Born to Battle

by Jack Hurst

  But Sherman’s time had passed. The Confederates had robbed him of it. Two Southern brigades that had evacuated Lookout Mountain, together with the so-called Orphan Brigade of Kentuckians from Bragg’s center, rushed into line on and around Tunnel Hill. Cannoneers pushed guns up amid the infantrymen. The Confederate position was now too strong for Sherman’s piecemeal approach. The few troops he had assigned to take the hill could only continue to try and bloodily fail.

  Grant’s order of the night before had said Thomas would join in after Sherman attacked the left, and Sherman wondered about the promised aid. At 12:45 p.m., he sent a message by signal to inquire about it: “Where is Thomas?” Fifteen minutes later,Thomas himself replied from Orchard Knob. “Am here,” he signaled back. “My right is closing in from Lookout Mountain, toward Mission Ridge.” But Thomas’s message was misleading. Reluctant to launch his assault until the Confederates had been damaged elsewhere, he was waiting for Hooker, commanding on his right, to attack Bragg’s left. And Hooker was not yet “closing in”; he was still bridging Chattanooga Creek.35

  Grant began to worry about Sherman’s safety. He and others had seen Confederates rushing along the crest of Missionary Ridge toward Bragg’s right, Sherman’s vicinity. Grant and Thomas were both on Orchard Knob with their staffs, but the two generals and their retinues avoided each other. Grant’s men focused on Sherman, Thomas’s on Hooker. Around 2:30, Grant walked over to his West Point roommate, Kentucky native Thomas J. Wood, with whom he felt more comfortable than with Thomas. A brigadier in Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland, Wood had been the man who obeyed Rosecrans’s erring order to pull his division out of line at Chickamauga, opening the fatal gap that had nearly destroyed the Federal army. But that was the only major mistake in Wood’s career. Now, Grant said Sherman appeared to be struggling. Wood agreed.36

  “It seems as if we ought to help him,” Grant added, almost to himself. Again Wood agreed, adding that he and his men would try to do whatever Grant ordered. That seemed to be the nudge Grant needed. “If you and Sheridan advance your divisions to the foot of the ridge and there halt, I think it will menace Bragg’s forces and relieve Sherman,” Grant said. Wood replied that he thought such an advance could capture the first Confederate trench line, which fronted the base of Missionary Ridge.37

  Grant now took the idea to Thomas. The Army of the Cumberland commander stared through field glasses at Hooker’s bridging effort on Chattanooga Creek, on the Federal right. Grant asked if it might be a good idea for Thomas to advance on the lower line of Confederate rifle pits to divert attention from Sherman. Thomas did not lower the field glasses. Only Grant heard his reply, but it was plainly negative. Thomas was without one of his divisions, Absalom Baird’s, which Grant had sent off to aid Sherman around noon. That left Thomas with 19,000 men, which seemed thin for a frontal assault up a ridge bristling with enemy trenches. And it had been more than an hour since Hooker last reported his progress bridging Chattanooga Creek.38

  MAJOR GENERAL GEORGE H. THOMAS

  Grant said nothing further and walked away. His forbearance enraged John Rawlins. Thomas subordinate Gordon Granger infuriated him all the more. Throughout the Grant-Thomas exchange, Granger had indulged in a habit of his, loudly sighting cannons for nearby artillerymen. Rawlins plainly thought Granger and Thomas should show more concern for Sherman and deference to Grant. The inactivity of Thomas and his staff went on for another half hour. Grant staffer James Harrison Wilson begged Rawlins to do something. Finally, Rawlins approached Grant. In low tones, he appeared to upbraid his chief for letting the tragicomedy play out as if no one were in charge. His words hit home. Grant took command.

  “General Thomas,” Grant said, “order Granger to turn that battery over to its proper commander and take command of his own corps. And now order your troops to advance and take the enemy’s first line of rifle pits.”39

  Thomas did not reply. He just called Granger over and talked with him for a moment. Granger ambled off. Time kept passing. War Department official Charles Dana, who was there on Orchard Knob, thought an hour passed. Rawlins told Grant he did not believe Thomas’s troops had been ordered forward. Grant, embarrassed, said he thought they had. He asked Wood, who had originally encouraged the idea of an assault, why his troops remained in place. Wood said they had received no order to move. “General Thomas,” Grant said, turning to him, “why are not these troops advancing?” Thomas said he did not know, that Granger had been told to move them up. It did not look like it. Granger, again amusing himself among the cannons, acted as if he had been ordered to continue delaying while Hooker finished his bridge.

