Never Call Retreat (37 page)

It would have been better if they could have started earlier. The President had called Lee to Richmond on August 24, to discuss the western crisis, and the conference had gone on for the better part of a fortnight. By the time it was over, and the commitment to transfer troops had been reached, the government's physical ability to make the transfer had deteriorated badly.

The direct route from Richmond to Chattanooga was the Confederacy's one real railroad trunk line, the line that went by way of Lynchburg, Bristol, and Knoxville, a five-hundred-mile haul; Longstreet, perhaps a bit optimistically, had figured the move could be made in four days. But while the conference was going on another spasm of energy possessed the Federals, and General Ambrose E. Burnside brought a small army down across the mountains from Kentucky and did what Mr. Lincoln had desperately wanted some general to do from the earliest days of the war: he occupied Knox-ville, liberating much of the strongly Unionist area of eastern Tennessee and taking possession of a long stretch of that all-important railroad. As a result, Longstreet's soldiers had to make a huge detour, traveling in a long circle down through the Carolinas to Augusta and Atlanta. The distance was nearly twice as far and the going was more than twice as bad, because the separate railroads involved had different track gauges so that men and equipment had to change cars over and over, with much loss of time. The roads themselves were in bad shape, lightly built to begin with and badly run down because of the demands of war and the impossibility of replacing worn-out equipment, and one of Longstreet's staff officers remarked in disgust: "Never before were so many troops moved over such worn-out railways . . . Never before were such crazy cars used for hauling good soldiers." The move could not have been made at all if quartermaster officers and railroad men had not done prodigies of planning and organization; but it did take a solid ten days, nearly half of the men reached the battlefield only after the fighting had ended, and the artillery came in even later. An earlier start could have made a substantial difference.
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Chickamauga, which was a resounding Southern victory, might have been even more resounding—would have been so, possibly, if those missing men had all been there—and because it was not it was finally wasted. For this battle marked the appearance of the Confederacy's last great opportunity. In the gloomy thickets above Chickamauga Creek the Confederates, for the last time east of the Mississippi River, were able to strike back at a foe who made war without co-ordination. Never again, after Rosecrans' defeat, did any major Federal army operate independently, as if neither the actions of other Federal armies nor the logic of the whole military situation were anything its leader needed to consider; and never again was a major Federal army exposed to outright annihilation. Never again could a Southern commander east of the Mississippi really hope to destroy the opposing army: after this his only valid target had to be the will-to-resist of the opposing general, and after much trial and many errors the government at Washington was finding generals in whom that quality was powerfully developed. Bragg had the last big chance. He got a victory out of it, but he did not get the great, shattering victory that was briefly possible. This was partly his own fault, and it was also partly the fault of some of his subordinates, but it must be said that the 6000 shock troops who did not arrive on time would have helped.

Perhaps there was something a little fated about what happened in Tennessee, anyway. Neither government had ever been able to lay a really firm hand on the war in that state; it was too far from the centers of control, and nothing that took place looked the same to the governments as to the soldiers on the spot. Once, after trying in vain to get an offensive started there, Mr. Davis consoled himself with the sensible reflection: "However desirable a movement may be, it is never safe to do more than suggest it to a commanding general, and it would be unwise to order its execution by one who foretold failure."
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This was entirely correct; the trouble was that it seemed to apply to Tennessee so often, on both sides.

Mr. Lincoln and General Halleck had both suggested and ordered various movements, without the slightest effect. All of their authority this spring had been insufficient to get their Tennessee army into action while the campaign against Vicksburg was going on, and honest bumbling Burnside was the first general who ever paid effective attention to the call for an advance on Knoxville. Mr. Davis had had no better luck. During the last winter he had been unable even to make a change in army commanders, and when he sent a general to the west to make one cause out of the defense of Tennessee and the defense of Vicksburg, Vicksburg went off to ruin as incontinently as if the general had never gone beyond the Blue Ridge. The most Mr. Davis could do now, with the very life of the nation at stake, was to scrape troops from here and there, send them off to Bragg, and hope for the best.

