Born to Battle

by Jack Hurst

  For Sherman, it was an anguished time. Amid the frantic preparations, his healthy nine-year-old son fell ill with typhoid fever. At the Gayoso Hotel in Memphis, despite the ministrations of two physicians and the constant vigil of Ellen Sherman, the boy died in less than a week. The general’s self-control, never formidable, all but dissolved. He wrote Grant, his commander and close friend, that this sole death among his progeny had robbed him of “the one I most prized.” He said he could barely compose himself enough to work “but must and will do so at once.”20

  Tenuous Chattanooga-Washington and Washington-Vicksburg communications delayed word of Rosecrans’s Chickamauga defeat on September 20; it was nearly October by the time Grant learned of the battle and its outcome. Almost as soon as he did, Halleck ordered him to Nashville. From there, Grant was to supervise troops sent to aid Rosecrans’s defense of Chattanooga. To reach the Tennessee capital, Grant had to travel by boat to Cairo, then roundabout by train to Indianapolis and Louisville. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton met him at Indianapolis to ride with him to Louisville. On the way, Stanton added Rosecrans’s and Burnside’s armies to Grant’s list of responsibilities. The secretary also handed him two sets of orders, directing him to choose between them. One kept Rosecrans in command at Chattanooga; the other replaced him with George Thomas. Recalling Rosecrans’s ungovernable behavior at Iuka and Corinth, Grant chose Thomas.21

  Before they parted at Louisville, Stanton got a dispatch from Dana. It reported that the force in Chattanooga was outnumbered, encircled, and hungry, its animals starving to death by the thousands; Rosecrans, it said, was about to evacuate the city. Chattanooga was the rail hub of southeast Tennessee, key to any Confederate attempt to recapture the eastern half of the state. Losing the city, Grant knew, would deprive the Federals of not only a critical strategic point but also of Rosecrans’s as yet uncaptured artillery—and perhaps even his whole army.22

  The worried secretary of war would soon see that the Union now had the right man in charge. Grant hobbled on crutches to a table and wrote out an order taking charge of the Chattanooga region. He telegraphed that order to Rosecrans, along with the one from Washington putting Thomas in immediate command of the city. He then forbade retreat with a wire to Thomas: “Hold Chattanooga at all hazards. I will be there as soon as possible.”23

  The replacement of the shattered Rosecrans and the elevation of Grant and Thomas injected a new, resilient mood into the atmosphere at Chattanooga. Thomas’s reply was proof of that. But its forcefulness also evinced a seeming edge, hinting that the “Rock of Chickamauga” had taken Grant’s hold-at-all-hazards order as not only unnecessary but perhaps insulting. His answer was stark: “I will hold the town till we starve.”24

  Grant kept his vow to Thomas, heading for Chattanooga with all speed.

  He had himself carried aboard a train to Nashville early on October 20, the morning after he wired Thomas. He had to lay over in the Tennessee capital because night travel was perilous, but the next morning he boarded another train to Bridgeport, Alabama. The Confederate siege had blocked all but the longest and most treacherous of the six routes into Chattanooga, so at Bridgeport he had to be lifted into the saddle by John Rawlins—“as if . . . a child,” James Harrison Wilson remembered—to endure his first horseback ride since the Louisiana accident. The trek crossed fifty-plus miles in hard, cold rain on what Grant would remember as “the worst roads I ever saw.” Aides lifted him off his horse and carried him over every slippery point they came to except one, which they noticed too late.The horse slid and fell, reinjuring Grant’s leg.

  The final stretch was hellish, and not just for Grant’s teeth-grinding agony and the downpour. Stinking vistas of war’s wreckage stretched in every direction. Smashed wagons and rotting bodies of mules and horses littered the road. The little party met fleeing unionist refugees. Wet and shivering mothers clutched babies they could shelter from the bone-chilling rain with only patches of the thinnest cloth. Rawlins had seen much of the human misery of war, “but never before in so distressing a form as this.”25

  No one in Chattanooga expected Grant to arrive so quickly. Just four days after leaving Nashville, on the evening of October 24, he was helped into the small house that was Union headquarters. He entered an atmosphere scarcely more welcoming than he had passed through. Thomas and his staff were cool and distant.