  “General Granger, why are your men waiting?” Grant asked with increasing edge.

  “I have no orders to advance,” Granger said.

  Grant had taken enough mocking. He now let both Thomas and Granger know their ploy was played out. “If you will leave that battery to its captain and take command of your corps,” Grant told Granger in iron tones, “it will be better for all of us.”40

  Granger hurried from the cannons. He told Wood that Wood and Sheridan were to move their divisions up at the firing of six of the cannons Granger had been fooling with. They were to take the first line of trenches and halt there. Orders also went to Richard W. Johnson’s division on Sheridan’s right and to Baird’s just-returning division on Wood’s left. These orders originated with Grant; Thomas appears to have given none. Having been reluctant to attack since Grant first took command at Chattanooga, he now seemed to fear destruction of his understrength army in what he likely viewed as a reckless bid to pull Sherman out of trouble. Having saved the Army of the Cumberland from Rosecrans’s blunders, Thomas seemed to feel he must also save it from Grant’s.

  But Grant, unlike Rosecrans at Chickamauga, did not leave the field to Thomas. Because Granger had dawdled in the face of the first order, Grant repeated it directly to the division commanders, bypassing Thomas. The advance on the face of Missionary Ridge was finally about to move.41

  Grant’s order appalled its rifle-carrying recipients. They would have to advance under fire across a mile of flat ground. If they managed to take the first line of trenches at the foot of Missionary Ridge, they would still be under fire from more trench lines above them, on the side of a five-hundred-foot slope whose angle of ascent was forty-five degrees. Yet, according to the orders some received, they would not even be allowed to advance up the ridge to try to silence the fire from above. Their orders were to stop at the first trench line and wait amid the fusillade.42

  This order, which Grant had first given Thomas on Orchard Knob, was obviously unsound. It likely was born of desperation to aid Sherman as well as exhausted patience with, and rising rancor toward, Thomas and the exasperating Granger. Grant later claimed he included within his order the authority to “re-form . . . and carry the ridge” after Thomas’s troops overran the initial trench, but few others remembered such a provision. James Harrison Wilson did tell General Absalom Baird that the charge into the first Confederate line was to be “preparatory to a general assault on the mountain,” but that appears to have been Wilson’s own amendment to the Grant order.43

  Some officers never understood that they were to stop at the foot of the ridge. One division commander, Phil Sheridan, could not believe the goal was just the first trench line because, once gained, he said, it would be “untenable.” He sent a staff officer to Orchard Knob for clarification, but before the officer could return, the order came to charge. At least one recipient seemed fatalistically untroubled by the confusion. When bellicose brigadier August Willich of Wood’s division told his officers their assignment, a major asked where they were to stop.

  “I don’t know,” Willich replied. “At Hell, I expect.”44

  But the Federals were not as close to hell’s gates as they thought. The Confederate position had shortcomings not evident from a mile across the plain. Bragg and Major General John C. Breckinridge, who commanded the middle of the line, were fixated on
their flanks. They assumed the ridge’s steepness made it madness to attack the center—until they saw the Federals massing there in the afternoon. Even then, they erred. Their one-behind-the-other mountainside trench scheme had thinned their resistance, spreading it across the face of Missionary Ridge from base to crest, and they now further weakened it. They issued orders for a brigade in the center of their forward line, Major A. W. Reynolds’s of Patton Anderson’s division, to fire a volley and retire up the mountain if the enemy closed to within two hundred yards. They told only officers, apparently concerned for the effect such an order might have on morale.45

  It was nearly 4 p.m. when the Army of the Cumberland started forward. Sherman had ceased his fragmentary, bloody efforts to take Tunnel Hill, and Hooker still had not crossed Chattanooga Creek. Federals watching from Orchard Knob, having seen the passage of Pat Cleburne’s and Alfred Cumming’s Confederates and the Orphan Brigade of Kentuckians from Lookout Mountain, believed—erroneously, it would prove—that much of Bragg’s army had shifted to the Confederate right to stop Sherman. The bulk of Bragg’s troops, however, remained in front of the Army of the Cumberland as well as somewhat to its left as it headed for the first line of Confederate trenches.46

