the sort. By the time Rosecrans had advanced from his camps around Winchester, Tennessee, in mid-August, plans were already in the works for a major reinforcement of Bragg. The additional troops were to come from Mississippi, where Johnston’s Vicksburg relief army obviously had little further purpose, and, most significantly, from Virginia. For the first and, as it turned out, also the last time in the war, Davis had set aside Robert E. Lee’s grave misgivings and had decided to detach troops from Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia to reinforce the western Confederates. The units he tapped for the job were two divisions of Georgians, South Carolinians, Louisianans, and Texans, under the command of LaFayette McLaws and John B. Hood. In overall command of the detachment came Hood and McLaws’s corps commander, James Longstreet. They would not be on hand until near the end of the third week in September, but some of the other reinforcements would be joining Bragg well before then.5 With some reinforcements already in his ranks and others on the way, Bragg was ready to turn at bay and hoped not only to dispute the continued possession of Chattanooga but also to deal Rosecrans a defeat that might reverse the tide of war in the Confederate heartland. He had halted his retreat at La Fayette, Georgia, which happened to be due east of Stevens Gap, and on September 9, Bragg received

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information that a column of Federals was descending from Lookout Mountain there, just ten miles from La Fayette, where Bragg’s main body was concentrated, and roughly the same distance from other powerful Confederate formations that composed Bragg’s right wing.6 The Federals who had descended to the eastern foot of Lookout Mountain were the lead division of Thomas’s Fourteenth Corps, commanded by Maj. Gen. James S. Negley, about 6,000 men, and they were soon to be followed by Brig. Gen. Absalom Baird’s division of about that many more. Bragg may not have known the precise identity of these units, but he had a very good estimate of their numbers, and he recognized that they were in a highly vulnerable position. Just south of them a spur ridge known as Pigeon Mountain diverged from Lookout Mountain and angled to the east, passing between the Union position and La Fayette. It formed a valley called McLemore’s Cove, enclosed on three sides by Lookout and Pigeon mountains and open to the northeast, where Bragg’s right wing was lurking.7 If Bragg could move his right wing into McLemore’s Cove from the northeast while his main body moved through the pass (known as Dug Gap) over Pigeon Mountain, he would hit the Yankees in front and flank with overwhelming force. The Federals would have nowhere to retreat except back up the road they had just descended from Lookout Mountain. That would be nearly impossible for a retreating force, and with the road clogged with the rest of the Fourteenth Corps it would be completely so. Even if all four of Thomas’s divisions should descend into McLemore’s Cove, the outcome should not be any different. Bragg would still have overwhelming advantages in numbers and position and the Federals would still have no viable line of retreat. The salient fact was that while Thomas’s corps was eighteen miles from McCook and twenty-four miles from Crittenden, it was only ten miles from Bragg, and those ten were much easier miles. The more of Thomas’s troops might descend into McClemore’s Cove, the more of them Bragg could bag. By late evening on September 9, Bragg knew enough of the situation to give the order for the attack. The troops were to march at once and launch their assault at dawn. Yet now, with the Army of Tennessee’s great opportunity literally directly in front of them, Bragg’s generals balked again. First it was Maj. Gen. Daniel H. Hill, commanding the forces that were supposed to advance through Dug Gap. On the morning of the tenth he sent word to Bragg that for various reasons he would be unable to launch his part of the assault as scheduled. Bragg duly sent word to the right wing commander, Maj. Gen. Thomas C. Hindman, to delay his attack and started additional reinforcements on the way to strengthen Hindman’s column. Having seen to it personally that these troops got on their way from Lee and Gordon’s Mill, Bragg rode the twelve miles southward back to his headquarters at La Fayette and then the ten miles to join Hill’s position at Dug Gap to see if he could, after all, get that column into the fight that Hindman would soon be initiating down in the cove. Once on the scene, Bragg discovered that Hill’s excuses had been hollow, and

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under the commanding general’s direction his corps was soon ready to advance into McLemore’s Cove at such time as the sound of Hindman’s guns would tell Bragg that the flanking column had started its attack. The guns never sounded. That evening, September 10, Hindman first delayed and then came to a complete balk. Bragg sent him repeated orders to attack at once and then, after night fell, to attack at first light in the morning. Yet, daylight, September 11, brought no action to the bucolic serenity of McLemore’s Cove. Despite being reinforced to well over twice Negley’s numbers and with promise of prompt cooperation by Hill’s force, Hindman refused to advance. His second-in-command, Maj. Gen. Simon B. Buckner, along with their brigade commanders, agreed that such an attack would not be safe. Hindman was making plans to retreat that afternoon when he discovered that the Federals in the cove were in fact in the final stages of withdrawing. Negley had at least realized his danger and had withdrawn to join the rest of the Fourteenth Corps. With the opportunity in McLemore’s Cove, Bragg lost his best chance to begin the process of unraveling the Army of the Cumberland so as to make the campaign a decisive and relatively cheap Confederate victory. Even more ominously, the operation demonstrated that the Army of Tennessee had become the kind of organization in which everyone, or at least most of the general officers, always had a good reason why he could not accomplish his mission. It was also becoming painfully apparent that Bragg was unlikely to get his higher ranking generals to carry out any of his orders in anything like timely fashion unless he was present in person, and he could not be present everywhere at once. None of this bade well for the rest of the campaign that was now beginning to unfold. After the near-disaster in McLemore’s Cove, the truth gradually dawned on Rosecrans that, far from being in a headlong retreat toward Atlanta, Bragg had assumed a highly menacing posture just ten miles from the center column of the Army of the Cumberland. On September 12, Rosecrans responded by issuing orders for the three severed wings of his army to reunite as rapidly as possible. Crittenden, who had already occupied Chattanooga, would move south toward Thomas. McCook would march north to come up behind Thomas, who would meanwhile begin sidling north. Together the army would continue this sidelong movement, facing eastward toward Bragg’s army while moving cautiously north, to secure its line of supply and communication through Chattanooga.8 Before the Army of the Cumberland’s concentration could be completed, however, Bragg had another chance to do serious damage to one of its separated components. For the moment, and for the next few days, the Army of Tennessee would still lie more or less at the center of a large arc around the perimeter of which Rosecrans’s three corps were scattered well beyond supporting distance of each other. It was a situation that by rights ought to give Bragg the opportunity to strike at least one of those corps. Just that occurred when on that same September 12, Bragg learned that Crittenden’s

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Twenty-first Corps had advanced southward on the Chattanooga-La Fayette Road all the way to Lee and Gordon’s Mill and was within striking distance of the Confederate right wing, now located just south of there. Bragg ordered Polk, who commanded the right wing, to attack Crittenden at “day dawn” on the morning of the thirteenth. Polk refused, called a conference of his subordinate generals, and got them to back him up. He would not attack, he wrote to Bragg, unless Bragg would reinforce him with another seven brigades, in addition to the thirteen he already had, “so as,” in Polk’s words, “to make failure impossible.”9 Just how many troops might have been necessary “to make failure impossible” for a force commanded by Leonidas Polk is difficult to imagine, but Bragg sent the seven brigades, keeping only six to cover the army’s center and left and keep watch on Thomas. Yet, even with a more than two-to-one superiority in numbers, Polk would not attack. Bragg went to Lee and Gordon’s Mill himself, found that Crittenden had concentrated his corps and massed it in a good defensive position on the west bank of Chickamauga Creek, and decided the opportunity had passed. In fact, he decided that the entire opportunity of catching the elements of the Army of the Cumberland before they could reunite was lost. There was nothing to do now, he reasoned, but to wait for the rest of his reinforcements to arrive and then hope to be able to deal with Rosecrans’s by then fully reunified army.10 If Bragg had known it, he might have had a chance for another shot or two at Rosecrans’s slowly converging corps, though what good it might have done with the likes of Polk, Hindman, and Hill leading the Confederate columns is hard to say. Rosecrans had difficulty getting his army together quickly because of unfamiliarity with the local road net. Not until September 17 was the Army of the Cumberland substantially concentrated and beginning to slide northward along the west bank of Chickamauga Creek. In a few more days at this rate it would be in the vicinity of Chattanooga, with its supply line relatively secure and ready to take on all comers. Rosecrans might have been breathing a little easier by that time, but Bragg saw in current movements the rapidly approaching demise of his chance to trap even a unified Army of the Cumberland. By this time reinforcements had brought the strength of the Army of Tennessee up to 68,000 men, 6,000 more than Rosecrans had. His hope now was to interpose his more powerful army between the Federals and Chattanooga. This would cut their supply line and leave them nowhere to flee but southward, into the cul de sac of McLemore’s Cove. By the evening of the seventeenth Bragg believed his army lay farther to the north than did Rosecrans’s, so he gave orders that on the next day his troops were to march west, force a crossing of Chickamauga Creek, and take up the desired position athwart the Chattanooga-La Fayette Road between the Army of the Cumberland and its only practical route of access to hardtack and cartridges.11 The next day, September 18, the Confederates made their bid for the crossings of Chickamauga Creek. The two most significant crossings, best placed for Bragg’s

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purposes, were Reed’s and Alexander’s bridges, but at both sites Union cavalry put up a spirited and skillful delaying action. Not until late in the day were the Confederates able to secure the bridges and begin moving troops to the west bank in large numbers. The movement continued through the night, and by nine o’clock on the morning of the nineteenth Bragg had most of his army in position on the west side of Chickamauga Creek and well north of Lee and Gordon’s Mill, which scouts the day before had reported as Rosecrans’s northern flank. Bragg’s orders for the morning called for a drive to the southwest, down onto Rosecrans’s flank.12 The scouts had been correct about where Rosecrans’s flank had been on the eighteenth, but the situation had changed overnight. Late in the afternoon, Thomas had arrived at Lee and Gordon’s Mill with his Fourteenth Corps, having marched up that day from his previous position in McLemore’s Cove. Rather than have Thomas’s four divisions simply take up a position to the left of Crittenden, whose corps was deployed in the immediate vicinity of the mill, Rosecrans, who was concerned about the possibility of exactly the kind of Confederate movement Bragg had in mind, ordered Thomas to keep his men marching, right through the night if necessary, until they reached the large clearing of a farmer named Kelly, alongside the La Fayette Road about three miles north of Lee and Gordon’s Mill. It was a difficult night for Thomas’s men, stumbling along through darkness and profound fatigue on a rough road, but dawn found Thomas’s lead division taking a much needed rest in Farmer Kelly’s field, where it had just arrived. The other three divisions were not far behind.13 It was at this point that Thomas received word from troops who had reconnoitered to his front that a Confederate “brigade” had been spotted on the west—hitherto Union—bank of Chickamauga Creek. Not willing to tolerate this incursion, and unaware that most of Bragg’s army by this time was sharing the west bank with him, Thomas dispatched a division to bag the audacious Rebels. What they ran into was not a brigade but a full division of Confederate cavalry under the command of the redoubtable Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest was guarding the flank of Bragg’s attack formation that was, as its generals supposed, about to descend on Rosecrans’s flank.14 A sharp fight flared up in the open woodlands between the La Fayette Road, on the west, and Chickamauga Creek, on the east. Both sides fed more troops into the battle as quickly as they could be brought up from positions to the south. The woods prevented long-range views of the field of conflict, masking occasional gaps in both sides’ battle lines—or what passed for battle lines in a fluid, rapidly developing fight that surged back and forth as first one side and then the other gained the advantage. Both commanding generals were at times reduced to ordering new formations of troops going into the battle to march toward the sound of the heaviest firing, somewhere off in the woods ahead. Nightfall found the two armies facing each other along a line that roughly followed the course of the La Fayette Road, veering sometimes a hundred yards or so to one side of it or the other, from the Kelly Farm, still held by Thomas’s men on the north

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end of the Union line, to the Viniard Farm, just a little more than a mile north of Lee and Gordon’s Mill. Neither side had gained a clear advantage in a day of furious and bloody fighting, and Rosecrans still controlled two routes to Chattanooga, the La Fayette Road itself, and the Dry Valley Road, which branched to the west of the La Fayette Road south of the battlefield and followed a different course into Chattanooga.15 For September 20, Rosecrans’s first priority was to hold firm on his left, Thomas’s sector, which secured his army’s continued access to Chattanooga—and thus its survival. For that purpose he promised to reinforce Thomas as heavily as might be necessary. Bragg’s goal, conversely, was to seize that very sector of the battlefield first, and then follow up with a series of hammer blows that would drive the crumbling Army of the Cumberland southward, away from its base and into the trap of McLemore’s Cove, where its final recourse must be surrender.16 To aid him in this endeavor Bragg received various reinforcements during the night, most notably, Lt. Gen. James Longstreet. Several of Longstreet’s brigades had taken part in the first day’s fighting, and several more arrived during the night to boost the army’s strength. Longstreet himself had arrived late on the nineteenth at the nearest stop of the railroad, Catoosa Station, and was immediately offended that Bragg, who in the midst of a battle might have been expected to have other things on his mind, had not had anyone waiting at the station to welcome him. Attempting to find his way to Bragg’s headquarters during the night, Longstreet blundered into Union lines but bluffed his way out again and finally arrived, in a very ill humor, at Bragg’s headquarters.17 Bragg felt compelled to give the highly important eastern general a suitable assignment for the coming day’s fight. He therefore undertook the questionable expedient of instituting a major reorganization of his forces in the midst of a great battle. He divided the army into two wings, each to consist of two corps and a division. One wing would be commanded by Longstreet, the other, of necessity, by the next ranking officer present, Leonidas Polk. Since those of the troops Longstreet had brought from Virginia, who had already joined the fray, had been engaged in the Viniard Farm sector on the south end of the battlefield, it was natural that Longstreet should take command of the Confederate left wing. That left the right wing for Polk, to whom it would thus fall to open the attack on the morning of September 20 by crushing Thomas’s Federals, caving in the north end of the Union line, and starting the process of driving the Army of the Cumberland southward into McLemore’s Cove. Longstreet’s wing of the army would join in once Polk had gotten the ball rolling.18 So it was that the least efficient Confederate general received the most crucial assignment. Polk went to bed that night without seeing to it that his troops were in position for what was supposed to be, as per Bragg’s orders, a “day dawn” attack the next morning. Nor could he be bothered to make sure the corps commander who was supposed to lead off the attack actually knew about the plan. That corps commander

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was D.H. Hill, a man known for his irascibility. That night Hill was miffed at having been placed under Polk’s command and perhaps for that reason neglected to report to his commanding officer. He later claimed he could not find Polk’s headquarters.19 “Day dawn” came and no attack. When Bragg went to investigate, he found that Polk had given no order for the attack until about the time it was actually supposed to have gone in. Then he had simply sent a messenger to Hill with orders that he advance as soon as he could get his divisions into proper alignment. This would have entailed more than enough delay, for both of Hill’s divisions were woefully out of position, but then Hill had countermanded Polk’s orders, announcing that his men were going nowhere until rations were issued and the men had a chance to eat them—a further delay of at least an hour. Once Bragg arrived and got to work trying to sort out this mess, it quickly became apparent that the rest of Polk’s corps was also badly misaligned, confused, and completely unprepared for action. Bragg and his staff were busy for some time trying to do the job that Polk and his staff should have performed the night before.20 It was 9:30 a.m., a good three and a half hours late, before the attack was finally launched, and even then it was reduced in strength because some units still had not gotten into position to take part. During those three and a half hours the Federals had not been idle. Officers in command of the troops manning Thomas’s line had decided early that morning to have their men construct log breastworks. Where no defensive works of any kind had existed at daybreak, a continuous line of sturdy breastworks greeted Bragg’s men by midmorning. One of the Union generals who commanded along this line later wrote that if the Rebels had attacked at daybreak, “the battle would not have lasted an hour; we would have gone to Chattanooga on the run”—perhaps, or, one might speculate, into McLemore’s Cove. During the same period before the Confederate blow fell, Thomas had already begun beseeching Rosecrans for reinforcements, and the Union army commander was proving as good as his word of the night before, shifting the rest of the army’s line steadily northward as he pulled one unit after another out of the line and sent it marching north to bolster Thomas’s already heavily manned perimeter.21 When the attack did strike it produced much sound and fury—and a lengthy casualty list on the Confederate side—but accomplished little more. A couple of Rebel brigades managed to get around the end of Thomas’s line and get into its rear, but the resulting Union embarrassment was soon remedied with a spirited counterattack that expelled the intruders. As additional units of Polk’s corps could be brought into battle, they attacked with similar results. By about 11:00 a.m. it was the turn of Longstreet’s wing to join the attack, which had hitherto accomplished nothing. A similar outcome greeted the first of Longstreet’s divisions to join the fray, on the right of his wing, but in his center Longstreet had prepared a column of attack, with divisions ranged behind divisions, eight brigades in all, five waves deep. Just as he was about to launch it at Rosecrans’s

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right-center, about 11:30 a.m., an interesting sequence of events played out on the Union side of the lines. Though Thomas was holding his own without too much trouble on the Union left, the stolid commander of the Fourteenth Corps continued to request more reinforcements, and Rosecrans complied with each request until Thomas’s command encompassed close to half the Army of the Cumberland’s total strength. One of the last divisions summoned to Thomas’s aid was, unknown to Rosecrans, already in line near the Union center. The staff officer who carried the order for the division to move brought word back to Rosecrans that the movement had created a gap in his line. In fact, the division commander, Brig. Gen. John M. Brannan, had rightly decided that Rosecrans would not have ordered the movement if he had known that Brannan’s division was in line, rather than in reserve, and had wisely stayed put. Thus no gap existed. Not knowing this, however, and not double-checking the report, a badly fatigued Rosecrans had issued a quick order for the division next in line to the south of Brannan’s to “close up” on the next division to the north of Brannan’s and “support it.” Since Brannan was still in line, the order to “close up” made no sense. The officer who received it, however, Brig. Gen. Thomas J. Wood, had been the target of at least one and perhaps another of Rosecrans’s infamous profane tongue-lashings in recent days, and apparently did not wish to risk another by inquiring as to whether there had been some mistake at headquarters. Instead, he interpreted the order as a directive to pull his division back out of line, march it north, behind Brannan’s to support the division farther to the north. He implemented it at once. The time was approaching 11:30 a.m., and Wood’s division had been covering the sector directly in front of Longstreet’s column of attack. So it was that Longstreet’s powerful column plunged directly into a newly opened gap in the Union line. The next Federal division to the south of Wood’s had made a frantic last-minute effort to move into the gap but to no avail. Longstreet’s powerful column brushed them aside and burst into the Army of the Cumberland’s rear area virtually untouched. That rear area happened to occupy the clearing of a farmer named Dyer, a broad natural amphitheater ringed by hills and woods, and on this day occupied by the Army of the Cumberland’s reserve artillery, supply wagons, and headquarters. The commander of the lead Confederate division later described the scene before him as he and his men burst out of the woods into the Dyer Field. “The scene now presented was unspeakably grand. The resolute and impetuous charge, the rush of our heavy columns sweeping out from the shadow and gloom of the forest into the open fields flooded with sunlight, the glitter of arms, the onward dash of artillery and mounted men, the retreat of the foe, the shouts of the hosts of our army, the dust, the smoke, the noise of fire-arms—of whistling balls and grape-shot and of bursting shell—made up a battle scene of unsurpassed grandeur.”

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A few hundred yards away, on a knoll near the other side of the field, Rosecrans and his headquarters party had been startled by the sudden crescendo in the roar of battle directly in front of them, then the sight of the solid lines of Confederates sweeping out of the forest and into the field almost within rifle range of them. The army commander, a devout Catholic, despite his penchant for sulfurous language, gazed at the enemy in mute amazement, crossed himself, and called for the horses.22 Equine transport proved to be of significant advantage to Rosecrans and his staff, as well as to corps commanders Crittenden and McCook, who were also caught up in what turned out to be the complete collapse of the Union center and right. Thanks to their horses, Rosecrans and his two corps commanders reached Chattanooga well ahead of their men. Meanwhile, back on the battlefield, everything went to pieces for the Army of the Cumberland south of the gap where Longstreet had broken through. Individual units made brave and determined stands, and a number of sharp combats took place, but nothing on the badly disorganized Union right could stay the onslaught of Longstreet’s Confederates. Most of the Federal units quickly rallied as soon as they escaped the immediate presence of their pursuers, then turned about, ready to take on the Confederates again. A few brigades, especially on the north end of the Union disaster area, were able to win their way through to Thomas’s lines. Others, caught farther south, began a roundabout march via the Dry Valley Road in order to come up behind Thomas’s command, where the sound of intense firing indicated that Federal troops were still doggedly holding their ground. Most, however, followed Rosecrans up the Dry Valley Road all the way to Chattanooga. When Thomas learned of the disaster on the Union center and right, he hurriedly cobbled together a line facing south, using units that had escaped the collapse as well as his own reserves. Throughout the afternoon the Confederates hurled attack after attack at Thomas’s lines, both from Longstreet’s wing, now driving northward from the point of its breakthrough, and from Polk’s wing, which under Bragg’s direction renewed its assaults on the breastworks it had tried in vain to storm during the morning. Stubbornly Thomas’s men held on, repulsing every attack. Thomas wanted to remain on the field until nightfall and then retire under cover of darkness, but Rosecrans, who had arrived back in Chattanooga and was completely unmanned by the day’s events, sent him an order to withdraw at once. Reluctantly, Thomas gave the order to withdraw while an hour or so of daylight remained. The daylight withdrawal entailed more casualties, but for the most part Thomas’s force got away intact, its rearguard units firing final volleys through the gathering dusk at the Rebels who pressed after them.23 Bragg had won the Battle of Chickamauga, but it was Rosecrans who had accomplished his operational purpose in the clash of the two armies. Battered though it might be, the Army of the Cumberland had successfully reached Chattanooga, avoiding entrapment by Bragg’s larger army or piecemeal destruction while spread out in

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a vulnerable pursuit mode in northwestern Georgia. Since September 12, when he learned of Bragg’s aggressive intent, falling back on Chattanooga had been Rosecrans’s chief goal. The key to its accomplishment lay in the fact that it was the Union center and right that broke, not the left, which controlled access to Chattanooga. Rosecrans had sufficiently strengthened his left, and Bragg had been unable to get a timely and coordinated assault from his right wing. Thomas had stood firm, and so even in the midst of disaster, the defeated Army of the Cumberland had been able to fall back safely. A more vigorous Confederate pursuit would have accomplished nothing. The Federals were already secure on the southern outskirts of Chattanooga. Bragg knew, on the morning of September 21, that decisive victory had eluded him. Neither he nor either of his wing commanders was aware until some time after sunrise that the Union troops had completely left the Chickamauga battlefield. During the night, everyone had assumed that they had simply broken contact but were still lurking nearby. As best they could with an army more or less as badly battered as that of the defeated Federals, Bragg and his generals got their troops in motion and proceeded up the La Fayette Road toward Chattanooga to see where Rosecrans might decide to make a stand. Rosecrans, of course, was remaining safely in Chattanooga, but George Thomas with most of the Army of the Cumberland was holding Rossville Gap, where the La Fayette Road passed through 600-foot-high Missionary Ridge about four miles north of the previous day’s battlefield and seven from Chattanooga. The troops were full of fight, eager to avenge the previous day’s setback, and Rosecrans’s chief of staff, who was on the scene, urged him to come and take command in person. It was no use. Rosecrans was a badly beaten man. Instead of coming to Rossville Gap, he sent orders for Thomas to withdraw the army the rest of the way to Chattanooga. Similarly, when a Union detachment holding the summit of Lookout Mountain encountered Confederate forces advancing northeastward along its broad crest, Rosecrans ordered them to abandon the mountain to the Rebels without a fight and retreat into Chattanooga.24 By abandoning all the high ground around Chattanooga during the days immediately following Chickamauga, Rosecrans gave Bragg exactly what he had denied him in the battle itself: the opportunity to cut the Army of the Cumberland’s supply line and trap it in a potentially inextricable situation. Bragg immediately availed himself of the proffered gift, occupied Missionary Ridge, Lookout Mountain, and the valley on the far side of Lookout Mountain, and thereby cut off Rosecrans’s only really practical line of supply. That supply line passed through the gorge of the Tennessee River below (southwest) of Chattanooga. Steamboats could carry supplies on the river itself. Railroad tracks ran along the north bank, and so did a passable wagon road. All those routes were now impossible for the Federals, however, thanks to Confederate firepower on the south bank. All that remained for the Army of the Cumberland’s supply line was a miserable excuse for a wagon road that clawed its tortuous way over the rugged bulk of Walden’s Ridge north

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of Chattanooga before descending into Sequatchie Valley to complete a roundabout sixty-mile route to the Union railhead supply depot at Bridgeport, Alabama. Over the weeks that followed, the Army of the Cumberland’s mule teams strained, struggled, and died in droves hauling supplies over the wretched road, and they could not bring nearly enough. Rations became miserably short, and guards had to be posted over the corn that was fed to officers’ horses, lest the men steal that and the horses starve. “The continual gnawings of a growing appetite was a perpetual reminder of our condition,” recalled one of Rosecrans’s soldiers. Another wrote, “Possibly no set of men were more completely starved, during the war of the rebellion,” except for Union captives in Rebel prison camps. Under the constant hunger and its perpetual reminder that they were trapped, the Army of the Cumberland’s morale, which had remained strong in the wake of Chickamauga, finally began to falter. Back in Washington, Lincoln and Stanton, dismayed by the defeat at Chickamauga and even more so by Rosecrans’s behavior since then, contemplated their next move.25 Meanwhile, on the heights surrounding Chattanooga, the Army of Tennessee had in some ways a much different perspective than its Union counterpart. The scenery was impressive. Twenty-nine-year-old Lt. Joshua Callaway wrote to his wife Dulcinea back in Summerfield, Alabama, of the view from the top of Lookout Mountain, “The scene is sublime beyond conception. The height is so great that the country appears perfectly level. And the renowned Missionary Ridge looks precisely like a wave, about as high as your head, in an illimitable blue sea. I could not help thinking,” Callaway continued, “how travelers from all countries will come to stand on Lookout Mountain to see the valley of Chattanooga, and how that the poets and pointers of future generations will stand here to have their geniuses inspired, and then immortalize the scene and the mountain in song and on canvas.”26 Yet the day to day realities for the average Confederate soldier in that cold, wet autumn were not so pleasant, and Bragg’s men were not always much happier than Rosecrans’s. Posted as they were on rugged terrain, or with rugged terrain like Missionary Ridge or Lookout Mountain immediately to their rear, the Confederates in the ranks were not always receiving very ample rations either, thanks to the difficulty of hauling supplies by wagon from the nearest railhead, while the railroad, like virtually all those in the Confederacy, was none too good to begin with.27 Despite the victory at Chickamauga, the Rebels still found it hard to feel that a successful end to the war was anywhere in sight. The loss of Vicksburg and thus the Mississippi had worked powerfully on both soldiers and civilians from the Confederate Southwest. In the camp of the 7th Texas, with Bragg’s army, Maj. Khleber Van Zandt received a long letter from his wife Minerva, back in Marshall. “It seems to me this war will never end,” Minerva had written several weeks before. “I think it is as indefinite as when it first began.” Most Confederates would have said the same. Still they were determined to persevere—and hope for the best. Minerva closed her letter, “May God bless and preserve you is the prayer of your devoted & affectionate wife.”28

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Among the gray-clad generals, the spirit of bitterness and discontent was rampant. Two days after the battle of Chickamauga, Bragg sent a dispatch to Polk asking for an explanation of why Polk had not obeyed Bragg’s order for a day-dawn assault on the second day of the battle. Polk received Bragg’s missive the same day but chose to ignore it for almost a week, during which time he called together other high-ranking malcontents within the army to confer on the best way to get Jefferson Davis to relieve Bragg of command. By agreement with his fellow conspirators, Polk wrote letters to Davis and to Robert E. Lee, while Longstreet, who longed to have Bragg’s command for his own, wrote to Secretary of War James A. Seddon. All the letters denounced Bragg and demanded his immediate removal.29 When on September 28, Polk finally got around to answering Bragg’s query, he blamed the whole affair on D.H. Hill, who happened to be his fellow conspirator against Bragg. Bragg, who was quite reasonably dissatisfied with such an excuse, relieved Polk of his command and ordered him to Atlanta. It was, as Bragg pointed out, something he should have done a long time ago. Predictably, Davis came to the defense of his crony, first urging Bragg to countermand the order and then stating that Bragg had no right to relieve Polk of command unless he brought court-martial charges against him. Yet when Bragg complied and charged Polk with disobedience and neglect of duty, Davis, who had traveled to the western theater to look into matters personally, quashed the charges and would have ordered Polk to resume his place in Bragg’s army had not Polk refused to do so. Davis therefore assigned Polk to a command in Mississippi.30 The president did support Bragg against his other critics, though somewhat ineffectually. The nadir of his efforts was a showdown meeting of Davis, Bragg, and Bragg’s four bitterest enemies still with the army. Davis hoped that when confronted directly by the commander-in-chief, in Bragg’s presence, the generals would back down and express at least grudging support for Bragg. Led by Longstreet, however, the four proved as implacable as ever in their hostility to Bragg and said so openly. Davis departed for Richmond leaving the high command of the Army of Tennessee in worse disarray than ever.31 Meanwhile, Lincoln, Stanton, and Halleck were coming up with solutions for their problems. The first order of business was to reinforce the outnumbered Army of the Cumberland. At 2:30 a.m. on the morning of September 24, they issued orders for the transfer by rail of 23,000 troops from the Army of the Potomac. The eastern soldiers rode the rails for a total of 1,159 miles during the next nine days and by October 1, had reached Bridgeport, thirty-five miles from Chattanooga, ready to march on into the beleaguered town, forcing their way, if necessary, as soon as the problem of supply could be solved.32 That problem, however, might take more than mere numbers. There were indications, growing stronger every day, that new leadership was necessary for the Army of the Cumberland. Rosecrans had, in Lincoln’s apt phrase, been acting “confused and

