8. Quotation from Robert Selph Henry, "First with the Most" Forrest (Indianapolis, 1944), 193. Union casualties at Chickamauga were about 16,000. Glen Tucker, Chickamauga: Bloody Battle in the West (Indianapolis, 1961), 388–89.
Bragg hoped to starve the Yankees out. By mid-October he seemed likely to succeed. The Confederates planted artillery on the commanding height of Lookout Mountain south of Chattanooga, infantry along Missionary Ridge to the east, and infantry on river roads to the west. This enabled them to interdict all of Rosecrans's supply routes into the city except a tortuous wagon road over the forbidding Cumberlands to the north. Mules consumed almost as much forage as they could haul over these heights, while rebel cavalry raids picked off hundreds of wagons. Union horses starved to death in Chattanooga while men were reduced to half rations or less.
Rosecrans seemed unequal to the crisis. The disaster at Chickamauga and the shame of having fled the field while Thomas stayed and fought unnerved him. Lincoln considered Rosecrans "confused and stunned like a duck hit on the head."9 The Army of the Cumberland clearly needed help. Even before Chickamauga, Halleck had ordered Sherman to bring four divisions from Vicksburg to Chattanooga, rebuilding the railroad as he went. But the latter task would take weeks. So, on September 23, Stanton pressed a reluctant Lincoln to transfer the under-strength 11th and 12th Corps by rail from the Army of the Potomac to Rosecrans. This would handicap Meade's operations on the Rappahannock, protested the president. Meade could not be prodded into an offensive anyhow, replied Stanton, so these corps should be put to work where they could do some good. Lincoln finally consented, and activated Joe Hooker to command the expeditionary force. Stanton summoned railroad presidents to his office. Orders flew around the country; dozens of trains were assembled; and forty hours after the decision, the first troops rolled out of Culpeper for a 1,233-mile trip through Union-held territory over the Appalachians and across the unbridged Ohio River twice. Eleven days later more than 20,000 men had arrived at the railhead near Chattanooga with their artillery, horses, and equipment. It was an extraordinary feat of logistics—the longest and fastest movement of such a large body of troops before the twentieth century.10
But there was no point putting these men into Chattanooga when the
9. Dennett, Lincoln/Hay, 106.
10. George Edgar Turner, Victory Rode the Rails (Indianapolis, 1953), 288–94; Thomas Weber, The Northern Railroads in the Civil War (New York, 1952), 181–86. From first to last, the transfer of Longstreet's 12,000 infantry about 900 miles had required twelve days and the transportation of their artillery and horses an additional four days. Longstreet left his supply wagons and their horses behind in Virginia.
soldiers already there could not be fed. And there seemed to be no remedy for that problem without new leadership. In mid-October, Lincoln took the matter in hand. He created the Division of the Mississippi embracing the whole region between that river and the Appalachians, and put Grant in command "with his headquarters in the field."11 The field just now was Chattanooga, so there Grant went. On the way he authorized the replacement of Rosecrans with Thomas as commander of the Army of the Cumberland. Within a week of Grant's arrival on October 23, Union forces had broken the rebel stranglehold on the road and river west of Chattanooga and opened a new supply route dubbed the "cracker line" by hungry bluecoats. Although Rosecrans's staff had planned the operation that accomplished this, it was Grant who ordered it done. A Union officer later recalled that when Grant came on the scene "we began to see things move. We felt that everything came from a plan."12 The inspiration of Grant's presence seemed to extend even to the 11th Corps, which had suffered disgrace at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg but fought well during a night action October 28–29 to open the cracker line. By mid-November, Sherman had arrived with 17,000 troops from the Army of the Tennessee to supplement the 20,000 men Hooker had brought from the Army of the Potomac to reinforce the 35,000 infantry of Thomas's Army of the Cumberland. Though Bragg still held Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, his immediate future began to look cloudy.
This cloudiness stemmed in part from continuing internecine warfare within Bragg's command. Soon after Chickamauga, Bragg suspended Polk and two other generals for slowness or refusal to obey crucial orders before and during the battle. The hot-blooded Forrest, bitter about failure to follow up the victory, refused to serve any longer under Bragg and returned to an independent command in Mississippi after telling Bragg to his face: "I have stood your meanness as long as I intend to. You have played the part of a damned scoundrel. . . . If you ever again try to interfere with me or cross my path it will be at the peril of your life." Several generals signed a petition to Davis asking for Bragg's removal. Longstreet wrote to the secretary of war with a lugubrious prediction that "nothing but the hand of God can save us or help us as long as we have our present commander."13
Twice before—after Perryville and Stones River—similar dissensions
11. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 30, pt. 4, p. 404.
