Never Call Retreat (38 page)

So the Yankee army was not where Bragg thought it was. It was still highly vulnerable, to be sure; if the left ever gave way the whole army would be lost, and Bragg's army had shown at Stone's River that when it struck a blow it struck with bone-crushing power. But Bragg's army could no longer win by maneuver. It would have to fight for everything it got, and although at last it got a good deal it did not get what it needed most. The battle of Chickamauga went by nobody's plan, once the first shots were fired. A Federal brigadier summed it up perfectly when he wrote that it was "a mad, irregular battle, very much resembling guerrilla warfare on a vast scale, in which one army was bushwhacking the other, and wherein all the science and the art of war went for nothing." The Confederate Senator G. A. Henry of Tennessee called the turn before the battle began when he told President Davis that the Army of Tennessee needed better leadership and warned him: "As sure as you are born, that army is better than its commanders."
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Both armies were.

It began a little west of the Chickamauga on that morning of September 19, when Bedford Forrest's cavalry—advancing dismounted, as competent foot-soldiers as any infantry—collided with one of Thomas' brigades near Reed's bridge. Confederate infantry moved up to help, and before long both armies were heavily engaged. Rosecrans brought McCook's weary corps in on Thomas' right and pulled Crittenden back from Lee and Gordon's, and all day long his army fought desperately to keep the Confederates away from the Lafayette road, with Thomas' corps drawn up in a long shallow crescent and taking most of the pressure. The country was full of trees and underbrush, with little clearings here and there; nobody could see much of his enemy's position, it was almost impossible to move artillery along the narrow country lanes, both armies were sodden with weariness, drinking water was hard to find, casualties were extremely heavy, and by nightfall all anyone could be sure of was that there had been a terrible fight and that it would be worse tomorrow.

That night there was a full moon, lighting the smoky fields and woods where lay so many thousands of dead and wounded men. In each army, generals who went to headquarters to report and compare notes felt a pervading air of depression and uncertainty; it was the hard fighting men, John B. Hood and Phil Sheridan, who were most struck by it.
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Rosecrans got a dozen of his chief lieutenants into a cramped log cabin owned by a lady who comes down in history simply as "the Widow Glenn"; there was a cot for the commanding general to rest on, and a camp chair for General Thomas, but everyone else sat on the floor or lounged against the wall. A fire flickered in the fireplace, and some aide lit a candle, with an inverted bayonet for a candle-holder. The generals were subdued, and the innumerable small noises of the surrounding camp could be heard in the little room; for some reason, when men spoke they spoke in low tones or even in whispers. Thomas was practically torpid for want of sleep. He kept dozing in his chair, rousing himself now and then to say, "I would strengthen the left," and then drowsing again.
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His advice was sound. The Federal army held a long, irregular line facing eastward, in front of the Lafayette road. The Confederates had tried all day to crush the northern end of that line—the left, held by Thomas—so that they could get in between Rosecrans and Chattanooga, and they were certain to renew the pressure in the morning. Rosecrans had some thought of shifting his troops into a position from which he could make a counterattack, but he felt that the men were too exhausted to be disturbed. The most he could do was to tell McCook and Crittenden to contract their lines in the morning so that they could send additional help over to Thomas in case he needed it.
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A few miles away, on the Confederate side of this most dismal of battlefields, in a country so tangled that a general could get lost making a simple trip to his superior officer's headquarters, Bragg was revising his command arrangements. It was natural that he should do this, in view of the way some of his generals had performed, although it was a risky thing to do in the middle of a big battle; one suspects that he was trying to find a way to make full use of the talents of General Longstreet, who reached the scene that evening, ready for action even though only five of his brigades were on hand. At any rate, Bragg divided his army into two wings, giving the right wing to Polk and the left to Longstreet. Polk was to make an all-out assault on Thomas at daybreak, and Longstreet was to apply pressure at the other end of the Federal line, making a full-scale attack of his own as soon as Polk's offensive showed progress.
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As usual, there was a hitch. Polk's attack did not get under way until somewhere around nine o'clock in the morning, for reasons now indecipherable: Bragg blamed Polk, Polk blamed D. H. Hill, Hill proclaimed his utter innocence, and probably the real trouble was simply that the chain of command was distressingly loose and that the units of this unhappy army moved with a timelag much like the one that was habitual in the Army of the Potomac.
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At any rate, the attack on Thomas was badly delayed, and the delay may have saved the life of the Union army because when at last Polk's troops attacked they struck with enormous force and if they had come in before Rosecrans could send reinforcements from his right Thomas' corps would probably have been overpowered.