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stunned, like a duck hit on the head,” ever since the battle of Chickamauga. It was time for him to go, Washington decided, and Crittenden and McCook could go with him. Thomas would take over command of the Army of the Cumberland, but for overall command of operations around Chattanooga, Lincoln and his advisors wanted the man who was rapidly emerging as the best general of the war. Accordingly, orders went out from Washington on the evening of October 16, creating an entity called the Military Division of the Mississippi, an overarching command encompassing all of the departments west of the Appalachians, and appointing Grant to command it.33 Even before arriving in Chattanooga, toward which he set out immediately, Grant ratified the removal of Rosecrans (the orders from Washington had left him the option of keeping that general) and sent an order to his friend Sherman, now commanding the Army of the Tennessee, to bring four divisions, about 20,000 men, to Chattanooga as rapidly as possible. Sherman’s men made an epic march almost the length of the state of Tennessee, despite muddy roads and bridges destroyed by guerrillas, reaching Bridgeport on November 13.34 By that time, Grant had already been in Chattanooga for three weeks. Lamed by a recent riding accident, Grant had with difficulty traversed the rugged wagon road across Walden’s Ridge in a storm of cold rain to encounter an even colder welcome at Thomas’s headquarters. Thomas was a strong supporter of Rosecrans and never understood Grant’s method of waging war. He disliked Grant and showed it. Grant gave no heed to such matters and got down to the business of raising Bragg’s quasi-siege of Chattanooga. In discussions with the Army of the Cumberland’s headquarters staff, he learned that Rosecrans’s chief engineer, Brig. Gen. William F. Smith, had worked out a plan to reopen the supply line down the Tennessee River gorge. Grant liked the plan, and, as he later said about a number of Rosecrans’s ideas, “My only wonder was that he had not carried them out.” Grant was just the man to carry out plans. He got the staff right to work making preparations. In the predawn hours of October 27, a brigade of Union infantry made a landing at Brown’s Ferry on the left bank of the Tennessee River in Lookout Valley and drove off the Confederate force there. The next day Grant’s engineers had a wagon road in service across the base of the peninsula formed by a bend that carried the Tennessee River to the foot of Lookout Mountain. Union supplies could henceforth travel up the Tennessee River unhindered by any Confederates in Lookout Valley and could then continue the journey into Chattanooga by wagon road, out of range of Confederate guns on Lookout Mountain. Two days later the detachment from the Army of the Potomac, commanded by Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker, marched into Lookout Valley from the west and linked up with the detachment of the Army of the Cumberland at Brown’s Ferry. With his thoroughly secure “cracker line,” as he called it, Grant could now afford to await Sherman’s arrival before dealing with Bragg.35 The loss of Lookout Valley and attendant opening of the Union cracker line was a serious disaster for the Confederates, and the manner in which it came about

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was another indication of the dysfunctional nature of the Army of Tennessee’s high command. Longstreet had the responsibility for the sector of the Confederate lines including Lookout Mountain and Lookout Valley. He did not even grasp the significance of what the army was doing around Chattanooga and so had no concept of the importance of Lookout Valley, which he held with an excessively small force. Bragg, probably shrinking from the open hostility of his subordinate, did not adequately inspect Longstreet’s sector of the lines. The result was an easy victory for the Federals in opening the Cracker Line.36 And that marked the abrupt end of any chance Bragg had of starving the Army of the Cumberland into surrender or disastrous retreat. He now had to come up with a different plan for the campaign, and none of his options was very attractive. Assuming he was unwilling to retreat and concede the campaign as another defeat, his choices were either to advance or to remain on the passive defensive. The latter was almost sure to end in disaster, since it would give Grant time to gather an overwhelming force and select the precise time and place of its employment. Passive defense had not served Pemberton well against Grant, and Bragg had no reason to think he would fare any better. That left advance as the only option, either frontal or by trying to turn one of Grant’s flanks. A frontal assault on the heavily fortified lines around Chattanooga would have been stark madness. A turning movement around Grant’s right—thus to the west of Chattanooga—would take Bragg’s force directly into the path of Sherman’s confident veterans. On the other hand, a turning movement around Grant’s left—into East Tennessee—would have to contend with Ambrose Burnside’s force around Knoxville, and that was clearly the best choice. The first step toward such a movement would be sending an advance force to deal with Burnside, much as Kirby Smith’s command had served as an advance force— albeit an out-of-control one—for Bragg’s 1862 turning movement that took him all the way into Kentucky. As an added benefit, sending a force to deal with Burnside was just the sort of thing that would please the Richmond authorities at this time. They were concerned with the presence of Union troops in East Tennessee and also, under Lee’s constant needling, they were anxious to get Longstreet’s detachment back to Virginia as soon as possible. Moving Longstreet to East Tennessee would place him that much closer to Virginia. Davis had even suggested as much in a letter to Bragg. So for Bragg the most natural move would be to send Longstreet and his two divisions of Army of Northern Virginia troops, along with various reinforcements, up into East Tennessee to get rid of Burnside and possibly clear the way for a major turning movement by Bragg’s entire army. As a final added benefit, such a course would remove Longstreet’s quarrelsome presence from the Army of Tennessee.37 Despite having so many points in its favor, the plan proved a dismal failure. Bragg issued orders for the movement on November 4, and Longstreet began complaining that very day and never let up. He moved slowly, fumbled away opportunities, and then sat down in front of Burnside at Knoxville in a siege far less effective than the

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one he had blundered away at Chattanooga. All the while he continued to bombard Bragg with requests for reinforcements. Thus stood matters in East Tennessee when time ran out for Bragg and affairs around Chattanooga finally came to a head.38 The weeks of delay waiting for Sherman to arrive and get his army into position had been fretful ones for Grant. From Washington came frequent missives of Halleck and others reminding him that he was expected not only to drive off the Confederate force around Chattanooga but also to bail Burnside out of his semi-confinement within the city of Knoxville and to do these things speedily. By late November all was at last in readiness. It had not been easy moving divisions around the Chattanooga area, especially since Grant’s lines had to cross the Tennessee River twice, and the pontoon bridges had a nasty habit of washing out when the water got especially high after some of the many heavy rains that marked those weeks. Grant’s plan called for Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland to threaten the Confederate center along Missionary Ridge. Hooker’s detachment—thanks to a recent shuffling now composed of one division from the Army of the Potomac, another from the Army of the Cumberland, and a third from the Army of the Tennessee—was to threaten the Confederate left flank on Lookout Mountain. Sherman’s detachment was to strike the decisive blow. Under cover of darkness it would land on the left bank of the Tennessee above Chattanooga and from its landing places would make a quick march to seize the upper end of Missionary Ridge, north of the Confederate lines. Thence it would sweep down the length of the ridge, rolling up the Confederate line. The Army of the Cumberland would join in the attack once it got well underway, and the Rebels, separated from the northern end of their line, would also be separated from their line of supply and communication, which passed close to the northern end of Missionary Ridge. Sherman’s landing took place on November 24 and proceeded exactly according to plan. Through a gloomy day of dark, low-hanging clouds and intermittent rain, Sherman’s men successfully reached the north end of Missionary Ridge before the Confederates could react to their presence. The day’s only unpleasant surprise for the men of the Army of the Tennessee was the discovery that Missionary Ridge was not quite the smooth, regular, continuous landform it had appeared when viewed from the heights on the other side of the river. Instead it was lumpy, its crest an undulating series of humps and shallow saddles. This tendency was much exaggerated at the north end, where the humps became so widely separated, and the saddles so deep, that the ridge seemed to end in a series of freestanding hills. Rebels met Sherman’s men on the southern-most of these hills, but the bluecoats chased them off and took sole possession as darkness was gathering. The task for the next day would be getting astride the more continuous segment of the ridge to the south and advancing along it as per Grant’s plan.39 While Sherman’s men had been about their task this day, Hooker’s had also been active. Grant’s original plan had not called for such action, but when a washed

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out bridge kept the three full divisions of Hooker’s command in Lookout Valley, Grant decided that such a force was too large to leave in idleness and so changed Hooker’s orders to include an attack on Lookout Mountain itself. The looming 1,400-foot bulk of the mountain seemed daunting indeed as Hooker’s men gazed up and caught glimpses of it through the murk, but as a defensive position it had serious shortcomings. Its cliff-rimmed crest was of no tactical use. The battle would be fought on the wooded slopes below. Yet, the mountain’s very bulk made it difficult to defend. The Confederates simply did not have enough men to cover it all. Hooker’s troops succeeded in getting on the slope south of the Confederate flank and then driving northward along the shoulder of the mountain, rolling up the defenders. As they passed around the northern point of the mountain they came within sight of the thousands of watching troops of both armies in the valley of Chattanooga itself. The fact that low-hanging fog sometimes obscured the fighting led newspapermen to dub the affair “the battle above the clouds.” By the evening of November 24, as Sherman’s men were taking up their position on the detached hills at the northern end of Missionary Ridge, Hooker’s were driving the last of the Confederates off the lower slopes of Lookout Mountain’s northeastern side and had made contact with the Army of the Cumberland’s lines around Chattanooga.40 November 25 was to be the decisive day. Grant’s orders were for Sherman to launch his attack at daylight and begin rolling up the Confederate line along Missionary Ridge, Thomas to join him with an assault on the front of Missionary Ridge once Sherman’s advance was well underway, and Hooker to clear the summit of Lookout Mountain then march down into the valley, cross Chattanooga Creek, and attack the southern end of Missionary Ridge, adding to Bragg’s discomfiture. The attack got under way as Grant had ordered, but then events quickly demonstrated the truth of the dictum that “no plan survives contact with the enemy.” Such was the case on Missionary Ridge. Sherman’s men crossed the deep saddle between their position and the continuous portion of the ridge and gained the crest without difficulty. So far so good. They soon found, however, that they could not successfully advance along the crest. A few hundred yards to the south of them, up a gentle slope of the ridge top, the Confederates had built breastworks on a small knoll known as Tunnel Hill, since it stood directly over the tunnel that carried the railroad through Missionary Ridge. The defenders belonged to a brigade of Texans in Maj. Gen. Patrick R. Cleburne’s division—perhaps the best brigade in the best division in the Army of Tennessee, and under the direction of its best division commander. Worse, however, was the fact that the mountainous landscape around Chattanooga seemed to turn all the rules of Civil War tactical terrain inside-out and upside-down. Attacking along the ridge should have made the Federals’ job easy. Instead, they found that the slopes fell away so steeply on either side of the narrow crest (only a few dozen yards of more or less level ground) that only the troops who were actually on the crest could get into the fight, and they found themselves charging up a narrow corridor,

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almost like a giant bowling alley, advancing across a prime field of fire against wellbuilt and heavily manned breastworks. This was Chickasaw Bayou all over again, and as had been the case eleven months before, the attackers had no chance. Nor could the problem be solved by using superior numbers and attacking Tunnel Hill from three sides at once. In order to get into position for such an assault, the attackers had to march around the broad base of the ridge, in plain sight of Cleburne’s defenders the whole way, while Cleburne could easily shift his troops around his compact hilltop position. Sherman’s men fought doggedly throughout the day, but the position, manned as it was by Bragg’s best troops, was all but impregnable. At the other end of the Union line, Grant’s plan ran into a different sort of complication. Hooker’s men found the summit of Lookout Mountain vacant, having been evacuated by the Rebels during the night. The Federals raised their flag there early on the morning of the twenty-fifth, drawing cheers from the troops in Chattanooga below. Hooker promptly put his men on the march for the southern flank of Bragg’s position on Missionary Ridge, but at Chattanooga Creek, midway across the valley between Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, the march came to a halt. The retreating Rebels had thoroughly destroyed the bridge, and there was nothing for Hooker to do but wait until his men could build a makeshift replacement. As the short late-November afternoon waned without any sign of Union success, Grant, watching the development of the battle from a hill called Orchard Knob, between Chattanooga and Missionary Ridge, became increasingly impatient. He suggested to Thomas, who was standing nearby, that perhaps it might be time for the Army of the Cumberland to attack the Rebel center, but Thomas ignored him. More minutes passed. Finally Grant had had enough and flatly ordered Thomas to start the planned offensive movement by assaulting and taking a line of Confederate rifle pits at the base of the ridge. True, the original plan called for Sherman to be advancing triumphantly along the crest by the time Thomas’s men stormed up the slopes, but that would have to give way to reality. If the Confederates were not weak at the north end of the ridge, perhaps they were weak here in its center. As in the long campaign against Vicksburg, Grant would probe until he found a weakness. In fact, the Confederates were not weak in this sector in terms of manpower. Cleburne had needed no reinforcements in his narrow position, and the line here had not been thinned as Grant hoped. However, this sector did have two very significant weaknesses. The first was a matter of terrain. Once again, the steep landscape of the Chattanooga, with its gigantic landforms, area reversed many of the tactical maxims that had applied on the more gentle slopes and smaller elevations where the armies had fought most of their previous battles. Along the long, straight stretch of Missionary Ridge in the Confederate center, the steep slopes actually offered cover for attackers advancing up them. The folds and undulations in the sides of the ridge increased the amount and extent of such areas that could not be covered by fire from the crest. Also, the narrowness of the crest insured that the Confederate defensive position would be

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shallow and that it would be difficult to shift defenders to threatened areas. In short, all of the factors that worked in favor of the defender facing an attack along the length of the ridge were reversed and favored the attacker when the assault was launched by a massed line striking the ridge broadside. The other weakness in the Confederate center was a matter of generalship. No Confederate general in the center—nor all of them combined, for that matter, including Bragg himself, whose headquarters were there—could match Cleburne’s tactical skill. In none of its previous battles had the Army of Tennessee stood on the defensive to receive a Federal attack, and it now became apparent that neither Bragg nor his subordinates were very good at it. The lines in the Confederate center were poorly placed, often running along the geographical crest of the ridge, rather than a few dozen yards down the front slope where they would have commanded a greater field of fire. As a result, the zones of safe ground on the front slope of the ridge were even bigger than they otherwise would have been. In some places attackers could take cover in almost complete safety only a few yards from the Confederate breastworks and there gather themselves for a final rush. A further blunder lay in placing some of the defenders in the rifle pits at the base of the ridge. The line there was too weak to hold against an attack, and its soldiers would have to flee directly up the slope, further obstructing their comrades’ field of fire against attackers who might well be right behind them. None of this was known to Grant and Thomas as they prepared for the attack. Thomas was glumly obeying orders, and Grant was determined to test the hypothesis that the Army of Tennessee’s center might in some way be weaker than its flanks. Thomas arrayed four divisions of his Army of the Cumberland, some 23,000 men, in fine order on the plain in front of the ridge. The firm ranks and steadfast appearance of the Federals began to disquiet the defenders even before the order to advance passed down the ranks and the long line marched steadily forward toward the base of the ridge. Predictably Thomas’s men crushed Confederate resistance at the rifle pits, but then confusion arose. Thomas, often praised for his habitual thoroughness of preparation, had not seen to it that his division commanders knew the objective of their attack. In fact, Grant had apparently intended the attackers to pause at the base of the ridge and re-form their ranks before he gave the order for the final advance to the crest. Some of Thomas’s officers had that understanding of their orders. Others thought they were to press on to the crest at once, and some had no idea at all as to where they were to halt. The divisions performed accordingly, some plunging immediately up the slope on the heels of the fleeing defenders of the rifle pits, others briefly halting. Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan, commanding one of the divisions, had sent a staff officer to the rear for clarification of the order. His men were half-way up when the staffer returned with orders to halt at the rifle pits, and Sheridan had to order his men to turn around and come back down.

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Yet remaining at the rifle pits turned out to be impractical since the ground there was well within range of Confederate artillery and small arms on the crest. Staying there would be more dangerous than advancing, at least at first, and those at the base of the ridge could see their comrades in neighboring divisions already pressing up the slopes above them. Officers like Sheridan took little time in deciding to turn a blind eye to their orders and send their own men up the ridge too. Having just reached the foot of the slope again after their first, abortive climb, Sheridan’s men turned and started back up again. Viewed from the vantage point of Orchard Knob, the attack had none of the fine order and closed ranks that had characterized the advance across the plain toward the rifle pits. Loose swarms of men worked their way upward, braving enemy fire when necessity demanded, flowing upward through sheltered folds and ravines when they could. Often the advancing swarms took on something of the geometry of flocks of migratory birds—large, ragged V-formations, with the strongest men, and often the colors, climbing ahead of the others at the point of the V while their slower comrades trailed off to either side, making the best speed they could. Despite the sheltered areas, many attackers fell to Confederate fire, and some collapsed from sheer exhaustion. The 24th Wisconsin Regiment lost several color bearers in quick succession, and when the flag went down again, eighteen-year-old Lt. Arthur MacArthur picked it up and raced ahead of his regiment shouting, “On, Wisconsin!” Similar acts of heroism occurred all along the slope. The attackers surged over the Confederate breastworks in half a dozen places almost simultaneously, and the Rebel line, shallow as it was and devoid of reserves, simply went to pieces. Here and there knots of determined Confederates fought stubbornly. The color guard of the 24th Tennessee fought to the last man and were later found piled around the fallen flag. Many Rebel cannoneers kept their guns firing until the Union infantry overran their batteries. Attempting to rally his men of Company K, 28th Alabama, Lt. Joshua Callaway took a bullet in the abdomen. Several of his men picked him up and tried to carry him off the field amid the rout, but Callaway asked them to lay him down and let him die. They placed him on the ground and then joined their comrades in flight.41 Elsewhere on the crest, Bragg himself tried to rally his men, shouting, “Here’s your commander!” It was too late for that, however, and the men kept running down the back slope of the ridge. Within the half hour of so of daylight that remained after Union troops gained the crest, resistance collapsed all along the Confederate center. Simultaneously, Hooker had finally gotten his command across the creek and struck the Rebel left, rolling it up and taking hundreds of prisoners. As darkness gathered, Cleburne’s men, for the moment almost the only intact Confederate formation on the field, covered the retreat of their routed comrades.42 The next day Cleburne’s division held a strong defensive position at Ringgold Gap, Georgia, twelve miles south of Missionary Ridge, and repulsed a pursuing

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Union force under Hooker’s command. Thereafter the Army of Tennessee continued its retreat unmolested to Dalton, Georgia, more than twenty-five miles from the scene of its disaster outside Chattanooga. It was a discouraging retreat for the Confederates. “Captain, this is the death knell of the Confederacy,” blurted a disheartened lieutenant as he trudged south with Bragg’s army. “If we cannot cope with those fellows with the advantages we had on this line, there is not a line between here and the Atlantic Ocean where we can stop them.” His company commander could not deny the truth of this dismal assessment, but ordered the dejected subaltern to keep quiet about it.43 Grant could not afford to pursue Bragg as he would have liked to have done. Rather he had to bear in mind Lincoln’s constant admonitions to relieve Burnside and the Unionist citizens of East Tennessee. He dispatched the Fourth Corps (a recently reorganized combination of the old Twentieth and Twenty-first corps) and Sherman’s detachment to see to the matter. That force, well over 40,000 men, was more than adequate to chase Longstreet out of the Knoxville area. Several days earlier the Confederate had in any case made a mismanaged attack on the Knoxville lines, only to suffer a bloody repulse. With the approach of Sherman’s much larger force, Longstreet quite sensibly made off in the direction of southwestern Virginia. Far off in Richmond, the always astute diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut read of the developments in East Tennessee and noted, “Detached from General Lee, what a horrible failure, what a slow old humbug is Longstreet.”44 With that, the 1863 campaign in the West came to an end. Its conclusion presented a dramatic contrast to the situation a year earlier. Union forces had taken the Mississippi and driven the Confederates completely out of Tennessee. A Confederate army of more than 30,000 men had been forced to surrender at Vicksburg, and an even larger one had been routed at Chattanooga. Union forces now stood poised to advance into what had been called the “Empire State of the South.” Georgia was a vital component of the Confederacy both in terms of population and production. It now lay threatened directly by Grant’s armies poised near Chattanooga, and no one could have harbored any doubts as to what the objective of those armies would be as soon as spring brought roads dry enough for marching again. Atlanta was the obvious target—far too valuable as an industrial city, rail hub, and prestige for the Confederacy to tolerate its loss. The campaigns of 1863 present a stark contrast between the eastern and western theaters. While the western Union armies were conquering a large piece of the continent, the Union’s main army in the East, the Army of the Potomac, had fought bloody battles at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg and smaller brushes at Bristow Station and Mine Run, yet it still remained encamped on the north bank of the Rappahannock, more or less just where it had been a year before. Geography, politics, and personalities all combined to make the eastern theater perennially indecisive. The West, by contrast, offered strategic targets as significant as those in the East, along with the breadth of territory necessary for a general to make superior numbers

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or superior generalship count in the final outcome. In both the Vicksburg and the Chattanooga campaigns, Grant had shown not only tenacity and strength of will but also a keen ability to analyze operational situations and determine what would be necessary in order to achieve victory. Then he showed great skill in trying various solutions to the problem thus presented until he hit on the right one, finding and exploiting the enemy’s weakness. On the Confederate side, however, the problems with generals that had prevailed throughout the war in the West, seemed no closer to solution, an ominous sign for the coming year’s campaign.

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Six

ij WINTER INTERLUDE, 1864

During the five-month interlude between the close of the 1863 campaign and the beginning of major operations in the West in the spring of 1864, both sides adjusted their command structures and made preparations for the struggle that was certain to begin as soon as the roads were dry. On the Confederate side there could be no doubt now that Braxton Bragg had to go. He knew it himself. Indeed, he had offered his resignation before the Battle of Chattanooga, but Davis had not accepted it. Now Bragg offered it again, and this time the president was ready to let him go. To fill Bragg’s place, at least for the time being, Davis chose Hardee, senior general present with the army, now that Polk was in Mississippi and Longstreet on his way back to Virginia. Hardee, however, did not want the job. He naturally tended to shy from responsibility and much preferred to criticize army commanders than to be one himself. Besides, the forty-eight-year-old widower had plans for a wedding in Mobile, Alabama, that winter, and if he held the top command in the army, it would be impossible for him to get the necessary furlough. As he and others had done in the weeks before Missionary Ridge, he urged Davis instead to give the command of the Army of Tennessee to Joseph Johnston. Had the Confederate president been the sort of man who tended to think his enemies were in league against him, which he was, he could easily have wondered if Hardee and the others were not pressing this advice on him merely because they knew how distasteful Johnston was to him. So far in the war Johnston had sent Davis an abusive letter complaining about rank, retreated unnecessarily in Virginia, all but

95

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refused to fight in front of Richmond, bungled the Battle of Seven Pines when Davis finally goaded him into action, complained incessantly about Davis’s arrangement of unified command for the western theater, balked at reinforcing Vicksburg when Davis thought it necessary, failed to take action to relieve Vicksburg when Grant had it under siege, and then carried on a contentious exchange of letters with Davis trying to shift blame for the fact that he had done nothing in Mississippi that summer. He had yet to win a single battle or to make any significant contribution to Confederate success. Yet his reputation remained impressive and Davis was not immune to it. Johnston had been highly regarded in the prewar U.S. Army. He looked like a general, and in manners he was as pleasant to his subordinates as he was churlish to his commanderin-chief. With a lingering faith in the prewar estimate of Johnston’s military prowess, and under the pressure of numerous recommendations, Davis finally succumbed and appointed the Virginian to command the Army of Tennessee. Thereafter Davis and Johnston spent the early months of 1864 arguing about how the army should be organized and what it should do. Johnston wanted the Army of Tennessee organized into three corps. Davis said two were enough. One of the two corps lacked a commander, and Johnston nominated several generals of questionable abilities and checkered records. Davis brushed them aside and instead assigned John B. Hood, dashing commander first of the Texas Brigade and then of a division in Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Hood had lost the use of an arm at Gettysburg and had received at Chickamauga a wound necessitating the amputation of one of his legs. During his convalescence in Richmond he had cultivated the personal friendship of the president. Davis wanted the Army of Tennessee to advance early in the spring, resuming the offensive in the country’s mid-section that had been the purpose of the transfer of troops to Bragg the previous summer. Indeed, Davis was advocating yet again what had been the chief Confederate goal in the West since the debacles of forts Henry and Donelson, the great offensive that would roll back the Union tide west of the Appalachians and restore what the Confederacy had lost there. He offered to send reinforcements to Johnston if the general would undertake to use his strengthened command in such an effort. Johnston urged the president to go ahead and send the reinforcements so that he could be more secure on the defensive. Davis replied that Johnston would get the troops only if he would promise to advance. This was reasonable since it would be one thing to thin the lines elsewhere in support of an offensive that would throw the Federals off balance and absorb their attention, but it would be another thing entirely to bolster Johnston’s passive army at the expense of other sectors that the enemy could then crush at his leisure. Johnston never saw it that way. In his concept, the proper course was for the president to reinforce his army to the maximum possible size while it remained stationary in a strong position, waiting for the enemy to be so cooperative as to attack it frontally. His

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frustration throughout the war was that he could never get either his own president or his opposing generals to operate on that program. At any rate, the bickering went on between Davis and Johnston all the way up until the beginning of operations made such matters a mute point. It did not auger well for the coming campaign. Feelings were much better on the Union side, where the chief concern was how to parlay the splendid victories of 1863 into continued successes that would finally put an end to the rebellion. Only two strategic objectives of any significance remained in the western theater. One was the port city of Mobile, Alabama, and the other was Atlanta. Grant wanted to move on Mobile immediately after the close of operations in East Tennessee, rather than going into winter quarters, but the authorities in Washington nixed the idea. They were still concerned about Longstreet, lurking somewhere in the mountains northeast of Knoxville. Mobile would have to wait until spring. If he could not move at once against Mobile, Grant hoped to use the winter months to prepare the strategic landscape of the western theater for what he expected to be the main effort in the West the following spring, the great advance against Atlanta. To insure that the Rebels elsewhere in the West would not be in a position to seize the initiative and distract Union forces from the drive on Atlanta, Grant determined to break up as much as possible of the Confederate military and logistic infrastructure of the Mississippi Valley. Thus when he met with Sherman in Memphis in December 1863, Grant was highly receptive to Sherman’s suggestion that he be allowed to take a large portion of his Army of the Tennessee and make a foray deep into the interior of Mississippi— much deeper than the previous summer’s operations had taken Union forces. This raid was to be aimed at the town of Meridian, the key rail junction and supply depot for the Confederate army in the state. If the Rebels were to make trouble in the Mississippi Valley, they would use Meridian as their base. Sherman wanted to take that away from them, and Grant agreed.1 During the month of January 1864, Sherman gathered two divisions of the Sixteenth Corps and two of the Seventeenth at Vicksburg, some 27,000 men in all. He also arranged for a force of 7,000 cavalry under Maj. Gen. William Sooy Smith to cooperate with him out of Memphis. Sherman’s column took up its march on February 3. Confederate cavalry harassed them and inflicted a few casualties, but Sherman’s veterans gave as good as they got and easily brushed aside their would-be tormentors. So little did the Confederate horsemen impede their progress that they were able to live off the land, and they fared well. A soldier of the 15th Illinois became quite a connoisseur of hams, writing that the Southern people were superior to northerners when it came to curing ham because they used more saltpeter and molasses. He certainly had tasted enough southern hams to know whereof he wrote. Sherman had no objection to his men’s taking such food as they needed from civilians. White southerners had, he told one of them who complained, “brought the war on themselves, and they must bear the consequences.”2