  The “Rock of Chickamauga” was plainly unimpressed with the captor of Vicksburg. A Tidewater Virginian hailing from slaveholding stock, Thomas had preceded Grant at West Point by three years, graduated twelfth in his class, and spent a distinguished antebellum military life. His resolute stand had saved the Union army from utter ruin at Chickamauga and won him glory in the press. He likely thought he deserved Grant’s job—which would already have been his if he had accepted the administration’s offer to replace his superior, Major General Don Carlos Buell, the previous year. Not wanting to appear scheming, he had refused. For the same reason, he had been reluctant to take Rosecrans’s place, only consenting to do so at the urging of Rosecrans himself on the ground that the army was face to face with the enemy and needed a leader. But Thomas’s appearance of rudeness to Grant now was a mistake that Grant and his staff would appear to never forget.

  Grant sat silent and dripping before the fireplace until James Harrison Wilson protested. Could not Thomas’s staff at least give the weary invalid some dry clothes and a bite to eat? Thomas offered Grant a bedroom and suggested he use it to change clothes. Grant declined. He wanted to get to work—and perhaps to let Thomas and all others in the room know who was in command. At Stevenson, Alabama, a couple of days before, Grant had done just that with former eastern-front commander Major General Fighting Joe Hooker. Hooker sent Grant a message that he was not feeling well and inviting Grant by his headquarters to talk. Rawlins’s reply was steely: “General Grant himself is not very well and will not leave his [train] car tonight. He expects General Hooker and all other generals who have business with him to call at once, as he will start overland to Chattanooga early tomorrow morning.” Grant himself then told the messenger, “If General Hooker wishes to see me, he will find me on this train.”26

  Now, after similar assertion of authority, Grant did take the light meal Thomas’s staff proffered. Quickly, though, he ordered a briefing.

  MAJOR GENERAL JOSEPH HOOKER

  The situation was even direr than advertised. Chattanooga was all but emptied of provisions; all supplies had to be entrained from Nashville to Bridgeport, then wagon-hauled to Chattanooga through sixty miles of mountains over the road on which Grant himself had arrived. The countryside was bare of forage. The soldiers were on fractions of rations, and the beef they got was skin and bones when it came in on the hoof. With colder weather coming, they needed shoes and coats. Most trees within the lines had been cut and burned, and there were no healthy horses or mules to haul others from outside. The only source of wood was standing timber on the Tennessee’s opposite upstream bank. It had to be floated down, then carried on soldiers’shoulders to the camps.27

  The Confederate siege was not complete, but nearly so. All but encircling Chattanooga, Bragg’s 46,000 troops manned towering Missionary Ridge east of the city with infantry trenches at the bottom, then halfway up, and on top, with the crest crowned with cannon. They also occupied Lookout Mountain south of the city and overlooked the two most direct routes—railroad tracks and a good wagon road beside them—from Bridgeport. To the west, they had possession of Browns Ferry, by which the Tennessee River could be crossed to reach Chattanooga’s back door. The only open road into even that rear entrance was the wretched one from the north that Grant had ridden. Its last leg was a pontoon bridge across the Tennessee into the city.28

  Thomas reported all this to Grant, then introduced General William F. “Baldy” Smith. A flinty Vermonter, Smith had a risky plan. Other Thomas subordinates scoffed, but Rosecrans, before being relieved, had desperately approved, and Thomas had let Smith gather materiél to try. T
he idea was to seize the crossing of the Tennessee River at Browns Ferry, as well as the mountain overlooking it. That would permit construction of a pontoon bridge across which to push troops into so-called Lookout Valley before the Confederates did.These Union troops could link up with 15,000 more coming from Nashville under Hooker. The combined force would open the valley between Browns Ferry and Bridgeport, free up the river, cut the wagon haul to ten miles, and bring supplies flooding in on the water and overland.29

  It was a high-risk, high-reward plan—just the kind Grant had adopted to get to Vicksburg. At Chattanooga, however, he was in an even tighter spot. He wrote Julia on October 27 that Smith’s proposal was “a desperate effort.” Yet Smith’s presentation had impressed him. The Vermonter had masterfully explained everything, including the topography and the two armies’positions within it.