  The Union divisions filed into long, full lines. Parallel to Missionary Ridge, they made Confederate riflemen on the ridge as apprehensive as the attackers. For much of the way across the plain, the Federals were protected by an oak forest from which autumn had stripped the leaves. But the final quarter to half mile was open, the oaks having been cut for firewood or visibility. Before the Union line had even reached the denuded woods that would cover most of their approach, the Confederate cannons roared, their thunder multiplied by echoes in the surrounding mountains. This din contrasted with the silence of the oncoming Federals, who had been ordered not to fire until they reached the rifle pits. The cannons, having to be repeatedly depressed as the Federals came on, did little damage.47

  BATTLE OF MISSIONARY RIDGE

  The attackers burst from the bare trees and broke, yelling, into a run. They hoped to cross the rest of the plain before the cannons could find them. Hardly had they begun the sprint when Confederates in the center of the trenches fired a volley and fell back. Seeing them turn to run transformed the Federals’ trepidation into elation. Willich’s skirmishers of the Sixth Ohio reached the trenches first. They had run nearly a mile carrying full battle gear, but the storm of fire from above spurred them into and past the trench line. Those who still had sufficient breath kept running, straight for log huts the Confederates had built on a low plateau between the rifle pits and the foot of the ridge. These little buildings offered at least some protection from the Confederate rifles above and were well past where the cannons could be depressed to aim.48

  Other panicking Confederates, following those abandoning the lower trench line, scrambled up the slope, blocking the firing lanes of their comrades in the lines behind and above them. When they reached those rearward lines, the retreating troops threw them, too, into disarray as they stumbled through. Those Confederate riflemen who could fire at all fired high.

  The Federals were just as confused as their foes. Some officers who had gotten Grant’s order to halt at the lower trench line tried first to stop their troops, then gave up and joined them in ragged surges upward. Wood, who had encouraged Grant to make the attack, never tried. When his first line surged out of the captured pits ahead of him and his second line begged, over the cannon roar, to follow, he waved them on. Willich and others never tried to halt at all. The men had recognized the reality as fast as, or faster than, their officers.49

  “To have stopped . . . would have been annihilation,” reported Major Samuel Gray of the Forty-ninth Ohio at the attack’s front and center. “Our only hope was to charge the hill.”50

  On Orchard Knob, well behind the stampede up Missionary Ridge, the Federal charge looked exactly like the chaos it was. Grant saw clots of men from Wood’s and Sheridan’s divisions pass the first trench line and begin disconnected attempts to scale the ridge beyond. He could not believe it. If the enemy counterattacked, a Bragg trademark, they could sweep the Federals off the mountainside, keep coming, and knock out the center of Grant’s army. It would mean defeat and disaster: loss of East Tennessee and perhaps the war. Seething over his inability to get anybody in the Army of the Cumberland to obey his orders, Grant abandoned military courtesy and shouted, “Thomas, who ordered those men up the ridge?”

  “I don’t know. I did not.”

  “Did you order them up, Granger?”

  “No, they started without orders,” Granger said. “When those fellows get started, all hell can’t stop them.”

  “Well,” Grant growled, “somebody will suffer if they don’t stay there.”51

  But they did more than stay. Raggedly, they swept up the ridge’s long, steep face. The First Ohio found a spot where a jut protected an area under its lip, just three yards beneath the crest. Here several hundred men gathered, out of the cannon and rifle fire. When they had assembled a sizable force, the Ohioans shouted and surged forward. They poured onto the ridge top into the midst of terrified Confederates, many of whom surrendered. As the Forty-ninth Ohio reached the crest, it was enfiladed by Confederate cannons turned to fire down the trench line. The Federals leveled their rifles at the flanked cannoneers, who got off a volley that targeted their own rifle pits as well as the attackers. Then they fled to join the wildly withdrawing infantrymen. The Ohioans pursued for a quarter mile, grabbing many prisoners and helping capture several pieces of artillery. Their comrades in the Fifteenth Ohio, cresting the ridge where a road headed east and down the opposite slope, found Confederates frantically trying to get cannons and caissons down that road. The Ohioans pursued, shooting horses and capturing guns and cannoneers in the gathering dusk.52

  It was not yet 5:30 p.m. From the tardy obedience to Grant’s order to charge to the victorious conquest of the crest, the entire assault had spanned less than ninety minutes. Charles Dana wrote the next morning that it constituted “one of the greatest miracles in military history.”