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The consequences could also include varying degrees of loss of nonmovable property. Sherman’s orders called for the destruction of railroad tracks, bridges, depots, factories, storehouses, and other targets of military or industrial significance. Fairly regularly, barns, gin houses, and the like burned, as did a number of private dwellings, though such acts were less common. Most of the soldiers disapproved of burning houses. “Just who set the fires none of us could tell,” wrote Wisconsin solider Hosea Rood. “A building here and there would be seen with the flames just bursting through windows or roof, and that is all any of us knew about it.” Illinois soldier Lucius Barber believed the acts of arson were committed by “gangs of ruffians, who always followed the wake of armies, to pillage and destroy.” Civilians could be, and were, confident that their persons were immune to violence or assault from the soldiers. Women generally remained at home and did not flee the army’s approach, and the policy was a wise one. Soldiers were far less likely to burn a house whose occupants were at home than one whose inhabitants had fled.3 As the blue-clad column continued its march, it began to grow a tail of a very different nature. From plantations and farms for some miles on either side of the route, slaves slipped away to follow the Union army and soon formed a growing column stretching for miles behind Sherman’s army. They came on mules, farm wagons, buggies, or on foot and included males and females ranging in age from the very young to the very old, despite warnings that the army lacked adequate capability to feed or transport them. Thousands upon thousands of the South’s supposedly contented slaves, unwilling to await the end of the war for their freedom, chose instead to follow the first Union army that passed close enough for them to hear of it, and they followed without any idea as to where the army was going. They were going to freedom, and that was good enough. When a Union soldier asked a black youth where he was going with his small bundle of personal possessions, the lad’s reply, as the soldier tried to write it out phonetically, was, “I’m gui-in to glory, marster.”4 Thus Sherman’s army continued its march day by day, the front of the column skirmishing more or less continuously with Confederate cavalry, foragers picking up food on the flanks, and a long train of freedom-seeking blacks following in its wake. Leonidas Polk had two divisions of Confederate infantry in Mississippi but chose, probably wisely, not to challenge Sherman’s advance. On the afternoon of February 14, Sherman’s troops marched into Meridian, and for the next five days his men worked hard at destroying the town’s capacity to serve as a base for Confederate military operations. Facilities on the standard list of military-industrial targets were consigned to the flames and food stocks deemed in excess of each family’s own needs were confiscated. On the other hand, Sherman had guards posted at houses to prevent excessive depletion of their victuals or unauthorized incendiarism. Such measures were effective most of the time, but some free-lance destruction did occur. The one part of Sherman’s plan that had not worked perfectly was that of Sooy Smith’s cavalry. Sherman could not understand why Smith did not join him as planned

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in Meridian. He eventually decided he could wait no longer and so marched his army back to Vicksburg. In fact, Smith had badly mismanaged the cavalry portion of the operation, becoming frightened of the Confederate cavalry commander in northern Mississippi, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and retreating without significant combat. No matter, Sherman’s infantry had accomplished all that he had desired for the raid. The expedition reached Vicksburg on March 3, ragged and dirty but with scarcely any losses to speak of. The campaign had seriously crippled Confederate capacity to create mischief in Mississippi during the coming months, and it had showed the destruction a Union army could wreak if marched across a Confederate countryside. Yet in one respect the Meridian raid worked together with a current policy of the government in Washington to create an effect that was not beneficial to Union efforts in the coming campaign in Georgia. The three-year enlistments of the Union regiments that had mustered in during the summer and fall of 1861 were set to expire during the midst of the campaigning season of 1864, with results that could be disastrous for Union arms when the most experienced troops left the armies in the midst of active operations. To avoid such a catastrophe, the authorities in Washington had instituted a policy by which soldiers whose enlistments were set to expire in 1864 could reenlist early, during the winter months, and as a bonus for such reenlistment, they were to be entitled to thirty days’ furlough in their home towns. Throughout February and March 1864 many regiments from various Union armies were taking their furloughs. The four divisions that took part in the Meridian campaign, however, were not able to do so and therefore their re-enlistees—a large percentage of their numbers—were still entitled to such leave afterward. The result was that these divisions were not ready for action again until several weeks after the main spring campaign against Atlanta had begun. Their presence at the outset might have made a difference. A final raid during the early spring of 1864 had even more pernicious effects with none of the compensating benefits the Meridian campaign had brought. Lincoln had for some time been wanting to get Union troops into Texas in order to send a message to French Emperor Napoleon III, who was deeply involved in an imperial adventure in Mexico, propping up Emperor Maximillian with French troops in blatant violation of the Monroe Doctrine. This desire on Lincoln’s part had already led to some operations that did not make very much sense from the point of view of defeating the Confederacy. The spring of 1864 saw the largest such operation, a foray by Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks’s of the Department of the Gulf, which already included one corps of Grant’s old Army of the Tennessee and, for this operation, borrowed the equivalent of another—a three-division detachment under the command of Maj. Gen. A. J. Smith. Banks’s expedition was to go up the Red River and serve the major Confederate base at Shreveport much the way Sherman had served Meridian. Then it was to continue into Texas and show the flag there. All along the way, in both

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Louisiana and Texas, it was to seize as much cotton as possible for the hungry textile mills of New England. Both the concept and the commander—Banks—were questionable, to say the least. A.J. Smith’s command was earmarked to take part in the grand advance against Atlanta in the spring, and it was important that those divisions not be delayed with dilatory campaigning in the wilds of the trans-Mississippi. Besides that, Grant, who in March 1864 had taken up his new duties as overall commander of all the Union armies, would have preferred to use Banks’s force to carry out the long-deferred attack on Mobile. He sent Banks orders to hurry up with his Red River goose chase and get back east of the Mississippi in time to move against Mobile simultaneously with the big push against Atlanta, which was now scheduled to be commanded by Sherman. That would have meant severely truncating the Red River expedition and moving with great speed and efficiency. Banks was unwilling to do the former and unable to do the latter. His expedition progressed slowly and then experienced a humiliating defeat at the April 8, 1864, battle of Mansfield, Louisiana. Only the presence of the redoubtable A.J. Smith and his hardcore veterans saved Banks from another drubbing the next day. His army retreated down the Red, harassed all the way by the victorious Rebels. By the time he got back to the Mississippi it was too late either to launch a synchronized movement against Mobile or to get A.J. Smith’s detachment back to Sherman in time for the start of the Atlanta campaign. The winter of 1863–1864 had been one of mixed success for both sides. Davis had once again managed to set up the Confederacy’s second-largest army with a commander whom he did not trust and, in this case, one with whom he shared an intense mutual dislike. He had failed to goad Johnston into taking the initiative with an early spring campaign. Whether such a campaign would have been a good idea or not can be debated endlessly—and probably will by Civil War historians—but the circumstances surrounding its nonoccurrence showed just how flawed was the relationship between Davis and Johnston. Neither trusted the other, and they had fundamentally different ideas about how the Confederacy should wage this war. The Union high command that winter was in many respects a study in contrasts to that of their opponents. Grant would bring unified command to all of the Union armies. His top subordinate in the West, and successor as commander of the Military Division of the Mississippi, was Sherman, his best friend in the army. The two might occasionally think somewhat differently in strategic terms, but they genuinely liked and trusted each other and would work superbly well together. Union strategy in the West might be hindered by occasional minor distractions like the Red River Campaign, but overall it remained strongly focused on the next season’s advance on Atlanta, the one remaining great goal of Union operations west of the Appalachians. Yet the winter’s peripheral operations had their cost. The Meridian Campaign had combined with the government’s reenlistment furlough policy to delay the availability of two divisions of the Seventeenth Corps, and the Red River Campaign had kept

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another division of the Seventeenth Corps and two of the Sixteenth—to say nothing of Banks’s own troops—occupied in operations that would not have brought Union victory any closer even if they had been successful. In all, the winter campaigns had subtracted five of Sherman’s best divisions from the force with which he would begin his advance on Atlanta and they had assured that no simultaneous advance on Mobile would distract Confederate attention while Sherman went for the big prize.

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102

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Seven

ij THE ATLANTA CAMPAIGN

The spring of 1864 brought an important change to the Union high command in the West. Lincoln had at last recognized Grant as the general he had been seeking for three years. With the president’s approval, Congress resurrected the rank of lieutenant general—last held by George Washington—and then Lincoln appointed Grant to fill it as commanding general of all the Union armies. Sherman urged Grant to exercise his new command from the western theater, making his headquarters with the combined western armies as he had done in the Chattanooga Campaign. It was not a bad idea. Command relations would have been cordial and efficient, better than Grant experienced in the East, and Grant’s superior talent—when it came to trapping an enemy army, he really had no equal in the war—might have brought decisive results early in the 1864 campaign. On the other hand, Grant believed, rightly, that Lincoln and the northern public expected him to go to Virginia for a showdown with Robert E. Lee. The political pressures on the top Union general in the East would always be such as to hamstring his efforts unless he was an extremely strong individual with an enormous stock of public and presidential confidence. Only Grant fit that bill. So he went East, leaving Sherman to take over as commander of the Military Division of the Mississippi. Yet with Grant in overall command of the Union armies, all of them would now be operating on a concerted plan. Grant’s program for the spring operations in 1864 represented the Union’s first coordinated offensive, designed to hit the Confederacy from every possible angle at the same time. While Grant accompanied Meade’s

103

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Army of the Potomac in a relentless drive toward Lee’s army and Richmond, two secondary Union armies, one under political general Benjamin Butler and the other under political general Franz Sigel were to threaten Richmond’s strategic flanks. Yet, another political general, Banks, would advance against Mobile, and Sherman, leading the combined force of the Army of the Tennessee, Army of the Cumberland, and Army of the Ohio (the last of which had been Burnside’s force at Knoxville), about 100,000 men in all, would advance from near Chattanooga with the goal of defeating Johnston’s Army of Tennessee and capturing Atlanta. As events played out, the Union offensive was not as coordinated as Grant had hoped, largely thanks to the lack of skills on the part of his political-general subordinates. Butler and Sigel’s drives fizzled out and then ended in defeat, and Grant was left, with only Meade’s army, to batter his way toward Richmond as best he could. In the West Sherman faced similar difficulties. Banks’s Mobile operation never even got underway, and this changed the strategic situation in which Sherman had to plan his campaign. His original plan had called for the entire Army of the Tennessee, now under the command of the charming and brilliant young Maj. Gen. James B. McPherson, to advance from its winter camps in northern Alabama directly against the town of Rome, Georgia, behind Johnston’s left flank. The Army of the Tennessee had shown itself to be the Union’s fastest moving and hardest hitting army. Sherman referred to it as his “whiplash” and preferred to use it for operations that required those characteristics. The new, post-Red River state of affairs, however, led Sherman to modify his plans. The Army of the Tennessee would now be short some five divisions, about half its strength. Also, Leonidas Polk’s Confederate army in Mississippi, which was supposed to have been distracted by the campaign against Mobile, would now be completely free to turn its attention eastward and fall on the flank of any Union force that advanced on Rome. Sherman was therefore unwilling to send the weakened Army of the Tennessee into what might well prove to be a trap. Johnston’s position in front of Dalton, with troops dug in along a height known as Rocky Face Ridge, was impregnable against frontal assault, so that was not an option. Instead, Sherman decided to use a turning maneuver but a more modest one. Instead of sending McPherson directly from northern Alabama to Rome, he would bring the Army of the Tennessee’s troops up through Chattanooga and then send them south, around Johnston’s left flank and through a mountain defile called Snake Creek Gap so as to reach Johnston’s rear area—and supply line—near the town of Resaca, Georgia, just north of the Oostenaula River. They would break Johnston’s supply line, and when he turned against them, as he must, the rest of Sherman’s force would fall on him and destroy his army.1 The campaign opened in early May, with the Army of the Tennessee marching rapidly through Chattanooga and down to Snake Creek Gap while Sherman’s other

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two armies feigned attacks on Johnston’s lines on Rocky Face Ridge. Johnston remained blissfully ignorant of the threat to his supply line while McPherson’s men marched unopposed through the gap. Partially this was due to Johnston’s innate passivity and partially it was thanks to Sherman’s skill in covering the movement with feints and diversionary attacks, so that Johnston was not sure whether it was his left, right, or center that was to be the target of the main Union effort.2 Not until on May 9, as McPherson’s army was debouching from the gap and heading for the vulnerable Confederate railroad lifeline just north of Resaca, did Johnston’s headquarters realize what was afoot, and then it was too late to stop it. The only troops in McPherson’s way consisted of a scratch force of gray-clad infantry and cavalry, perhaps 4,000 men at most, scarcely a fifth of McPherson’s numbers. They skirmished gamely but could hardly slow the Army of the Tennessee’s advance.3 Then something unexpected happened. It developed that McPherson, though undeniably bright and gifted, a splendid staff officer and a first-rate corps-commander, was not a natural for a semi-independent command of this nature. There were too many unknowns, too many possible contingencies that could be disastrous for his army. If only he had more cavalry and could get better reconnaissance about just how the enemy was deployed at the moment and how he might be reacting to this penetration. Perhaps large Rebel forces were in front of him. Perhaps they were bearing down from their positions around Rocky Face. McPherson took counsel of his misgivings and ordered his men to halt only a few hundred yards short of the railroad and then fall back toward Snake Creek Gap. Not until he had his army drawn up well back into the mouth of the gap and hard at work entrenching did he breathe easier.4 When Sherman learned that McPherson had failed to break Johnston supply line, he decided swing most of the rest of his army down through Snake Creek Gap to join him in threatening Johnston’s communications. By May 12 Sherman himself, with most of his force, was on hand with McPherson in front of Resaca, but by that time the Rebels had also adjusted to the situation and most of Johnston’s troops were present to hold the town and its bridges across the Oostenaula. The first major formation of Confederate troops to arrive at Resaca had come not from Johnston’s army up at Rocky Face but rather from Mississippi. Once it became apparent that Sherman was on the move, Johnston had appealed to Richmond for reinforcements. Davis had responded by ordering Leonidas Polk to go to Johnston’s aid with as many troops as he thought the Mississippi district could spare. Eager to keep as many troops under his own command as possible, Polk took almost the entire Confederate strength in Mississippi, more than 14,000 men, and the first 10,000 or so were in Resaca in time to give the town its first real chance of fighting off a Union attack.5 By May 13 both armies were in place around Resaca, and as they did throughout the campaign that followed, any time they halted for more than a couple of hours in the same place, they began to dig elaborate entrenchments and field works. Over

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the next two days, Sherman prodded Johnston’s lines forcefully, and Johnston struck back in kind, neither side gaining any significant advantage. To the west of the fortified Confederate bridgehead around Resaca, however, Union forces did accomplish something of importance. On the morning of May 14, a division of the Army of the Tennessee moved downstream from Resaca and used pontoon boats to stage a successful cross-river assault and seize a beachhead on the south bank against spirited Confederate opposition. McPherson’s men soon had a pontoon bridge in place and were rapidly expanding their position as more troops tramped across the swaying spans. With Federals on the south bank in force, Johnston’s position around Resaca was untenable, and he ordered his army to retreat across the Oostenaula during the night of May 15–16. By 3:30 a.m. the crossing was complete. Shortly after daybreak Sherman’s men were pouring across several pontoon and repaired bridges. The Union commander was chagrined that Johnston had escaped entrapment at Resaca. Yet the Federal success thus far in the campaign had been important. Johnston’s lines on Rocky Face Ridge had been just over ninety miles from downtown Atlanta. The Oostenaula River at Resaca was less than seventy-five. In ten days’ campaign Sherman had covered one-sixth of the distance to his goal. More significantly, he had crossed one of the three rivers that formed natural barriers to his march. The Etowah and the Chattahoochee still lay ahead, along with an impressive range of mountains. As his army marched south from Resaca, Johnston hoped he could turn and make a stand near Calhoun, Georgia, a little more than five miles south of Resaca and still quite close to the Oostenaula, which took a broad turn to the south after passing Resaca and flowed less than a mile west of the courthouse square in Calhoun. Yet Johnston could find no defensive position to suit him in the Calhoun area, so he kept the army on the road and marching south until it reached Adairsville, another ten miles south of Calhoun, where Johnston’s troops began arriving at dawn on May 17.6 Here Johnston hoped to strike at one of Sherman’s isolated columns. The Union general was pursuing vigorously with the component armies of his force spread out to take advantage of the local road net. Nor was Sherman concerned about the possibility of a counterstrike from Johnston. In fact, it was exactly what he wanted, and his separated columns were almost a sort of bate for Johnston. He believed that even if the Rebels gained a slight advantage over one of his columns at first, the others would pile in and secure victory, with a chance of crushing Johnston’s force. The Confederate rearguard skirmished briskly with their Union pursuers near Adairsville, but the growing convergence of the Union columns began to look ominous, and Johnston opted against making a serious stand there.7 Once again the Army of Tennessee took up the retreat, this time bound for Cassville, another ten miles to the south. There Johnston hoped for an opportunity to launch a counterattack. Two roads diverged at Adairsville and came together again at Cassville. Johnston rightly calculated that Sherman would use both roads in order

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to speed his march, and Johnston planned to strike one of the two separated forces. The Confederate commander arranged his three corps (Polk’s force had become the third) carefully and on the morning of May 19 issued a stirring battle announcement to be read in each of the regiments of his army. All seemed ready for the blow to fall when Hood, whose corps was to lead off the attack, discovered a force of Union cavalry advancing on his flank. Though Hood had an unmatched reputation for aggressiveness and had been sent to the Army of Tennessee for the purpose of bringing some of that hard-hitting spirit to the hapless Confederate western army, he now announced that he could not go on with the attack but instead must fall back a short distance to deal with the Union horsemen. In fact, the Federal-mounted column was not a very serious threat, but by the time the Confederates had gotten the matter sorted out, Johnston judged that it was too late to resume the plan for an attack and instead pulled back to the south side of Cassville and took up a defensive position.8 By this time Johnston’s series of retreats had covered just about half the distance from his original position at Rocky Face to Atlanta. Of more direct immediate significance, the retreat across the Oostenaula and subsequent retreats that took the army away from that river had opened the way for Federal troops to occupy the town of Rome, Georgia, the most important industrial town in the northern part of the state. Among the town’s assets, Noble Brothers’ Ironworks was one of only fifteen private cannon-manufacturing enterprises in the Confederacy. That was gone now, as Union troops had taken possession on May 18.9 Nor was Johnston’s army likely to stay where it was in the Cassville area very much longer. When Sherman’s forces arrived in front of the Confederate position they brought up their artillery and began giving Johnston’s lines a thorough going over. It developed that the position was not very strong against enemy artillery, and some portions of the Confederate line were even exposed to enfilading fire from the Union batteries. Polk and Hood sought out Johnston to tell him that the position was untenable. Johnston was at first stubbornly unwilling to consider the idea of retreating, but with Polk and Hood persistently urging that course, he gave in about an hour later. So May 19, a day which had begun with Confederate soldiers hearing a stirring order about how they were about to turn and give battle to their pursuers, ended, well after nightfall, in the gray-clad troops filing out of their trenches and once again taking up the retreat. The army’s morale plummeted.10 By the morning of May 20, the Confederate column had reached the Etowah River, south of Cartersville, and had begun crossing. By nightfall the last gray-clad units were on the south bank, and the last Confederates destroyed the bridges behind them. They were under no illusions, however, that Sherman would be stymied for any length of time about crossing the Etowah, since his army possessed a number of pontoon bridges. And indeed, after giving his army two days of rest, Sherman had his troops across the river and marching south again on May 23.

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Concern was rising in Atlanta, and in North Georgia it was approaching the level of panic. In Richmond, Jefferson Davis felt considerable frustration. Since the campaign had opened he had sent Johnston more than 20,000 men, bringing the Army of Tennessee’s strength to more than 70,000 despite the loss of several thousand casualties. This made Johnston’s army the largest force the Confederacy had ever fielded in the western theater and the largest force it had anywhere as of late May 1864. Yet Johnston had retreated more than half way to Atlanta and had given up two of the three natural river barriers to Union advance as well as the major industrial city of North Georgia. Only one encouraging factor remained for the Confederacy, and that was the terrain between the Etowah and the Chattahoochee rivers. A belt of mountainous country provided an abundance of good defensive positions. Perhaps the best of these was Allatoona Pass, where the Western & Atlantic Railroad, Sherman’s supply line, and the axis around which the campaign had hitherto moved, passed through a narrow defile in an imposing ridge. At Allatoona a corporal’s guard could hold off a host. There, Confederates could hope, Johnston’s retreat might finally end. As a young army officer back in the 1840s, Sherman had traveled through the mountains of North Georgia, and he remembered them well. He knew about Allatoona Pass and was determined to avoid it. In order to do that he was willing to take the somewhat radical step of casting loose of his supply line and ranging a score of miles from the Western & Atlantic. While the railroad ran southeast from its crossing of the Etowah, Sherman planned to move his army due south and get through the mountains to the east of Johnston’s positions around Allatoona before swinging back toward the railroad and either trapping Johnston or forcing another retreat. Sherman’s specific target was the town of Dallas, Georgia, which would give him just the sort of commanding position he was seeking on Johnston’s flank. McPherson’s Army of the Tennessee, moving as usual on the outside edge of Sherman’s turning movement, advanced through Dallas on May 26, while Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland approached from the north. This time, however, Johnston had gotten wind of Sherman’s turning maneuver and moved to block it. The opposing forces collided just southeast of Dallas, with the Confederates dug in on a line that extended from near the town itself to New Hope Church, three or four miles to the east. Over the next several days Sherman tried to dislodge the stubborn Rebels. An effort to turn Johnston’s right ended in a bloody fiasco at Pickett’s Mill. The Rebels countered by attacking Sherman’s right, the Army of the Tennessee’s lines around Dallas, but they suffered a similar repulse.11 With his army beginning to run low on supplies, Sherman knew he had to get back to the railroad soon. Gradually he edged the various components of his force eastward. Johnston perceived the movement and countered with a number of small attacks to try to thwart Sherman. Fighting was bitter, but by June 3, Sherman’s men had reached the tracks of the Western & Atlantic at the hamlet of Acworth. Significantly, Acworth was southeast of Allatoona Pass. Sherman’s broad turning movement to Dallas had

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not accomplished all that he had hoped, and it had brought hard fighting and hard living for his soldiers, but it had succeeded admirably in its one indispensable goal—it had pried Johnston out of his second great impregnable position of the campaign.12 Yet serious obstacles still stood in the way of Sherman’s advance. Allatoona Pass lay behind, but a series of imposing heights still blocked the way to Atlanta. Sherman’s three armies edged forward from Acworth, past Big Shanty (present-day Kennesaw), and skirmished around the edges of the Confederate position seeking weak points or an opportunity to outflank Johnston without relinquishing a hold on the Western & Atlantic. In some cases the Federals were able to gain positions from which they could make particular parts of the Confederate line untenable by means of artillery fire, but the Rebels drew back to other high ground just as strong. On June 14, Johnston, Hardee, and Polk met to observe the Union positions from the prominent summit of Pine Mountain and drew artillery fire. The third round was a direct hit on Polk. It was probably one of the most unfortunate shots of the war for the Union side. Polk had damaged the Confederate cause consistently ever since joining the army, and he would have had opportunities to do much more damage in the weeks to come. Instead, his position was filled by Maj. Gen. A.P. Stewart, who had been a steady and capable division commander.13 Yet despite small adjustments of the lines in his favor and whatever satisfaction he could take from the death of Polk, of which the Federals learned that same day by an intercepted Confederate semaphore signal, Sherman was frustrated with the slow progress he was making. He had stretched his lines far in either direction in hope of reaching the Confederate flanks, but so far it had been of no use. The Rebel lines had stretched to match, and with the elaborate field fortifications both sides were using by this point in the war, those thin-stretched lines were still proof against attack. Or were they? Sherman wondered if perhaps Johnston’s lines really had become too thin to hold against a determined assault. Then there was always the example of Missionary Ridge—the frontal attack that seemed as if it should not have worked but somehow did. Was the time ripe for a repetition? Sherman decided to find out. He ordered an attack for the morning of June 27 against Confederate lines on a two-mile-long ridge known as Kennesaw Mountain. Kennesaw had three distinct summits. Troops of the Army of the Tennessee would attack the lowest of the three, while their comrades of the Army of the Cumberland would strike toward a lower but still extremely formidable Rebel position on a detached hill beyond the south end of Kennesaw. Promptly at eight o’clock that morning the troops told off for the attack grimly shouldered their rifles and slogged up the hill. Sherman’s experiment on the strength of the Confederate center produced its answer within two hours. Clearly the attacks were going nowhere, and alert corps and army commanders recalled their units before they could suffer further damage. Thanks to its relatively short duration, the attack at Kennesaw Mountain produced only about 2,000 casualties— killed, wounded, and missing—a total that equaled just another day on the Virginia

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front, where Grant and Lee were even then fighting furious battles. Still, Kennesaw represented Sherman’s biggest setback of the campaign.14 Yet only five days later Johnston was on the retreat again. Even while the doomed attacks were suffering their bloody repulse on the slopes of Kennesaw and its neighboring hill, a division of Schofield’s Twenty-third Corps, part of the Army of the Ohio, was making a very interesting discovery. Tasked with distracting Confederate attention from the planned attacks in the center, this division had finally succeeded in getting beyond the Confederate left flank. This showed Sherman how he could pry Johnston out of his mountain fastness, and the Union commander immediately gave orders for the Army of the Tennessee, his whiplash, to pull out of its position on the Union left, swing behind the other units of Sherman’s command, and come in on the far Union right, beyond Schofield and, of course, beyond Johnston as well. The wily Confederate got wind of the movement, however, and realized that Sherman had robbed him of the advantage of the defensive position anchored by Kennesaw Mountain. For Johnston that situation could dictate only one course of action. He gave the necessary orders, and after nightfall on the evening of July 2, his army pulled out of its trenches and marched off of Kennesaw Mountain. Six miles farther south, the gray-clad soldiers filed into a new system of entrenchments that Johnston had had prepared in advance in a position on the north bank of the Chattahoochee, the last river-barrier between Sherman and Atlanta. As the Confederates approached their new position, the belt of mountainous country with its fine defensive positions now lay behind them, in Union hands. Ahead of them, scarcely more than ten miles from the Chattahoochee’s south bank, lay the heart of the city.15 As the long Confederate retreat from Dalton to the Chattahoochee had proceeded in its several stages throughout May and June and into July, relations between Johnston and his superiors in Richmond, especially Davis, had grown increasingly strained. Johnston had repeatedly notified Davis that he did not believe he could halt Sherman’s advance and that he thought the only hope of saving Atlanta would be for the authorities in Richmond to dispatch cavalry from Mississippi—now outside Johnston’s command—to slash into Sherman’s rear area and destroy his supply line. Just as frequently Davis had informed Johnston that the cavalry in Mississippi was busy protecting that department and that Johnston must use his own cavalry to strike at Sherman’s supply line. The back-and-forth bickering became reminiscent of the two men’s disagreements regarding the Vicksburg campaign the previous summer.16 In this case, both were partially right. As Davis suspected, Johnston’s claims that he could not stop Sherman were typical examples of Johnston’s habitual shirking of responsibility, and Johnston should have attempted to cut Sherman’s supply lines with his own cavalry. On the other hand, Johnston was correct in his assumption that the Confederacy no longer possessed any major assets in Mississippi that were worth weighing against the importance of holding Atlanta. Certainly, there were a number of ways in which the Federals could hurt the Confederacy should they

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overrun Mississippi and spread eastward into Alabama—particularly by depriving the Confederacy of food-producing areas and perhaps even the war industries complex around Selma, Alabama.17 Still, holding Atlanta represented the Confederacy’s last best hope of securing its independence, and therefore the protection of what was left of Confederate Mississippi should have been subordinated to the campaign in Georgia. The cavalry of the Mississippi department, commanded by Nathan Bedford Forrest, should have been dispatched to raid Sherman’s supply line. Sherman himself had thought much about the prospect and had made what preparations he could to prevent it. The rail line in his rear was heavily guarded by small detachments in blockhouses. He also had ample supplies of spare rails, ties, and bridge components stockpiled at various points with well-organized parties of experienced workers ready to repair any damage that raiders might inflict. Aside from such passive measures, Sherman had an active program to assure that the dreaded Forrest could not derail his campaign. This consisted primarily of powerful expeditions dispatched into northern Mississippi with the express purpose of bringing Forrest to battle and crushing his force. The first of these consisted of 8,500 men under the command of Maj. Gen. Samuel D. Sturgis and left Memphis on June 2, intent on catching Forrest and his 3,500 Confederates. Sturgis proved no match either for Forrest’s deep cunning or for his almost demonic combativeness. The Memphis slave-trader-turned-general, who had never so much as opened a book on military science, virtually wrote a chapter in future textbooks on war when at the June 10 battle of Brice’s Crossroads he subjected Sturgis’s larger force to as thorough a drubbing as the war ever saw. Sturgis’s woeful discomfiture demonstrated more clearly than ever to Sherman that Forrest had to be neutralized—and that Sturgis was not the man to do it. Instead Sherman chose as leader of the next expedition A.J. Smith, who would bring with him his three-division detachment of the Army of the Tennessee, numbering about 14,000 men. They left Memphis in early July, just as Johnston was falling back to the Chattahoochee and pressed southwestward into Forrest’s domain, skirmishing frequently with the Confederate cavalry that hovered around their column. On July 13 Smith arrived at Harrisburg, near Tupelo, Mississippi, and took up a strong defensive position, knowing that Forrest was nearby. Forrest attacked the following morning with some 9,500 men but took a severe beating at the hands of Smith’s veteran infantrymen. Yet, though Forrest could not make Smith withdraw, problems of supply could and did. The next morning, July 15, Smith pulled out of his position and withdrew unscathed to Memphis. He had avoided defeat and had damaged Forrest’s command, but he had not destroyed Forrest as Sherman had hoped. Yet, the two expeditions had not been without their effect. Whether Forrest was sending his men to slaughter in front of the guns of Smith’s infantry or was thrashing the hapless Sturgis, he was still in Mississippi and not in Tennessee, where he could have done far more damage to the Union war effort. In that sense even Sturgis had

