Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

by Allen C. Guelzo

  Lincoln’s memories were a generation old in 1863, and the mature Lincoln’s association as a lawyer with the railroads provided telling evidence of a dramatic shift in market transportation away from the north-south axis of the Mississippi River Valley and toward the east-west axis of the railroads, which now brought goods more swiftly to Chicago and New York than the steamboat could bring them to New Orleans. Even as Vicksburg bitterly surrendered to Grant, resourceful Northern farmers had already begun to turn to the railroads as their preferred means of shipment to market, and Mississippi River traffic never again regained the heights it had attained before 1861.

  Of course, the conquest of the Mississippi did pay the Union a few dividends. The Confederates surrendered an entire army at Vicksburg—nearly 29,000 men—and the loss of the Mississippi cut them off from Texas, Arkansas, and most of Louisiana. But Braxton Bragg’s rebel Army of Tennessee was still intact and dangerous in middle Tennessee; what was more, none of the regions cut off by the capture of the Mississippi had been a critical source of supply for the Confederacy anyway. Whatever their loss did to damage the Confederate war effort, it did not prevent the Confederacy from waging war for almost two more years. In fact, the real heart of the Confederacy’s power to carry on the war—its factories, its granaries, its rail centers—never had lain along Halleck’s or Grant’s lines of operation on the Tennessee or the Mississippi. They lay, instead, in upper Alabama and Georgia, around the critical rail centers of Chattanooga and Atlanta, where the remaining pieces of the Confederacy’s two lateral rail lines still intersected, and around the new government-run gun foundries and ironworks at Selma and the great powder works in Augusta. This meant that the real line of successful operations for the Union in 1862 and 1863 would have to be the same eastern Tennessee line that McClellan had vainly urged Buell to follow back in January 1862.

  A good deal more might have been made of this had not Buell shown himself no more eager to pursue his chances in 1862 than McClellan had been. In the spring of 1862, he had pretty much taken McClellan’s view of the war by announcing, “We are in arms, not for the purpose of invading the rights of our fellow-countrymen anywhere, but to maintain the integrity of the Union and protect the Constitution.” He had defeated Braxton Bragg at Perryville in October 1862, only to let Bragg retreat unscathed while Buell composed criticisms of the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln and the War Department had seen all they wanted to see of this kind of behavior from field officers, and on October 24, 1862, Buell was unceremoniously replaced by Major General William Starke Rosecrans. It would now be up to Rosecrans to finish the long-delayed conquest of eastern Tennessee, seize Chattanooga and Atlanta, and drive a stake into the heart of Georgia and Alabama.51

  Like so many other high-ranking Union officers, Rosecrans was a West Point graduate, class of 1842, who served in the prestigious Corps of Engineers until 1854 (including a stint teaching at West Point from 1843 to 1847), when he resigned and opened up his own business as an architect and engineer. Unlike many of the others, however, Rosecrans was a Democrat and a Roman Catholic (his brother was a bishop), which made him an object of suspicion in an overwhelmingly Protestant culture. James A. Garfield, one of Rosecrans’s brigadiers and a radical evangelical preacher, sat up into the wee hours of many mornings with Rosecrans, “talking constantly and incessantly for hours on religion.” To Lincoln, any Union man with those credentials was a political godsend who could be used to rally Northern Democrats and working-class immigrants, and Rosecrans suddenly found himself rewarded in 1861 with a brigadier general’s commission. He served briefly (and not entirely happily) under Grant, and conducted a successful defense of Corinth from a rebel attempt to recapture that key Mississippi railroad junction in 1862. A serious student of strategy, paternal and well loved by every brigade and division he had ever commanded, Rosecrans now took over Buell’s 46,900 men, gave them the name “Army of the Cumberland,” and on December 26 moved south out of Nashville after Bragg.52

  Braxton Bragg, meanwhile, had nearly gone the same way as Buell. Bragg was gravely hampered by an assortment of physical ills, ranging from nightmarish headaches to abdominal cramps, which made him quarrelsome with subordinates and a disciplinary fiend to his soldiers. After Perryville, rather than risk chances with a fresh invasion of Kentucky, Bragg went into winter quarters at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, approximately forty miles south of Nashville along Stone’s River. When Davis visited Bragg and the Army of Tennessee at Murfreesboro in early December 1862, Davis was delighted to see that Bragg’s men were “in good condition and fine spirits.”53

