by Jack Hurst
Overwhelming numbers bore down on Forrest’s horsemen on the road, requiring more firepower. Two guns that the Confederate Fourth Kentucky had captured the day before had been added to Lieutenant John Morton’s four, and Forrest also had another battery, Captain A. L. Huggins’s. These were not enough. Forrest asked Breckinridge for more, and Breckinridge gave him a section of Kentuckians under Lieutenant Frank Gracey.
Forrest then pulled back from the hospital and arrayed Morton, Gracey, and Huggins on a ridge to the east paralleling LaFayette Road. They opened up on Granger’s approaching Federals. Some of the shells struck the hospital. Forrest charged Granger’s flank with both artillery and cavalry but was beaten back.36
Granger, too, had problems. For two of the five miles on his route to the field, Forrest’s guns shelled him, killing and wounding a number of his troops. The Federals hurried off the road to their right as Forrest’s cannon and musketry set fire to the woods sheltering them. But Granger would not be diverted. He sent Brigadier General James Steedman onward with 4,000 men carrying 95,000 rounds of ammunition. Steedman ordered up a brigade from Rossville under Colonel Dan McCook to deal with Forrest and kept heading south toward the embattled Federal line.37
Granger and Steedman probably saved Rosecrans’s army. It was under mortal threat, having been struck hard at a charmed moment by the new arrival from Virginia: Longstreet. He had not even met his brigade commanders until he rode forward from Bragg’s headquarters at dawn, but he had arranged them well. Instead of the single, two-mile-wide line Polk had to employ, he put his two divisions in a power punch five brigades deep across a quarter-mile front.38
All morning, Thomas at Horseshoe Ridge requested more and more men and ammunition to resist Breckinridge’s assaults on the Federal left, and a nervous Rosecrans complied. Thomas’s position was vital to Federal retreat routes northward via LaFayette Road, and Rosecrans steadily transferred men to him from the right. About 11 a.m., Rosecrans pulled the division of Major General Thomas J. Wood from the Federal line to double-quick leftward to support Thomas. Some of Wood’s men were already skirmishing in his front, and enemy pressure was plainly building against the fortifications Wood had been told to abandon. Just ninety minutes earlier, however, a tired and shaky Rosecrans had given him a tongue-lashing for not promptly obeying an order. Angry, Wood obeyed now—leaving a quarter-mile gap in the breastworks.39
By coincidence, the Confederates chose that moment and that place to charge. Bushrod Johnson led Hood’s vanguard of Longstreet’s column through the gap Wood had left in the Federal front. Turning on Federals to his left and right, Johnson routed two Union divisions. The entire Federal line might have dissolved had it not been for the timely arrival of the 4,000 men and 95,000 rounds of ammunition Steedman had pushed past a far outnumbered Forrest. Thomas first hurried Steedman into line on the Federal left, then rushed him on rightward to a hill on the farm of a family named Snodgrass, where outnumbered Federals were trying to stem Bushrod Johnson’s wholesale breach of their lines.