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been a success. If Sherman could succeed in taking Atlanta, he could afford to send out several expeditions like Sturgis’s simply to occupy Forrest by being beaten by him. On the other hand, Forrest could not afford any repetitions of the repulse he had suffered against Smith. All the while, Sherman’s supply line through Tennessee and North Georgia had remained intact, Sherman’s army had continued to advance closer and closer to Atlanta, and Jefferson Davis’s patience with Johnston wore correspondingly thinner. Then on the evening of July 8, Sherman succeeded in getting a division across the Chattahoochee upstream from Johnston’s position, with more Federals pouring across on pontoon bridges. The next night, Johnston’s army abandoned its position on the north bank and withdrew nearly to the outskirts of Atlanta. This was almost too much for Davis, and he dispatched Braxton Bragg, who was now serving in the Confederate capital as his top military advisor, to travel to Atlanta and assess the situation with a possible view to relieving Johnston of his command.18 Bragg arrived in Atlanta on July 13, and his initial report of the situation he found there tended to confirm the president’s worst apprehensions. “The indications seem to favor an entire evacuation of this place,” Bragg wrote. The civilian population of the city had already by and large drawn its own conclusions and was getting out as quickly as possible. More alarming for Davis was the fact that Confederate personnel were already shipping supplies and equipment out of Atlanta, and even while the city continued to hold out, the Federals were already in position to cut off much of the flow of food and war supplies from Alabama and Mississippi heading for both Johnston’s and Lee’s armies.19 Davis had already been considering the selection of Johnston’s successor. Whoever that officer might be, he would have to be someone who was already with the Army of Tennessee, since by the time a general could arrive from another part of the Confederacy, the fate of Atlanta might already be sealed. In practical terms, the choices were limited to corps commanders, and not to the relatively junior Stewart, who had taken over Polk’s old corps less than a month before. That left Hardee and Hood. Hardee was senior, but Hood had throughout the campaign been sending Davis a series of letters, outside of channels, lamenting Johnston’s lack of aggressiveness. Undecided as to which man would make the better replacement for Johnston, Davis wrote to Lee the day before Bragg arrived in Atlanta, “General Johnston has failed, and there are strong indications that he will abandon Atlanta. . . . It seems necessary to relieve him at once. Who should succeed him? What think you of Hood for the position?”20 Lee was cautious, pointing out that this was a bad time to change commanders of the Army of Tennessee. Hood, he said, was “very industrious on the battlefield, careless off,” and Lee had had “no opportunity of judging of his action when the whole responsibility rest upon him.” By contrast, Lee tactfully pointed out, Hardee had much more experience. Lee’s advice counted for a good deal with Davis, who,

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in any case, usually tended toward caution himself. Accordingly, on July 14 Davis telegraphed Bragg that he should use his own discretion but that if it really seemed necessary to replace Johnston, it might be best to go with Hardee.21 Bragg had very different ideas. “I am decidedly opposed,” he telegraphed back to Davis. Bragg had commanded Hardee for more than a year and had doubts as to how well qualified that officer was for command of an entire army. Also, Hood had been lobbying Bragg aggressively since he had arrived in Atlanta and had convinced him that Hardee had advised and supported Johnston’s policy of perpetual retreat. This was an exaggeration. At Cassville it had been Hood and Polk who urged retreat. Still Bragg favored Hood, adding in his telegram to Davis, “If any change is made Lieutenant-General Hood would give unlimited satisfaction.”22 Through all these discussions, Davis remained determined to give Johnston every opportunity to save Atlanta. Only if it seemed clear that Johnston would not fight for the city would the president feel justified in relieving him. On July 16 Davis sent a telegram to the general requesting “to hear from you as to the present situation and your plan of operations so specifically as will enable me to anticipate events.” Johnston had always been reluctant to communicate any plans to his commanderin-chief, probably because he had none. Davis wanted to impress on his general not only the importance of keeping his superior informed but also of taking the initiative. The present passive policy had allowed Sherman to drive the Confederate army to the gates of Atlanta. Johnston replied that same day and in exactly the way Davis had feared. Since he was outnumbered, Johnston stated, he could make no plans but only respond to the enemy’s actions. If past experience was any indication, that response would be another retreat. Faced with the near certainty that Atlanta would fall if he did not give the Army of Tennessee a new commander at once, Davis acted decisively. The next day, July 17, he issued an order relieving Johnston of his command and appointing Hood in his place. Somewhat surprisingly, Hood telegraphed back the next day to say that he did not want the job—at least, not now. Hood’s letters to Davis during the campaign, and especially his conversations with Bragg in recent days, had looked very much as if he were angling for command of the army, but apparently he was expecting Davis to sack Johnston and appoint a successor after Atlanta fell and wanted to position himself for that eventuality. He had not imagined that Davis would have the nerve to change commanders with the army on the very doorstep of Atlanta, and he was not eager to take the responsibility of fighting thus with his back to the wall. Davis remained firm, however, insisting that Hood take command despite a joint appeal to the contrary by Hood, Hardee, and Stewart.23 On July 17, the same day that Davis had sent his decision for Johnston’s removal, Sherman had started the next phase of his campaign. He knew that Atlanta would become untenable for the Confederates if he could cut the railroads leading into it, and he planned to start with the Georgia Railroad, which led east out of Atlanta to Decatur

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and then up through the states of the eastern seaboard. It was not only a potential line of supply for Atlanta but also a possible conduit for reinforcements from Virginia. Sherman therefore wanted it thoroughly destroyed as soon as possible. Accordingly, he gave orders for McPherson’s Army of the Tennessee to pull out of its position on the extreme Union right, swing behind Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland, march to the east side of Atlanta, and destroy the railroad in and around Decatur. Schofield’s Army of the Ohio would follow and reestablish connection between McPherson and Thomas’ forces as all three armies pressed closer to Atlanta. The Army of the Tennessee began its march on the seventeenth.24 Faced with yet another of Sherman’s turning maneuvers, Hood had little choice about what to do next. He could fight or retreat. Retreat meant giving up Atlanta, and that was intolerable. The only question then was exactly where and how he would give battle. Analyzing the Union position, Hood believed he saw an opportunity to strike Sherman a serious blow. While the armies of the Tennessee and the Ohio were in motion, swinging to the east, the Army of the Cumberland would be isolated, advancing on Atlanta from the north. Thomas’s force had just crossed Peachtree Creek, about four miles from the heart of Atlanta. If Hood attacked now, the Army of the Cumberland would have to fight without having had time to construct entrenchments, with Peachtree Creek at its back, and without the aid of Sherman’s other two armies. Those circumstances might just give Hood the chance for a decisive victory that would so cripple Sherman as to force him to fall back on Chattanooga and perhaps even give Hood further opportunities to damage the other components of the Union army group. Hood made his plans to attack Thomas at 1:00 p.m. on July 20, carefully instructing his corps commanders and making sure they understood their assignments. Yet the usual difficulties of the Army of Tennessee quickly asserted themselves almost before the movement got underway. Staff work had never been particularly strong in this army, and recent substitutions had left it weaker than ever. Relations between generals—and the attitudes of those generals—had been the army’s Achilles heel, and despite the fact that Bragg was long gone, that trait asserted itself as strongly as ever on July 20. Beginning with Hardee, who was bitter at having been passed over by Hood, an assortment of its generals were malcontent and out of temper with each other. As a result, the army moved as if it had a severe malady of the central nervous system, which, in fact, it did. The assault did not go in at one o’clock as planned but rather at four. Then it was poorly coordinated. The Confederate soldiers fought bravely, as always, but so did Thomas’s men. Hood had done his part as commanding general. His attackers outnumbered Thomas’s defenders 23,000 to about 20,000, and, as planned, the Federals had not yet built extensive breastworks. Hardee’s performance, however, was lackluster, as was that of several lower-ranking generals. The battlefront swayed first one way and then the other. By evening, however, Thomas had stabilized his lines

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and beaten off the attack. Casualties totaled about 2,500 Confederates and 1,900 Federals.25 For Hood, the inconclusive result at Peachtree Creek stepped up the pressure to strike again before Sherman’s army group, constantly coiling and re-coiling like an enormous python, succeeded in getting Atlanta, and possibly Hood’s own army, firmly—and fatally—wrapped in its toils. Nor did he have much time to look for openings. Even while the Battle of Peachtree Creek was raging north of the city, McPherson’s Army of the Tennessee pressed forward on the east side to within about three miles of Atlanta, and the following morning McPherson’s men succeeded in driving dismounted Confederate cavalry off of a prominent bald hill only about two and a half miles from the center of town. From that hill, Union artillery could command the city and, as Sherman hoped, make it untenable—if he could not do so more quickly by other means. Fierce fighting raged just north of the bald hill, where Cleburne’s division held off further attempts by McPherson’s men to edge their lines closer to Atlanta. Yet in this new and threatening Union movement, Hood thought he saw another chance to turn the tables on Sherman. McPherson’s Army of the Tennessee, now numbering about 27,000 men after the arrival of two of its missing divisions, held the extreme left of the Union line. Some of its infantry was busy tearing up the tracks of the Georgia Railroad around Decatur, as was all of the Union cavalry that would normally have been assigned to screen this flank. That meant that Hood could strike McPherson simultaneously in front, flank, and—with a long enough approach march—also in rear. He gave the orders immediately. At nightfall on the twenty-first, most units of the Army of Tennessee would pull out of their positions around Atlanta and move into position to attack McPherson the next day. To Hardee’s corps—including Cleburne’s weary division—would go the most challenging task, that of marching south and then east, all the way around McPherson’s army to reach Decatur and come in behind the Federals. On the opposite side of the lines, Sherman was eager to have the Georgia Railroad destroyed more quickly and thoroughly. He wanted enough of the tracks wrecked to ensure that the Confederates would not be able to use the railroad for some months to come, and in order to achieve that purpose more quickly, he directed McPherson to detach the Sixteenth Corps for demolition duty along the tracks on July 22. McPherson had other ideas. By this time both he and Sherman knew that it was Hood, and not Johnston, with whom they now had to contend. Sherman was happy for the change. Despite the progress he had been able to make against Johnston, Sherman felt frustrated that he had not been able to draw the Confederates into a stand-up fight in the open. Everything about Hood’s reputation indicated that he would be much more likely to give battle. McPherson, who had been Hood’s West Point classmate, agreed. What was more, McPherson believed that Hood was very likely to come piling into the Army of the Tennessee’s exposed southern flank at any

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time. Rather than send the Sixteenth Corps back to Decatur to work on the railroad, he wanted to send them to his southern flank as insurance against such an attack. After a brief discussion with Sherman at the latter’s headquarters, McPherson gained permission to use the Sixteenth Corps as he envisioned. Impressed with Sherman’s generosity, McPherson promised that if the Rebels had made no move by 1:00 p.m., he would release the Sixteenth Corps to the demolition duties Sherman preferred. July 22 dawned clear and warm, with promise of another scorching day. To the east of Atlanta all remained quiet. Union pickets found the lines Cleburne had held the day before empty now, and the right of McPherson’s line moved forward to occupy them—a few hundred yards closer to Atlanta. The Sixteenth Corps marched south and, around noon, halted behind the extreme left of the Union line. McPherson and several of his officers enjoyed a leisurely lunch under a grove of trees behind the Army of the Tennessee’s center, and the general decided to go ahead and write the order for the Sixteenth Corps to get to work on the tracks. Well to the south of him, all was not proceeding well with the Confederate attack plan. Marching all the way around the Army of the Tennessee was a tall order and would have been difficult even with good staff work and well-rested troops. Hardee finally decided that it was simply not going to be possible to get his corps in position to move through Decatur and attack McPherson that day. With Hood’s permission he altered the plan so as to shorten the march and have his troops strike the Federals in the left flank and left rear. By about noon, the corps was in position and ready to launch its attack. The first Confederate attacking waves went right into the teeth of the position the Sixteenth Corps had just taken up on the Union left rear. Both sides were surprised to find the other where they did. Neither was entrenched, and a fierce stand-up fight ensued, from which the Federals emerged victorious. McPherson had left his grove of trees and hurried to the sound of the fighting. After watching the Sixteenth Corps repulse the Confederate attack, he rode west to investigate a gap that existed between the Sixteenth Corps and the Seventeenth. In fact, Confederate troops—Cleburne’s division—were already pouring through that gap. Some of them encountered McPherson, haled him to surrender, and shot him dead when he tried to escape. Command of the Army of the Tennessee passed to Fifteenth Corps commander John A. Logan. The next several hours were desperate ones for the Army of the Tennessee. Confederates did indeed succeed in hitting the lines of the Seventeenth Corps, front, flank, and rear, from the left flank all the way up to the bald hill. The Federals would leap over their breastworks and fire to the rear to repulse one attack, then hop back to the proper side of the works and fire toward the front to beat off another—then repeat the whole process. Only when the attacks from multiple directions were precisely simultaneous did Logan’s men give ground, still fighting all the way. A Tennessee soldier among the attackers wrote of seeing the Union defenders “Jump first on one

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side of the works and then on the other, but,” he added, “we being on both sides and pouring upon them such a galling fire, they continued steadily to give way, firing back at us as they went.”26 By late afternoon, the Union line had bent back all the way to the bald hill, which now became the apex of a line that extended to the north and to the east of the summit. Attack after attack stormed up the slopes, and the fighting was sometimes hand-to-hand. Somehow the Federals held on. While the Seventeenth Corps was fighting desperately to hold the bald hill, catastrophe overtook the neighboring Fifteenth Corps. Weakened by reserves sent to reinforce other parts of the army, the Fifteenth Corps was stunned when Confederates using a railroad cut for cover penetrated the center of its line and began to roll it up in both directions, capturing a number of cannon. The situation was extremely serious and threatened to bring about the total defeat of the Army of the Tennessee that Hood had intended and that Logan’s army had narrowly dodged in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth corps’ sectors. Already, though, Union troops were beginning to rally. To the north of the Confederate breakthrough, the extreme right-flank division of the Fifteenth Corps, unaffected by the debacle to its left, turned south and prepared to counterattack directly into the gap that had just been created on either side of the railroad cut. In the ranks of that division an Ohio soldier noted, “Never did troops keep better alignment in marching in the face of an enemy. To the right and to the left we could see the straight blue lines with their banners gaily waving in the breeze.”27 Meanwhile, the divisions that had been driven out of the gap were also regrouping to the east of their original position and preparing a counterattack of their own, aimed at retaking the ground they had lost. Into the midst of this situation galloped John Logan. After learning that he now commanded the entire Army of the Tennessee, Logan had hurried to the left to check on the lines of the Sixteenth Corps. There word caught up with him of the breakthrough back in the sector of what had been his own Fifteenth Corps. As was his invariable custom in battle, Logan rode full tilt directly toward the scene of the crisis, and behind him on the double-quick came a brigade of Fifteenth Corps troops that had previously shifted to the left to shore up the line there, along with another brigade from the Sixteenth Corps. Logan was hugely popular with all the men of the Army of the Tennessee, and his ability to inspire troops to valor in battle was unmatched. An Illinois soldier later described how Logan looked astride his “coal-black charger streaked with foam, hatless, his long black hair flying, his eyes flashing with wrath—a human hurricane on horseback.” Thousands of Federals, catching sight of Logan, began to shout his nickname—“Black Jack!” With Logan leading them, the troops of the Army of the Tennessee surged back into the gap, driving the Confederates before them. In some places the fighting was hand-to-hand, but the Federals prevailed and before nightfall had completely restored their position.28

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The fight that day would come to be called the Battle of Atlanta, and it was Hood’s best chance to hand Sherman a major defeat that might have reversed the momentum of the campaign. Considering how much was riding on the campaign—politically as well as militarily—the battle deserves to be considered one of the more momentous of the war. The 27,000 men of the Army of the Tennessee withstood the onslaught of some 40,000 men of the Confederate Army of Tennessee to maintain the Union grip on Atlanta and its eastern communications via the Georgia Railroad. Union losses came to 3,722 killed, wounded, and missing. Hood’s losses for the day are harder to pin down, but historians have produced a range of estimates from 5,500 to 10,000.29 And the campaign for Atlanta went on. Sherman stuck with his plan of cutting Hood’s railroad lifelines. Having thoroughly destroyed the Georgia Railroad to the east of Atlanta, he planned next to swing the Army of the Tennessee all the way around to the west side of the city. It would then support the Union cavalry, which was to reach even farther afield and cut the Macon & Western Railroad. The Army of the Tennessee, now under the command of Maj. Gen. Oliver O. Howard in place of the fallen McPherson (Sherman had held, probably correctly, that the amateur Logan, though highly inspirational, was not up to the job of permanent army command), got underway on July 27. Hood anticipated the movement and made plans to counter it. Once again he hoped to take advantage of the Union flank, this time hitting the right flank of the Army of the Tennessee, which would be the extreme right of Sherman’s line. Having learned from the problems in the previous operation, Hood allowed plenty of time for his units to get into position, an entire day. Gen. Stephen D. Lee, newly arrived from Mississippi to take over the corps that had been Hood’s, would lead the flanking march, and he would get started on July 28, a full day before the planned attack.30 Yet, though this movement was planned more carefully than Hood’s last, it went awry from the very start. The wellspring of Confederate sorrows this time lay in the fact that Howard’s army was moving much more rapidly than Hood had guessed. Then the problem was compounded by Lee’s inexperience. When he approached the position Hood had ordered him to take up, along the Lick Skillet Road near Ezra Methodist Church, he found that Howard’s men were already in possession of it. Rather than send back to Hood for further instructions, Lee launched an immediate attack. Worse, he did so without waiting for all of his corps or A.P. Stewart’s, which was supporting his movement, to come up and get into position. Instead, he advanced each division as soon as it became available, hitting Howard’s men with a series of piecemeal attacks that never came close to dislodging the Federals. When Stewart’s troops came up, Lee, who outranked Stewart even though he had less experience in corps command, threw them into the fight in the same way. Lee apparently thought that the Federals had only just come on the scene a few minutes ahead of him, that they would not have had time to build defensive works, and that a rapid

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assault might take them off balance and throw them back, thus allowing him to fulfill Hood’s orders. That might have been an understandable assumption for him to make, but he was very slow to learn the truth when one Confederate attack after another was beaten back with heavy slaughter.31 In fact, the Army of the Tennessee had not been in position very long before the Confederates arrived. Yet Howard, having alertly read the signs and divined that a Rebel attack was in the offing, had his army in position with the entire Fifteenth Corps turned so as to face in the direction from which Lee’s attacks would come. As Lee had suspected, the Federals had had minimal time to erect breastworks, but they had become fast workers at that sort of job. Before the attacks commenced they had piled logs and rails two or three feet high, behind which they could crouch to fire. Thus one Union corps, and primarily its right two divisions—perhaps 9,000 men at most—had little difficulty in repulsing the two-thirds of the Army of Tennessee that Lee was leading that day. The Battle of Ezra Church cost Hood 3,000 casualties, Sherman only 627.32 For Sherman, however, the frustrating anticlimax of the whole operation was that his cavalry then failed to carry out the planned destruction of the Confederate railroads. As always, cavalry seemed inadequate for such work. If they succeeded in evading pursuit and thrashing by the Confederate cavalry, they did minimal damage to the railroads. Such was the case with the two raids Sherman sent out at this time. Both suffered severe drubbings, and the damage they did to the railroads was repaired in a matter of days. Thus, by the middle of August it was apparent that although Sherman had won all three of the pitched battles around Atlanta that summer, Hood still had the city, and no means Sherman had yet employed seemed likely to get him out of it soon.33 Throughout the first half of the month of August, Sherman steadily stretched his lines farther and farther around Atlanta. He could never hope to encircle it completely, but he hoped to stretch farther than the Confederates could and perhaps get those railroads after all. Fortifications on both sides became elaborate in order to hold each mile of line with the fewest troops possible. In some ways the situation was reminiscent of when the armies had faced each other at Kennesaw Mountain. The Confederate works around Atlanta were far too strong to be assaulted directly, and for some time it seemed that the smaller Confederate army would stretch as far as the more numerous Union host. By the middle of the month, Sherman decided that he was going to have to try something more daring. He devised a plan to leave one corps—the Twentieth (formerly the Eleventh and Twelfth), now under the command of Maj. Gen. Henry W. Slocum—on the north side of Atlanta to guard the railroad, supply depot, and communications with the North, while Sherman with all the rest of his force cut loose of his supply line once again and marched around the west side of Atlanta to sever its railroad supply lines at Jonesboro, southwest of the city.34

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After final preparations—and one final vain attempt to get at the railroads with his cavalry—Sherman set the new operation in motion on August 25, pulling his troops out of the fortifications east and north of Atlanta, except for the Twentieth Corps, which remained near the Chattahoochee bridge. The rest of the army group edged southward along the west side of Atlanta. The Confederates discovered the empty breastworks but were not sure what they meant. Hood was wary but uncertain. Still not understanding that Sherman had cut loose of his supply lines, he expected a more limited probe. On August 28 Sherman’s forces reached the Atlanta & West Point Railroad and spent the following day wrecking a thirteen-mile stretch of it. Then they pressed on toward the much more important Macon & Western Railroad. On August 30, Howard’s Army of the Tennessee, which was leading the march, pressed forward even farther than Sherman had ordered, seized a bridge across the Flint River and put out fires the Rebels had started in hopes of burning the bridge. Howard’s men then crossed the Flint and continued another half mile to the east. His lead element, Logan’s Fifteenth Corps, entrenched on a ridge only half a mile short—and well within artillery range—of the Macon & Western at Jonesboro. The rest of Sherman’s force moved up on Howard’s left, threatening the railroad between Jonesboro and Atlanta. When word reached Hood that Union troops were east of the Flint and threatening the Macon & Western, he finally realized something of what had been going on for the past few days. In response he dispatched Hardee with his own corps and Stephen D. Lee’s to go to Jonesboro and drive the Federals back. Hardee’s force clashed with the Army of the Tennessee at Jonesboro the following day, August 31, but could not hold the town or the railroad. Even as they fought, Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland advanced unopposed and seized a stretch of track north of Jonesboro. The fighting at Jonesboro continued the following day, with the Confederates suffering another severe beating, but already Atlanta’s railroad lifelines were hopelessly severed. Realizing as much, Hood gave the order for his army to abandon Atlanta and head south. Before leaving, the Confederates burned military supplies, including a railroad train filled with ammunition. The resulting explosions leveled nearby buildings.35 The sounds of exploding ammunition were heard both in Sherman’s camps, south of Atlanta, and in Slocum’s north of the city. The following morning, September 2, Slocum’s patrols advanced cautiously but found the Confederate entrenchments empty. Advancing into the city, they met the mayor, coming out with a white flag to surrender Atlanta. Before noon, the United States flag was flying over city hall, and Slocum had telegraphed Washington, “General Sherman has taken Atlanta.” Sherman himself followed up with his own dispatch the following day: “So Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.”36 The fall of Atlanta doomed the Confederacy. Throughout 1864 the Confederacy’s best chance of victory—only real chance of victory by that time—was that Union

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war-weariness would prevail and Union’s will to keep up the struggle would collapse. The best means of achieving that result was for Confederate armies to inflict long casualty lists on their Union opponents while denying them any clear, tangible milestones of success—accomplishments that the northern public could recognize as signs that the war was progressing satisfactorily. That public was prepared to see such success primarily in the capture of major cities and above all in the capture of the South’s two most emotionally significant cities at that time, Richmond and Atlanta. As long as both of those cities held out against Union attack, the Northern public would perceive a marked lack of progress in their government’s efforts to win the war—and its morale would suffer and possibly collapse. The most obvious visible sign of the early stages of such a collapse would be Lincoln’s defeat for reelection in November 1864. With the Democrats running on a platform that declared the war a failure and called for a “negotiated peace”—as a nice euphemism for surrender—Lincoln’s defeat would represent the electorate’s agreement that the country could never win the war and should abandon the effort. In recent times, some historians have tried to argue that the Union would have won the war even if Lincoln had lost the election. Of course, we can never know what would have happened if historical events had turned out differently than they did, and it is certainly possible that the Union would still have won. However, such arguments overlook the meaning of a Lincoln defeat in terms of what it would have said about northern morale. It would have been one thing to win the war before March 4, 1865, despite a certainty that Lincoln would leave office on that day—if, for example, he had opted not to run for reelection. It would have been a much different thing, however, for the Union to have won the war after a collapse of northern morale displayed in the decision of the electorate that the war should be abandoned short of victory. The Confederacy might have lost the war even if Lincoln had lost the election, but a Democratic victory in the 1864 presidential election was the rebellion’s last, best hope of success. Lincoln’s defeat might not have guaranteed Confederate victory, but his victory guaranteed Confederate defeat. During the spring and summer of 1864, the Confederacy had come remarkably close to securing the conditions that might have produced a collapse of Union morale and the attendant Democratic electoral victory in the North. The hard fighting of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia had produced long casualty lists for both sides and had kept the Federals out of Richmond. To a lesser extent, Hood’s operations around Atlanta during July had done the same for that city. On the other hand, Johnston’s long retreat from Dalton to the outskirts of Atlanta during May, June, and July, had done relatively little to lengthen Union casualty lists and had given away a ninetymile-deep swath of territory that the Confederacy could ill afford to lose, both as space in which to defend Atlanta and for the supplies of food and war materials it produced. It is ironic that by August both Grant’s and Sherman’s campaigns had already done almost irreparable damage to the Confederacy in loss of soldiers, soil,

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and supplies, and both had gained a degree of leverage over their opponents that all but insured victory within a matter of months. Yet the northern populace seemed unable to perceive success unless it included the capture of one or both of the two major cities on which all eyes were then turned. By August, Lincoln himself, as astute a politician as was then alive, believed that he would be beaten and beaten badly in the race for reelection unless news from the war fronts took a dramatic turn for the better before election day. For Lincoln and the northern electorate, the fall of Atlanta was that news. It is possible that Lincoln might have won the election even without that victory. The Union naval victory of Rear Admiral David Farragut at Mobile Bay earlier that summer or the victory of Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan at the early autumn battle of Cedar Creek in the Shenandoah Valley might have been enough to convince northerners that success was on the way. Or the northern electorate might have remained steadfast without any obvious victories to prop it up, contrary to Lincoln’s expectations. However that may have been, the fact of Sherman’s great triumph at Atlanta shattered the Democrats’ central claim that the war was a failure, and having done that, it all but assured Lincoln’s reelection. In November 1864 Lincoln was indeed reelected by a comfortable margin, along with a solidly Republican congress committed to seeing the war through to victory. That event insured that the Union war effort would be maintained, if necessary, for at least another two years and probably four. It was already clear by then that the Confederacy could not possibly last even one more year, and the war’s outcome was therefore as certain as any future event could be. The election doomed the Confederacy, and Sherman’s conquest of Atlanta decided the election. It was a stroke that drove the last nail in the coffin of the dream of a slaveholders’ republic.