  Bragg was soon given a chance to use the Army of Tennessee to redeem his reputation. The combative Rosecrans and the Army of the Cumberland moved down to within two miles of Bragg’s lines around Murfreesboro on December 30, and the next day, both armies planned to leap at each other’s throats in simultaneous attacks. In the event, however, the Confederates moved first, catching Rosecrans’s right flank still at breakfast and scattering it backward for three miles. The battle might well have been lost right there had not Rosecrans personally rode down the lines and rallied his men in the face of Confederate fire. When his chief of staff protested against exposing himself, Rosecrans merely replied, “Never mind me. Make the sign of the cross and go in.” As for Bragg, the Confederate commander kept on feeding his divisions into the fight piece by piece, feeling all along Rosecrans’s battered lines for a weakness. Somehow the Federals held on: one Federal division under a scrappy Irishman named Philip Sheridan lost all three of its brigade commanders and almost one-third of its men, but it slowed Bragg’s attack on the center of the Union line to a halt by midday. At other points, the Federals managed to repel Confederate attacks with nothing more than odds and ends of cavalry and, in one instance, members of Rosecrans’s own headquarters escort. By the time darkness fell, each army had lost close to a third of its men as casualties.54

  Bragg immediately jumped to the conclusion that he had won a great victory, and he telegraphed Richmond that Rosecrans was falling back. Rosecrans himself was inclined to agree. But his three corps commanders disagreed; one of them, George Henry Thomas, snapped, “This army can’t retreat. … I know of no better place to die than right here.” When Bragg awoke the next morning, New Year’s Day, the Army of the Cumberland was still there. On January 2, Bragg launched a second series of attacks, hoping to prod Rosecrans into the withdrawal that Bragg presumed he ought to be making. Instead, by the end of the day, it was Bragg who became convinced that he had lost the fight and ought to retreat, and during the night of January 3, 1863, Bragg began pulling out of Murfreesboro for another camp twenty miles south.55

  Murfreesboro was, like Shiloh, more like a simple slugfest than a model of tactical brilliance, but it temporarily made Rosecrans a national hero all the same. Bragg, meanwhile, was assailed by a mounting tide of criticism from his own officers for uselessly throwing away a victory. Just as at Perryville, at Murfreesboro Bragg demonstrated a fatal incapacity to perform under the stress of combat, and his abrupt decision to retreat was due at least in part to a simple loss of nerve. As one of Bragg’s disgusted subordinates remarked, Bragg could easily fight his way straight up to the gates of Heaven, but once there would doubtless order a withdrawal. One division commander in the Army of Tennessee, Benjamin F. Cheatham, vowed never to serve under Bragg again. Another, the Irish-born Patrick Cleburne, politely informed Bragg that no one really trusted his military judgment anymore: “I have consulted all my Brigade commanders… and they write with me in personal regard for yourself, in a high appreciation of your patriotism and gallantry… but at the same time they see, with regret, and it has also met my observation, that you do not possess the confidence of the Army, in other respects, in that degree necessary to secure success.”56

  At this point, even President Davis was ready to relieve him of command, and in March 1863 Davis tried to persuade Joseph E. Johnston to take over Bragg’s command. Johnston declined Davis’s suggestion,
however, and Davis took that as a sign that Bragg had been severely misjudged by his subordinates. Accordingly, Davis decided to grant Bragg one more reprieve, and in March he even allowed Bragg to court-martial one of his critics, Major General John Porter McCown, who had loudly threatened to leave the Army of the Tennessee and go back to farming potatoes until Bragg was relieved.57

  The situation for the western Confederacy might have looked even bleaker had not Bragg’s failures been partly compensated for by the spectacular achievements of one of Bragg’s cavalry brigadiers, Nathan Bedford Forrest. By the end of 1862, Forrest had emerged as the single most daring and successful light cavalry officer of the Civil War: in July 1862, leading only 1,400 cavalry troopers, Forrest raided Buell’s supply lines, “captured two brigadier-generals, staff and field officers, and 1,200 men; burnt $200,000 worth of stores; captured sufficient stores with those burned to amount to $500,000, and brigade of 60 wagons, 300 mules, 150 or 200 horses, and field battery of four pieces.” In December 1862, he led a new brigade of 2,100 cavalrymen on a destructive joyride through middle Tennessee that, in two weeks, destroyed fifty bridges along the Mobile & Ohio Railroad, killed or captured 2,500 Federal pursuers, captured ten pieces of artillery and enough Enfield rifles to reequip his own men (with 500 rifles to spare), and generally made a shambles of the Federal occupation of middle Tennessee. “Forrest’s cavalry seemed to be ubiquitous,” rejoiced one Tennessee rebel. “The Federals never knew when he would appear upon their flanks or in their rear.”58