Forrest’s men had done their best to stop Steedman. Lieutenant Colonel David Magee, marching his Eighty-sixth Illinois through the “smoking, burning sea of ruin” in a field west of LaFayette Road, said Forrest’s cannons “played upon us with spherical case, shell, and almost every conceivable missile of death.” Under the Forrest bombardment, Magee moved back into yet-unburned woods to his north and detailed men to extinguish the flames. The Federals unsuccessfully sent skirmishers to dislodge the Confederate guns. They could only lie down and wait out the continuing barrage. Yet Magee reported that he lost just one man killed and one wounded. An accompanying Ohio unit did not report its casualties, but its colonel reported that it remained under fire on a hill beyond the burning woods until nightfall. Perhaps the continued presence of pinned-down Union troops in his front encouraged Forrest to report wrongly that he had prevented most of Steedman’s troops from reaching Thomas until nearly dark.40
Longstreet’s breakthrough on the Confederate left eased Polk’s task on the right, where Breckinridge’s 10 a.m. assault had been repulsed in the late morning. Polk launched another charge all along his line in the late afternoon. In addition to weakened Union opposition, his men met Federals fleeing Longstreet up the LaFayette Road. Many surrendered and streamed through Breckinridge’s lines and away from the combat. At dusk, masses of other Federals trying to get northwest of the woods beyond LaFayette Road became disoriented and ran to and fro. For Forrest’s gunners, it appears to have been like shooting fish in a barrel. He reported that his guns fired at short range in open ground and killed “two colonels and many officers and privates.” Federal Brigadier Absalom Baird, leading the leftmost division in Thomas’s salient, reported total losses of 1,034 killed and 1,319 missing, most as his men tried to retreat in the gloom.41
At dusk on September 20, the right of the Army of Tennessee raised a howl of vengeful joy. The roar rolled all along Polk’s line. But Thomas’s remaining Federals hung on in a shrunken horseshoe. Only after dark did they slip off to Chattanooga.42
Thomas’s holding out on embattled Horseshoe Ridge symbolized a broader trend that bloody day. The battle had been fought apart from its commanders. Much of its field was woods dotted with clearings, and both Bragg and Rosecrans had spent most of the day far behind the lines. In fact, by 3 p.m., Rosecrans had left the field to Thomas, thereafter forever known as the “Rock of Chickamauga.” Like Rosecrans, Bragg had been in the dark to varying degrees all day. The next morning, the Confederate generals did not even know they had won. When Bragg found out, he seemed unconcerned with finishing the fleeing foe.43
The vast wreckage of equipment and men and commingling of regiments and divisions in the prolonged combat seemed to overwhelm his professional soldier’s sense of order. “The army is so disorganized,” he complained.44
Confederate casualties were ghastly. Complete figures, because of missing reports, are unknowable, but estimates run between 14,000 and 21,000, the latter approaching the combined losses of both sides at Shiloh. The Union total, more complete, was 16,000, bringing the combined loss of life and limb to at least 30,000, perhaps nearer 40,000. Shiloh’s was 24,000. Chickamauga entered the list of America’s bloodiest battles.
On the night of September 20, Forrest’s men slept on the field. Nearby was the captured hospital, with a pile of amputated arms and legs a dozen feet high and twenty feet across.
Forrest seems to have been unfazed. Fighting meant killing, according to his credo, and he exhibited marked reluctance to stop doing it at a time such as this, when it had become easiest. As in his hounding of Abel Streight, his impulse today was to stay on the heels of the retiring Federals, despite Confederate weariness. The Federals were weary too—and their flight from the battlefield indicated that the “skeer” was on. His troopers had not eaten for two days, and they and their horses thirsted in the dry Georgia autumn. He had ordered during the battle that the horses get “a partial feed”; the men could rifle corpses and rob Union wounded for enough sustenance to get them by. Early on Monday, September 21, he pushed them toward Rossville, rounding up more gangs of prisoners, abandoned weapons, and wagons along LaFayette Road.45
At 7 a.m. on September 21, Forrest and General Armstrong, riding with an advance troop of four hundred, saw Federal cavalry ahead. The Confederates kicked their mounts into a gallop, and the Federals fired and withdrew. A bullet struck Forrest’s horse in the neck. Seeing the animal’s blood spurt, Forrest stuck a finger into the wound and continued the chase. At a ridge point above a gap through which LaFayette Road ran to Rossville and Chattanooga, the swift Confederate arrival trapped some Federals in a treetop lookout post. Forrest reined in and jumped off the wounded horse. It fell and died.
Forrest took the captured Federals’ field glasses and climbed the lookout tree. He scanned the landscape ahead, then descended to dictate a message to Polk. He said he was a mile from Rossville on Missionary Ridge, the towering range that runs northeast a
long the eastern side of Chattanooga. From there, he claimed to be able to see Chattanooga and its environs. Enemy wagon trains were going around the end of Lookout Mountain, he said, adding that he had captured Federals who said two pontoons had been laid across the Tennessee River to put it between Rosecrans and the Confederates. “I think they are evacuating as hard as they can go,” Forrest’s note finished. “They are cutting timber down to obstruct our passing. I think we ought to press forward as rapidly as possible.”46
The postscript of Forrest’s note asked Polk to forward the dispatch to Bragg. Polk might as well have forwarded it to Abraham Lincoln. Bragg had seen more than enough Federals for a while. Longstreet tried to get Bragg to move forward that morning—to no avail. Bragg himself said he dismissed Longstreet’s suggestion out of hand. The Army of Tennessee could do nothing “for want of transportation,” he reasoned. Almost half his army consisted of troops who had just arrived from Virginia on a train, bringing with them no wagons or artillery horses. And nearly a third of the artillery horses the army did have had been killed in the battle.