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ij TO DURHAM STATION

Although the fall of Atlanta had, for practical purposes, decided the outcome of the Civil War, the exact timing and manner of its ending was yet to be determined. Many—though by no means all—white southerners remained steadfastly committed to their cause, convinced that it was just and holy, the cause both of God and of liberty, and that somehow they would yet prevail. Jefferson Davis was foremost among these, but he was far from alone. With him ranged a hard core of Confederate supporters determined to resist to the last ditch. Their continued efforts led to two more western campaigns—one fought in the heart of the Confederate heartland and the other fought by the western armies in territory that had until then been the eastern theater. After the fall of Atlanta, Hood attempted to drive Sherman out of Georgia by threatening his supply line, the Western & Atlantic Railroad from Chattanooga to Atlanta. Establishing a base of operations in northeastern Alabama, Hood led his army on forays to the east, into northwestern Georgia, to threaten Sherman’s rail lifeline. Sherman responded with a large portion of his own army, chasing Hood through the mountainous terrain over which they had fought the preceding summer. Hood succeeded in snapping up a few of Sherman’s blockhouses guarding the railroad along with their small garrisons, but when a full division of his army attacked a brigade of the Army of the Tennessee under Brig. Gen. John M. Corse at Allatoona Pass, the attackers suffered a bloody repulse. Hood became frustrated with his inability to obtain more momentous results. If he was going to enable the Confederacy somehow

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to win the war at this late juncture, he was going to have to undertake something much more dramatic. Sherman, for his part, was far from satisfied with recent operations in northern Georgia. He had not been able to catch Hood’s army, and he was wearying his own and accomplishing little else while marching back and forth across ground he had conquered months before. If he was going to bring this long war to a speedy conclusion and prevent it dragging on through endless bloody months, he was going to have to undertake something much more dramatic. Both generals weighed their strategic options and each decided that the results he required were to be achieved by penetrating deeply into the enemy’s country. Hood planned to swing west, cross the Tennessee somewhere in north-central Alabama, and then march north to Nashville, thereby turning Sherman and forcing his retreat. He would defeat such Union forces as he encountered, cross the Ohio River, bring the war home to the North, then turn eastward, march into Pennsylvania, and join Lee in defeating Grant and dictating peace to the Yankees on the banks of the Potomac— or somewhere in the vicinity. It was the most ambitious scheme in the series of Confederate offensive plans aimed at restoring all that the Confederacy had lost in the West since those first twin debacles at forts Henry and Donelson, now almost three years before. It was also the most unrealistic. The only thing that could possibly be said in its defense is that by this stage of the war, Confederate plans might as well be the counsels of desperation. Little else was left to the Rebel generals. Even at that, it was hard to imagine how Hood thought his army would get over the Alleghenies of Pennsylvania among the snows of December or January. At any rate, Hood succeeded in persuading a somewhat doubtful Jefferson Davis to approve the plan. Davis still had misgivings enough to appoint P.G.T. Beauregard to a supervisory position to oversee Hood’s operations in a broad sense. While Hood made these plans, Sherman’s thoughts were turning in the opposite direction. The more he chased Hood through the mountains trying to keep the Confederates off of his supply line, the more convinced he became that he needed to try something radically different. Defending a supply line this long was nearly impossible and in any case would occupy the whole of his forces in purely defensive activities. At this rate he could not begin to think of penetrating deeper into the Confederacy. What he determined to do instead was to cut loose of his supply line entirely and set out across Georgia, living off the land and heading for the port city of Savannah, on the Atlantic coast, where he could make contact with the Union fleet and draw supplies by sea. In passing through Georgia he would make the civilian population feel some of the effects of the war in the loss of some of their food and most of their livestock as well as the destruction of any facilities that could be of use to the Confederate war effort. This would prove to the average southern white— both the civilian at home and the far off soldier who heard that Sherman’s men had passed through his home county—that the war was really over and the Confederacy

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had lost. If the slaveholders’ republic could no longer prevent Union armies from marching hither and yon across its territory, eating up its citizens’ food and tearing up its railroads, then it might as well be defunct. Sherman’s first challenge was to gain Grant’s approval for the March to the Sea, and Grant had serious doubts. “I propose we break up the railroad from Chattanooga,” Sherman wrote to his friend, “and strike out with wagons for Milledgeville, Millen, and Savannah.” By doing so he would demonstrate to Georgians that “war and individual ruin are synonymous terms.” That was fine with Grant, but he had other ideas about what Sherman’s army should do. It seemed to him that Sherman should go after Hood’s army and assure that it would not penetrate north of the Tennessee River or, worse, all the way to the Ohio. Sherman assured him that he could leave Gen. Thomas with a sufficient force to deal with Hood and still have strength enough to make the March to the Sea. Besides, if Hood wanted to go all the way to the Ohio, that was fine with Sherman. “Let him go north,” he quipped. “My business is down south.” “I can make this march,” he assured Grant, “and make Georgia howl.” On November 2, 1864, Grant acquiesced and sent Sherman his permission to go ahead with the march.1 On November 16, Sherman’s troops marched out of Atlanta. Before leaving the city Sherman had ordered his men to tear up the railroad north of town, cut the telegraph wires, and burn all remaining facilities in Atlanta that could be of use to the Rebels in the further prosecution of the war. The fires got out of hand and about three tenths of the city went up in smoke before the flames went out. Sherman had organized his force into two columns. The Army of the Tennessee, now composed of the Fifteenth and Seventeenth corps and still under Howard’s command, marched on the right. The other column, soon to be called the Army of Georgia, was composed of the Fourteenth and Twentieth corps and commanded by Henry W. Slocum. Sherman rode with Slocum on the first day of the march and recalled looking back at the column of smoke rising from Atlanta while listening to the marching soldiers behind him singing, “John Brown’s body lies a mouldering in the grave . . . his soul is marching on,” and thinking he had never heard that favorite Union song performed in more fitting manner or circumstances. The two columns headed southeastward on separate tracks, each making use of a different set of roads and scouring foodstuffs from a different stretch of the countryside. In all, the footprint of Sherman’s march was about sixty miles wide. Central Georgia was a land of rich farms and plantations, and Sherman made sure that his route passed through the most productive counties. The army could live well here as long as it kept moving. If it stopped, however, here or anywhere on the march, it would soon exhaust the countryside within its reach and begin to go hungry. Therefore, although the Rebels now possessed in Georgia no force that could begin to contend seriously with Sherman’s hardened legions, it was important for Sherman to keep the enemy off balance since even a successful battle, if it

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forced him to halt, concentrate, and maneuver his army, might cause serious supply problems. In order to keep the Confederates in doubt as to his target and to prevent them from concentrating their scant forces in his path, Sherman had his left wing march so as to threaten Augusta while his right wing appeared to be bearing down on Macon. As he had hoped, the Rebels divided their available forces of militia and cavalry between those two cities, leaving a wide swath of rich farmland open between them. Then Sherman’s two wings veered back toward the center, passing through the tract thus exposed and avoiding heavy combat. The only clash approaching the dignity of a pitched battle during the march occurred just east of Macon, near the little town of Griswoldville. A division of Georgia militia composed mostly of men in late middle age and boys in their mid-teens— all of them perfectly innocent of how warfare was actually conducted—attacked a brigade of Howard’s battle-hardened veterans guarding the supply wagons of the right column. The Federals had had only a few minutes to throw together scant barricades of rails and tree branches, but they were very experienced and some of them were carrying repeating rifles instead of the standard single-shot muzzle-loaders carried by most Civil War soldiers. The result was catastrophic for the attackers. “It was awful the way we slaughtered those men,” wrote Capt. Charles Wills of the 103rd Illinois. When the fight was over, the Georgia militia had retired, leaving behind more than 500 dead and wounded. Union casualties were less than 100. The Federals were appalled at the carnage they had had to create. “I hope we will never have to shoot at such men again,” wrote Wills. “They knew nothing at all about fighting.”2 The destructiveness of Sherman’s march through Georgia became legendary, but to a significant extent it was nothing more than legend. Railroads, depots, bridges, factories, warehouses, and government buildings were put to the torch, but relatively few houses suffered that fate. In later years, when the legend of Sherman’s relentless destruction had grown up, several Georgia towns in the path of the march came up with creative, sometimes charming local legends to explain the dozens of beautiful antebellum mansions that still grace their streets. The town of Madison, for example, went through several myths and finally settled on one that had Sherman exclaiming that the town was too beautiful to burn. In fact, residential districts were generally spared throughout the march. Sherman and his officers, especially the devoutly Christian Howard, were determined that the march should be conducted in keeping with the laws and customs of war. Foraging and destruction of governmental and industrial structures was permissible. So too was destruction of civilian structures, even houses, in retaliation for hostile action by local civilians. Wanton destruction, on the other hand, was to be minimized. Howard even gave strict orders that any of his soldiers found guilty of stealing—as opposed to confiscating food and livestock for army use—was to be shot. His officers were not eager to stand any of their men before firing squads, and

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so in the few cases that did arise they made sure to convict the offenders of lesser, noncapital offenses. In any case, the difficulty of carrying booty on one’s back for 300 miles helped to keep theft to a minimum. Civilians’ persons were even more sacrosanct and immune from harm. Assaults or murders of civilians were extremely scarce, and, when detected, such crimes drew ferocious punishments from Sherman’s officers. Georgians expected this, and when Sherman’s troops were known to be bearing down on a locality many of the male residents would take their four-legged livestock and attempt to get out of the path of the march, leaving their womenfolk at home to greet the invaders. By this point in the war civilians were well aware that an occupied house was far less likely to be ransacked or burned than an abandoned one. They also knew that the odds of women being attacked or abused were remote.3 One particular class of Georgians was very happy indeed to see Sherman’s troops. Slaves flocked to Sherman’s armies as they had flocked to his raiding expedition during the Meridian operation nine months before. “The Darkies come to us from every direction,” commented Hoosier soldier Theodore Upson, “They are all looking for freedom but don’t really seem to know just what freedom means.” They were happy enough about it at any rate. “They seem to be half crazy with joy,” wrote Wills. They presented a curious spectacle, trailing out for miles behind the army—men, women, boys, and girls, very old, very young, and every age in between, many with their belongings in bundles over their shoulders or on their heads. Some were riding on an “assortment of animals and vehicles, limping horses, gaunt mules, oxen and cows, hitched to old wobbly buggies, coaches, carriages and carts,” wrote an Illinois soldier.4 Sherman and some of his officers were concerned about the exodus their passage had triggered. The army could feed itself by means of its system of well-organized foraging parties ranging out on either side of the column, but the former slaves had no such ability, nor did the army have the surplus capacity to feed and care for them, either on the march or once they reached Savannah. Many of them might die of hunger or exposure, and meanwhile their presence encumbered and potentially endangered the army. Whenever he spoke to small groups of slaves along the way, Sherman emphasized that they would be better off staying where they were and waiting for the end of the war to bring them freedom. The march itself was evidence that final Union victory could not be far off now. To the slaves, however, any wait would be too long and too uncertain, and they continued to flock after Sherman’s columns. At Ebenezer Creek, in southeastern Georgia, the problem of the columns’ long and irregular tails of escaping slaves resulted in tragedy. Here in the low country, a creek such as this one was a broad waterway that required bridging. Brig. Gen. Jefferson C. Davis’s Fourteenth Corps crossed it by means of its pontoon bridge. Such portable bridging equipment was vital to the army’s survival. Without it, Sherman’s columns would be trapped, unable to reach the coast through this land of broad tidal rivers

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and creeks. After his troops, guns, and wagons had gotten over the creek, Davis faced the decision of what to do about the long, straggling, uneven column of escaping slaves that followed behind. Should he leave his valuable bridge in place, along with a detachment of troops to try to protect it, while these nonmilitary personnel crossed? How long might that take? And would Confederate cavalry, known to be hovering just out of reach of the powerful Union columns, come upon the bridge and its detachment before such a movement was complete, possibly endangering his entire command? Davis decided not to run that risk and ordered his men to take up the bridge before the blacks could cross. The blacks were well aware that the Confederate cavalry regularly caught would-be escaping slaves on the margins of the march and returned them to bondage. Some of the former slaves, panicking at this possibility, jumped into Ebenezer Creek and tried to swim across. Some made it; others drowned. Many in the army, including in his own command, as well as large segments of the press and public once news got out, roundly condemned Davis for this action, pointing out that his own personal opinions tended toward racism and that he had nothing against slavery except that its adherents had started a war against the United States. Another officer—Howard for example—might well have run the risk of trying to help the blacks across the creek, but military necessity provided sufficient grounds for Davis’s decision, whatever may have been his inner motives and his shortcomings on the issue of race. Slocum’s column passed through Milledgeville, the capital of Georgia. Neither Governor Joe Brown nor the legislature had stayed to welcome the state’s blue-clad guests, but some of Slocum’s men met in the state house, constituted themselves as the legislature, and passed various facetious acts. Several days later anger replaced humor among the men of Slocum’s column when they reached a Confederate prisoner of war camp where thousands of their comrades had been confined inside a stockade, exposed to the elements, and woefully underfed. The Confederates had moved their prisoners a few days before Slocum’s arrival, but mass graves gave mute testimony to what had gone on here, as did several emaciated corpses that the Rebels had left unburied. Slocum’s men buried these unfortunates and then burned the nearby town of Millen to the ground. As the march moved farther southeast, it passed through a belt of piney woods that contained few farms and offered little food. The foraging parties had to range farther and work harder to keep their comrades fed, and sometimes rations were short. Confederate cavalry that prowled around the fringes of the columns, keeping carefully out of the way of Union combat power, sometimes caught and murdered individual foragers or whole foraging parties, in blatant violation of the laws of war. Yet, despite their rage, the Rebels could do nothing to stop Sherman’s progress across the state. Approaching the coast, Sherman’s columns entered the zone of rice plantations. Rice was now almost all the soldiers had to eat, and as the army halted in front of

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Savannah, which it did on December 10, there soon was none too much rice either. Rations grew short, and hunger became an issue. The only way to feed the army now was to open a path to the Union supply ships standing offshore. The best and quickest means of doing so would be via the Ogeechee River, just south of Savannah, but Confederate Fort McAllister blocked that route. Getting to the fort involved rebuilding a lengthy bridge that the Confederates had burned. Hence, Union forces did not arrive in front of the Rebel stronghold until December 13. Sherman ordered Howard to take the fort, and Howard gave the assignment to the division of Brig. Gen. William Hazen—the same division Sherman had commanded at Shiloh more than two and a half years before. From the roof of a rice mill on the other side of the river late that afternoon, Sherman and Howard watched Hazen’s men successfully storm the fort. Union signalmen were already in contact, via semaphore, with naval vessels offshore, and supplies were soon flowing to Sherman’s troops around Savannah. Inside Savannah’s fortifications was a Confederate garrison of about 10,000 men under the command of William J. Hardee. During the week after the fall of Fort McAllister, Sherman’s army worked its way into position around the city, preparing for an assault or a siege. Movement was slow and difficult in a countryside cut by numerous deep streams. Hardee was not inclined to wait to try conclusions. During the night of December 19–20, he marched his troops out of the city, using an improvised floating bridge made of thirty rice flats lashed together end to end. The next morning Sherman’s men were delighted to discover the Rebel trenches empty and the city theirs. After taking stock of the captured weapons, supplies, and other goods the Confederates had left behind, Sherman telegraphed the good news to Lincoln, presenting him as a Christmas present the city of Savannah with 250 heavy guns, plenty of ammunition, and about 25,000 bales of cotton. While Sherman and his men had been marching through Georgia, Hood had been conducting a somewhat different campaign in Tennessee. Various logistical problems delayed his departure until November 21, five days after Sherman had left Atlanta. Hood’s army, about 30,000 infantry and 8,000 cavalry, marched north from Florence, Alabama. Opposing him in Tennessee was a composite force under the command of George H. Thomas. Sherman had given Thomas the Fourth and Twenty-third corps from the force with which he had taken Atlanta and had ordered Thomas to bring together various troops that had been on garrison duty in Tennessee. Also on the way to join Thomas was A.J. Smith’s wandering detachment of the Army of the Tennessee. After whipping Forrest in Mississippi, Smith’s command had traveled to Missouri to chase Confederate raider Sterling Price out of the state. Now they were headed back to the east bank of the Mississippi to join Thomas in countering Hood’s incursion. Thomas would have an army more than large enough to deal with Hood’s once he got all his forces together. What he needed was time to accomplish that. Hood’s late start had already given him a very welcome gift of time, and to win him some

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more, Thomas dispatched John M. Schofield with the Fourth and Twenty-third corps to delay Hood’s approach to Nashville. Schofield took up a position at Pulaski, Tennessee, about seventy-five miles south of the state capital and just over fifty miles northeast of Florence. Hood conducted his campaign against Schofield skillfully and his troops marched well. By November 22 his army had reached Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, forty miles northwest of Florence and twenty miles west-northwest of Pulaski. This turned Schofield’s position at the latter town and forced him to fall back, which he did on the evening of the 22nd. Continuing the next two days, Schofield headed toward Columbia, Tennessee, another thirty miles due north of Pulaski and thus closer to Nashville, while Hood and his army paralleled them on roads to the west of theirs, gradually converging toward Columbia. That town was a key point because it controlled the main bridge over the Duck River on the road to Nashville. Forrest’s Confederate cavalry arrived on the morning of November 24 and skirmished with the small Union garrison that had already been in place there. Later that morning Schofield’s army began arriving and drove off the Rebel horsemen. Hood had backed Schofield up almost half way to Nashville, but he had failed to cut him off by seizing the Duck River crossing. During the next several days Hood moved his army up into positions facing Columbia, while Schofield’s men diligently entrenched. By the time the full Army of Tennessee was on the scene, Schofield had rightly begun to suspect that Hood’s next move would be a turning maneuver. So during the night of November 27–28, he pulled all of his troops back to the north bank of the Duck, destroying the bridges behind him. The next day, however, Nathan Bedford Forrest, commanding a division of cavalry now attached to Hood’s army, found a crossing upstream, to the east of Columbia, and Hood prepared to follow with the bulk of his army. He conceived a plan for another turning movement against Schofield, one that he hoped would indeed trap the Federals and thus subtract two of Thomas’s best corps before the real fight for Nashville even got underway. Leaving Stephen D. Lee’s corps along with all of the army’s artillery in position on the south bank of the Duck at Columbia, Hood took his other two corps and followed in Forrest’s wake, upstream, then across the Duck and northward toward the town of Spring Hill, about twelve miles north of Columbia on the main road to Nashville. The Confederates moved well before dawn, and the operation went exactly as planned. While Lee and the artillery skirmished with Schofield at Columbia, Hood marched around the Federals and by late afternoon his vanguard was approaching Spring Hill. A small Union force on hand there fought gamely to try to keep the turnpike open for Schofield’s escape, but Hood had more than enough troops available to brush aside their resistance. And yet, somehow, the Confederates failed to do so. Hood seemed exhausted—no doubt it was fatiguing to ride all day strapped into the saddle because of a missing

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leg—and he turned in early. Awakened and informed that the road was still open and being used by the Federals, Hood gave orders for several units to advance and close the road but then went back to sleep without seeing that his orders were carried out. The generals of the Army of Tennessee that night staged one more demonstration of why they had won only a single battle in the course of the war. Jealousy, crosspurposes, mistrust, and dissension all played their part among the generals, and the army remained halted within a few hundred yards of the vital turnpike. That night Schofield’s entire force marched by along that road, keeping as quiet as they could. One story has it that a couple of unwary Federals, seeing a campfire not far from the road and thinking it Union, walked over to light their pipes and were taken prisoner. The morning of November 30 found Schofield’s army taking up positions around Franklin, Tennessee, thirteen miles north of Spring Hill. The bridges over the Harpeth River at Franklin had been destroyed, and Schofield would have to wait at Franklin until his engineers could repair them. He placed his army in position in the defensive works that had been built sometime before covering the southern approaches of the town and settled down to wait. Hood could hardly be expected to launch a frontal attack on such powerful and heavily manned entrenchments. On learning that Schofield had escaped his clutches the night before, Hood was annoyed. His army, he believed, had been spoiled by prolonged use of breastworks, and now they believed such works impregnable. They needed to relearn open-field fighting and recover the e´lan necessary to storm a line of the enemy’s breastworks, and Hood would teach it to them as soon as they could catch up with Schofield’s Federals. He put the army on the march at once, and by late afternoon they had arrived on the Winstead Hills, about two miles south of the Union breastworks around Franklin.5 Without waiting for Lee’s corps or the artillery to come up, Hood ordered an immediate attack. His troops, about 18,000 men, formed line and advanced at about 4:00 p.m. The Federals, some of them armed with repeating rifles, had plenty of time to await their steady approach across the broad, shallow intervening valley. Yet, a Union blunder gave the attack some hope after all. The general commanding the last of Schofield’s divisions to reach Franklin, foolishly—or as some suggested, drunkenly— posted two of his brigades several hundred yards in front of the breastworks, on either side of the Columbia Pike. They could do no good there, had no chance of holding, and when they were driven back, they blocked their comrade’s field of fire. Following closely on their heels, the charging Confederates succeeded in breaking into the Union lines near the Carter plantation house and outbuildings. Col. Emerson Opdyke, commanding the third of the division’s brigades, had also been ordered to halt outside the works but had flatly refused and marched his brigade into a reserve position just behind the Carter House. Now he led his men in a furious countercharge to plug the gap. Fierce hand-to-hand fighting swirled around the plantation buildings until at last the Federals managed to restore their line.

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With that, the last slim chance of Confederate victory in the attack vanished. In other sectors of the front there had never been any chance in the first place. The Confederate attackers were mowed down as they approached the breastworks, and in the ditch immediately in front of the works their bodies lay in heaps at some places. The fighting continued until well after nightfall without the least chance of making any serious dent in the Union lines. When it was over, Confederate casualties totaled 6,252 while Union losses came to only 2,326, most of those suffered by the two brigades left out in front and also in the intense close-range fighting around the Carter House. Among the Confederate dead were six generals, including Patrick R. Cleburne. That night Schofield withdrew his army across the Harpeth and continued his march to Nashville unhindered, leaving the gory battlefield to Hood, who on that basis claimed the previous evening’s one-sided butchery of his troops as a victory. After taking what care it could of its many wounded, the Army of Tennessee proceeded north and drew up outside Nashville, the first units arriving on December 2, and the remainder of the army coming up the next day. Thomas had by this time assembled a force in the Tennessee capital that outnumbered his Confederate opponent two-toone, and the Federals were solidly ensconced behind the elaborate defensive works of what was undoubtedly one of the three most heavily fortified cities in North America. Hood probably could not have stormed the place with an army six times the size of the one he had, but retreat was unappealing, and there was little else to do. So he sat down, as it were, Macawber-like, and waited for something to turn up. Following the course of events by reports over the telegraph wires, Grant was eager for Thomas to attack and destroy Hood’s army before the Confederate general took it into his head to slip past Nashville and make a dash for the Ohio River, occasioning no end of nuisance in catching him. When Thomas informed Grant that he would not initiate action until he received more cavalry horses, Grant telegraphed him on December 6, “Attack Hood at once and wait no longer for remount of your cavalry. There is great danger of delay resulting in a campaign back to the Ohio River.” Thomas replied that he would do so, but more days passed without action.6 Grant continued to fret about the delay. On December 7 he telegraphed Secretary of War Stanton stating that if Thomas did not attack promptly, it would be best to supersede him by Schofield. The next day Grant wired Halleck expressing continued concern that the Rebels would slip past Nashville and reach the Ohio. “If Thomas has not struck yet, he ought to be ordered to hand over his command to Schofield,” Grant continued, adding, “There is no better man to repel an attack than Thomas, but I fear he is too cautious to ever take the initiative.” Halleck replied that Grant could remove Thomas if he wished but that no one in Washington was going to do so and no one there wanted it done. Grant relented and agreed that the time had not come to remove Thomas. Instead, he sent the stolid Virginian a telegraphic pep talk. “Why not attack at once?” Grant exhorted. Thomas must not allow Hood to get past him and engage in

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a “foot race” to the Ohio River. “Now is one of the finest opportunities ever presented of destroying one of the three armies of the enemy,” Grant continued. “If destroyed, he never can replace it. Use the means at your command, and you can do this and cause a rejoicing that will resound from one end of the land to another.”7 Yet Thomas remained inert. In fact, he was still waiting for horses. Having convinced himself that he needed a very large cavalry force, he simply was not going to move until he had as many horses as he deemed necessary—as well as supplies, equipment, and the like—regardless of what Grant said. Finally on December 9 Grant ran out of patience and telegraphed an order to Halleck to have Thomas removed. Before Halleck could draw up the formal order and forward it to Nashville, he received a telegram from Thomas stating that he was finally prepared and about to attack but that an ice storm had started and that nothing could be done until it passed. Halleck queried Grant in the matter, and again Grant relented and suspended the order for Thomas’s removal.8 Days went by, and the sleet continued to fall in Middle Tennessee. On December 13, the same day Sherman’s men took Fort McAllister, completing the March to the Sea, Grant once again ran out of patience. He simply did not have confidence that Thomas would proceed as rapidly as possible. So Grant sent an order for Gen. John A. Logan, hero of the Battle of Atlanta and a long and trusted Grant lieutenant, to go to Nashville and, if Thomas had neither fought a battle nor appeared about to fight one, Logan was to relieve him and take command. Logan had been on leave in the North to electioneer for Lincoln during the fall and had missed the March to the Sea. Returning now, he received Grant’s order and prepared to set out for Nashville. Meanwhile, Grant himself had second thoughts and decided that nothing short of his own presence in Nashville would serve the purpose. He too prepared to set out. In the end, neither man would be traveling West. On December 14 a dispatch from Thomas reached Washington stating that the ice storm had let up and that he would launch his attack the next day. This time he was as good as his word, and on December 15, the Battle of Nashville began. Hearing the good news, Grant cancelled his plans to go West and cabled Logan to turn back. The Battle of Nashville was a two-day affair. On December 15 the attack did not get underway until around midday, as Thomas’s forces became entangled with each other, and delays resulted as they sorted out the confusion. When at last all was in readiness, Thomas opened with a diversionary attack against Hood’s right. Making this assault was a division of United States Colored Troops (USCT). They were inexperienced soldiers but they attacked bravely against long odds and suffered heavy casualties before their attack was beaten off. By that time, however, A.J. Smith’s command was ready to launch its own attack on the Confederate left. Because his line was so short in comparison to its opponent’s, Hood had refused his left—that is, he had bent it back at about a ninety-degree angle away from the enemy. This refused section of his line was composed of a series of separate hilltop forts called redoubts, which were the key strong points anchoring

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the west end of Hood’s line. Smith’s Federals, the hard-bitten and supremely confident veterans of many battlefields, took the redoubts by storm in quick succession, assisted by Maj. Gen. James H. Wilson’s dismounted Union cavalry on the far right flank. With this debacle, Hood’s line was broken, and his battered army had to retreat, covered by the gathering darkness that ended the short mid-December day. The Confederates took up a position some distance farther south of Nashville, and prepared to bid defiance to Thomas again the next day. All that remained for Thomas on December 16, therefore, was to strike again and finish the job. Yet, when morning came his army was in confusion and uncertainty and unprepared to renew the attack. Some of Thomas’s subordinate commanders were, at best, unenterprising, and Schofield seemed downright timid, reporting that he anticipated the Confederates would attack him. When the Union troops finally did advance, their initial assaults were piecemeal and uncoordinated. The unfortunate division of USCT again charged with exemplary bravery but once again suffered a bloody repulse, as did a division of white troops. By mid-afternoon, Hood appeared to be well on his way to winning an unlikely defensive victory after all. A.J. Smith’s men had been in position and waiting for sometime—with growing impatience. One of Smith’s division commanders, John McArthur, chafed at the delay. This was not how they had taken Fort Donelson or Vicksburg. Finally, the Scottish-born Chicago ironworks owner decided to proceed on his own initiative and attack the formidable Confederate lines on an imposing hill directly in front of his position. At about 4:00 p.m. his troops successfully stormed the eminence, later to be known as Shy’s Hill, in honor of a Confederate officer who died resisting the onslaught of McArthur’s men. McArthur’s success, coupled with the nearly simultaneous drive by Wilson’s cavalry around the flank and into the rear of the Confederate army, broke the back of Rebel resistance. Panic swept through Hood’s army, many of its units still demoralized from the fearful bloodletting at Franklin, and brigade after brigade broke for the rear in desperate flight until the whole army was running. Nightfall shielded the Confederate escape, and heavy rains and muddy roads hindered pursuit. Forrest’s cavalry, which had missed the Nashville debacle thanks to Hood’s having unwisely dispatched it to Murfreesboro in the days preceding the battle, now returned to cover the retreat, and some of the Army of Tennessee’s infantry rallied to help in that effort. Skirmishing followed through miserable weather for the next ten days, with the campaign finally coming to an end when Hood got the last of his troops across to the south bank of the Tennessee River on December 27. The Army of Tennessee did not stop, however, until it reached Tupelo, Mississippi. As an organization it would never see its namesake state again.9 By the beginning of 1865, almost no further significant military operations remained to be carried out in the western theater of the Civil War. In the spring of 1865, Wilson led 10,000 Union cavalry on a raid into what was left of the Confederate military-industrial complex in Alabama, defeating Forrest at Selma. Another

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Union army, including A.J. Smith’s ubiquitous detachment and commanded by Maj. Gen. Edward R.S. Canby, finally moved to capture Mobile that spring, as Grant had hoped Banks would do a full year before. By early April Canby’s men had successfully stormed several key strong points in the Mobile defenses. Sherman’s army at Savannah was already outside the strict geographical boundaries of the western theater, having passed over the watershed between the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic not long after leaving Atlanta on the March to the Sea. Yet Sherman’s force represented some of the clearest evidence of how the war in the western theater ultimately decided the entire conflict, for in the war’s closing stages he brought the western front to the eastern seaboard states and almost to the borders of Virginia. Grant suggested that Sherman bring his army from Savannah to Virginia by ship, but Sherman pointed out that it would be difficult to collect enough transports to move the entire army quickly and suggested that instead he ought to march north to join Grant, passing through the Carolinas in much the same way he had through Georgia. Grant agreed, and in late January 1865, Sherman set out, once again moving with two wings commanded by Howard and Slocum. This march was much more difficult than the one through Georgia, coming in the dead of winter amid frequent chilly rain, over roads that seemed to be composed of bottomless mud, and through swamps that could be miles wide. Sherman’s men laid hundreds of miles of corduroy roads, waded the swamps, and even though contending against growing Confederate military opposition, continued to make about ten miles a day and take all their food from the countryside. At Lee’s behest Jefferson Davis had recalled Johnston to active duty and had charged him with the task of impeding Sherman’s northward march. Most of Johnston’s troops consisted of remnants of the Army of Tennessee, sent East after returning from Hood’s disastrous Tennessee campaign. Yet not until Sherman had reached North Carolina was Johnston able to do more than harass his march. South Carolina came in for special treatment from Sherman’s soldiers. The state had for decades been the most rabid hotbed of proslavery agitation, and it had led the way in seceding and trying to persuade other states to secede. Then it was South Carolinians, albeit under the auspices of the Confederacy, who had fired on Fort Sumter and transformed attempted secession into outright civil war. If more than half a million Americans had died during the past four years and billions of dollars had been wasted, the fault could be traced right back to the Palmetto State, and many of Sherman’s men meant to see that at least some measure of justice was done. The troops—or at least the more implacable spirits among them—burned most of the cotton gins and other outbuildings they came to, as well as the majority of the unoccupied houses. Even here, however, in South Carolina, many troops found themselves fighting fires set by retreating Confederates. For example, when the Rebels pulled out of Orangeburg, South Carolina, they torched stockpiles of cotton in the town’s warehouses and thus inadvertently set fire to the town as well. The first Union

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troops to arrive put out the fires, saved the town, and then, because Sherman’s force had no capability of transporting bulk cotton, moved the remaining cotton to a safe location in the open fields outside of town and burned it there.10 If South Carolina was marked for vengeance by a fair proportion of Sherman’s men, Columbia, its capital, was doubly so. Many soldiers expressed their determination to burn the city when they got there. They did get there and marched into town on February 17, to find that Gen. Wade Hampton’s Confederate cavalry had stacked cotton bales in long ridges down the middle of several of the streets and set fire to them. They also found many newly freed slaves as well as a number of escaped Union prisoners of war, embittered by their treatment at the hands of the Rebels. Both groups were more eager to burn Columbia than any of Sherman’s men. That night a strong wind fanned the embers of the cotton fires back into flames and blew them into buildings, setting several fires. A number of other fires were set by parties unknown. Large formations of troops spent the night fighting fires, while some of their off-duty comrades did their best to interfere with any such efforts. Some no doubt engaged in plundering and arson. Still other Union soldiers spent the night helping women and children escape from houses that could not be saved from the fire, helping to rescue what valuables they could for such civilians, and gathering and distributing blankets to newly homeless civilians on a chilly night. By morning, one-third of Columbia, mostly the business district, had been destroyed. Some of Sherman’s soldiers felt sorry for the women and children who had been made homeless, but they felt no guilt in the matter. The city of Columbia was, as an Illinois soldier wrote, “among the first to cry out for the war, and at length reaped its reward.”11 As the march proceeded into North Carolina, where Sherman’s men again moderated their destructiveness, the Confederate cavalry hovering around the flanks of the column grew more enraged and began to murder any foragers they captured. This had happened occasionally earlier but now became fairly common. Sherman sent a query to Wade Hampton regarding such practices, and Hampton replied that he believed his men had a perfect right to murder prisoners of war. The laws of war offered Sherman one remedy for Hampton’s bloodlust, and he duly ordered retaliation. The first such case, however, proved to be the last. The Confederate soldier selected by lot from among the prisoners Sherman was holding had obviously had nothing to do with any of the murders, and his execution was almost unbearable to those who had to carry it out. Sherman’s men, though hardened to the point of nonchalance about shooting Rebels who were shooting back at them, simply did not have the stomach to match Hampton in cold-blooded killing. They made no further retaliation, though Hampton’s men continued to murder their captured comrades throughout the rest of the campaign, killing two and leaving another for dead just two days before the final surrender was signed. One of the South’s largest slaveholders, Hampton had apparently long since become inured to committing acts of cruelty against the defenseless.

