by Jack Hurst
The tenacity and ingenuity of Grant’s campaign had won the faith of his fellow commoner in the White House. The rail-splitter president, who had endured even more sneers than Grant, seemed finally to see the front-rank potential in this member of their dogged class. Grant soon got an admiring letter, dated July 13, from this man who had dallied so long with his archenemy McClernand: “I write this now as a grateful acknowledgment for the almost inestimable service you have done the country,” Lincoln’s message read. To a White House confidant, the president made plain that the gratitude he had expressed was no passing fancy.
“Grant is my man and I am his,” Lincoln said, “for the rest of the war.”46
V
CHATTANOOGA
26
AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 1863—FORREST AT CHICKAMAUGA
“Cross My Path Again at the Peril of Your Life”
From Richmond to deepest Dixie, loss of Vicksburg evoked shrieks for action. Somebody had to do something fast or the western Confederacy would be gone.
The majority of newspaper headlines focused on the war in the east, between the doorsteps of the executive mansions in Washington and Richmond, but much of the muscle, blood, and sinew of rebellion lay farther south and west. Since Confederate loss of the Middle Tennessee metal-forging region northwest of Nashville, most of the South’s war-supporting industries had withdrawn far into the interior—to such towns as Selma, Alabama, and Rome and Macon, Georgia. Much food for sustenance of Confederate armies came from Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia on railroads crucial for its transmission. With the trans-Mississippi now gone via the loss of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, beef and other products of Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas were similarly cut off. Myriad shortages not already in effect were in prospect.
Two subordinate generals—James Longstreet in Virginia and Nathan Bedford Forrest in Tennessee—proposed solutions.
Longstreet, Robert E. Lee’s senior subordinate, wanted out of the Army of Northern Virginia. He had seen Lee reject his counsel and order George Pickett’s disastrous Gettysburg charge, and he thought he could better himself and the Confederacy on the other side of the Appalachians. In the east Lee was supreme, but Braxton Bragg’s inability in the west was obvious to all but Jefferson Davis and a few of his military and political supporters. Bragg had bungled his chance to destroy Don Carlos Buell’s army in Kentucky in the fall of 1862 and had retreated from Stones River in early January 1863; now he was retreating to Chattanooga, vacating forage-rich central Tennessee and threatening also to cede the state’s eastern third and its Virginia-to-Georgia rail line to a Union army moving south from Kentucky under Ambrose Burnside.
Lee reluctantly approved Longstreet’s move. For too long he had essentially ignored all fronts but Virginia’s; he now had to face reality. Federals were dismembering the lower South, threatening the very foundations of secession. So Lee agreed to send Longstreet to East Tennessee to counter the Kentucky-based threat. Once in the west, Longstreet hoped to succeed Bragg as commander of the Army of the Tennessee. If the Confederacy was to avoid defeat, somebody had to. “I hope that I may get west in time to save what there is left of us,” Longstreet wrote a politician friend.1
Longstreet, in Virginia at the time, did not know the extent of the ruin. Forrest, in Tennessee, did. For fourteen months, he had had to serve under the vacillating, vengeful, and sickly Bragg, who was increasingly wracked by dyspepsia, neuralgia, and other pains of the stress of his position. Forrest wanted both to escape Bragg and to counter damage Grant had inflicted on the South at Vicksburg. In August, Forrest sent Richmond two copies of a letter—one through Bragg, the other straight to President Davis. He sent the second, he said, because he assumed Bragg would not forward the first.
Forrest’s letter asked for a command behind enemy lines: all the forces he could organize between Vicksburg and Cairo, Illinois. In sixty days, he wrote, he could prevent Federal plying of the lower Mississippi and raise several thousand troops who had gone home and become unavailable to the Confederacy otherwise. All he needed, he wrote, was a nucleus of four hundred men armed with four hundred long-range Enfield rifles and four rifled cannons to blow Federal shipping out of the river. He noted that, having lived on the Mississippi for more than twenty years “buying and selling negroes,” he knew both sides of it from Memphis to Vicksburg, as well as all the well-to-do slaveholders upriver and down. And the four hundred troops he wanted to accompany him included men who had rafted timber out of the delta and knew the region by heart.