  Nevertheless, Forrest was an embarrassment to Braxton Bragg. A self-made man, Forrest smacked of the slave market (where before the war he had made a fortune in slave dealing), and his grammar invariably left something to chance. He had no formal military schooling (or any other schooling, for that matter), and made up his own earthy maxims of war as he went. Always strike first, he counseled his artillery commander, the twenty-two-year-old John Watson Morton; “in any fight, it’s the first blow that counts; and if you keep it up hot enough, you can whip ’em as fast as they can come up.” Then, never let the enemy regain his balance, or, as Forrest put it, “Get ’em skeered and then keep the skeer on ’em.” His final piece of advice was never to be intimidated by professional soldiers, since, as Forrest had discovered, “Whenever I met one of them fellers that fit by note, I generally whipped hell out of him before he got his tune pitched.”59

  Forrest was utterly indifferent to drill and urged his men to attack the enemy directly and without regard for the niceties of the tactics books. “General Forrest, as a commander, was, in many respects, the negative of a West Pointer,” wrote Morton. “He regarded evolution, maneuvers, and exhaustive cavalry drill an unnecessary tax upon men and horses.” Forrest’s untutored lust for combat might have merely resulted in more casualty-laden melees had it not been for his natural, baffling gift—a gift possessed by only a few generals in the Civil War, including Ulysses Grant—for sizing up a given tactical situation and instinctively knowing what to do in response. According to Morton:

  [Forrest] had absolutely no knowledge or experience of war gleaned from the study of what others had wrought. General Forrest grasped intuitively and instantaneously the strategic possibilities of every situation which confronted him. … His knowledge of men was in most cases unerring; and his ability to inspire and bring out the greatest power and endurance of his men was unsurpassed. … His eye for position was almost infallible, and his knowledge of the effect of a given movement on the enemy was intuitive and seemed to come rather from an inner than an outer source of information.60

  Forrest was a fairly good inkling of what could be done by pressing relentlessly for decisive combat conclusions on the battlefield. Unfortunately, he was also everything that a tightly buttoned regular (such as Bragg) ought not to be, and Forrest never ceased to suspect that Bragg had authorized his raids chiefly as a means of getting him out of the way.

  Forrest’s raids were almost the only activity Bragg, or anyone else, would indulge in after Murfreesboro. For six months, the Confederate and Union armies, exhausted and bloodied by the battle at Stone’s River, were content to rest and refit. Rosecrans’s self-confidence had been badly shaken by the carnage at Murfreesboro (his closest friend and adjutant, Colonel Julius Garesché, had been decapitated by a shell while riding beside Rosecrans, spattering the general with a mess of blood and brains), and instead of pushing on toward Chattanooga, he carefully fortified himself in Murfreesboro and began demanding reinforcements and supplies. Stanton and Halleck refused. “You have already more than your share of the best arms,” Halleck replied, “Everything has been done, and is now being done, for you that is possible by the Government. Your complaints are without reason.” When Stanton instead began prodding Rosecrans to get the Army of the Cumberland moving southward, Rosecrans went over Stanton’s head and began whining to Lincoln in March 1863 about enemies in the War Department who were denying him the promotion he deserved, the staff members he wanted, and so forth.61

  Then, on June 23, 1863, Rosecrans’s old aggressiveness resurfaced, and the Army of the Cumberland suddenly lurched into action. Bragg’s Army of Tennessee was entrenched around Tullahoma, Tennessee, almost halfway between Rosecrans and Chattanooga, inviting an attack as a sure way of revenging itself for Murfreesboro. But Rosecrans deftly feinted to Bragg’s left, smartly zigzagged to Bragg’s right, and then slipped around behind Bragg in a skillfully executed turning movement that forced Bragg to retreat in confusion to Chattanooga. Rosecrans then paused and waited until more telegrams from Washington caught up with him, demanding more advances.