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Before hostilities ended, however, Johnston made a final bid to halt Sherman’s progress toward Virginia and what would have been the inevitable crushing of Lee’s army between Sherman and Grant. At Bentonville, North Carolina, on March 19 he attacked Slocum’s wing of the force, the Army of Georgia. Although Johnston gained some initial advantage, Slocum’s troops steadied and held their ground. The next day Howard’s Army of the Tennessee came up, and by March 21 Sherman had nearly succeeded in trapping Johnston’s army. By dint of his considerable craftiness on the retreat as well as some hard fighting by his men, Johnston’s army escaped, but it was more clear than ever that no effort of his could conceivably halt or even significantly delay Sherman. In the end, Grant was able to finish off Lee before Sherman arrived. On April 1 he broke Lee’s right flank at Five Forks, west of Petersburg, Virginia, and the next day Richmond fell. Lee fled westward until Grant succeeded in cornering him at Appomattox Court House, east of Lynchburg. There on April 9 Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia. With the demise of its last remaining significant army, the Confederacy was manifestly finished, and the various remnants of its other fighting forces surrendered in quick succession over the next few weeks. On April 18, Johnston surrendered to Sherman at Durham Station, North Carolina. Back in the heartland, Mobile had fallen to Canby on April 12. On May 4 Confederate general Richard Taylor met with Canby at Citronelle, Alabama, forty miles north of Mobile, to surrender the remaining Confederate forces east of the Mississippi. Those west of the river followed suit within a few weeks, and the war was over. The final operations of what had once been the western theater were the key factor in the war’s closing months. The March to the Sea produced fewer casualties than almost any other major campaign of the Civil War. Even the Tullahoma Campaign, which Rosecrans had complained might be ignored because it was “not written in letters of blood,” had nevertheless been bloodier than the march through Georgia. Yet the march brought the end of the war significantly closer. Beyond the destruction of southern manufacturing and railroad transportation and the disruption of one of its rich agricultural districts, the greatest effect of the March to the Sea was on Confederate morale. More than any other Union operation of the war, the March to the Sea and subsequent Carolinas Campaign sapped Confederate soldiers’ will to fight. The most widespread motivation for common Confederate soldiers was the simple desire to keep the Yankees away from their homes. Once it became clear to a Confederate soldier that Union troops could march through his home county, even if they did not commit any depredations against civilians, the typical Confederate soldier had little left to fight for. An added motivation for many Rebel soldiers had been the preservation of slavery or at least of white supremacy in their home counties. The passage of the Union armies destroyed slavery, and at the time, it did not seem that white supremacy could be maintained without slavery. Once Union troops had

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marched through a Confederate soldier’s home county, he might stay with the colors for the sake of his comrades or his leaders, or because desertion seemed dishonorable, but those motivations were proving increasingly inadequate for many southerners during the final year of the war. More than 100,000 Confederate soldiers were absent without leave. The 8th Georgia Regiment provides an example of the effectiveness of the March to the Sea in bringing about this result. Composed of companies from throughout the state of Georgia, the 8th had been a high-morale regiment since 1861, serving in one of the hardest hitting divisions in Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Like all the regiments in Lee’s army, it suffered a steady but growing trickle of desertion during the winter of 1864–1865. Interestingly, desertion was drastically higher in companies through whose home counties Sherman’s troops had passed. The companies from Rome, Atlanta, and Savannah—places where the Yankees had stayed the longest— had the highest desertion rates. On the other hand, companies whose home counties had yet to see any Union incursion had the lowest rates, some boasting no desertions at all. As far as historical records reveal, none of the soldiers who deserted from the 8th Georgia made his way back home during the war. All of them crossed over to Federal lines and took the oath of allegiance to the Union—in exchange for permission to live out the war anywhere north of the Ohio River. These men realized that they could not as individuals defend their families from the passing juggernaut of the Union armies, and with that realization, the war for them was over. By taking the oath, they were making their own separate peace with the Union and choosing to insure that they would be alive after the war to care for their families then. Thus the March to the Sea and the Carolinas Campaign took the heart out of the Confederacy, even while Lee’s army continued to hold Richmond. Outside of Lee’s army, and the enclave around Richmond and Petersburg that it protected through the end of March 1865, the Confederate people were beaten. Many might continue to harbor resentment and some might even express defiance, but few were willing to continue the contest in the face of what it was sure to cost now that the rest of the Confederacy—outside the Richmond–Petersburg enclave—was all but overrun. Because the Union had already won the Civil War in the West, Lee’s surrender brought a quick collapse of all that was left of the rebellion. Had Lee held on a few weeks longer around Richmond, Sherman’s armies would have joined Grant and insured a quick and final Union victory over the Confederacy’s last remaining viable army. Hood’s fiasco in Tennessee and Johnston’s vain attempt at Bentonville had already demonstrated that no other Confederate force could hope to offer resistance. Sherman had been right. Once the great valley of the Mississippi had been subdued, the Atlantic slope quickly followed.

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INTRODUCTION 1 Brooks D. Simpson and Jean V. Berlin, (eds.). Sherman’s Civil War: Selected Correspondence of William T. Sherman, 1860–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), pp. 605–606. CHAPTER ONE 1. Hosea W. Rood, Story of the Service of Company E, Twelfth Wisconsin Regiment Veteran Volunteer Infantry in the War of the Rebellion (Milwaukee, WI: Swain & Tate, 1893), pp. 47–51. 2. Dietrich C. Smith to Carrie Pieper, April 1861, Dietrich C. Smith Papers, Illinois State Historical Library. 3. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); John Hope Franklin, The Militant South, 1800–1861 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1956). 4. Richard M. McMurry, Two Great Rebel Armies: An Essay in Confederate Military History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), pp. 87–105. 5. Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 8 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 4:532. 6. Thomas Lawrence Connelly, Army of the Heartland: The Army of Tennessee, 1861–1862 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), pp. 25–29. 7. Connelly, Army of the Heartland, pp. 25–29.

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8. Joseph H. Parks, General Leonidas Polk, C.S.A.: The Fighting Bishop (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1960), pp. 166–167; Isham G. Harris to Davis, July 2, 1861, Dearborn Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University; Connelly, Army of the Heartland, p. 47; Stanley Horn, The Army of Tennessee (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1941), p. 48; James T. McIntosh, Lynda L. Crist, and Mary S. Dix, eds., The Papers of Jefferson Davis (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 3:91n; Milo Milton Quaife, ed., The Diary of James K. Polk (Chicago, IL: McClung, 1910), 4:5–9, 22; Arndt M. Stickles, Simon Bolivar Buckner: Borderland Knight (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1940), p. 134. 9. U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 128 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1881–1901; hereinafter OR; all references are to Series 1), vol. 4, pp. 362, 365–366; vol. 52, pt. 2, p. 115, 128–129. 10. Harris to Davis, September 4, 1861, I. G. Harris Papers, Tennessee State Library and Archives; OR, vol. 4, pp. 179–184, 189; endorsement by Jefferson Davis, September 5, 1861, on telegram from Harris to Davis of September 4, 1861, National Archives, RG109, “Documents in the Official Records”; Davis to Polk, September 4, 1861, Polk Papers, Library of Congress. 11. OR vol. 3, p. 142. 12. Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, 2 vols. (New York: Charles L. Webster & Co., 1885), 1:264–265; OR vol. 3, pp. 141–142, 144, 152; vol. 4, p. 196; William B. Feis, Grant’s Secret Service: The Intelligence War from Belmont to Appomattox (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), pp. 21–23; John Y. Simon, ed. The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 26 vols. (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 2:189–193. 13. Jefferson Davis, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1881), 1:309; Polk to Davis, November 6, 1861, Dearborn Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University; OR vol. 4, p. 539. 14. OR vol. 4, p. 481; vol. 7, pp. 710–711; Kendall D. Gott, Where the South Lost the War: An Analysis of the Fort Henry-Fort Donelson Campaign, February 1862 (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2003), pp. 16–20, 40. 15. Davis, Rise and Fall, 1:407; OR vol. 3, p. 530. 16. John Marszalek, Commander of All Lincoln’s Armies: A Life of General Henry W. Halleck (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004). 17. OR vol. 7, p. 440; Janet L. Coryell, Neither Heroine nor Fool: Anna Ella Carroll of Maryland (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1990). 18. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Anatol Rapoport, ed. (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1968; originally published, 1832), p. 164. 19. OR vol. 7, p. 76. 20. OR vol. 7, p. 76–116, 855; Connelly, Army of the Heartland, 97; R.M. Kelley, “Holding Kentucky for the Union,” Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence Clough Buell, eds. 4 vols. (New York: Yoselof, 1956), 1:389. 21. David W. Poak to Sarah J. Poak, January 9, 1862, David W. Poak Papers, Illinois State Historical Library; W.H.L. Wallace to Ann Wallace, January 8, 9, 16, and 20, 1862, ISHL; U.S. Grant to Capt. R.B. Hatch, January 8, 1862, U.S. Grant Papers, Civil War

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Miscellaneous Collection, U.S. Army Military History Institute; OR vol. 7, pp. 68–74; pp. 541–543, 551; James W. Jessee, Civil War Diaries of James W. Jessee, 1861–1865, Company K, 8th Regiment of Illinois Volunteer Infantry, William P. LaBounty, ed. (Normal, IL: McLean County Genealogical Society, 1997), Jessee, chap. 1, p. 4; Grant, Personal Memoirs, 1:286–287; Feis, Grant’s Secret Service, pp. 62–63; William L. Sanderson to “Dear wife,” January 26, 1862, “Letters from Col. William L. Sanderson, 23rd Indiana Infantry,” in “Indiana in the Civil War,” IndianaintheCivilWar.com; John D. Kerr to “Dear wife,” February 3, 1862, John D. Kerr Papers, ISHL; Marion Morrison, History of the Ninth Regiment Illinois Volunteer Infantry (Monmouth IL, 1864; reprint Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), pp. 16–17. 22. Grant, Personal Memoirs, 1:287–288; Simon, The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 4:103–104; OR vol. 5, p. 41; vol. 7, p. 571. 23. OR vol. 7, p. 121. 24. OR vol. 7, p. 126; Douglas Hapeman Diary, February 2 and 3, 1862, ISHL; Jessee, Civil War Diaries, chap. 1, p. 5; Daniel Leib Ambrose, History of the Seventh Regiment Illinois Volunteer Infantry (Springfield, IL: Illinois Journal Company, 1868), 25; Grant, Personal Memoirs, 1:288; Brooks D. Simpson, Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity, 1822–1865 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), p. 111. 25. OR vol. 3, p. 379; vol. 4, pp. 481, 491–492, 513–514, 517, 539; vol. 7, pp. 699–700, 705, 710–711, 779, 813, 817–818; vol. 52, pt. 2, pp. 239, 245–246; Connelly, Army of the Heartland, 79–85; Benjamin Franklin Cooling, Forts Henry and Donelson: The Key to the Confederate Heartland (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1987), pp. 58–59. 26. Gott, Where the South Lost the War, 124; Steven E. Woodworth, “When Merit Was Not Enough: Albert Sidney Johnston and Confederate Defeat in the West,” in Civil War Generals in Defeat (Lawrence, KN: University Press of Kansas, 1999), pp. 20–21. 27. OR vol. 7, p. 124; Simon, The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, pp. 165–166, 175, 179; W.H.L. Wallace to Ann Wallace, February 8, 1862, Wallace-Dickey Family Papers, Illinois State Historical Library. 28. OR vol. 7, pp. 162–163; Allen Morgan Geer, The Civil War Diary of Allen Morgan Geer, Twentieth Regiment, Illinois Volunteers, Mary Ann Anderson, ed. (Denver, CO: Robert C. Appleman, 1977), p. 17; F.F. Kiner, One Year’s Soldiering: Embracing the Battles of Fort Donelson and Shiloh (Lancaster, PA: E.H. Thomas, 1863. Reprint Prior Lake, MN: Morgan Avenue Press, 2000), p. 11; Simon, The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 4:191–193; Henry G. Hicks, “Fort Donelson,” Papers of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States (hereinafter MOLLUS) 56 vols. (various publishers and dates; reprint, Wilmington, NC: Broadfoot, 1994), vol. 29:440; Douglas Hapeman Diary, February 12, 1862, Illinois State Historical Library; Wilbur F. Crummer, With Grant at Fort Donelson, Shiloh and Vicksburg (Oak Park, IL: E. C. Crummer & Co., 1915), p. 25. 29. Kiner, One Year’s Soldiering, pp. 13–14; Gould D. Molineaux Diary, February 13, 1862, Special Collections, Augustana College Library, Rock Island, Illinois. 30. Gott, Where the South Lost the War, pp. 184–186; Gould D. Molineaux Diary, February 13, 1862, Special Collections, Augustana College Library, Rock Island, Illinois; Kiner, One Year’s Soldiering, 14–15; Geer, Civil War Diary, 18; R.W. Burt, “Experiences of the 76th Ohio in the Siege,” National Tribune, September 13, 1906.

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31. Grant, Personal Memoirs, 1:304. 32. Hicks, “Fort Donelson,” in MOLLUS, 29:448; OR vol. 7, pp. 168, 175–176, 185–187, 190, 195–196, 200, 210, 217–219, 237–238, 244; Gould D. Molineaux Diary, February 15, 1862, Special Collections, Augustana College Library, Rock Island, Illinois; David W. Poak to “Dear Aunt,” February 17, 1862, David W. Poak Papers, Illinois State Historical Library; Ira Blanchard, I Marched with Sherman: Civil War Memoirs of the 20th Illinois Volunteer Infantry (San Francisco, CA: J.D. Huff, 1992), p. 46; Lew Wallace, Smoke, Sound & Fury: The Civil War Memoirs of Major-General Lew Wallace, U.S. Volunteers, Jim Leeke, ed. (Portland, OR: Strawberry Hill Press), pp. 79–85; Jesse B. Connelly Diary, February 15, 1862, Indiana Historical Society; Johann Stuber, Mein Tagebuch ueber die Erlebnisse im Revolutions-Kriege (Cincinnati, OH: S. Rosenthal & Co., 1896), pp. 16–17; R.W. Burt, “Experiences of the 76th Ohio in the Siege,” National Tribune, September 13, 1906, p. 3. 33. Gott, Where the South Lost the War, pp. 220–221. 34. Grant, Personal Memoirs, 1:308; OR vol. 7, pp. 223, 229–230; Cooling, Forts Henry and Donelson, p. 185, 191; Wallace, Smoke, Sound, and Fury, pp. 87–89; William H. Brown to “Dear Parents,” February 18, 1862, William H. Brown Letters, Illinois State Historical Library. 35. OR vol. 7, pp. 278–285, 296–300; Gott, Where the South Lost the War, pp. 238–241; Cooling, Forts Henry and Donelson, p. 132. 36. Gott, Where the South Lost the War, pp. 251–254; 37. John H. Brinton, Personal Memoirs of John H. Brinton: Civil War Surgeon, 1861–1865 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), pp. 129–130; Simon, The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 4:218. 38. Grant, Personal Memoirs, 1:306. 39. Larry J. Daniel, Shiloh: The Battle that Changed the Civil War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), p. 30. 40. Minerva J. Van Zandt to Khleber Van Zandt, March 15, 1862, private collection of Edmund Pendleton Cranz, Fort Worth, TX. CHAPTER TWO 1. OR vol. 7, p. 437; vol. 10, pt. 2, pp. 302, 327, 361, 370–371. 2. John Y. Simon, ed. The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 24 vols. to date (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967), 4:245, 284; OR vol. 7, p. 641. 3. OR vol. 7, pp. 680, 682; Simon, ed. The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 4:319; Grant, Personal Memoirs, 1:326. 4. Lew Wallace, Smoke, Sound, and Fury: The Civil War Memoirs of Major-General Lew Wallace, U.S. Volunteers, Jim Leeke, ed. (Portland, OR: Strawberry Hill Press, 1998), pp. 103– 104; OR vol. 10, pt. 2, pp. 15, 21; Jean Edward Smith, Grant (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), pp. 176–179; Brooks D. Simpson, Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity, 1822–1865 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), pp. 123–127. 5. OR vol. 10, pt. 2, pp. 390–391; Wiley Sword, Shiloh: Bloody April (Dayton, OH: Press of Morningside, 1983), pp. 106–108; Charles P. Roland, Albert Sidney Johnston: Soldier of Three Republics (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1964), pp. 319, 325.

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6. Marion Morrison, A History of the Ninth Regiment Illinois Volunteer Infantry (Monmouth, IL, 1864; reprint, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), p. 22. 7. Edward A. Gordon, “A Graphic Picture of the Battle of Shiloh,” in MOLLUS, 28:32; OR vol. 10, pt. 1, p. 89; pt. 2, pp. 93–94. 8. OR vol. 10, pt. 2, p. 387; Grady McWhiney, Braxton Bragg and Confederate Defeat (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), pp. 217, 221, 223–224; James Lee McDonough, Shiloh: In Hell before Night (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1977), pp. 73–75. 9. Thomas W. Connelly, History of the Seventieth Ohio Regiment (Cincinnati: Peak Bros., ND), p. 22; Andrew Hickenlooper, “The Battle of Shiloh,” in MOLLUS, 5:415–417. 10. OR vol. 10, pt. 2, p. 144. 11. Jefferson Davis to Varina Davis, June 21, 1862, Jefferson Davis Collection, Eleanor S. Brockenbrough Library, The Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia; Allen Morgan Geer, The Civil War Diary of Allen Morgan Geer, Twentieth Regiment, Illinois Volunteers, Mary Ann Andersen, ed. (Denver, CO: Robert C. Appleman, 1977), pp. 34–35; Morrison, A History of the Ninth Regiment, p. 35. 12. OR vol. 16, pt. 2, pp. 701–702; vol. 17, pt. 2, pp. 599, 601; vol. 52, pt. 2, pp. 324– 335; Dunbar Rowland, ed., Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist: His Letters, Papers and Speeches, 10 vols. (Jackson, WY: Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 1923), 5:279, 283; Bragg to Davis, June 19, 1862, Manuscript Department, Perkins Library, Duke University; Davis to Bragg, June 19, 1862, The Museum of the Confederacy; Davis to Gov. J.J. Pettus, June 19, 1862, Mississippi Department of Archives and History. 13. Larry J. Daniel, Days of Glory: The Army of the Cumberland, 1861–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004), pp. 91–97. 14. Michael B. Ballard, U.S. Grant: The Making of a General, 1861–1863 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), p. 75; John F. Marszalek, Commander of All Lincoln’s Armies: A Life of General Henry W. Halleck (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 127–154. 15. OR vol. 16, pt. 2, pp. 701–702, 726–727, 734–735, 741–742; vol. 17, pt. 2, pp. 626, 630, 652, 675–676; vol. 52, pt. 2, pp. 324–325; Grady McWhiney, Braxton Bragg and Confederate Defeat (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), pp. 262–271; Thomas Lawrence Connelly, Army of the Heartland: The Army of Tennessee, 1861–1862 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), pp. 192–193; Joseph H. Parks, General Edmund Kirby Smith, C.S.A. (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1954); Gary Donaldson, “‘Into Africa’: Kirby Smith and Braxton Bragg’s Invasion of Kentucky,” Filson Club History Quarterly 61 (October 1987): 450–451. 16. OR vol. 16, pt. 2, pp. 741–742, 745–746, 751–753; vol. 17, pt. 2, pp. 675–676; Jefferson Davis to E. Kirby Smith, July 28, 1862, E. Kirby Smith Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Library of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Rowland, ed., Jefferson Davis, 5:313. 17. OR vol. 16, pt. 2, pp. 748–749, 751–753, 755, 766–769, 775–776; vol. 52, pt. 2, p. 340; Smith to Jefferson Davis, August 13, 1862, Dearborn Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University; Connelly, Army of the Heartland, p. 195; Donaldson, ‘Into Africa,’ Filson Club History Quarterly 61 (October 1987): 453, 464.

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18. Taylor Peirce and Catharine Peirce, Dear Catharine, Dear Taylor: The Civil War Letters of Taylor and Catharine Peirce, Richard L. Kiper, ed. (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2002), pp. 189–190; Samuel Calvin Jones, Reminiscences of the Twenty-Second Iowa Volunteer Infantry (Iowa City, IA: Camp Pope Book Shop, 1907; reprint, 1993), pp. 5–6. 19. Daniel, Days of Glory, p. 117. 20. Connelly, Army of the Heartland, p. 217. 21. OR vol. 16, pt. 2, p. 837. 22. Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones, How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), pp. 252–254; OR vol. 16, pt. 2, pp. 847, 852–854, 859–861, 865–866, 873. 23. OR vol. 16, pt. 2, pp. 845–846, 876. 24. Daniel, Days of Glory, pp. 131–136. 25. OR vol. 17, pt. 1, pp. 60–65; pt. 2, p. 214; J. W. Greenman Diary, September, p. 13–14, 1862, Mississippi Department of Archives and History; Albert E. Smith, “A Few Days with the Eight Regiment, Wisconsin Volunteers at Iuka and Corinth,” MOLLUS 49:61– 62; Peter Cozzens, The Darkest Days of the War: The Battles of Iuka and Corinth (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), p. 61. 26. Grant, Personal Memoirs, 1:407–408, 411; OR vol. 17, pt. 1, pp. 66–67, 117– 118; John Quincy Adams Campbell, The Union Must Stand: The Civil War Diary of John Quincy Adams Campbell, Fifth Iowa Volunteer Infantry, Mark Grimsley and Todd D. Miller, eds. (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2000), p. 57; William W. McCarty reminiscence, William W. McCarty Papers, Civil War Miscellaneous Collection, U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle, PA; John B. Sanborn, “Battles and Campaigns of September, 1862,” in MOLLUS 30:214; Earl J. Hess, Banners to the Breeze: The Kentucky Campaign, Corinth, and Stones River (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), pp. 132–133. 27. OR vol. 17, pt. 1, pp. 67, 85, 91–92, 95, 97, 101–102, 118–119; Grant, Personal Memoirs, 1:412–413; Hess, Banners to the Breeze, pp. 136–137; Cozzens, The Darkest Days of the War, 72; Albert E. Castel, General Sterling Price and the Civil War in the West (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), pp. 101–103; Hattaway and Jones, How the North Won, pp. 251–252; W. G. McElrea Diary, September 19–20, 1862; Campbell, The Union Must Stand, pp. 58–59; John B. Sanborn, “Battles and Campaigns of September, 1862,” in MOLLUS 30:215–230; Alonzo L. Brown, History of the Fourth Regiment of Minnesota Infantry Volunteers during the Great Rebellion, 1861–1865 (St. Paul, MN: Pioneer Press, 1892), pp. 85, 88–89, 98, 100–101; Cyrus Sears, “The 11th Ohio Battery at Iuka,” National Tribune, November 6, 1884, p. 3; Q.O. Russell, “The Position of the Troops,” National Tribune, October 2, 1884, p.3; Cyrus Sears, “The 11th Ohio Battery at Iuka,” National Tribune, November 6, 1884; T.G. Orr, “The Battle of Iuka,” National Tribune, September 11, 1884, p. 3; A.L. Brown, “The 48th Ind.’s Conduct, and the 11th Ohio Battery’s Losses,” National Tribune, October 2, 1884, p. 3. 28. OR vol. 17, pt. 2, pp. 698, 701, 703–704, 707, 709–710, 714; Van Dorn to Jefferson Davis, September 9, 1862, The Samuel Richey Collection of the Southern Confederacy, Miami University Libraries.