Forrest dictated another, similar message four hours later, near noon, saying he could hear axes ringing on the side of Lookout Mountain. The Federal rear guard was obviously throwing up obstructions to stop pursuit. Time was of the essence. Forrest brought up his artillery and dismounted his men. For several hours he tried to dislodge the Federals holding Rossville Gap and open a path for the Confederate infantry he assumed was on the way. But the Federal force was too large, and neither Polk nor Bragg replied to his notes. Bragg busied himself consolidating his troops, ordering them to pick up matériel left on the battlefield, and preparing recriminations for the tardy battlefield obedience of intra-army enemies. On September 22, while Forrest still waited, Bragg prepared to relieve Polk for disobeying his order to attack at daylight instead of 10 a.m. on September 20. Division commander Thomas Hindman would meet the same fate for not attacking in McLemore’s Cove on September 10. Within two more weeks, the Polk firing would touch off an attempt by several other top generals—including Longstreet, Hill, and Buckner—to oust Bragg.47
In the meantime, on the evening of September 21, Forrest rode to Bragg’s headquarters to ask why the army did not advance. Bragg, roused from sleep, parried with a question of his own. How could the army advance without supplies? “General Bragg,” Forrest answered, “we can get all the supplies we need in Chattanooga.” He left.
The next day, September 22, Forrest remained puzzled and furious. A member of Morton’s artillery asked him if the army was going to advance. “No!” he stormed. Then he seemed to soliloquize on Bragg’s folly. “I have given him information of the condition of the Federal army,” he said, as if to himself. “What does he fight his battles for?”48
Forrest returned to his troops facing Rossville Gap. He formed a line of battle facing the gap and continued to wait. A single brigade under Major General Lafayette McLaws, finally sent by Bragg, arrived that afternoon. Forrest had moved up to the north end of Lookout Mountain, but his industry was of no use. McLaws’s orders were to engage in little more than picket duty: to advance to two miles from Chattanooga. Forrest soon got orders to bivouac and refit. He likely gave vent to his eloquent profanity.49
Bragg hatched a comparatively puny alternative to pursuit. On September 23 he ordered Wheeler on a raid northwestward, to Rosecrans’s rear; Wheeler’s objective would be to cut the Federal supply line to Nashville. Five days after Chickamauga, Bragg ordered Forrest and his men farther north, but not to harm Rosecrans. They were to head northeast to drive off a force of Burnside’s Knoxville-based army, which had reportedly advanced to Charleston, Tennessee. The Charleston foe turned out to be a brigade of mounted infantry, and Forrest shelled it into retreat. Learning that Federal cavalry was camped up the road near Athens, he thought it “necessary to follow” and chased the combined Union force through Athens past Sweetwater to Philadelphia, Tennessee. He stopped when the Federals crossed the Tennessee River at Loudon, eighty miles north of Chattanooga.50
This fighting dash up the Tennessee Valley on jaded horses netted only about 20 Federals killed or wounded and 120 captured. The pell-mell scamper seems to indicate Forrest’s mounting post-Chickamauga frustration—a desire to do something—and his increasing resolve to escape Bragg.