12. Bruce Catton, Grant Takes Command (Boston, 1969), 56.
13. Henry, "First with the Most" Forrest, 199; O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 30, pt. 4, p. 706.
had erupted in the Army of Tennessee. On October 6 a weary Jefferson Davis boarded a special train for the long trip to Bragg's headquarters where he hoped to straighten out the mess. In Bragg's presence all four corps commanders told Davis that the general must go. After this embarrassing meeting, Davis talked alone with Longstreet and may have sounded him out on the possibility of taking the command. But as a sojourner from Lee's army, Longstreet professed unwillingness and recommended Joseph Johnston. At this the president bridled, for he had no confidence in Johnston and considered him responsible for the loss of Vicksburg. Beauregard was another possibility for the post. Although he was then doing a good job holding off Union attacks on Charleston, Davis had tried Beauregard once before as commander of the Army of Tennessee and found him wanting. In the end there seemed no alternative but to retain Bragg. In an attempt to reduce friction within the army, Davis authorized the transfer of several generals to other theaters. He also counseled Bragg to detach Longstreet with 15,000 men for a campaign to recapture Knoxville—an ill-fated venture that accomplished nothing while depriving Bragg of more than a quarter of his strength. Indeed, none of Davis's decisions during this maladroit visit had a happy result. The president left behind a sullen army as he returned to Richmond.
With Longstreet's departure in early November the Confederates yielded the initiative to Grant. As soon as Sherman's reinforcements arrived, Grant set in motion a plan to drive the rebels away from Chattanooga and open the gate to Georgia. As usual the taciturn general's offensive succeeded, but this time not in quite the way he had planned. Grant rejected the idea of a frontal assault against the triple line of trenches on Missionary Ridge as suicidal. He intended to attack both ends of Bragg's line to get on the enemy's flanks. Believing that Thomas's Army of the Cumberland was still demoralized from their shock at Chickamauga and "could not be got out of their trenches to assume the offensive," Grant assigned them the secondary role of merely threatening the Confederate center on Missionary Ridge while Sherman's and Hooker's interlopers from the Armies of the Tennessee and the Potomac did the real fighting on the flanks.14 By this plan Grant unwittingly applied a goad to Thomas's troops that would produce a spectacular though serendipitous success.
Hooker carried out the first part of his job with a flair. On November
14. Memoirs of General William T. Sherman, 2 vols. (2nd ed., New York, 1886), I, 390.
24 he sent the better part of three divisions against three Confederate brigades holding the northern slope of Lookout Mountain. The Yankee infantry scrambled uphill over boulders and fallen trees through an intermittent fog that in later years became romanticized as the "Battle Above the Clouds." With surprisingly light casualties (fewer than 500), Hooker's troops drove the rebels down the reverse slope, forcing Bragg that night to evacuate his defenses on Lookout
and pull the survivors back to Missionary Ridge.
During the night the skies cleared to reveal a total eclipse of the moon; next morning a Kentucky Union regiment clawed its way to Lookout's highest point and raised a huge American flag in sunlit view of both armies below. For the South these were ill omens, though at first it did not appear so. On the other end of the line Sherman had found the going hard. When his four divisions pressed forward on November 24 they quickly took their assigned hill at the north end of Missionary Ridge—but found that it was not part of the ridge at all, but a detached spur separated by a rock-strewn ravine from the main spine. The latter they attacked with a will on the morning of November 25 but were repeatedly repulsed by Irish-born Patrick Cleburne's oversize division, the best in Bragg's army. Meanwhile Hooker's advance toward the opposite end of Missionary Ridge was delayed by obstructed roads and a wrecked bridge.