Losing the territory in which he had labored for more than half his life had plainly shaken him. He seemed to lack faith that it could be retaken without desperate measures and a more original approach than Bragg appeared capable of. Forrest doubtless also wished to rid himself of Bragg’s insults and injustice. But knowing Bragg was a Davis favorite, Forrest dissembled. He said he would leave his present post “with many regrets, as I am well pleased with the officers in command.” Davis may have wondered why, if this was true, Forrest thought Bragg unlikely to forward the letter.2
Forrest’s plan almost certainly was born, at least partly, of his sour relations with his commander, but likely without the overweening ego with which the chain of command was rife. Forrest claimed to be making his proposal “entirely for the good of the service.” He added that he had never asked for advancement, which—unlike the claim that his proposition was advanced in complete selflessness—was true.3
Forrest’s gambit, however, got nowhere. Jefferson Davis said the idea had value but sought Bragg’s input. And despite Forrest’s statement that he did not expect Bragg to forward the other copy of his letter, Bragg had done so—and effectively thwarted Forrest’s ploy. Sending the note to Richmond five days after Forrest penned it, Bragg ambiguously wrote that he knew “no officer to whom I would sooner assign” the independent command Forrest requested. No task, he added, was more important than recovery of territory along the Mississippi. But removing Forrest from the Army of Tennessee would rob it “of one of its greatest elements of strength” at a time of ominous need.
Davis approved Bragg’s recommendation of postponing Forrest’s request for the time being. He added, though, that the plan might be approved when circumstances changed. Davis thus put off dealing substantively with his western problem.4
Circumstances in Tennessee were forbidding. In August, Major General Ambrose Burnside and 12,000 men of the Army of the Ohio neared Knoxville from Kentucky, liberating much of East Tennessee’s long-suffering unionist majority.
The region’s rage erupted. Mountaineers began taking revenge on secessionist sympathizers who had savaged them for two years. Confederate brigadier general A. E. Jackson reported from upper East Tennessee that many Confederate sympathizers were fleeing with their families and whatever they could carry, chased by unionist guerrillas who were committing “brutal murders.” Federal cavalry had reached Knoxville and an abandoned Confederate base at Morristown, cutting Jackson off from East Tennessee commander Simon Buckner and preventing the two from coordinating their defense of the eastern section of the state.5
Buckner could not have helped Jackson anyway. On September 1, Bragg ordered Buckner and his 9,000 troops of the Department of East Tennessee to fall back to the Chattanooga area. Forrest at Kingston got the same directive. Two days later, Bragg named Forrest head of the cavalry gathering north of Chattanooga.
Forrest’s new subordinates were unpromising. Division commander John Pegram, a thirty-one-year-old West Pointer from Richmond high society, tended toward indecision. He had been recommended for service in the west by Robert E. Lee—possibly, given Lee’s lack of concern with the western theater, to get Pegram out of his department. Colonel John S. Scott of the aristocratic First Louisiana was the rich planter who had refused to serve under Forrest when General P. G. T. Beauregard first sent Forrest east from Mississippi. Scott resisted orders from men he deemed his social inferiors and even quarreled with Pegram, who was plainly not.
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sp; Forrest’s previous associates, like his new subordinates, promised to give trouble. Cooperation between Forrest and Joe Wheeler, commanding the cavalry south of Chattanooga, was potentially problematic, given their Dover disagreement. Fellow Dover participant John Wharton, a brigadier who had been a Wheeler division commander but was for the moment under Forrest, was the Texas attorney with whom Forrest had had a flare-up during the Murfreesboro raid. Wharton’s cheerful subordination to Forrest could hardly be taken for granted.6
Topping this list of potential recalcitrants was Bragg himself. His continual blunders had sapped his army psychologically. His top generals—Leonidas Polk, John C. Breckinridge, William Hardee, and the just-arriving Virginian Daniel Harvey Hill, brother-in-law of Stonewall Jackson—were (or in Hill’s case, soon would be) in open revolt. Further down the chain of command, rampant dislike of Bragg engendered an atmosphere of incipient insubordination. The army’s hard-fighting riflemen had seen their valor wasted by Bragg’s vacillations in the face of the enemy and flouted by his petty vendettas against all who disagreed with him.