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29. Simon, ed. The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 6:104–106; OR vol. 17, pt. 1, p. 154–155. 30. OR vol. 17, pt. 1, pp. 205, 251, 336–337; Jonathan Labrant Diary, October 3, 1862, Civil War Miscellaneous Collection, U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle, PA; Cozzens, The Darkest Days of the War, pp. 151–155. 31. Cozzens, The Darkest Days of the War, pp. 224–228, 232–234, 251–252, 267–268; Hess, Banners to the Breeze, pp. 154, 157, 159–160; Hubert, History of the Fiftieth Regiment, pp. 138–147; Morrison, History of the Ninth Regiment, 39; Wardner, “Reminiscences of a Surgeon,” in MOLLUS, 12:189; OR, vol. 17, pt. 1, p. 293, 295. 32. Jackson, The Colonel’s Diary, pp. 71–75; William L. Wade Diary, October 4, 1862, Civil War Miscellaneous Collection, U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle, PA; Wardner, “Reminiscences of a Surgeon,” in MOLLUS, 12:190; Cozzens, The Darkest Days of the War, pp. 261–267, 305–306; Hess, Banners to the Breeze, pp. 160–167. 33. Grant, Personal Memoirs, 1:417. 34. Meeker, “Hurlbut’s Division at the Hatchie,” National Tribune, June 10, 1886, p. 3; Hess, Banners to the Breeze, pp. 168–169; Jackson, “On the Hatchie,” National Tribune, January 14, 1886, p. 3; Dugan, History of Hurlbut’s Fighting Fourth Division, pp. 175–176, 187; OR, vol. 17, pt. 1, pp. 305–306, 332–333; Francis M. Johnson Diary, October 65, 1862, Civil War Miscellaneous Collection, U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle, PA; Barber, Army Memoirs, pp. 81–85; Grant, Personal Memoirs, 1:418. 35. Hubert, History of the Fiftieth Regiment, p. 162; Simon, ed., Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 6:123, 131, 133; OR vol. 17, pt. 1, p. 368; Dugan, History of Hurlbut’s Fighting Fourth Division, p. 181; Hess, Banners to the Breeze, pp. 170–171; McCord, “Battle of Corinth: The Campaigns Preceding and Leading Up to This Battle and its Results,” in MOLLUS 29:582; Chetlain, Recollections of Seventy Years, pp. 95–96. 36. Daniel, Days of Glory, pp. 141–143; Hess, Banners to the Breeze, pp. 80–83; McWhiney, Braxton Bragg and Confederate Defeat, pp. 297–301. 37. Hess, Banners to the Breeze, pp. 83–84; McWhiney, Braxton Bragg and Confederate Defeat, pp. 301–06. 38. McWhiney, Braxton Bragg and Confederate Defeat. 39. Daniel, Days of Glory, pp.145–158. 40. Joshua K. Callaway, The Civil War Letters of Joshua K. Callaway, Judith Lee Hallock, ed. (Athens, OH: University of Georgia Press, 1997), p. 62. CHAPTER THREE 1. Gary W. Gallagher, The Confederate War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 61–111; Gary W. Gallagher, Lee and His Generals in War and Memory (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), pp. 3–20. 2. William Williams, et al. (several citizens of Murfreesboro) to Jefferson Davis, October 24, 1862, Manuscript Department, Perkins Library Duke University; John B. Jones, A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary, Earl Schenck Miers, ed. (New York: Sagamore Press, 1958), p. 110; OR vol. 17, pt. 2, pp. 627–628, 654–655, 658, 667–668, 673. 3. Grady McWhiney, Braxton Bragg and Confederate Defeat (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969; reprint Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1991), pp. 323–324,

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328–329; Kirby Smith to Jefferson Davis, October 20, 1862, Houghton Library, Harvard University; Thomas Lawrence Connelly, Autumn of Glory: The Army of Tennessee, 1862–1865 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), pp. 20–21. 4. Sherman, Memoirs, p. 303; Simon, ed., Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 6:372; Grant, Personal Memoirs, 1:428. 5. Johann Stuber, Mein Tagebuch ueber die Erlebnisse im Revolutions-Kriege (Cincinnati, OH: S. Rosenthal & Co., 1896), p. 62; J.E. Leasure, “Chickasaw Bluffs,” National Tribune, December 25, 1884, p. 3; OR vol. 17, pt. 1, p. 625; Steven E. Woodworth, Nothing but Victory: The Army of the Tennessee, 1861–1865 (New York: Knopf, 2005), pp. 272–279. 6. McWhiney, Braxton Bragg, pp. 370–373. CHAPTER FOUR 1. John A. McClernand to Abraham Lincoln, February 14, 1863, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress. 2. Charles Dana Miller, The Struggle for the Life of the Republic: A Civil War Narrative by Brevet Major Charles Dana Miller, 76th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, Stewart Bennett, ed. (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2004), p. 86; Franklin A. Wise, Diary, Janaury 26, 1863 (Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, OH); Jacob Ritner and Emeline Ritner, Love and Valor: The Intimate Civil War Letters between Captain Jacob and Emeline Ritner, Charles F. Larimer, ed. (Western Springs, IL: Sigourney Press, 2000), p. 108; William Wiley, The Civil War Diary of a Common Soldier, Terrence J. Winschel, ed. (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2004), pp. 37–40. 3. Edward P. Stanfield to “Dear Father,” January 4, 1863, Edward P. Stanfield Papers, Indiana Historical Society; Boyd, Civil War Diary, pp. 110–111. 4. John Y. Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967), 7:486–487; Warren E. Grabau, Ninety-eight Days: A Geographer’s View of the Vicksburg Campaign (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2000), p. 61. 5. OR vol. 24, pt. 1, p. 517; Warren E. Grabau, Ninety-eight Days, pp. 76–77; Edwin C. Bearss, The Campaign for Vicksburg, 3 vols., vol. 2, Grant Strikes a Fatal Blow (Dayton, OH: Morningside Press, 1985), pp. 67–73. 6. Wilbur F. Crummer, With Grant at Fort Donelson, Shiloh, and Vicksburg (Oak Park, IL: E.C. Crummer & Co., 1915), pp. 93–94; Luther H. Cowan, Diary, April 21, 1863, Madison, WI: Wisconsin Historical Society; Luther H. Cowan to “Dear Harriet,” April 22, 1863, Luther H. Cowan Papers, Madison, WI: Wisconsin Historical Society; James W. Jessee, Civil War Diaries of James W. Jessee, 1861–1865, Company K, 8th Regiment of Illinois Volunteer Infantry, William P. LaBounty, ed. (Normal, IL: McLean County Genealogical Society, 1997), chapter 3, p. 16; Allen Morgan Greer, The Civil War Diary of Allen Morgan Geer, Twentieth Regiment, Illinois Volunteers, Mary Ann Anderson, ed. (Denver, CO: Robert C. Appleman, 1977), p. 92; William E. Strong, “The Campaign against Vicksburg,” in Papers of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion, 11:321–326; OR vol. 24, pt. 1, pp. 565–569; pt. 3, pp. 215–216. 7. Henry O. Dwight, “A Soldier’s Story: The Affair on the Raymond Road,” New York Daily Tribune, November 21, 1886; OR vol. 24, pt. 1, pp. 637, 707–708, 711–712; Manning F. Force, “Personal Recollections of the Vicksburg Campaign,” in Papers of the Military Order of

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the Loyal Legion of the United States, 56 vols. (various publishers and dates; reprint, Wilmington, NC: Broadfoot Publishing Co., 1994), 1:298–300; Warren E. Grabau, Ninety-eight Days, 222– 224; 229, 231–234; Edwin C. Bearss, The Campaign for Vicksburg, 3 vols., vol. 2, Grant Strikes a Fatal Blow (Dayton, OH: Morningside Press, 1985), pp. 493–500, 510–511. 8. Grant, Personal Memoirs, 1:499–500; John Y. Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 8:204–208; Bearss, Grant Strikes a Fatal Blow, 512–514. 9. OR vol. 24, pt. 1, p. 215. 10. OR vol. 24, pt. 1, pp. 217–218; pt. 3, pp. 870, 877. 11. Grant, Personal Memoirs, 1:501–504; John Y Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 8:212. 12. Enoch Weiss, Diary, May 14, 1863, Civil War Miscellaneous Collection (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army Military History Institute); Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs, 1:506–507; Edward P. Stanfield to “Dear Father,” May 16, 1863, Edward P. Stanfield papers (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana Historical Society); R.W. Burt to “Dear Wife,” May 23, 1863, R.W. Burt Papers, Western Historical Manuscript Collection, Ellis Library, University of Missouri, Columbia, TN; Sherman, Memoirs, pp. 347–348; Miller, The Struggle for the Life of the Republic, pp. 94– 95; Charles B. Clark and Roger B. Bowen, University Recruits—Company C, 12th Iowa Infantry Regiment, U.S.A., 1861–1866 (Elverson, PA: Mennonite Family History, 1991), p. 178; Gary L. Scheel, Rain, Mud, and Swamps: 31st Missouri Volunteer Infantry Regiment Marching Through the South During the Civil War with General William T. Sherman (Pacific, MO: published by the author, 1998), pp. 117–118; L.F. Parrish, “At Jackson,” National Tribune, August 11, 1887, p. 3. 13. OR vol. 24, pt. 3, 882; Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs, 1:506–507; William T. Sherman, Memoirs, 347. 14. Edwin C. Bearss, Grant Strikes a Fatal Blow, pp. 607–608. 15. OR vol. 24, pt. 2, p. 15; Edwin C. Bearss, Grant Strikes a Fatal Blow, pp. 617–618, 625, 640; Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs, 1:520. 16. OR vol. 24, pt. 2, pp. 50, 53, 59, 63; Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs, 1:517; Grabau, Ninety-eight Days, p. 296; Edwin C. Bearss, Grant Strikes a Fatal Blow, pp 611–625. 17. Warren Grabau, Ninety-eight Days, pp. 321–326. 18. Edwin C. Bearss, Grant Strikes a Fatal Blow, p. 642; Warren Grabau, Ninety-eight Days, p. 312; OR vol. 24, pt. 1, p. 617; pt. pp. 130–131. 19. OR vol. 24, pt. 2, pp. 42, 49, 55. 20. Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs, 1:529; William T. Sherman, Memoirs, p. 351; Grabau, Ninety-eight Days, pp. 356–358; William L. Shea and Terrence J. Winschel, Vicksburg Is the Key: The Struggle for the Mississippi River (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), p. 146; OR vol. 24, pp. 257, 264, 268. 21. Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs, 1:531; John Y Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 8:246. 22. Hickenlooper, “The Vicksburg Mine,” Papers of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion 3:542; Bearss, Unvexed to the Sea, pp. 913–921; Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs, 1:551; OR vol. 24, pt 2, pp. 249, 294. 23. OR vol. 24, pt. 1, pp. 194–195, 223–224; Dunbar Rowland, ed., Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist: His Letters, Papers, and Speeches, 5 vols. (Jackson, MI: Mississippi Department

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of Archives and History, 1923), 5:499–500; Johnston to Davis, June 3, 1863, Joseph E. Johnston Papers, E.G. Swem Library, College of William and Mary. 24. Strong, “The Campaign Against Vicksburg,” in Papers of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion, 11:349–354; OR vol. 24, pt. 3, p. 476; Lydia Minturn Post, ed., Soldiers’ Letters from Camp, Battle-field, and Prison (New York: Bunce & Huntington, 1865), 263–272. Post incorrectly identifies the author of this letter as Stephen A. Rollins of the 95th Illinois, but it was almost certainly written by John A. (or H.) Rollins of the 45th. 25. Lincoln to James C. Conkling, August 26, 1863, Roy P. Basler, ed. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 8 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 6:406–411. CHAPTER FIVE 1. OR vol. 20, pt. 2, pp. 23, 306; pt. 2, pp. 255–256. 2. Peter Cozzens, This Terrible Sound: The Battle of Chattanooga (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992), pp. 21–26; William M. Lamers, The Edge of Glory: A Biography of General William S. Rosecrans, U.S.A. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1961), p. 295; Donn Piatt, General George H. Thomas: A Critical Biography (Cincinnati, OH: R. Clarke and Company, 1893), pp. 370–371. 3. Judith Lee Hallock, Braxton Bragg and Confederate Defeat, Volume 2 (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1991), p. 54; Thomas L. Connelly, Autumn of Glory: The Army of Tennessee, 1862–1865 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), pp. 174–175. 4. John Beatty, Memoirs of a Volunteer, pp. 243–244. 5. James Longstreet, From Manassas to Appomattox: Memoirs of the Civil War in America, James I. Robertson, Jr., ed. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1960), pp. 434–436; Hattaway and Jones, How the North Won, p. 443; Clifford Dowdey and Louis H. Manarin, eds., The Wartime Papers of R. E. Lee (New York: Bramhall House, 1961), p. 596; Dunbar Rowland, ed., Jefferson Davis, 5:26; Connelly, Autumn of Glory, pp. 152, 160–162. 6. Connelly, Autumn of Glory, p. 175. 7. OR 30, pt. 2, pp. 27–28. 8. Cozzens, This Terrible Sound, pp. 69–79; OR 30, pt. 3, pp. 545, 564–565, 570, 574–576, 598–599. 9. OR 30, pt. 1, pp. 711–712, 802; pt. 2, pp. 30, 44–45; Cozzens, This Terrible Sound, pp. 81–83; Connelly, Autumn of Glory, pp. 186–187. 10. Cozzens, This Terrible Sound, pp. 84–87; Lawrence Connelly, Autumn of Glory, pp. 189–191; OR 30, pt. 4, p. 643. 11. OR 30, pt. 2, pp. 31, 451; Connelly, Autumn of Glory, p. 197. 12. OR 30, pt. 2, pp. 32, 239. 13. OR 30, pt. 1, pp. 55, 115, 248–249, 274–275, 400, 440; pt. 4, p. 724; Cozzens, This Terrible Sound, pp. 115–117, 123; Francis F. McKinney, Education in Violence (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1961), pp. 230–232. 14. OR 30, pt. 1, pp. 56, 124, 249, 400, 407, 854, 860, 871; pt. 2, pp. 240, 252; Cozzens, This Terrible Sound, pp. 121–125. 15. Steven E. Woodworth, Six Armies in Tennessee (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), pp. 87–101.

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16. OR 30, pt. 1, pp. 57, 251, 488, 609. 17. Jeffry D. Wert, General James Longstreet: The Confederacy’s Most Controversial Soldier: A Biography (New York : Simon & Schuster, 1993), throughout. 18. OR 30, pt. 2, pp. 11–18, 33; Connelly, Autumn of Glory, pp. 208–210. 19. OR 30, pt. 2, pp. 33, 47, 140–141; Connelly, Autumn of Glory, pp. 211–214. 20. OR 30, pt. 2, pp. 33, 47–48, 140–41, 193, 216, 219, 231, 233, 236, 239; Connelly, Autumn of Glory, pp. 218–221; Cozzens, This Terrible Sound, pp. 305–310; Hallock, Braxton Bragg, pp. 71–73; Joseph H. Parks, General Leonidas Polk, C.S.A.: The Fighting Bishop (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1962), pp. 334–336. 21. OR 30, pt. 1, pp. 441, 535, 714, 763; Cozzens, This Terrible Sound, pp. 338–356; McKinney, Education in Violence, pp. 235–240; Connelly, Autumn of Glory, pp. 209–221; Glenn Tucker, Chickamauga: Bloody Battle in the West (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961), pp. 253–260. 22. OR 30, pt. 1, pp. pp. 457–458; Cozzens, This Terrible Sound, p. 380. 23. OR 30, pt. 1, p. 253; Cozzens, This Terrible Sound, pp. 487–502. 24. OR 30, pt. 3, pp. 762, 808, 834–835; Wiley Sword, Mountains Touched with Fire: Chattanooga Besieged, 1863 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), pp. 14–15, 17, 37–39, 41, 44; Lamers, Edge of Glory, pp. 356–361, 365, 368–369; Alfred Lacey Hough, Soldier in the West, pp. 150–151; Cozzens, This Terrible Sound, p. 520; Chesley A. Mossman, The Rough Side of War: The Civil War Journal of Chesley A. Mossman, First Lieutenant, Company D, Fiftyninth Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment, Arnold Gates, ed. (Garden City, NY: Basin, 1987), pp. 88–89; McKinney, Education in Violence, pp. 267–268. 25. Mossman, Rough Side of War, pp. 106–107; James Lee McDonough, Chattanooga: Death Grip on the Confederacy (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), p. 48; Wiley Sword, Mountains Touched with Fire, pp. 42–44; Peter Cozzens, Shipwreck of Their Hopes: The Battles for Chattanooga (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994), pp. 20–22. 26. Joshua K. Callaway, Civil War Letters, p. 161. 27. Sword, Mountains Touched with Fire, pp. 107–111; Cozzens, Shipwreck of Their Hopes, pp. 29–31; James Lee McDonough, Chattanooga, pp. 63–64. 28. Minerva J. Van Zandt to Khleber Van Zandt, August 31, 1863, private collection of Edmund Pendleton Cranz, Fort Worth, TX. 29. OR 30, pt. 2, pp. 47, 54, 67–68; Steven E. Woodworth, Jefferson Davis and His Generals, p. 238; Stanley Fitzgerald Horn, Army of Tennessee, p. 259; Hallock, Braxton Bragg, p. 89; Connelly, Autumn of Glory, pp. 235–236; McDonough, Chattanooga, p. 28, Wert, General James Longstreet, pp. 300–303; Parks, General Leonidas Polk, pp. 342–343; Bridges, Lee’s Maverick General, p. 228. 30. OR 30, pt. 2, pp. 54–55, 67–68; vol. 51, p. 772; vol. 52, pt. 2, pp. 533–535, 540; McDonough, Chattanooga, pp. 29–30, 35; Connelly, Autumn of Glory, pp. 236, 241–242; Longstreet, From Manassas to Appomattox, p. 465; Jones, Rebel War Clerk’s Diary, p. 289; Rowland, ed., Jefferson Davis, 5:62–63; Hallock, Braxton Bragg, p. 94; William C. Davis, Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), pp. 518–519. 31. OR 30, pt. 4, p. 751; Davis, Jefferson Davis, pp. 519–521; Hudson Strode, Jefferson Davis, Confederate President (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959), pp. 479–580; Connelly, Autumn of Glory, pp. 241, 245; Longstreet, From Manassas to Appomattox, pp. 465–466.

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32. Roger Pickenpaugh, Rescue by Rail (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), throughout; Sword, Mountains Touched with Fire, p. 41; Donald, Lincoln, p. 458. 33. Sword, Mountains Touched with Fire, pp. 51–53; Grant, Personal Memoirs, 1:583–584, 2:17. 34. Sherman, Memoirs, p. 383; Grant, Personal Memoirs, 2:45; Jabez Banbury Diary, November 4–6, 1863, Civil War Miscellaneous Collection, Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army Military History Institute; Crooker, Nourse, and Brown, The 55th Illinois, p. 277; Campbell, The Union Must Stand: The Civil War Diary of John Quincy Adams Campbell, Fifth Iowa Volunteer Infantry, Mark Grimsley and Todd D. Miller, eds. (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2000), pp. 129–130. 35. OR 31, pt. 1, pp. 40, 49–51, 77–92; Grant, Personal Memoirs, 2:28–31; Horace Porter, Campaigning with Grant, Wayne C. Temple ed. (New York: Bonanza Books, 1961), pp. 1–8; McDonough, Chattanooga, pp. 54–57, 76–83; Sword, Mountains Touched with Fire, pp. 58–59, 112–122; Bruce Catton, Grant Takes Command (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1969), pp. 42–43, 50; Cozzens, Shipwreck of Their Hopes, pp. 52–65; Wert, General James Longstreet, p. 33. 36. Connelly, Autumn of Glory, pp. 25–26, 256–58; Wert, General James Longstreet, pp. 330–333, 337; Richard M. McMurry, John Bell Hood and the War for Southern Independence (Lexington, MA: University Press of Kentucky, 1982), p. 76. 37. Davis to Bragg, October 29, 1863, Philip H. and A.S.W. Rosenbach, Museum and Library, Philadelphia; OR vol. 29, pt. 2, p. 742; vol. 31, pt. 3, p. 634; Connelly, Autumn of Glory, p. 263; Dowdey and Manarin, eds., Wartime Papers of R.E. Lee, pp. 604–605; Edward Carr Franks, “Detachment of Longstreet Considered,” in Steven E. Woodworth, ed., Leadership and Command in the American Civil War (El Dorado Hills, CA: Savas Publishing, 1996), pp. 36, 53; Hallock, Braxton Bragg, p. 126. 38. OR 31, pt. 2, pp. 635–637, 644–645, 670, 71; pt. 3, pp. 634–635, 686–687, 721, 732–733; Wert, General James Longstreet, pp. 340–345; Franks, “Detachment of Longstreet Considered,” p. 59. 39. Lucien B. Crooker, Henry S. Nourse, and John G. Brown, The 55th Illinois, 1861–1865 (Huntington, WV: Blue Acorn Press, 1993), pp. 281–284; OR vol. 31, pt. 2, pp. 43–44, 572–573, 629, 643, 646; Grant, Personal Memoirs, 2:66–68; Grant, “Chattanooga,” in Johnson and Buel, eds., Battles and Leaders, 4 vols. (New York: The Century Company, 1887), 3:699–701; S.H.M. Byers, “Sherman’s Attack at the Tunnel,” in Johnson and Buel, eds., Battles and Leaders, 3:712; Catton, Grant Takes Command, p. 76; McDonough, Chattanooga, pp. 119–120; Sword, Mountains Touched with Fire, pp. 192–196; Cozzens, Shipwreck of Their Hopes, pp. 147–148; John S. Kountz et al., History of the 37th Regiment, O.V.V.I. (Toledo, OH: Montgomery and Vrooman Printers, 1889), p. 31; Campbell, The Union Must Stand, pp. 34–36, 224–227; Thomas W. Connelly, History of the Seventieth Ohio Regiment from its Organization to its Mustering Out (Cincinnati, OH: Peak Brothers, 1902), pp. 60–61; Thomas Taylor, Tom Taylor’s Civil War, Albert Castel, ed. (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2000), pp. 84–87. 40. George K. Collins, Memoirs of the 149th Regiment New York Volunteer Infantry (Syracuse, NY: Published by the author, 1891), p. 207; James A. Connolly, Three Years in the Army of the Cumberland: The Letters and Diary of Major James A. Connolly, Paul M.

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Angle, ed. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1959), pp. 153–154; OR vol. 31, pt. 2, pp. 33, 154–156, 314–317, 390–399, 411–412, 599–600, 665, 677, 688–696; Grant, Personal Memoirs, 2:70–73; McDonough, Chattanooga, pp. 130–140; Catton, Grant Takes Command, pp. 73–76; Cozzens, Shipwreck of Their Hopes, pp. 159–191; Sword, Mountains Touched with Fire, pp. 202–221. 41. Calloway, Civil War Letters, pp. 166–167. 42. OR vol. 31, pt. 2, pp. 132–135, 189–193, 208, 230–232, 258–261, 264–265, 281– 283, 318–320, 527–529, 600–602; Fullerton, “The Army of the Cumberland at Chattanooga,” Battles and Leaders, 3:725–726; Samuel Watkins, “Co. Aytch,” Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment; or A Side Show to the Big Show (Jackson, TN: McCowat-Mercer Press, 1952), p. 125; Sword, Mountains Touched with Fire, p. 282–325; McDonough, Chattanooga, pp. 176–205; Hallock, Braxton Bragg, pp. 138–142; Connelly, Autumn of Glory, pp. 275–276; Cozzens, Shipwreck of Their Hopes, pp. 282–360; Connolly, Three Years in the Army of the Cumberland, p. 150. 43. Cozzens, Shipwreck of Their Hopes, p. 391. 44. OR vol. 31, pt. 2, p. 35; Sword, Mountains Touched with Fire, pp. 335–351; Cozzens, Shipwreck of Their Hopes, pp. 370–386; Chesnut, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, C. Vann Woodward, ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 509. CHAPTER SIX 1. Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs, 2:107; William T. Sherman, Memoirs, p. 413. 2. William T. Sherman, Memoirs, p. 419; OR vol. 32, pt. 1, pp. 172, 175; Buck Foster, Sherman’s Mississippi Campaign (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2006), throughout; J. Jessee, Civil War Diaries, chap 5, pp. 6–8; H.W. Rood, Story of the Service of Company E, Twelfth Wisconsin Regiment Veteran Volunteer Infantry in the War of the Rebellion (Milwaukee, WI: Sweain & Tate, 1893), p. 242; Lucius W. Barber, Army Memoirs of Lucius W. Barber, Company “D,” 15th Illinois Volunteer Infantry (Chicago, IL: J.M.W. Jones Stationery & Printing Co., 1894), p. 135. 3. Rood, Story of the Service of Company E, pp. 244–245; Barber, Army Memoirs, pp. 135, 138. 4. Jessee, Civil War Diaries, chap. 5, p. 12; Post, ed., Soldiers’ Letters, p. 435; Rood, Story of the Service of Company E, p. 250. CHAPTER SEVEN 1. Richard M. McMurry, Atlanta 1864: Last Chance for the Confederacy (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), pp. 50–58. 2. Stephen Davis, Atlanta Will Fall: Sherman, Joe Johnston, and the Yankee Heavy Battalions (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2001), pp. 34–40. 3. OR vol. 38, pt. 3, p. 17; Davis, Atlanta Will Fall, pp. 40–41. 4. OR vol. 38, pt. 3, pp. 16–17, 375–376, 397–398, 452, 457, 483; pt. 4, p. 105. 5. Davis, Atlanta Will Fall, pp. 42–45; OR vol. 39, pt. 4, pp. 661, 669, 733, 735, 737e, 740.

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6. Davis, Atlanta Will Fall, pp. 51–52; McMurry, Atlanta 1864, pp. 77–79. 7. Davis, Atlanta Will Fall, pp. 52–53. 8. Davis, Atlanta Will Fall, pp. 53–56; McMurry, Atlanta 1864, pp. 80–82. 9. Davis, Atlanta Will Fall, pp. 51–58. 10. Davis, Atlanta Will Fall, pp. 57–58. 11. McMurry, Atlanta 1864, pp. 88–92; Steven E. Woodworth, Nothing but Victory: The Army of the Tennessee, 1861–1865 (New York: Knopf, 2005), pp. 508–513. 12. McMurry, Atlanta 1864, pp. 92–93. 13. Joseph E. Johnston, Narrative of Military Operations Directed during the Late War between the States (New York: Appleton, 1874), pp. 337; OR vol 38, pt. 4, pp. 775, 787; Jefferson Davis, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government 2 vols., (New York: D. Appleton, 1881), 2:554–555. 14. OR vol. 38, pt. 4, pp. 588–589; Davis, Atlanta Will Fall, pp. 86–87. 15. OR vol. 38, pt. 3, pp. 100–101, 383, 553; pt. 4, pp. 631, 646–647; pt. 5, pp. 11, pp. 28–29; Sherman, Memoirs, pp. 532–536; McMurry, Atlanta 1864, pp. 110–111; Davis, Atlanta Will Fall, pp. 88–92. 16. OR vol. 52, pt. 2, pp. 672–673, 678; vol. 38, pt. 4, p. 774; Connelly, Autumn of Glory, pp. 435–437; Herman Hattaway, General Stephen D. Lee (Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 1976), pp. 113–114; Thomas Lawrence Connelly and Archer Jones, The Politics of Command: Factions and Ideas in Confederate Strategy (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), pp. 87, 152–153, 159, 172, 183; Hattaway and Jones, How the North Won, p. 594; Davis, Atlanta Will Fall, pp. 73–77, 84–85, 88–92; McMurry, Atlanta 1864, pp. 97–99, 131–135. 17. McMurry, Atlanta 1864, pp. 131–135. 18. Davis, Atlanta Will Fall, pp. 100–101; Dunbar Rowland, ed., Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist: His Letters, Papers, and Speeches, 10 vols. (Jackson, MI: Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 1926), 6:283. 19. Rowland, ed., Jefferson Davis, 6:286; OR vol. 38, pt. 5, pp. 873, 878; Connelly, Autumn of Glory, pp. 411–414. 20. OR vol. 52, pt. 2, p. 692. 21. Dowdey and Manarin, The Wartime Papers of R. E. Lee, pp. 821–822; Richard M. McMurry, John Bell Hood and the War for Southern Independence (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), p. 119. 22. OR vol. 38, pt. 5, p. 881; vol. 52, pt. 2, p. 707. 23. OR vol. 38, pt. 5, pp. 883, 888–890; vol. 52, pt. 2, pp. 708–709; Rowland, ed., Jefferson Davis, 6:295–296. 24. OR vol. 38, pt. 3, p. 101; pt. 5, pp. 149–151, 156–158, 165. 25. Davis, Atlanta Will Fall, pp. 131–135; McMurry, Atlanta 1864, pp. 147–152. 26. Alfred Tyler Fielder, The Civil War Diaries of Capt. Alfred Tyler Fielder, 12th Tennessee Regiment Infantry, Company B, 1861-1865, Ann York Franklin, ed. (Louisville, KY: A.Y. Franklin, 1996), p. 189. 27. Charles Dana Miller, “Saving His Battery,” National Tribune, April 23, 1885, p. 3. 28. Crooker, Nourse, and Brown, The 55th Illinois, p. 341; George L. Childress, “Atlanta,” National Tribune, August 5, 1886, p. 3; Alexander Ralston, “De Grasse’s Battery: The Part the

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111th Ill. Took in Its Recapture,” National Tribune, August 27, 1885, p. 3; Jacob Fink, “De Grasse’s Battery,” National Tribune, July 9, 1885, p. 3; Jeff (last name not given, soldier in 6th Missouri), “Atlanta,” National Tribune, July 9, 1885, p. 3. 29. OR vol. 38, pt. 3, p. 31; Albert E. Castel, Decision in the West: The Atlanta Campaign of 1864 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1992), p. 421; Davis, Atlanta Will Fall, p. 139. 30. Davis, Atlanta Will Fall, p. 151. 31. Davis, Atlanta Will Fall, pp. 151–154; McMurry, Atlanta 1864, pp. 156–157. 32. OR vol. 38, pt. 3, p. 140; pt. 5, p. 282; Connelly, History of the Seventieth Ohio Regiment, pp. 97–98; Sherman, Memoirs, p. 562; McMurry, Atlanta 1864, p. 157. 33. Davis, Atlanta Will Fall, pp. 154–155; McMurry, Atlanta 1864, pp. 157–159. 34. McMurry, Atlanta 1864, pp. 160–164. 35. McMurry, Atlanta 1864, pp. 171–176. 36. OR vol. 38, pt. 5, p. 777; McMurry, Atlanta 1864, pp. 175–176; Davis, Atlanta Will Fall, p. 191. CHAPTER EIGHT 1. Anne J. Bailey, War and Ruin: William T. Sherman and the Savannah Campaign (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2003), pp. 46, 49–50; OR vol. 39, pt. 3, pp. 162–163, 359, 378; Horace Porter, Campaigning with Grant (New York: The Century Co., 1897), pp. 317–318. 2. Bailey, War and Ruin, pp. 72–74; Charles Wright Wills, Army Life, pp. 322– 324. 3. On the destructiveness of Sherman’s march and the interaction between Union soldiers and Confederate civilians, see Lee B. Kennett’s, Marching through Georgia: The Story of Soldiers and Civilians during Sherman’s Campaign (New York: HarperCollins, 1995); Mark Grimsley’s, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy toward Southern Civilians, 1861– 1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Joseph T. Glatthaar’s, The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman’s Troops in the Savannah and Carolinas Campaigns (New York: New York University Press, 1985); and Stephen V. Ash’s, When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861-1865 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). 4. Theodore F. Upson, With Sherman to the Sea, p. 136; Charles Wright Wills, Army Life, pp. 320–322; Enoch Weiss Reminiscences, pp. 39–40, Civil War Miscellaneous Collection, U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle, PA. 5. John B. Hood, Advance and Retreat: Personal Experiences in the United States and Confederate States Armies (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), pp. 189–193. 6. OR vol. 45, pt. 2, p. 70. 7. OR vol. 45, pt. 2, pp. 84, 96–97. 8. OR vol. 45, pt. 2, pp. 115–116. 9. Wiley Sword, The Confederacy’s Last Hurrah: Spring Hill, Franklin, and Nashville (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1992), pp. 331–433.

