Born to Battle
Page 38
Bragg was like a man with no control over his legs and arms. His subordinates, cowed by his fierce irresolution and continual blaming of others when things went wrong, were as useless as he was. More depressed than usual, he temporarily abandoned attempts to exploit Rosecrans’s rashness. Rosecrans meanwhile became more guarded, realizing the error in scattering his men across a fifty-mile front against an enemy not in retreat. Bragg’s lassitude gave Rosecrans two days—September 14 and 15—to regather his army.15
Forrest’s scouting of Rosecrans’s left had been impaired by other wide-ranging duties. One was the fighting that resulted in his wound at Tunnel Hill.
Bragg had sent him on September 9 to headquarter at Dalton, junction of the Georgia & Tennessee Railroad to Knoxville and the Western & Atlantic to Chattanooga. From Dalton—where he retained only his sixty-man escort and, his report seems to stress in defiance of Bragg, “about 240 of General Morgan’s cavalry”—he participated in the Tunnel Hill fight and supervised units guarding roads to his north, northwest, and west. But a week later, on the night of September 16, Bragg ordered him to seize two bridges and some fords on Chickamauga Creek; this was to be the Bragg army’s first move to cross the Chickamauga and attack Rosecrans. Whether Forrest got this order, though, is questionable. His report does not mention it, and on September 17 he left Dalton. Soon after noon, he rode into Ringgold, where one of his units under Colonel John Scott was holding off an advance by elements of Crittenden’s Federals.
Forrest’s command numbered 3,500, but it was scattered. A brigade under Colonel George B. Hodge was up the Tennessee-Georgia tracks, watching for a Burnside advance from Athens,Tennessee, where the Union general had moved after capturing Knoxville. Colonel Scott’s brigade was around Ringgold, protecting against Crittenden. Pegram was northwest of Dalton, screening Bragg’s headquarters at Leet’s Mill and Tanyard. Brigadier Frank Armstrong fronted Major General Frank Cheatham’s infantry due west of Dalton and also west of LaFayette.16
Early next morning—Friday, September 18—Forrest received an out-of-the-blue order. He was to lead an attack by the right wing of Bragg’s army. The plan was to turn the Federal left and cut Rosecrans’s communications with Chattanooga and Nashville.17
Both Forrest and his commander on the right, Brigadier General Bushrod Johnson, were added to the mission as afterthoughts. Bragg had planned to advance across Chickamauga Creek at two points, Thedford’s Ford and ten miles north at Alexander’s Bridge. But late on the night of September 17, to be sure he overlapped the Union left flank, Bragg decided on a third crossing still farther north at Reed’s Bridge. Johnson, who had a patchwork division eight miles east of the bridge at Ringgold, was in a prime location for the Reed’s Bridge job—as was Forrest, who was also there. And Johnson’s ranks were swelling with Longstreet’s Virginians, whom Lee had finally agreed on September 5 to send to Chattanooga to aid Bragg.
But Longstreet was not as glad to be coming as he had expected to be. He had hoped to take Bragg’s place, not to aid him. On September 18, as his men began to arrive from Virginia at the nearby Catoosa Railroad Station, Longstreet was chagrined.18
Bragg’s order to begin the attack caught Johnson on the road. A previous order, written September 16, had directed Johnson from Ringgold west-southwest to Bragg’s headquarters at Leet’s Mill, and he was amid that march on the early morning of September 18 when a Bragg aide caught him. Turn around, the aide said. Go back to Ringgold and take the road due west to Reed’s Bridge; Forrest’s cavalry would screen his right and front. When they arrived at the bridge, Johnson should cross it and turn left. Then, joined by Simon Buckner’s division from Thedford’s Ford and W. H. T. Walker’s from Alexander’s Bridge, he was to strike Crittenden and drive him south.19
BATTLE OF CHICKAMAUGA: This Confederate-drawn map, with notable misspellings, shows Reed’s Bridge where Forrest’s men initiated the battle in the lower right quadrant; LaFayette Road running left to right and, at its right end, the “Cloud Yankee Hospital” captured by Forrest troopers on September 20, when they defended against Federal reinforcements under Gordon Granger. Snodgrass Hill, where George Thomas led the Federals’last stand, is at the top right center. Only infantry seems deemed worthy of mention here.