The attack flamed all along his front, overlapping his left as he had feared, and men from McCook's and Crittenden's corps were sent to the left, where Thomas already had more than half of the Union army under his command. Thomas touched the edge of final disaster, once, when John Breckinridge broke past his flank with his division and put two brigades squarely on the vital Lafayette road; these brigades swung around, astride that fateful sandy highway, and came charging south straight into the Union rear, and for a time part of Thomas' line was under attack from two sides at once. By a prodigious effort, the Federals broke these brigades and drove them away, mangling them so badly that they had to be taken out of action altogether; but after they were gone another Confederate corps came in in their place, and the fight had to be made all over again, and Thomas notified Rosecrans that he had to have more help.

The unexpected result of this pressure on the Union left was that the Union right collapsed. In the hot confusion of battle, army headquarters at last lost track of the shifting and counter-marching that had been ordered, and Rosecrans finally pulled the division of Major General Thomas J. Wood out of Crittenden's line and sent it off to the left. This left a big gap in the line, and before anyone could fill it Longstreet made his own attack, striking with five divisions at the precise spot that had just been vacated, handling his men with the cold professional competence that prevailed in Lee's army.
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A third of Rosecrans' army was crumpled and driven off to the west, Sheridan's entire division and most of Jeff Davis', with elements from other commands, going all the way beyond the lower end of Missionary Ridge and shambling in disorganized rout toward the crossroads of Rossville, five miles north of the battlefield. With them went Rosecrans himself and two of his corps commanders, McCook and Crittenden. Since the last word the unhappy Rosecrans had from Thomas indicated that the left was in dire straits, Rosecrans seems to have assumed now that the entire army had been broken up, and he himself went all the way to Chattanooga in the belief that the commander of a beaten army ought to return to his base and make arrangements for a last-ditch stand.
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That left Thomas to pick up the pieces and save the army, and Thomas did all any soldier could have done. He contracted his original lines and formed a long extension on Snodgrass Hill to the west, getting his men into a huge horseshoe-shaped formation, determined to hold on until dusk and make the final withdrawal an orderly one. He was powerfully helped by two circumstances: Polk's wing had been so roughly handled in the morning's fighting that it was unable to renew the assault until late in the day, and a Federal reserve corps under Major General Gordon Granger, three brigades that had been stationed east of Rossville, came hurrying down to buttress the lines on Snodgrass Hill. Longstreet pressed his attack with grim energy, Polk renewed his own attack, and some of the most terrible fighting of the entire battle came shortly before sunset. The Federal lines never broke, and for the stand his men made Thomas was known ever after as "the Rock of Chickamauga," but the most that can be said is that he staved off complete catastrophe. At the end of the day he managed to get his tired soldiers out of line and everybody began to march north toward Chattanooga.

Federal morale was far down. Ambrose Bierce, serving that afternoon on Thomas' staff, recalled the mood that came on at twilight: "Away to our left and rear some of Bragg's people set up the 'rebel yell.' It was taken up successively and passed round to our front, along our right and in behind us again until it seemed almost to have got to the point whence it started. It was the ugliest sound that any mortal ever heard—even a mortal exhausted and unnerved by two days of hard fighting, without sleep, without rest, without food, and without hope. There was, however, a space somewhere at the back of us across which that horrible yell did not prolong itself—and through that we finally retired in profound silence and dejection, unmolested."
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From Chattanooga, at about the time Thomas was retiring from the field, Rosecrans sent a wire to Halleck: WE HAVE MET WITH A SERIOUS DISASTER; EXTENT NOT YET ASCERTAINED. ENEMY OVERWHELMED US, DROVE OUR RIGHT, PIERCED OUR CENTER, AND SCATTERED TROOPS THERE. THOMAS, WHO HAD SEVEN DIVISIONS, REMAINED INTACT AT LAST NEWS. GRANGER, WITH TWO BRIGADES, HAD GONE TO SUPPORT THOMAS ON THE LEFT. EVERY AVAILABLE RESERVE WAS USED WHEN THE MEN STAMPEDED. And Charles A. Dana, the Assistant Secretary of War who stayed with Rosecrans as Secretary Stanton's observer, sent a dark message of his own: MY REPORT TODAY IS OF DEPLORABLE IMPORTANCE. CHICKAMAUGA IS AS FATAL A NAME IN OUR HISTORY AS BULL RUN.
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Meanwhile, General Bragg had a singular fact to reflect on at his convenience. He had fought to the limit of his army's capacity for two days in an attempt to drive Rosecrans away from Chattanooga, and he had at last driven him straight into it. He had won a victory that he could not use.