His plan not working, Grant in mid-afternoon ordered Thomas to launch a limited assault against the first line of Confederate trenches in the center to prevent Bragg from sending reinforcements to Cleburne. Thomas made the most of this opportunity to redeem his army's reputation. He sent four divisions, 23,000 men covering a two-mile front, across an open plain straight at the Confederate line. It looked like a reprise of Pickett's charge at Gettysburg, with blue and gray having switched roles. And this assault seemed even more hopeless than Pickett's, for the rebels had had two months to dig in and Missionary Ridge was much higher and more rugged than Cemetery Ridge. Yet the Yankees swept over the first line of trenches with astonishing ease, driving the demoralized defenders pell-mell up the hill to the second and third lines at the middle and top of the crest.
Having accomplished their assignment, Thomas's soldiers did not stop and await orders. For one thing, they were now sitting ducks for the enemy firing at them from above. For another, these men had something to prove to the rebels in front of them and to the Yankees on their flanks. So they started up the steep ridge, first by platoons and companies,
then by regiments and brigades. Soon sixty regimental flags seemed to be racing each other to the top. At his command post a mile in the rear, Grant watched with bewilderment. "Thomas, who ordered those men up the ridge?" he asked angrily. "I don't know," replied Thomas. "I did not." Someone would catch hell if this turned out badly, Grant muttered as he clamped his teeth on a cigar. But he need not have worried. Things turned out better than anyone at Union headquarters could have expected—the miracle at Missionary Ridge, some of them were calling it by sundown. To the Confederates it seemed a nightmare. As the Yankees kept coming up the hill the rebels gaped with amazement, panicked, broke, and fled. "Completely and frantically drunk with excitement," blueclad soldiers yelled "Chickamauga! Chickamauga!" in derisive triumph at the backs of the disappearing enemy. Darkness and a determined rear-guard defense by Cleburne's division, which had not broken, prevented effective pursuit. But Bragg's army did not stop and regroup until it had retreated thirty miles down the railroad toward Atlanta.15
Union soldiers could hardly believe their stunning success. When a student of the battle later commented to Grant that southern generals had considered their position impregnable, Grant replied with a wry smile: "Well, it was impregnable." Bragg himself wrote that "no satisfactory excuse can possibly be given for the shameful conduct of our troops. . . . The position was one which ought to have been held by a line of skirmishers."16 But explanations if not excuses can be offered. Some Confederate regiments at the base of Missionary Ridge had orders to fall back after firing two volleys; others had received no such orders. When the latter saw their fellows apparently breaking to the rear, they were infected by panic and began running. The Union attackers followed the retreating rebels so closely that Confederates in the next line had to hold their fire to avoid hitting their own men. As northern soldiers climbed the slope, they used dips and swells in the ground for cover against enemy fire from the line at the top, which Bragg's engineers had mistakenly located along the topographical crest rather than
15. Quotations from Joseph S. Fullerton, "The Army of the Cumberland at Chattanooga," Battles and Leaders, III, 725, and James A. Connolly, Three Years in the Army of the Cumberland, ed. Paul M. Angle (Bloomington, 1959), 158.
16. Ulysses S. Grant, "Chattanooga," Battles and Leaders, III, 693n; Bragg's official report in O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 31, pt. 2, p. 666.
the military crest where the line of fire would not be blocked by such dips and swells. Perhaps the ultimate explanation, however, was the Army of Tennessee's dispirited morale which had spread downward from backbiting generals to the ranks. Bragg conceded as much in a private letter to Jefferson Davis tendering his resignation. "The disaster admits of no palliation," he wrote. "I fear we both erred in the conclusion for me to retain command here after the clamor raised against me."17 As the army went into winter quarters, Davis grasped the nettle and grudgingly appointed Johnston to the command.
Meanwhile the repulse on November 29 of Longstreet's attack against Knoxville deepened Confederate woes. In Virginia a campaign of maneuver by Lee after the 11th and 12th Corps left the Army of the Potomac also turned out badly. During October, Lee tried to turn the Union right and get between Meade and Washington. Having foiled that move, Meade in November attempted to turn Lee's right on the Rapidan. Though unsuccessful, the Federals inflicted twice as many casualties as they suffered during these maneuvers, subtracting another 4,000 men from the Army of Northern Virginia it could ill afford to lose.