The best might turn out to be very good indeed, because the reinforcements stiffened Bragg's naturally pugnacious instincts and during the second week in September he unexpectedly reversed the flow of the campaign, passing from defense to offense so quickly that Rosecrans nearly lost his army.

In the middle of August when the campaign began Bragg had an over-all strength of some 44,000 men, as compared to slightly less than 80,000 under Rosecrans. Then he began to get additions. Simon Bolivar Buckner brought 8000 men down from Knoxville (evacuated perforce as Burnside drew nigh) and from Joe Johnston in Mississippi came 900 under John C. Breckinridge and W. H. T. Walker, followed shortly afterward by 2500 more; and of course Longstreet and his 12,000 were coming down from Virginia. (The contingents from Mississippi and Virginia of course would not have been present at all if the Federal advance had taken place while the Vicksburg and Gettysburg campaigns were in progress.) Inasmuch as a fair number of Rosecrans' men were on duty in the rear and would not be present in battle, Bragg faced the prospect, unheard-of for a Confederate, of going into action with the numerical odds equal if not indeed slightly in his favor.
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He shaped his plans accordingly, and suddenly he had Rosecrans in serious trouble.

Rosecrans got Crittenden's corps into Chattanooga on September 9, after Bragg evacuated the city, and as far as he could see the Confederates were running away and needed only to be caught. His army was well placed to catch them. The largest corps, that of Pap Thomas, 22,000 or more, was twenty miles southwest of Chattanooga at Stevens Gap in the long ridge of Lookout Mountain, with its leading elements thrust forward into a valley known as McLemore's Cove; and a third corps, McCook's, was twenty miles southwest of Thomas', moving through another gap in the Lookout ridge and heading toward the town of Alpine, just east of the Georgia-Alabama line. Bragg seemed to be making for Rome, Georgia, which was more than fifty miles south of Chattanooga. A loyal Tennesseean who got to Federal headquarters that day assured Rosecrans that if the retreating Confederates were pressed hard "they will not stop short of Atlanta," and one of Crittenden's brigadiers wrote afterward that the commanding general "expected to drive Bragg to the sea." Rosecrans sent a wire to Halleck saying that "our move on the enemy's flank and rear progresses, while the tail of his retreating column will not escape unnoticed." This message, breathing the true spirit of the offensive, was most welcome in Washington, but the general who wrote it had lost touch with reality.
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For Bragg was not retreating, and the Federals who thought they were chasing him were marching straight into trouble. Bragg was concentrating his army at Lafayette, less than twenty-five miles south of Chattanooga; far from running away, he was preparing to strike the nearest part of the invading army as soon as he could organize columns of assault. He could hardly have asked for a better opportunity. He could attack the three Federal corps one at a time; all of them were within his reach, but they were so widely separated that no one of them could easily come to the rescue of either of the others. On the evening of the day Rosecrans sent his confident dispatch to Halleck, Bragg issued orders for a counterattack.

His most obvious target was Thomas' corps, nearly half of which had been sent forward from Stevens Gap into McLemore's Cove, with scouts and skirmishing parties thrown on ahead to prepare for an advance to Lafayette, where the sensitive flank of the retreating foe could doubtless be assailed. Thomas' corps was dangerously exposed, with its nearest friends two days' march away; with proper handling, Bragg's army could crush it, and if this happened the Federal center would be destroyed and there would be a forty-mile gap between the Federal right and left wings . . . which meant, of course, that Rosecrans' entire army would be mortally wounded and that the war itself would look very different.

Bragg devised a good plan: one Confederate column would march southwest, following Chickamauga Creek into Mc-Lemore's Cove, while another drove west from Lafayette, and Thomas' isolated troops would be hit in front, flank, and rear all at once and so of course would be overwhelmed. It could have been done . . . but nothing ever worked out right for Braxton Bragg. Sometimes the fault was his and sometimes it was not, but in the long run the man wore failure as a habit; and now, during the time when Rosecrans' army might have been destroyed, Bragg could do no more than alarm it.