By appointing Forrest to head up one of his major cavalry contingents, Bragg had tossed him a bone—but a meatless one, and Forrest soon showed it had not mollified him. John Morgan had made an unauthorized cavalry raid across the Ohio River throughout most of July that resulted in the capture of Morgan and most of his troopers—and enraged Bragg. The commander had come to dislike Kentuckians as much as Tennesseans since his 1862 Bluegrass invasion, when, despite the promises of Morgan and others, Kentuckians had not flocked to his ranks. Cavalrymen took pride in being soldiers on horseback, but Bragg now directed that the remnant of Morgan’s men who had survived the trans-Ohio raid be dismounted and redesignated infantry.
Bragg’s September 3 directive naming Forrest commander of the cavalry north of Chattanooga placed the Kentuckians under him, and Forrest disobeyed the order to dismount them. In August, Kentuckian Adam Rankin Johnson, a onetime Forrest scout who had advanced to the rank of colonel under Morgan, had wangled permission from the War Department to reestablish Morgan’s unit if he could find horses for it. Johnson worked with fellow Kentuckian Buckner, then still commander of the Department of East Tennessee, to acquire horses and gather several hundred Morgan troopers. Nonetheless, Johnson said, Bragg remained bent on dismounting them and “would have done so, had it not been for the resolute action of Forrest.” One order affecting the Kentuckians may have been a general one Bragg issued on September 16 providing that all cavalrymen absent from their commands without authority be assigned to the infantry.
Forrest valued the bravery of the Morgan men, and if they remained mounted, they could be part of Forrest’s command. He probably also felt some empathy for Morgan, his fellow cavalry leader. Morgan’s background was more refined, but his prewar businesses had, like Forrest’s, included slave trafficking, although on a smaller scale. The two were likely acquainted before the war, because Forrest’s far-ranging slave buying and selling had taken him from Kentucky to Texas. As soldiers, he and Morgan showed much interest in each other’s exploits. Forrest’s empathy for his imprisoned fellow cavalryman likely strengthened as Morgan came under Bragg’s wrath. According to Johnson, Forrest ran the risk of a court-martial by ignoring Bragg’s order. Nonetheless, he did so, not only folding Morgan’s troops into his own command but keeping them close to him during the next few days after Bragg’s September 16 order.7
While Bragg busied himself trying to punish his soldiers and control his generals, Union commander William S. Rosecrans made an audacious move. During late August and early September, he sent Major General Thomas Crittenden’s Twenty-first Corps to threaten Chattanooga from the north while the Fourteenth and Twentieth Corps of Major Generals George Thomas and Alexander McCook slipped south of the city, heading for Bragg’s rear.
Chattanooga itself had a population of just 2,500, but its importance was vast. It was a strategic rail hub of the first rank, junction of the East Tennessee & Georgia Railroad to Virginia, the Western & Atlantic to the southeast coast, and the Memphis & Charleston to the west. Most important, it was the gateway to key military matériel-manufacturing facilities in Georgia and Alabama. Sitting in a wide bend of the Tennessee River at an altitude of 750 feet, ringed by mountains three times as high, it was hard to get into and out of. Even before Bragg’s army began digging in after retreating there from Middle Tennessee in late summer of 1863, it was a fortress.
Bragg now paid dearly for having named Wheeler head of his cavalry so many months ago. The twenty-seven-year-old West Pointer guarded erratically, when at all. He left only troopers of the Third Confederate Cavalry to oversee fifty miles of mountain gaps and river crossings south-west of Chattanooga. The other two-thirds of his horsemen rested and refitted in Rome, Georgia, fifty miles away. He disregarded orders of August 30 and September 1 to keep an eye on passes through Lookout Mountain immediately southwest of the city and on a Federal concentration at nearby Bridgeport, Alabama. When Thomas and McCook were flanking Chattanooga from the southwest in late August, Bragg learned of these incursions from a civilian rather than Wheeler. He and his generals continued to believe Crittenden in the north was the main threat. Until September 2, thanks greatly to Wheeler’s inactivity, they had no clue where the southern Federal stroke was aimed. They did not know for sure until September 5, when Bragg read a summary of Rosecrans’s plan in a captured issue of the Chicago Times.8
Suddenly realizing that he was being flanked, Bragg ordered a pullout from Chattanooga southward on September 6. He directed his northern infantry, Buckner’s, to hasten to bring up the rear of this move and ordered Forrest to screen Buckner with a brigade of cavalry. He meanwhile tried to rouse Wheeler and told him to run every risk to drive in all Federal pickets and locate the heaviest Federal concentrations. But he did not send this order until the afternoon of September 6. Even then, his southern cavalry commander seemed unwilling to understand the urgency of the situation.