The glimmer of southern optimism that had flared after Chickamauga died in November. When he heard the news of Chickamauga, War Department clerk John B. Jones had written: "The effects of this great victory will be electrical. The whole South will be filled again with patriotic fervor, and in the North there will be a corresponding depression. . . . [They] must now see the impossibility of subjugating the Southern people." But two months later Jones confessed despair at Bragg's "incalculable disaster." Another southern official wrote of "calamity . . . defeat . . . utter ruin. Unless something is done . . . we are irretrievably gone." And at the end of 1863 diarist Mary Chesnut found "gloom and unspoken despondency hanging] like a pall everywhere."18
17. Bragg to Jefferson Davis, Dec. 1, 1863, in O.R., Ser. I, Vol 52, pt. 2, p. 745. The best accounts of the internal strife in the Army of Tennessee can be found in Thomas Lawrence Connelly, Autumn of Glory: The Army of Tennessee, 1862–1865 (Baton Rouge, 1971), chap. 10, and James Lee McDonough, Chattanooga—A Death Grip on the Confederacy (Knoxville, 1984), passim.
18. Jones, War Clerk's Diary (Swiggett), II, 50, 106; Hugh Lawson Clay quoted in Bell Irvin Wiley, The Road to Appomattox (Atheneum ed., New York, 1973), 65; Woodward, Chesnut's Civil War, 501.
II
In foreign policy, too, the second half of 1863 brought cruel disappointment to the South. Not only had dreams of British recognition gone glimmering after Vicksburg and Gettysburg, but hopes for a new super-weapon to break the blockade were also dashed.
British laxity in allowing the commerce raiders Florida and Alabama to escape from Liverpool encouraged Confederate naval envoy James Bulloch to aim even higher. In the summer of 1862 he had contracted with the Laird firm for construction of two armor-plated vessels carrying turrets for nine-inch guns and a seven-foot iron spike attached to the prow to pierce wooden ships below the waterline. These fearsome "Laird rams" were expected to raise havoc with the blockade fleet, perhaps even to steam into New York harbor and hold the city for ransom.
While such extravagant hopes were doubtless unrealistic, the diplomatic crisis generated by the rams was real enough. Charles Francis Adams bombarded the Foreign Office with protests and warnings. Bulloch countered by transferring ownership of the vessels to a French firm which was ostensibly buying them for His Serene Highness the Pasha of Egypt. This subterfuge deceived only those who wished to be deceived. The diplomatic tension escalated as the ships neared completion in midsummer 1863.
A British court decision in an unrelate
d case buoyed Bulloch's prospects. In April the Palmerston government had seized the commerce raider Alexandra being built for the Confederacy, on the grounds that its warlike intent could be inferred from its structure despite the absence of guns. But in June the Court of Exchequer ruled against the government in this case. The way seemed clear for Bulloch to sail his unarmed rams out of Liverpool through a loophole in British law. Adams sent Foreign Secretary Russell increasingly acerbic protests culminating in a declaration on September 5: "It would be superfluous in me to point out to your Lordship that this is war." Unknown to Adams, the Palmerston ministry had decided to detain the ships even before receiving this note. But when the diplomatic correspondence was later published, Adams became a hero at home for apparently forcing John Bull to give in. Despite Palmerston's resentment of Adams's tone ("We ought," the prime minister told Russell, "to say to him in civil Terms 'you be damned' "), Union diplomacy had won a victory that Henry Adams described as "a second Vicksburg."19
19. Quotations from D. P. Crook, The North, the South, and the Powers 1861–1865 (New York, 1974), 325, 326; and Worthington C. Ford, ed., A Cycle of Adams Letters 1861–1865, 2 vols. (Boston, 1920), H, 82.
A disheartened James Bulloch transferred his efforts to France, where during 1863 the Confederates contracted for four commerce raiders and two double-turreted ironclad rams. Louis Napoleon continued to nurture southern hopes for recognition. He was still trying to restore a French empire in the new world. In June 1863 a French army of 35,000 men captured Mexico City and overthrew the republican government of Benito Juarez. Meanwhile the Confederates had formed alliances with anti-Juarez chieftains in provinces bordering Texas to foster the contraband trade across the Rio Grande. Perceiving a similarity of interests with the clerical monarchists and hacienda owners whose laborers were peons, southern leaders welcomed French intervention in behalf of this group. When Napoleon made clear his intent to set up the Hapsburg Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian as Emperor of Mexico, Confederate envoys made contact with Maximilian and offered to recognize him if he would help obtain French recognition of the South. Maximilian was willing, but by January 1864 Napoleon seemed to have lost interest in the scheme.
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