  Pallid with pain and weariness, Grant peppered the officers with questions. He especially wanted to know how much ammunition was on hand. Hardly enough for a day’s fight, he was told. But there was a stockpile at Bridgeport, where Hooker’s two corps were arriving. That settled it.

  On the night of October 26, seventy-seven hours after Grant first limped into Thomas’s headquarters, Smith’s plan went into motion. The Federals floated pontoons and men down the Tennessee to Browns Ferry under cover of darkness and overwhelmed the Confederate guards. Then Grant ordered Hooker forward up Lookout Valley from Bridgeport.30

  The Confederates reacted with the bungling that had become standard under Bragg. Longstreet attacked Hooker’s rear guard on October 29 at Wauhatchie, halfway up the valley. But he did it at night, the best time for confusion, and only with a fraction of the force Bragg proposed. The Federals prevailed and took control of Browns Ferry and a road across Raccoon Mountain to another Tennessee River ferry, Kelly’s. Kelly’s was reachable by steamboat from Bridgeport, opening the so-called Cracker Line, named for the quarter-inch-thick crackers that were army-issue bread. Hooker’s 15,000 men marched into Chattanooga unopposed. Sherman was on the way from Memphis with 20,000 more.31

  Grant was rapidly shoring up Rosecrans’s erstwhile crumbling position in Chattanooga. “If the rebels give us one week more time,” he wired Halleck on October 28, “I think all danger of losing territory now held by us will have passed away.”

  Then he could go on the offensive.32

  28

  NOVEMBER 1863-FEBRUARY 1864—FORREST ON THE MISSISSIPPI

  “If Matters Are Not Arranged to My Satisfaction,

  I Shall Quit the Service”

  The war was bleeding toward the end of a third year. Confederate losses at Vicksburg and Gettysburg and the wasted win at Chickamauga had produced crises of confidence. The attrition of Southern slave labor as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation, coupled with territorial shrinkage and the military shortfalls, had wrecked the Southern economy. Food and clothing prices leapt in Richmond and elsewhere. Bragg’s loss of the East Tennessee rails to the Deep South and Grant’s isolation of the trans-Mississippi had hardened the arteries of commerce. And Lincoln showed no inclination to compromise. He mounted a Gettysburg rostrum on November 19 to urge the North on to twofold triumph: the restoration of the old Union and the simultaneous making of it into a new, freer one.

  Forrest, at last free of Bragg, was becoming a different man. His experience in the purgatory of the Army of Tennessee had shown its leaders to be hapless losers, and the prospect of their dooming the Confederacy—and with it, the fruits of his life’s struggles—seemed to galvanize him. He was in no mood to brook additional aristocratic slights, and for a time it looked as if there might be no more. He had dressed down his hateful and hated ex-commander with impunity. The Confederacy’s very president had all but begged him to stay in the army and help regain the indispensable southwest. And Forrest had found a more appreciative commander in thirty-year-old Major General Stephen Lee; Lee, having seen newspaper reports that Forrest had resigned from Bragg’s army, wrote Bragg on November 6 requesting Forrest’s assignment to occupied West Tennessee. Forrest’s popularity there, Lee explained, “would enable him to raise at least 4,000 men otherwise lost to our service.”1

  The next day, to a note from Forrest, Lee responded in admiring terms. A brigade under Colonel R. V. Richardson was “nearly organized” and could form the nucleus of a large Forrest command, Lee wrote. And although he was a West Point–trained South Carolina gentleman, Lee all but pledged better conduct toward Forrest than Bragg had displayed. Lee assured Forrest that “we shall not disagree” and that he would be proud either to command or to cooperate with a cavalry officer of such established fame.2

  Forrest must have already noticed that the trans-Appalachian South’s common folk revered him while reviling most of his leaders. Perhaps because of this awareness of his own cachet, as well as disgust with the distracted way the elite seemed to fight this war, his relations with superiors soon became steelier.