Forrest had received no such order, so Johnson started with just his own troops. With no cavalry to serve as his eyes, he moved slowly. He was halfway to Reed’s Bridge when a single rifle shot—which hit nobody—caused him to stop his entire advance. Warned by residents that a Federal force lurked at Peavine Ridge just west of a creek in his front, he put his four infantry brigades in line of battle and waited. A Bragg aide rode up with orders for him to “move forward immediately.” About the same time, Forrest arrived with his escort and the couple of hundred Morgan troopers.20
Forrest did not scout the Federal position, perhaps because his arrival was almost simultaneous with that of Bragg’s peremptory order to advance. The Morgan Kentuckians, reinforced by skirmishers from some Tennessee regiments in Johnson’s ranks, moved forward into artillery fire supporting Federal cavalry. They worked their way across deep, muddy Peavine Creek, and their rifle fire killed the first man to die in the Battle of Chickamauga, a Federal private. His Union comrades withdrew in disorder, leaving a few horses and some gear and food. Over the next four hours, Johnson got several impatient orders from Bragg to press forward, informing Johnson that the rest of the army was waiting for him to attack, but to no avail.21
While Johnson dragged his feet, Forrest’s men and the Twenty-fifth Tennessee struggled across Peavine Ridge. The uneven ground bristled with briary thickets, punishing the many barefooted infantrymen. Perhaps in rage at their discomfort or joy at its end, when they reached Reed’s Bridge and saw it guarded by a strong Federal position, they spontaneously charged. The Tennesseans dispersed the guards before they could torch the structure, and at about 3 p.m., Johnson’s men began crossing. Forrest’s troopers led some across at an adjacent ford farther to the right.22
As they crossed, Johnson was relieved in more ways than one. Major General John Bell Hood of Longstreet’s corps arrived at Catoosa Station, got his horse from a railroad car, and galloped to the front. Johnson reported to him, then faded back into division command. Hood took control a mile past Reed’s Bridge. The vanguard of the column had veered to the left, as Bragg had ordered, and headed south on a road to Alexander’s Bridge. Pegram’s division had joined Forrest at Reed’s Bridge, and their troopers spent the night of September 18 behind Hood’s line of battle near Alexander’s Bridge.23
At dawn, Bragg ordered Forrest to ride back toward Reed’s Bridge to be sure the Confederate overlap of the Federal flank was complete. It was not. Rosecrans had detected the enemy buildup on his left and, during the night, sent George Thomas’s corps there from his right. In woods just west of Reed’s Bridge, Forrest and Pegram met a Thomas infantry brigade under Colonel John Croxton. Forrest saw that he was overmatched and sent an aide galloping to Polk asking for Armstrong’s division of his cavalry for reinforcement. Forrest himself meanwhile hurried to find friendly infantry while Pegram tried to hold off Croxton. Back down the road toward Alexander’s Bridge, he saw the Georgia brigade of Colonel Claudius Wilson, a Savannah lawyer, cooking breakfast after crossing the Chickamauga. Forrest asked for help. Wilson said he needed permission from his commander, touchy W. H. T. Walker. Walker then refused the permission without getting an okay from his own touchy commander, Bragg.24
Forrest went to Bragg. His report of significant Federal force well to the right of where it was supposed to be paralyzed the Army of Tennessee commander. Realizing his plans had been founded on out-of-date intelligence, he scrubbed his attack and vacillated. But he granted Forrest’s request, and Forrest led Wilson back toward Pegram.25
Forrest also received additional cavalry, but not as much as he had requested. Polk sent only half of Armstrong’s men: Colonel George Dibrell’s brigade. It galloped to Pegram’s right, dismounted, and stymied any po
ssibility of further advance by Croxton, then moved around the Federals’ left. There Dibrell ran into another advancing Federal brigade under Colonel Ferdinand Van Derveer. Dibrell fought Van Derveer in the woods for half an hour before pulling back around 9:30 a.m. Van Derveer’s clash with Dibrell freed Croxton’s left to again turn all its rifles on Pegram.