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10. Steven E. Woodworth, Nothing but Victory: The Army of the Tennessee, 1861–1865 (New York: Knopf, 2005), pp. 612–613. 11. Marion Brunson Lucas, Sherman and the Burning of Columbia (College Station, Texas: A&M University Press, 1976); Woodworth, Nothing but Victory, 619–624; Crooker, Nourse, and Brown, The 55th Illinois, pp. 408–410.

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BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

An abundant literature exists on the Civil War in the western theater—what I have called in this book, the heartland. The major armies that fought there have become the subjects of several books. Thomas Lawrence Connelly’s Army of the Heartland: The Army of Tennessee, 1861–1862 (1967) and Autumn of Glory: The Army of Tennessee, 1862–1865 (1971) chronicle the Confederate Army of Tennessee. Although they are still considered landmarks of Civil War scholarship, the books are limited in their usefulness by their exclusive focus on the army’s high command and by overanalysis and excessive criticism of all participants. Two other books provide useful additional perspectives on the Army of Tennessee. Larry J. Daniel’s Soldiering in the Army of Tennessee: A Portrait of Life in a Confederate Army (1991) gives a vivid picture of the life of the long-suffering common soldier of this Confederate army, filling a gap in Connelly’s coverage. Richard McMurry’s Two Great Rebel Armies: An Essay in Confederate Military History (1989) takes an innovative approach by comparing the Army of Tennessee with the Confederacy’s more successful Army of Northern Virginia and examining reasons for the disparity. My own 1990 work, Jefferson Davis and His Generals: The Failure of Confederate Command in the West, covers the often acrimonious interaction between the Confederate president and the generals who led both the Army of Tennessee and its Confederate partner, the Army of Mississippi. On the Union side, Larry J. Daniel’s recent history of the Army of the Cumberland, Days of Glory: The Army of the Cumberland, 1861–1865 (2004), provides an excellent command-level history of the Union’s middle army. Gerald Prokopowicz’s, All for the

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Regiment: The Army of the Ohio, 1861–1862 (2001) provides valuable insights into the training and organization of the Army of the Cumberland’s predecessor organization, the (original) Army of the Ohio (not to be confused with the unit that bore that title in 1863 and 1864). My own book Nothing but Victory: The Army of the Tennessee, 1861–1865 (2005) deals with the Union’s other army in the heartland, the Army of the Tennessee and covers both the deliberations of the generals and the lot of the common soldier. The major leaders in the struggle for the heartland of the nation have naturally rated multiple biographies. Brooks D. Simpson’s Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity, 18221865 (2000) is a good, balanced biography of that general, covering his life up until the end of the war. Another volume continues with the account of his presidency and retirement. Michael B. Ballard’s U.S. Grant: The Making of a General, 1861–1863 (2005) takes an analytical view of Grant’s performance during the early war years. John F. Marszalek’s Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order (1994) is still the standard biography of that general. Union generals William S. Rosecrans and George H. Thomas are covered in badly outdated works and are long overdue for modern treatment. The best existing biography of Rosecrans is William M. Lamers’s The Edge of Glory: A Biography of General William S. Rosecrans, U.S.A. (1961). The corresponding work on Thomas is Francis F. McKinney’s Education in Violence (1961). On the Confederate side, the standard biography of Joseph E. Johnston is Craig Symonds’s 1992 work, Joseph E. Johnston: A Civil War Biography. Braxton Bragg is covered in an unusual two-volume work, Braxton Bragg and Confederate Defeat. The first volume, written by Grady McWhiney and published in 1969, covers Bragg’s life up through the end of 1862 and the second, written by Judith Lee Hallock and published in 1991, covers 1863 and after. The first volume, though well done, is by now somewhat dated, and Bragg is due for a good single-volume treatment. Michael B. Ballard has written a good modern biography of John C. Pemberton, Pemberton: A Biography (1991). The great campaigns of the western theater have been the subject of much excellent recent scholarship—too much to discuss in a brief bibliographic essay. Looking only at the most significant campaigns—Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, and Atlanta—here are some of the most important works. Kendall Gott’s 2003 work Where the South Lost the War: An Analysis of the Fort Henry-Fort Donelson Campaign, February 1862 provides a useful analysis of the campaign for forts Henry and Donelson. Larry J. Daniel’s Shiloh: The Battle That Changed the Civil War (1997) is now the standard work on that campaign, though Wiley Sword’s Shiloh: Bloody April (1974) is still good, and the recently released Shiloh and the Western Campaign of 1862 (2007), by O. Edward Cunningham, is excellent. Edwin C. Bearss’s three-volume work, The Campaign for Vicksburg (1985), which relies heavily on The War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, is an exhaustive account of the military operations that led to the fall of

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Vicksburg. Warren Grabau’s Ninety-Eight Days: A Geographer’s View of the Vicksburg Campaign (2000) provides an excellent one-volume account of Grant’s final campaign and the siege, and Michael B. Ballard’s Vicksburg: The Campaign That Opened the Mississippi (2004) gives a comprehensive account of the campaign in the context of its effects on the people of Mississippi. Chickamauga is covered in painstaking detail by Peter Cozzens in This Terrible Sound: The Battle of Chickamauga (1992), and in a less bullet-by-bullet fashion by my own Six Armies in Tennessee: The Chickamauga and Chattanooga Campaigns (1998). Albert Castel’s mammoth Decision in the West: the Atlanta Campaign of 1864 (1992) is still the dominant work on the Atlanta Campaign, although it is rather idiosyncratic due to the author’s use of the present tense throughout and his overly critical treatment of Sherman. Two excellent and relatively brief accounts of the campaign are Richard McMurry’s Atlanta 1864: Last Chance for the Confederacy (2000) and Stephen Davis’s Atlanta Will Fall: Sherman, Joe Johnston, and the Yankee Heavy Battalions (2001).

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INDEX

Abbeville, Mississippi, 48 Abe (eagle), 1 Acworth, Georgia, 108–9 Adairsville, Georgia, 106 Alabama, 25, 27, 30–31, 39, 112, 124, 134 Alabama Regiments 28th Infantry, 92 Alexander’s Bridge, 78 Allatoona Pass, 108–9, 123 Anderson, Robert, 4, 8 Appalachian Mountains, 4, 7, 8, 27, 86 Arkansas Post, 55 Arkansas River, 55 Army of Georgia, 125, 137 Army of Northern Virginia, 40, 121, 137–38 Army of Tennessee, 36, 39–40, 42–44, 49, 51–53, 69–76, 84–85, 87, 91, 93, 95–96, 104–8, 112–19, 123, 129–34, 135 Army of the Cumberland, 51–53, 69–70, 73, 76–91, 104, 108–9, 114, 120

Army of the Mississippi, 23–24 Army of the Ohio (first), 19, 22–23, 25, 32, 36–37 Army of the Ohio (second), 103, 110, 114 Army of the Potomac, 42, 69, 85, 93, 104 Army of the Tennessee, 20–23, 38, 39, 42, 50, 56–59, 69, 86, 97, 99, 104–6, 108–9, 110–11, 114–20, 123, 125–26, 137 Atlanta, Battle of, 115–18, 133 Atlanta, Georgia, 76, 85, 93, 97, 99, 101, 104, 107–15, 116–25, 129, 138 Atlanta & West Point Railroad, 120 Baker’s Creek, 62–63 Bald Hill, the, 115–16 Baltimore, Maryland, 27 Banks, Nathaniel Preston, 59, 66, 99, 100–101, 104 Barber, Lucius, 98 Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 32 Battery Robinett, 34

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Beauregard, Pierre Gustave Toutant, 21–25, 38, 124 Belmont, Missouri, 10 Bentonville, North Carolina, 137 Big Black Bridge, Battle of, 63–64 Big Black River, 60, 63–64 Big Muddy River, 2 Big Shanty, Georgia, 109 Bolivar, Mississippi, 34 Bowen, John, 59, 62–63, 67 Bowling Green, Kentucky, 7, 13, 30 Bragg, Braxton, 19, 24–31, 33, 36–38, 40–45, 49–53, 67, 70–92, 93, 95, 112–13 Bragg, Elise, 71–72 Brannan, John M., 81 Breckinridge, John C., 32, 52–53 Brice’s Crossroads, Battle of, 111 Bridgeport, Alabama, 85–86 Brown, Joseph, 128 Brown’s Ferry, 86 Bruinsburg, Mississippi, 59 Buckner, Simon Bolivar, 7, 14–16, 76 Buell, Don Carlos, 8–10, 19–23, 25–28, 30–33, 36–39, 41 Bull Run, First Battle of, 3 Burnside, Ambrose, 42, 73, 87–88, 93, 104 Butler, Benjamin, 24, 104 Cairo, Illinois, 2, 7, 8, 12–13 Calhoun, Georgia, 106 Callaway, Dulcinea, 84 Callaway, Joshua, 84, 92 Camp Dick Robinson, 73 Canby, Edward R. S., 135, 137 Carbondale, Illinois, 2 Carroll, Anna E., 9 Carter House, 131–32 Cartersville, Georgia, 107 Cassville, Georgia, 107 Catoosa Station, 79 Cave City, Kentucky, 30 Chalk Bluffs, 5–6

Champion’s Hill, Battle of, 62–64 Chattahoochee River, 106, 108, 110–12, 120 Chattanooga, Battle of, 88–95 Chattanooga Creek, 89 Chattanooga, Tennessee, 25–26, 70, 72–74, 76–77, 79, 82–88, 93, 103–4, 123 Chattanooga Daily Rebel, 51, 70 Chattanooga-La Fayette Road. See La Fayette Road Chesnut, Mary Boykin, 93 Chicago, Illinois, 17 Chickamauga, Battle of, 78–86 Chickamauga Creek, 77–78 Chickasaw Bayou, Battle of, 50–51, 53–55 Churchill, Thomas J., 28 Cincinnati, Ohio, 2, 27 Citronelle, Alabama, 137 Clausewitz, Carl von, 10 Cleburne, Patrick R., 28, 89–92, 115, 132 Clinton, Mississippi, 62 Columbia, South Carolina, 136 Columbia, Tennessee, 130 Columbus, Kentucky, 5–7, 10 Connelly, Thomas, 22 Corinth, Battle of, 34–35, 41–42 Corinth, Mississippi, 13, 19–21, 23–24, 27, 33–35 Corse, John M., 123 Cracker Line, 86–87 Crittenden, George B., 11 Crittenden, Thomas L., 73, 75–77, 82, 86 CSS Arkansas, 32 CSS Virginia, 45 Cumberland Gap, 11, 25–26, 73 Cumberland Plateau, 27–29, 73 Cumberland River, 4, 8–11, 13, 16–17 Curmp’s Landing, Tennessee, 20, 22 Dallas, Georgia, 108 Dalton, Georgia, 93, 104, 110, 121 Davis, Jefferson C., 31–32, 127–28 Davis, Jefferson F., 3–6, 11, 16, 19, 27, 38, 42–50, 53–54, 61, 65, 67, 71–72, 74,

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Index 85, 95, 97, 100, 105, 108, 110, 112–13, 123–24, 135 Davis’s Bridge, 35–36 Decatur, Georgia, 113, 115–16 Department of the Gulf, 99 Dry Valley Road, 78, 82 Duck River, 53, 130 Dug Gap, 75 Durham Station, North Carolina, 137 Dyer Field, 81 Eau Claire, Wisconsin, 1–2 East Tennessee, 8–11, 13, 25, 45, 73, 87, 93 Ebenezer Creek, 127–28 Eleventh Corps, 119 Emancipation Proclamation, 52, 53 Etowah River, 106–7 Ezra Church, Battle of, 118–19 Farragut, David G., 24, 122 Fifteenth Corps, 56, 116–17, 120 Flint River, 120 Florence, Alabama, 13, 129–30 Floyd, John B., 14, 16, 18 Foote, Andrew Hull, 12–15, 17 Forrest, Nathan Bedford, 16, 26, 49, 78, 111, 130, 134 Fort Donelson, 8, 12–19, 26–27 Fort Henry, 8, 11, 12–13, 18–19, 26–27 Fort Hindman, 55 Fort McAllister, 129, 133 Fort Pickens, 19 Fourteen Mile Creek, 60 Fourteenth Corps, 73, 75–76, 78, 81, 127 Fourth Corps, 93, 129–30 Frankfort, Kentucky, 29, 36 Franklin, Tennessee, 131–32, 134 Fr´emont, John C., 4, 6, 7, 9, 10 Galt House, 31–32 General War Order Number One, 12

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Georgia, 93, 111, 125–27 Georgia Railroad, 113, 115, 118 Georgia Regiments 8th Infantry, 138 Glasgow, Kentucky, 30 Grand Gulf, Mississippi, 59 Grant, Ulysses S., 7, 10–15, 17, 19, 20–23, 26, 28, 33, 36, 38–39, 41–42, 47–66, 69, 86–90, 93–94, 97, 103, 124–25, 132, 135, 137 Green River, 30 Gregg, John, 60 Griswoldville, Georgia, 126 Guerrillas, 25 Gunboats, 12–15, 24, 32, 57–59, 66 Halleck, Henry Wager, 9, 11–13, 19–21, 23–25, 27, 31, 33, 39, 41, 47–48, 54, 73, 85, 88, 133 Hardee, William J., 43, 53, 70, 72, 95, 112–13, 115, 120, 129 Harpeth River, 131–32 Harris, Isham G., 4–6, 8, 10 Harrisburg, Mississippi, 111 Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 27 Hatchie River, 34–35 Hatchie River, Battle of the, 35 Hazen, William B., 129 Hickenlooper, Andrew, 22 Hickman, Kentucky, 5 Highland Rim, 53, 70 Hill, Daniel Harvey, 75, 77, 80, 85 Hindman, Thomas C., 75–77 Holly Springs, Mississippi, 50 Holmes, Theophilus H., 49 Hood, John B., 74, 96, 107, 112–15, 118–20, 123–25, 129–33, 134 Hooker, Joseph, 69, 88–89, 92–93 Howard, Oliver Otis, 118–20, 125–26, 128–29, 135, 137 Hurlbut, Stephen A., 35 Illinois, 47–48

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Index

Illinois Regiments 8th Infantry, 2 15th Infantry, 97 45th Infantry, 66 103rd Infantry, 126 Indiana, 27, 31–32 Iowa City, Iowa, 28 Iowa Regiments 22nd Infantry, 28, 65 Iron Banks, 5, 6 Island Number Ten, 24 Iuka, Mississippi, Battle of, 33, 35, 39

Lincoln, Abraham, 3–4, 8–10, 12, 25, 27, 39, 41–42, 47–48, 51, 53–57, 66, 84–85, 93, 99, 121–22, 133 Logan, John A., 58, 65, 116–18, 120, 133 Logan’s Crossroads, Battle of, 10–11, 18 Longstreet, James, 74, 79, 81, 82, 85, 87, 93, 95 Lookout Mountain, 73–75, 83–84, 86–90 Lookout Valley, 86–89 Loring, William W., 62–63, 67 Louisiana, 56–59, 100 Louisville, Kentucky, 2, 8, 27, 30–31, 36

Jackson, Mississippi, 60–63 Jackson, Thomas J. “Stonewall,” 42, 62 Johnson’s Island, Ohio, 17 Johnston, Albert Sidney, 7, 8, 12–13, 17, 19, 20–22, 38 Johnston, Joseph Eggleston, 45–47, 49–50, 53–54, 61–62, 65, 67, 71–72, 74, 95, 97, 100, 104–13, 135, 137 Jones, Samuel, 28 Jonesboro, Georgia, 119–20

MacArthur, Arthur, 92 Macon, Georgia, 126 Macon & Western Railroad, 118, 120 Madison, Georgia, 126 Magoffin, Beriah, 6 Mansfield, Louisiana, 100 Manson, Mahlon D., 28–29 March to the Sea, 125–27, 133, 135, 137–38 Marshall, Texas, 17, 85 Maximillian, 99 McArthur, John, 134 McClellan, George B., 9, 25, 27, 41–42 McClernand, John A., 15, 42, 47, 48, 51, 55, 56, 60, 62–63, 65 McCook, Alexander McDowell, 73, 75–76, 82, 86 McCown, John P., 52 McLaws, Lafayette, 74 McLemore’s Cove, 75–80 McPherson, James Birdseye, 56–57, 60, 62–63, 104–05, 108, 114–16, 118 Meade, George Gordon, 103–4 Memphis, Tennessee, 5, 24, 27, 48, 55–56, 97, 111 Memphis & Charleston Railroad, 13, 17, 25 Meridian, Mississippi, 97–99, 100, 127 Mexico, 99 Middle Tennessee, 25–27, 32, 39, 69, 133 Military Division of the Mississippi, 86, 100, 103 Milledgeville, Georgia, 125, 128

Kelly Field, 78 Kennesaw, Georgia, 109 Kennesaw Mountain, 109, 119 Kentucky, 3–11, 17, 26–33, 36–40, 41, 43–44, 67 Kentucky River, 36, 37 Knoxville, Tennessee, 73, 87–88, 93, 97, 104 La Fayette, Georgia, 74, 75 La Fayette Road, 77–79, 83 Lake Providence, Louisiana, 56–57 Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, 130 Lee, Robert E., 25, 27, 40–42, 45–46, 62, 74, 85, 93, 103, 112, 121, 135, 137–38 Lee, Stephen Dill, 118–20, 130–31 Lee and Gordon’s Mill, 75, 77–79 Lexington, Kentucky, 29–30 Lick Skillet Road, 118

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Index Millen, Georgia, 125, 128 Milliken’s Bend, 55–56 Mill Springs, Battle of, 10–11, 18 Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 37 Minnesota Regiments 2nd Infantry, 11 Missionary Ridge, 83–85, 88–92, 95, 109 Mississippi, 24–26, 32–33, 38, 41, 44–45, 48–51, 53–54, 57, 59, 61, 67, 85, 95–99, 105, 110–12 Mississippi Central Railroad, 48, 55 Mississippi River, 4, 6–7, 17, 19, 24, 32, 39, 46–49, 55–58, 66–67, 85, 93, 100, 138 Missouri, 4, 6, 129 Mobile, Alabama, 24–25, 45, 95, 97, 100–101, 104, 135 Mobile Bay, Battle of, 122 Monroe Doctrine, 99 Morgan, George, 25–26 Morgan, John Hunt, 29, 49 Morton, Oliver P., 31–32 Munfordville, Kentucky, 30 Murfreesboro, Battle of. See Stone’s River, Battle of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, 40, 49, 51, 53 Napoleon III, 99 Nashville, Battle of, 133–34 Nashville, Tennessee, 7, 10, 13–14, 16, 20, 27, 38, 41, 49, 51, 124, 130, 132–34 Negley, James S., 75, 76 Nelson, William, 29, 31–32 New England, 100 New Hope Church, Battle of, 108 New Madrid, Missouri, 24 New Orleans, Louisiana, 24, 27, 57, 59 Newton, Iowa, 28 Noble Brothers’ Ironworks, 107 North Carolina, 135–36 North Georgia, 108 Ogeechee River, 129 Ohio, 27

163

Ohio Regiments 9th Infantry, 11 20th Infantry, 60 Ohio River, 2, 7, 26, 124–25, 132–33, 138 Oostenaula River, 104–7 Orangeburg, South Carolina, 135 Orchard Knob, 90, 92 Ord, Edward O. C., 33, 35 Opdyke, Emerson, 131 Owl Creek, 21 Paducah, Kentucky, 6–8, 11–12 Peach Orchard, The, 22 Peachtree Creek, Battle of, 114–15 Peirce, Katharine, 28 Peirce, Taylor, 28 Pekin, Illinois, 1 Pemberton, John C., 44–46, 48–49, 53–54, 60–67 Perryville, Kentucky, Battle of, 37–38 Pickett’s Mill, Battle of, 108 Pidgeon Mountain, 75 Pillow, Gideon J., 5, 7, 11, 14, 16–17 Pine Mountain, 109 Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, 20–23, 38 Pittsburg Landing, Battle of. See Shiloh, Battle of Polk, Leonidas, 5–8, 11–12, 17, 36–38, 43, 53, 70, 72, 77, 79–80, 82, 85, 95, 98, 105, 107, 109 Pope, John, 23–24, 27 Porter, David Dixon, 55, 57–59 Port Gibson, Battle of, 59 Port Gibson, Mississippi, 59 Port Hudson, Louisiana, 39, 59, 66 Potomac River, 27 Price, Sterling, 26, 32–33, 35, 38–39, 41, 44, 129 Pulaski, Tennessee, 130 Randolph, George Wythe, 49 Raymond, Mississippi, Battle of, 60 Recruitment, 1–2, 28 Red River, 57, 99, 100, 104

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Index

Reed’s Bridge, 78 Reedy, Martha “Matty”, 49 Resaca, Georgia, 104–6 Richmond, Kentucky, Battle of, 28–29 Richmond, Virginia, 44–46, 49, 61, 71, 74, 85, 87, 93, 96, 104–5, 108, 110, 121, 137, 138 Ringgold Gap, 92 Rocky Face Ridge, 104–7 Rome, Georgia, 104, 107, 138 Rood, Hosea, 98 Rosecrans, William Stark, 33–35, 39, 42, 49, 51–54, 69, 72–86 Rossville Gap, 83 Round Forest, 52 Sand Mountain, 73 Savannah, Georgia, 125, 127, 129, 135, 138 Savannah, Tennessee, 20 Schoepf, Albin, 10–11 Schofield, John M., 110, 114, 130–31 Seddon, James A., 85 Selma, Alabama, 134 Sequatchie Valley, 84 Seventeenth Corps, 56–57, 60–63, 97, 100–101, 116–17 Sixteenth Corps, 97, 101, 115–17 Shelbyville, Tennessee, 53 Sheridan, Phillip H., 51, 91, 92, 122 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 8, 21, 48, 50, 54–56, 60–62, 86–90, 93, 97–98, 100–129, 135–38 Shiloh, Battle of, 22, 38, 39 Shreveport, Louisiana, 99 Shy’s Hill, 134 Sigel, Franz, 104 Slaves, 98 Slocum, Henry W., 119–20, 125, 128, 135, 137 Smith, Andrew Jackson, 99–100, 111–12, 129, 133–35 Smith, Charles F., 11, 15–16, 20 Smith, Edmund Kirby, 25–31, 36–38, 41, 44, 67, 87

Smith, Preston, 28 Smith, William F., 86 Smith, William Sooy, 97–98 Snake Creek, 21 Snake Creek Gap, 104–5 South Carolina, 135–36 Sparta, Tennessee, 29 Springfield, Missouri, 3 Spring Hill, Tennessee, 130–31 Stanton, Edwin M., 31, 47–48, 69, 73, 84–85, 132 Starkweather, John C., 37 Stevens Gap, 73–74 Stewart, Alexander Peter, 109, 112, 118 St. Louis, Missouri, 8, Stone’s River, Battle of, 51–54, 69–71 Sturgis, Samuel D., 111–12 Summerfield, Alabama, 85 Tallahatchie River, 48 Taylor, Richard, 137 Tennessee, 4, 8, 17, 24–25, 34, 42, 49, 50, 93, 112, 129, 135 Tennessee Regiments 24th Infantry, 92 Tennessee River, 6, 8–14, 17, 20, 26, 50, 53, 73, 83, 86, 124–25 Texas, 99 Texas Regiments 7th Infantry, 60, 85 Thirteenth Corps, 56, 62–63 Thomas, George H., 10, 11, 73, 76–82, 86, 90, 108, 114, 120, 125, 129–34 Tilghman, Lloyd, 12 Trans-Mississippi, 100 Tullahoma, Tennessee, 53, 70–73, 137 Tunnel Hill, 89–90 Tupelo, Mississippi, 24, 40, 111 Twelfth Corps, 119 Twentieth Corps (first), 73, 93 Twentieth Corps (second), 119–20 Twenty-first Corps, 73, 77, 93 Twenty-third Corps, 110, 129–30

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Index United States Colored Troops, 133 United States Military Academy (West Point), 2, 11, 15, 43–44, 46, 115 Upson, Theodore, 127 USS Hartford, 24 Van Dorn, Earl, 26, 32–35, 38–39, 41, 44, 49–50 Van Zandt, Khleber, 17, 85 Van Zandt, Minerva, 17, 85 Vicksburg, Mississippi, 24, 26, 32, 39, 47–50, 53–62, 64–67, 69–70, 85, 93–94, 96–97 Viniard Farm, 79 Virginia, 74, 93, 95, 114, 135, 137 Walden’s Ridge, 83, 86 Walker, Leroy Pope, 6 Wallace, Lewis, 15, 20, 22 Washburne, Elihu B., 20 Washington, D.C., 3, 9, 11, 19, 27, 36, 47, 53, 66, 69, 70, 72–73, 84, 86, 88, 97, 99, 120, 133

Western & Atlantic Railroad, 108–9, 123 West Point. See United States Military Academy West Tennessee, 25, 32–33, 49 Whittlesey, Charles, 9 Wills, Charles, 126–27 Wilson, James Harrison, 134 Wilson’s Creek, Battle of, 3 Winchester, Tennessee, 74 Winstead Hills, 131 Winston’s Gap, 73 Wisconsin Regiments 8th Infantry, 2 24th Infantry, 92 Wood, Thomas J., 81 Yandell, D. W., 70 Yates, Richard, 47 Yazoo River, 56–57 Young’s Point, 56 Zollicoffer, Felix K., 8, 10–11, 18

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About the Author STEVEN E. WOODWORTH is Professor of History at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas. He received his Ph.D. in history from Rice University in 1987 and has taught at colleges in Texas, Oklahoma, and Georgia. He has authored, coauthored, or compiled twenty-six books, including Nothing but Victory; While God Is Marching On; and Jefferson Davis and His Generals.

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Albert Sidney Johnston. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

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The railroad depot in Atlanta. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

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Pierre G. T. Beauregard. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Braxton Bragg. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

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Simon B. Buckner. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

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Confederate defensive works around Atlanta. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

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Fort McAllister. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

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Ulysses S. Grant. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

John B. Hood. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

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Joseph E. Johnston. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Edmund Kirby Smith. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

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John A. Logan. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

William S. Rosecrans. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

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Lookout Mountain seen from the Chattanooga rail yards. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

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James B. McPherson. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

John C. Pemberton. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

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Leonidas Polk, pictured in clerical garb in his pre-war role of bishop. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Sterling Price. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

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John M. Schofield. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

William Tecumseh Sherman. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

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Sherman at Atlanta. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

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The summit of Lookout Mountain. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

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George H. Thomas. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

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Union outer lines at Nashville. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

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Western Campaigns, February–October 1862

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The Kentucky Campaign, July–October 1862

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The Battle of Chickasaw Bayou, December 1862

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The Vicksburg Campaign, February–July 1863

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The Tullahoma and Chickamauga Campaigns, June–September 1863

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The Atlanta Campaign, May–September 1864

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The March to the Sea and the Carolinas Campaign, November 1864–April 1865

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