  On August 16, Rosecrans set off again, this time to turn Bragg’s position in Chattanooga, too. Finding an unguarded ferry on the Tennessee River about thirty miles below Chattanooga, Rosecrans threw the entire Army of the Cumberland across the Tennessee on the back of a single pontoon bridge and an assortment of rafts and boats. He then swept around behind Chattanooga and compelled Bragg to abandon the city on September 8 without firing a shot in its defense. In only ten weeks, Rosecrans had moved the Army of the Cumberland almost a hundred miles southward, had outmaneuvered Bragg into abandoning all of eastern Tennessee and Chattanooga, and had done it all at the price of less than a thousand casualties.62

  What Rosecrans did not know, however, was that in Richmond, an anxious Jefferson Davis had finally decided that the threat to Chattanooga was dangerous enough to justify desperate measures. At the very same moment that Rosecrans was crossing the Tennessee, Davis overrode Robert E. Lee’s objections and sent James Longstreet’s corps of the Army of Northern Virginia to reinforce Bragg at LaFayette, Georgia, about twenty-five miles south of Chattanooga. The southern railroads were in such poor condition that it took the first of Longstreet’s men ten days to make the 952-mile trip from Richmond to northern Georgia. By September 19, Longstreet and five of his nine brigades were with Bragg, and Bragg now determined to use his newly reinforced strength of 47,000 men (not counting Forrest’s dismounted cavalry) to strike back at Rosecrans. All unsuspecting, Rosecrans kept on rolling along merrily after Bragg into northern Georgia under the delusion that Bragg was still retreating, and not until September 10 did he realize that Bragg had actually turned and was moving in for the kill. Rosecrans hastily concentrated his four corps—approximately 56,000 men—in the valley of Chickamauga Creek, a dozen miles south of Chattanooga. Before he could devise a plan of action, Bragg struck first.63

  Chickamauga is a Cherokee word meaning “river of death,” and for two days, September 19 and 20, Chickamauga Creek fully lived up to its name. The fighting on the nineteenth was a cautious draw, with Bragg hesitantly testing Rosecrans’s defensive lines behind Chickamauga Creek. The next morning, Bragg threw caution to the winds and launched a furious series of frontal assaults on the Federal corps that lasted for two hours without gaining much ground. But at 11:00 AM, Rosecrans mistakenly pulled one of his divisions out of line and sent them in the wrong direction, just as Longstreet’s three divi
sions came avalanching down upon the 600-yard gap so conveniently left for them. The Federal left flank simply turned and fled in panic, sweeping Rosecrans and two of his corps commanders with it. “I saw our lines break and melt away like leaves before the wind,” wrote Charles Dana, who was traveling with Rosecrans as an observer. “Then the headquarters around me disappeared. … The whole road was filled with flying soldiers. … Everything was in the greatest disorder.”64

  By 1:00 PM, all that was left of Rosecrans’s army at Chickamauga was the single corps commanded by George H. Thomas, who had so stoutly rebuked the idea of retreating from Murfreesboro the preceding December. Thomas’s corps stood its ground against Longstreet on a small hill beside the road to Chattanooga, and gave the rest of the beaten Army of the Cumberland time to retreat. Thomas’s valiant rearguard action earned him the nickname “The Rock of Chickamauga,” but Thomas was almost the only senior Federal officer to emerge from the defeat at Chickamauga with any semblance of reputation intact. The Federals lost 16,000 men that afternoon (fully half of them as prisoners) plus 51 cannon and 15,000 rifles, not to mention innumerable horses, wagons, and supplies.65

  Rosecrans never recovered from the shock of Chickamauga. A disgusted Lincoln told John Hay that “Rosecrans has seemed to lose spirit and nerve since the battle of Chickamauga,” and he imagined Rosecrans waddling in circles, “confused and stunned like a duck hit on the head.” Curling up in the defenses of Chattanooga, Rosecrans allowed Bragg to close off the Tennessee River and move his army onto Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain, the heights that loomed over Chattanooga. Without full control of the Tennessee, Rosecrans was in a very bad supply position, and within a month the despondent Army of the Cumberland was facing either starvation or surrender. Charles Dana anxiously wired Stanton, “It does not seem possible to hold out here another week without a new avenue of supplies.” Soldiers working on entrenchments hooted at their generals and shouted for hardtack. Nor did it seem that Rosecrans was likely to pull himself together in time to avoid the disaster. “The practical incapacity of the general commanding is astonishing, and it often seems difficult to believe him of sound mind. His imbecility appears to be contagious, and it is difficult for any one to get anything done.” Here was Vicksburg in reverse, and at last Lincoln decided that it was time to bring Grant onto the scene.66