Wheeler replied with a dispatch listing myriad reasons why he should not comply. His men were strung out across forty miles, the gaps between them blocked by felled trees; Bragg could get the desired information by “other means”; Wheeler’s horses would be exhausted; following Bragg’s order would expose Rome to the Federals. Wheeler’s lethargy seemed accompanied by blithe witlessness as he added that he believed that “if General Rosecrans’ army was commencing a vigorous campaign upon us, it was of the first importance that our cavalry be kept in as good a condition as possible, as it would be indispensable to protect our lines of communication.” Knowing in what locality Rosecrans would commence this “vigorous campaign” appeared unimportant to him.9
Bragg limped through September 6 in the dark. His few working scouts provided mixed indications of where the enemy was, and he called off the withdrawal. The next day, September 7, Wheeler’s minimal efforts and work by other scouts continued to produce conflicting reports. Bragg called his second council of generals in five days. The meeting showcased his poor performance under stress. He reached no decision in the council, then soon sent the generals another order to move south.10
Forrest could only have been frustrated by what followed. He was ordered south on September 8 to cover Rome, Georgia, and do the scouting Wheeler would not. On September 10 he got orders to return northward to find Crittenden’s Federals again and discern where they were headed. Forrest now seemed to be covering his own assigned territory and Wheeler’s—a circumstance that surely chafed him further.
That afternoon, Forrest found some of Crittenden’s men in a foolhardy position. They had crossed to the south side of Chickamauga Creek at a bridge nine miles out of Chattanooga. The northward-running creek, actually more of a river, stretched south and then southwest from Chattanooga, and by crossing it the Crittenden unit had placed the stream between itself and help, if needed. Forrest sent couriers to Polk and Bragg, each six miles away, and readied his troopers to get to the Federals’ rear and seize the bridge by w
hich they had crossed the Chickamauga, trapping them.11
He heard nothing from Polk or Bragg. Around midnight he rode off to urge an attack, but found that Bragg and his army had pulled out southwestward toward LaFayette, Georgia. The opportunity was thus lost. The next day, September 11, Forrest conducted a fighting retreat. At Tunnel Hill, halfway between Ringgold and Dalton, he and Colonel Scott’s nine hundred Louisianans were joined by Pegram and George Dibrell, a hard-fighting bootstrap Tennessee cavalryman like Forrest himself. To avail themselves of cover, their forces fought as infantry and stopped Crittenden’s wary advance. In the process, Forrest sustained an unspecified wound serious enough for him to violate his teetotalism and take a drink of whisky. But he did not quit the field.12
Bragg had left Crittenden’s vicinity to seek another vulnerable Union force. Major General James Negley’s division of George Thomas’s corps had advanced through a gap in Lookout Mountain into McLemore’s Cove, twenty-some miles south of Chattanooga. There, across a branch of Chickamauga Creek, Negley’s Federals were isolated. Bragg ordered ex–Arkansas congressman and now Major General Thomas Hindman to attack them on September 11. Both Bragg and Hindman waffled. Bragg sent Hindman a message telling him not to attack if unsure, then another telling him if he was going to do it, he should hurry. The day passed nearly to dusk before Hindman attacked—and struck nothing. Negley had retreated.13
Bragg turned back to Crittenden. By September 12, the Federal general was at Ringgold, still well north of Negley and Thomas and even farther north of McCook. Bragg ordered Polk to attack Crittenden at dawn on September 13. Polk ignored the order. Bragg then called an unproductive council of his generals. Instead of making an attack, Polk got his men into line and awaited one. It did not come. Crittenden had left Polk’s front and gone to Lee & Gordon’s Mill, nine miles south of Chattanooga and nearer—but still apart from—Thomas, McCook, and Rosecrans’s other units.14