  In early November, Forrest headed west with his micro-army of fewer than three hundred men. He took them first to Rome, Georgia, where for two days they prepared for the ride across Alabama. They made the trek without their chief. He took a train to Selma, Alabama, to better outfit them from arms factories there, then went on to Meridian, Mississippi, to confer with the department commander, General Joe Johnston. On November 14, Johnston issued an order that must have surprised Union authorities. It named Forrest commander of Federal-held West Tennessee. His assignment would be part of the one he had requested during his final months under Bragg: to range through the captured area and rally—or conscript—as many of its citizens for Confederate service “as practicable.”3

  But appearances of Forrest’s rising influence in the high command were illusory. He was promoted to major general in mid-December, but not for merit. The Federals were mounting a drive eastward from Vicksburg toward Meridian, and Johnston wanted West Pointer Stephen Lee to direct cavalry opposition in the state’s southern half. Another major general of cavalry was meanwhile needed to supervise the northern half. Johnston asked Jefferson Davis not for Forrest but for Major General Wade Hampton, a South Carolina blue blood commanding cavalry in the Army of Northern Virginia. Davis replied that Virginia commander Robert E. Lee could not spare Hampton.

  So Forrest was Johnston’s second choice—if, in fact, Johnston chose him at all. Johnston wanted Hampton because Hampton owned vast Mississippi properties and thus presumably knew the territory; Johnston did not seem to care, if he even knew, that Forrest had lived and worked in the area since his early teens. Nor did Johnston have the excuse that Hampton was a West Pointer; he was not. So, because Robert E. Lee needed Hampton, Davis sent Johnston Forrest. And because Johnston said he needed another major general of cavalry, Davis promoted Forrest. Davis carefully pointed out, however, that Stephen Lee was already a major general and thus would remain the department’s senior commander.4

  Forrest’s job was dangerous and would have to be done quickly. In addition to Sherman’s looming advance on Meridian from Vicksburg in January, the Federals were also known to be preparing a thrust southward from Memphis. To guard against the latter, the Confederates needed in northern Mississippi both a major general and an appropriate number of troops for him to command. The only place to get them fast enough was Union-occupied West Tennessee.

  Forrest set about recruiting an instant army—again, without sufficient tools. He asked for arms and equipment that he thought Davis had promised him in their meeting, but they did not materialize. He wrote Johnston on November 25 that it would be “rash” to take his now 450 men far behind Union lines without sufficient arms for themselves and the new units they expected to recruit, but a day or so later he went ahead anyway. With Stephen Lee ordering strikes against stations on the Memphis & Charleston Railroad to divert attention, Forrest left his Okolona headquarters 80 miles south of the Mississippi-Tennessee border and headed to Jackson, nearly 150 miles north.

  He arrived on December 6. He either had men already work
ing the area or had been mobbed by recruits on the road, because he wrote Johnston on November 6 that he was progressing spectacularly. He had gathered 5,000 troops and expected more as his presence at Jackson became better known. He reported that, per day, fifty to one hundred men conscripted by the Federals in western Kentucky were deserting and joining his ranks. But he needed $100,000 to buy artillery horses, wagons, forage, and other matériel, as well as another $150,000 to pay troops returning to the army. In the interim, he had had to use $20,000 of his own.5

  Two days later, he availed himself of a new potential source of aid: his personal acquaintance with Jefferson Davis. He sent a staff member to Richmond to inform Confederate authorities of his appeals to Johnston for the needed money and arms. In the accompanying letter, he told the government’s highest representatives that if he received aid, he could regain for the Confederacy a great swath of Union territory, bringing along vast supplies not to be gotten in such cheap volume elsewhere.6 If Stephen Lee could move up into West Tennessee and bring rifles for the recruits, he added, their forces could combine to destroy the Memphis & Charleston Railroad and drive south 4,000 to 6,000 head of cattle for Johnston’s army. He sent a letter of similar appeal to Bragg, saying he believed he could send at least 5,000 members of the Army of Tennessee back to Bragg if he got the desired arms and money.