For much of the morning of September 19, Croxton and Pegram battled for a ridge west of a sawmill called Jay’s. Nearly a third of Pegram’s troopers fell. Although the only supporting Confederate battery was running out of ammunition and most of its horses had been shot, Forrest seemed unfazed. He moved up and down the line telling the men that infantry help was on its way. “Go to it, my little man,” he told a mere boy frantically reloading and scanning the woods ahead. He patted the boy’s shoulder, and the youth, seeing who had spoken to him, sprang forward to a large pine tree, aimed the newly loaded weapon, and fired.26
When Wilson’s men arrived at the battlefield, they began driving Croxton back four hundred yards. Back and forth, the struggle ebbed, eddied, and flowed. With Dibrell now faltering on Reed’s Bridge Road on the Confederate right, Forrest sought more help for the fight against Van Derveer. Forgetting General Walker, who plainly did not understand the urgency, he galloped toward Alexander’s Bridge again and took matters into his own hands. Seeing Brigadier General Matthew Ector’s brigade in a field a half mile away, he ordered it up to aid Dibrell. Accompanied by Forrest, Ector charged forward until Federals and an accompanying battery nearly surrounded him. Together, Forrest and Ector fell back fighting to their earlier position at Jay’s Sawmill.
As morning wore into afternoon, the fighting sidled southward toward Alexander’s Bridge. Forrest went with it. He saw Brigadier George Maney’s brigade being pushed backward and sent a six-piece battery and Dibrell’s dismounted cavalry to Maney’s aid. The battery kept firing until the Federals were within fifty yards. Despite loss of horses, the cannoneers managed a retreat with all their pieces, thanks to help from Dibrell’s men. But the greatest pressure on Maney was from his left. Under fire for just forty-five minutes, Maney’s ranks were riddled; a colonel and two of four artillery officers died, and a lieutenant colonel and a major were badly wounded.27
Forrest did his last fighting of the day during their withdrawal. He gathered up Dibrell’s men, fewer and scattering on Maney’s right, and helped protect the retirement of the artillery. Toward dusk, Polk finally let Forrest have Frank Armstrong, a key Forrest subordinate. Armstrong gathered his division around Reed’s Bridge for the night.28
Tension was beginning to take a physical toll on both Bragg and Rosecrans. By the evening of September 19, both armies’ command chains had turned into dress parades of dysfunction.
Lieutenant General Longstreet had arrived in the afternoon. When he stepped off a railroad car at Catoosa Station, ten miles behind the Confederate right, the vaunted erstwhile second in command of the Army of Northern Virginia found no welcome. Bragg had not even sent an aide to conduct him to the battlefield. Longstreet and two subordinates waited two hours for their horses to chug in on a following train, then set out down Reed’s Bridge Road, looking for headquarters. They had to navigate a rivulet of stragglers and wounded that turned into a bloody flood as they approached the front. Night befell them on the road. They blundered up to a Federal picket station and barely eluded capture. When they reached the headquarters camp at Thedford’s Ford at 11 p.m., Bragg had bedded down in an ambulance.29
Turning in was the most helpful thing Bragg did that evening. A little earlier, he had reorganized his forces into two wings comprising disparate commands and then ordered an attack at dawn. Reorganization would have been perilous at anytime, let alone after the onset of a major battle. Then, with three lieutenant generals under him—Polk, Hill, and the arriving Longstreet—he snubbed one. Putting the army’s right wing under Polk and its left under Longstreet, he left the flinty Hill virtually jobless as Polk’s second in command. Next, he ordered Polk to initiate the next day’s attack, although Polk argued against attacking without allotting more troops to the right. Bragg merely asked Polk if he understood his instructions and then dismissed him.
LIEUTENANT GENERAL LEONIDAS POLK
Bragg orally ordered Polk to assault at dawn, never writing out this critical directive; even an optimal subordinate needed a written copy to refer to in the heat of battle, not to mention in his eventual reporting of it. Nor did Bragg inform Hill of his reduced status or the jumping-off time for the next day’s assault. Hill came around at midnight looking for orders and could not find Bragg’s headquarters. And Polk bivouacked apart from his command, so that Hill, apprised only secondhand of his reduced position, then could not find Polk either. Finally, Polk never told subordinates Hill and Breckinridge that Bragg expected a daybreak attack. So, the next morning Hill informed Polk that many of his men had not been fed in thirty hours; they could not attack until rations were issued and they had eaten, he said.30
All night, Confederates on the right had heard axes at work. This signaled construction of breastworks, meaning that the earlier the Confederates attacked, the better. Yet Polk only formed up to fight at 9:30 a.m. on September 20, three hours past Bragg’s starting time. Polk commanded, and the far more experienced Hill was relegated to supervisor. During the night Hill had sent Breckinridge to the right to overlap the breastworks the Federals were heard throwing up, and Forrest got orders to extend Breckinridge’s line farther right. He dismounted Dibrell’s brigade and most of Armstrong’s division to fight as infantry, placing Pegram’s division in their right rear. Two Armstrong units—the First Tennessee and a 150-man battalion under Major Charles McDonald—were mounted.31
At 9:30, Polk’s wing—the Confederate right, comprising 9,000 men under Patrick Cleburne and John Breckinridge, not including Forrest’s—went forward. On the Confederate line’s other end, Longstreet heard the action, and his men moved as soon as he could get them all into position. Hood, with two brigades, was Longstreet’s spearhead on the Confederate left.