The column that was to strike the Federals from the northeast was led by Major T. C. Hindman, lately of Arkansas, and the column from Lafayette was under Lieutenant General D. H. Hill, veteran of the Virginia wars, sent west by Mr. Davis in the belief that the army in Tennessee needed hard-fighting generals; and these two men were good soldiers but difficult, tenacious of their own opinions, ready to interpret orders in the light of their own judgment. On September 10, the day appointed for their attack, they did not attack. Hill, as senior officer, explained that the roads in his front had been obstructed, that his best division commander was ill, and that the move, all in all, was not practicable . . . Balked here, Bragg ordered a similar attack for the next day, with Hindman and General Buckner leading the columns. Buckner too could be difficult; he and Hindman conferred, disliked the plan, and asked Bragg to change it, and when he refused and told them to go ahead as originally ordered they remained passive, making no attack. And at last Thomas' advance guard took alarm and marched back out of danger.

Two mis-fires, and the Federal center was no longer vulnerable. Now Bragg tried to hit Crittenden's corps, which was coming south on the road from Chattanooga to Lafayette, with one division crossing the Chickamauga at Lee and Gordon's Mills and the other two extended eastward toward Ringgold and Dalton. General Polk, commanding the nearest Confederate corps, was told to attack at Lee and Gordon's Mills at daylight on September 13.

Polk was both a lieutenant general and an Episcopal bishop, and in his own upright way he was even more difficult than the other generals. He found that the Federals who had gone off eastward had rejoined the division on Chickamauga Creek, and instead of attacking he sent back word that he had taken a strong defensive position and thought he could hold his ground if he were properly supported. Bragg angrily insisted that Polk was to attack, and told him that Buckner's troops would help him, but the bishop was convinced that he was right and his commanding general was wrong. Firm in this faith, he stayed where he was, no attack was made, and once again the Federals were unharmed . . . and at last Rosecrans began to understand his position, and hastily ordered his widely separated units to concentrate in the area occupied by Crittenden. Bragg in turn pulled his own army together on the opposite side of the creek, holding the crossing at Lee and Gordon's and extending his lines several miles downstream, and he sent a hopeful telegram to Richmond:

ENEMY HAS RETIRED BEFORE US AT ALL POINTS. WE SHALL NOW TURN ON HIM IN THE DIRECTION OF CHATTANOOGA.
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It took time to make all of the necessary movements, and time was what Rosecrans desperately needed for survival. After Bishop Polk overrode Bragg's orders for an attack on September 13, five days went by, and as the Federal corps drew closer together the chance that Rosecrans' army might be destroyed by piecemeal vanished. Even so, it was still in danger. Longstreet's leading brigades came into Bragg's camp on September 18, and on the following morning Bragg at last began to fight the battle which he had three times tried unsuccessfully to open. In place of the somewhat intricate maneuvers which his lieutenants had considered unworkable, his plan now was simple. He would turn the Federal left, cutting Rosecrans off from Chattanooga and driving him back into the blind alley of McLemore's Cove; that is, he would put his right wing across the Chickamauga a few miles below the Federal position and march upstream on the Yankee side, holding the upper crossings with his left and moving the left over to join in the fight as opportunity offered. Rosecrans was facing south, and Bragg would attack him from the east. If the advancing Confederates could get past the Federal left and seize the north-south road that ran from Lafayette to Chattanooga, Rosecrans' army would be done for.

That was what Bragg planned, and he probably would have got it if he had been able to start the fighting twenty-four hours earlier. On September 18 the Federal left rested at Lee and Gordon's Mills, where the Lafayette road crossed the Chickamauga, and nobody but Crittenden was there to hold it. The country off to the northeast, downstream, across which Bragg proposed to attack, was empty except for cavalry, Thomas and McCook were still coming in from the distant right, and Confederate infantry could have marched straight to the Lafayette road, deep in the Federal rear. But on September 18, while this balky Confederate army was moving down its aide of the river, driving Yankee cavalry away from the crossings and getting itself properly organized, Thomas' four divisions were making a prodigious hike. They left their camp in the afternoon and they kept on marching all night, setting fences on fire to light the way, infantry stumbling with fatigue but plowing on regardless; and by the morning of September 19, when Bragg's army at last opened its offensive, Thomas had most of his people in line east of the Lafayette road several miles north of Crittenden, drawn up squarely in the path of the Confederate divisions that were coming west from the river.