  It was a miracle that no general, only riflemen, could take credit for. “Neither Grant nor Thomas intended it,” Dana went on. “Their orders were to carry the rifle-pits along the base of the ridge and capture their occupants, but when this was accomplished the . . . spirit of the troops bore them bodily up those impracticable steeps, over the bristling rifle-pits on the crest and thirty cannon enfilading every gully.”53

  But at 8 p.m. on November 25, with the wondrous feat not three hours old, Dana began recording a sidelight worth noting. The Federals, he wrote to Secretary Stanton, were “frantic with joy and enthusiasm” and “received Grant, as he rode along the lines after the victory, with tumultuous shouts. Good.”54

  Dana’s one-word approval rings. He appeared to realize that, despite Grant’s order prohibiting the troops’ climb to victory, his relentless spirit had put them in position to make it. In so many respects, as he rode amid their cheers, the unkempt general mirrored the men hurrahing him. Figuratively, they applauded themselves.

  The overjoyed Federals’ pursuit of Bragg was late and minimal. The rush up Missionary Ridge was so astounding that, in the hours immediately after, Grant seemed rocked back on his heels, torn between his chase-and-destroy instinct and the urgency of preventing the hapless Burnside from surrendering to Longstreet at Knoxville. Longstreet had cut telegraph wires into the city, and Lincoln’s and Halleck’s dispatches on Burnside’s behalf were continual. Only Grant could help. On November 26, the day after the battle at Missionary Ridge, he ordered Granger to take 20,000 men to Knoxville.55

  Having sent aid to Burnside, Grant ordered a two-pronged move on Bragg. He sent Sherman east toward the railroad at Chickamauga Station to interpose his army between Bragg and Longstreet. He gave Thomas a more southerly route, toward Rossville, to try to catch Bragg in flight. Thomas again acted like the rock he had been proclaimed—but not as admirably
this time. He did not send Hooker forward toward Rossville until the afternoon of November 26, and even then Hooker had to ask to go. Hooker marched his men hard, but the Confederates had burned bridges across two creeks to discourage pursuit. Hooker surmounted these obstacles as fast as he could and drove on toward Ringgold, pushing his men into evening, then night. They marched by moonlight along roads littered with Confederate wagons, caissons, tents, and blankets.56

  But his persistence was to no avail. Approaching Ringgold Gap, Hooker’s 15,000 troops ran into as fine an infantry commander as served Bragg’s army and perhaps the whole of Dixie. Major General Pat Cleburne guarded Bragg’s rear with just his single division of 4,100 men. On him, Bragg had stressed, depended the life of the Army of Tennessee. It proved to be in good hands. That day, November 27, Cleburne’s men blocked the gap and killed or wounded five hundred Federals, losing less than half that many Confederates. By mid-afternoon, having saved the motley train of matériel that Bragg had salvaged from Missionary Ridge, Cleburne pulled out eastward. Hooker let him go.57

  Burnside’s relief would be even tardier. Granger did not leave for Knoxville until the afternoon after Cleburne mauled Hooker. Grant had had enough of the cannon sighter. Making other arrangements, he called off the pursuit of Bragg—because, he reported, he was drafting Sherman, who was part of the pursuit, to instead lead the Knoxville expedition in place of Granger, and it was “already getting late” to reach Knoxville before Burnside’s ten days’ worth of supplies ran out. He wrote Sherman that he had “lost all faith” in Granger’s “energy and capacity.”58

  Sherman blanched. Knoxville’s surrounding countryside, wooded mountains, and deep gorges—all of which offered perfect cover for hordes of stealthy enemies—reminded him of his Kentucky paranoia of 1861. “Recollect,” he wrote Grant, “that East Tennessee is my horror.”59