Forrest took his mounted detachment farther right to block the LaFayette Road. This road ran straight north to Chattanooga, its path slightly west of and roughly parallel to the snaking twists of Chickamauga Creek until it finally crossed the creek at Lee & Gordon’s Mill, two-thirds of the way to Chattanooga. Less than five miles north of Forrest’s position on this road on September 20, Federal Major General Gordon Granger headed a reserve corps on the Tennessee state line at Rossville, Georgia. Part of Forrest’s task was to protect the Confederate flank by warning of, and trying to fend off, any Union force coming down LaFayette Road from the north. That morning, he quickly blocked the road and captured a church beside it that had been converted into a 1,000-patient Union field hospital. Confederate cannons had targeted the bustling facility, and by the time two Armstrong units arrived there, all but about sixty nonambulatory patients had been moved to Chattanooga and the hospital abandoned. The cavalrymen rifled it of everything usable and mobile, including medical supplies and medicines precious in the blockaded Confederacy.32
The hospital captors comprised little more than a remnant. Forrest had dismounted most of Armstrong’s men and sent them forward to attack with Breckinridge on Breckinridge’s right, while keeping Pegram’s division to his own right rear as a reserve overlooking LaFayette Road from the east. Three-quarters of a mile southward, to Forrest’s left, blood now ran in rivers. Just west of LaFayette Road, the Federals had dug in on Horseshoe Ridge, a series of hills taking their name from the shape of the Federal line there. Before 1 p.m., Federal infantry under Major General George Thomas fought off two furious but ill-arranged charges by the Confederate right. To overlap the Federal left, Breckinridge had to assault in a single line against fortified Federals. Twice, his men—accompanied by Dibrell’s and most of Armstrong’s cavalry, dismounted—crossed LaFayette Road into Thomas’s left rear, but their single line was too shallow. They ran out of steam and pulled back.33
&n
bsp; Forrest split his time between his mounted men, covering LaFayette Road to the north, and those afoot with Breckinridge. He came back toward Breckinridge’s main body as the fortified Federals threw it backward. Brigade commander Daniel W. Adams’s Louisiana unit had charged to the right of the breastworks and reached the west side of LaFayette Road, in Thomas’s rear, when they met a brigade of Negley’s Federal division rushing up LaFayette Road from the south. Adams was captured, and his men were recoiling back up the road when Forrest rode up behind a battery of the Washington Artillery of New Orleans, which had gone forward with Breckinridge. He challenged its pride of manhood with his own. “Rally here, Louisianans,” he shouted, “or I’ll have to bring up my bobtail cavalry to show you how to fight.” The cannoneers rallied and saved their guns.34
General Hill saw men fighting so well in front of him that he asked a nearby Forrest aide whose infantry they were. The men were Forrest’s cavalry, Major J. P. Strange told him. Hill, Stonewall Jackson’s brother-in-law, was taken aback. He had angered horse troops on the eastern front by saying he had never seen a dead cavalryman—meaning they never put themselves in harm’s way—but the performance of Forrest’s horsemen obviously made him rethink.35
Probably between noon and half past, Forrest galloped up to Hill. “That ever-watchful officer,” as Hill’s report described him, reported that Granger’s heavy Federal reserve force was now approaching along the LaFayette Road from Rossville. Granger had heard the battle from Rossville and could tell by its direction that Rosecrans was in trouble. He now rushed toward the field. Hill turned the north end of Breckinridge’s line to meet the new threat.