6. 37,000 Plus One

THE REASON why the victory at Chickamauga could not really be used appears in the bare account of the steps the opposing governments took as a result of the battle. The Union government sent 37,000 soldiers to Tennessee: the Confederacy sent Jefferson Davis. The contrast does not reflect different ideas about what was needed; it simply measures the extent of the resources at hand. Each government did the most it could do.

The commanding generals came in for bitter criticism. Bragg had failed to win as much as might have been won, and Rosecrans had failed to win anything at all, and each man had subordinates zealous to prove that much more ought to have been done. The case against Rosecrans, of course, was self-opening. He had passed too quickly from triumph to disaster. After proudly boasting that his strategy did not need to be written in letters of blood he had plunged into one of the bloodiest battles of the war, and his period of brilliant maneuvering that got the Confederates out of Tennessee began to look like nothing better than a happy moment of calm between the miseries of Stone's River and Chickamauga. Worst of all, he had left the field before the fighting stopped, and his army's finest feat of arms came after he himself had ridden to the rear in the belief that all was lost. No one could ever question his physical courage, and yet it seemed clear that the fury of Longstreet's attack had given him some sort of numbing shock.

Bragg in his turn suffered from the contrast between what was and what might have been. The victory he won had been an opening rather than a final achievement, and the opening had not been seized. Longstreet wrote after the war that "our last opportunity was lost when we failed to follow the success at Chickamauga and capture or disperse the Union army." This to be sure was an afterthought, formulated when it was easy to see how the lost cause had been lost, but even at the time Longstreet was bitter. Less than a week after the battle he assured Secretary of War Seddon (not bothering to forward the letter through channels; that is, through Bragg, his commanding officer) that having won the most complete victory of the war, except perhaps for Bull Run, Bragg was unable to follow it up. Longstreet concluded dolefully: "I am convinced that nothing but the hand of God can save us or help us as long as we have our present commander." His opinion was shared by two other lieutenant generals, Polk and Hill—both of whom Bragg summarily relieved of their commands shortly after the battle—and some of the division commanders got together and drew up a sort of round robin as a public avowal of their utter lack of confidence.
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The trouble of course was that Rosecrans' army had got off alive. Bragg might have made a more vigorous pursuit, while the Federal rout was still on; later, he might have taken his own army across the Tennessee, past one or another of the Yankee flanks, to cut Rosecrans' supply line and force him to surrender. To the argument that he should have done these things Bragg had fairly good answers, but hardly anyone was in a mood to listen to them.

Chickamauga had hurt his army dreadfully, putting more than 18,000 men out of action. This amounted to about a third of his effective infantry total—a genuinely crippling loss, by ordinary standards—and although Rosecrans' own loss of 16,000 was in about the same proportion it was undoubtedly true that on the morning after the battle Bragg's army was in poor shape for brisk movement. During the forty-eight hours following the Federal flight into Chattanooga, Bragg was informed by his frontline commanders that Rosecrans' army was itself going north of the Tennessee—Bedford Forrest watched Yankee wagon trains snaking west past the foot of Lookout Mountain and sent back word, "I think they are evacuating as hard as they can go"— and perhaps it was good to leave well enough alone.
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Besides, Bragg felt that it was physically impossible for him to go north of the Tennessee just then. He lacked the wagons and horses for a long cross-country march, and so he was tied to the railroad line that came up from Atlanta. All of the railroad bridges over the Tennessee had been destroyed. He had no pontoon trains, and any Confederates who crossed the river would have to wade, which meant that a sudden rise in the stream (it could happen at any time, following a thunderstorm in the mountains) would make it impossible for them to get back.
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