Bragg remained more intent on disciplining subordinates than on pursuing the Federals. He proceeded with the suspensions of Polk and Hindman and prompted near rebellion within the officer corps. Dissatisfaction with him, which began after the Kentucky retreat a year earlier and increased following the Stones River withdrawal in January, verged on mutiny. Buckner, a stickler for every regulation, complained that Bragg had robbed him of his authority over the Department of East Tennessee. Hill branded Bragg’s leadership inept, and Longstreet wrote letters to Richmond jockeying for his job. Frank Cheatham mulled asking for a transfer, and even Bragg’s genial chief of staff, West Point classmate Brigadier William W. Mackall, wanted out. Mackall had known Bragg longer, and perhaps better, than anyone else in the army, and his judgment of his chief was damning. He wrote his wife that although Bragg gave himself totally to his work, he was “repulsive” in manner and loved flattery and deference. He was reluctant to give credence to bad news, and if it did prove true, he was not prepared to accept and act on it. And he demanded absolute obedience, which his continually changing orders made difficult to give.51
Forrest’s East Tennessee chase infuriated Bragg. He soon told another subordinate that Forrest was “nothing more than a good raider” and that his “rampage” toward Knoxville epitomized his ignorance, especially of cooperation. And, Bragg raged, Forrest was all too typical. The Army of Tennessee, Bragg said, did not include “a single general officer of cavalry fit for command.”52
Bragg apparently excluded Wheeler from his indictment. Although he quickly reorganized his army’s mounted arm into a single unit again, he retained the erratic Georgian as its commander. As for Forrest, Bragg sent him new orders—twice. The first, on September 25, Forrest apparently ignored. Three days later, a Bragg aide wrote him to “without delay turn over the troops of your command previously ordered” to Wheeler.
Forrest fumed. According to his assistant adjutant general, Charles W. Anderson, Forrest exploded and dictated a wild letter resenting Bragg’s treatment of him. Anderson said the letter accused Bragg of lying and informed him Forrest would soon visit headquarters to reaffirm his words in person. Anderson related that as a courier rode off with the letter, Forrest said, “Bragg never got such a letter as that before from a brigadier.” The same day, Forrest wrote Wheeler that he was turning over the brigade of Armstrong and two under H. B. Davidson but keeping the ones under Dibrell and Pegram. He added that “neither men nor horses are in condition for an expedition” such as the raid Wheeler was embarking on into Rosecrans’s rear. Forrest was not exaggerating, Wheeler found. The running fight up the Tennessee Valley, following the days at and after Chickamauga, had utterly exhausted his troopers and horses.53
Forrest soon rode to Bragg’s headquarters atop Missionary Ridge. His letter, or perhaps just his manner, led Bragg to tell him there that his cavalrymen were just on loan to Wheeler and would be returned after the raid. Bragg possibly added that Forrest would be arrested if he did not comply immediately with future orders; Forrest had flouted Bragg’s order to dismount Morgan’s men and turn them over to the infantry, and, according to a famous story, the subject would soon surface again.
Forrest took a breather after the meeting. Having vowed after the battle of Dover never to serve under Wheeler again, he now took a leave and let his men go on Wheeler’s raid without him. But he had hardly arrived at LaGrange, Georgia, where Mary Ann Forrest was staying, when on October 5 he received another Bragg order. It said all his troops had been transferred to Wheeler. He was to report to the twenty-seven-year-old for instructions.54
This was the last straw. Forrest rode to headquarters again. This time an in-law,
Forrest chief surgeon J. B. Cowan, accompanied him. Cowan later said he had no idea about the purpose of the ride. Forrest was unusually quiet. When they arrived at Bragg’s tent, Forrest brushed past the sentry and found Bragg alone. Bragg rose to shake hands, but Forrest ignored the hand and jabbed his left index finger toward Bragg’s face. He began spewing a litany of the slights Bragg had dealt him over seventeen months:You robbed me of my command in Kentucky and gave it to one of your favorites—men that I armed and equipped from the enemies of our country. . . . You drove me into West Tennessee in the winter of 1862 with a second brigade I had organized, with improper arms and without sufficient ammunition . . . and now this second brigade [sic], organized and equipped without thanks to you or the government, a brigade which has won a reputation for successful fighting second to none in the army . . . in order to humiliate me you have taken these brave men from me. . . .
I have stood your meanness as long as I intend to. You have played the part of a damned scoundrel, and are a coward, and if you were any part of a man I would slap your jaws and force you to resent it. You may as well not issue any more orders to me, for I will not obey them, and I will hold you personally responsible for any further indignities you endeavor to inflict upon me. You have threatened to arrest me for not obeying your orders promptly. I dare you to do it, and I say to you that if you ever again try to interfere with me or cross my path it will be at the peril of your life.55
This speech as reported by Cowan took insubordination to its ultimate extreme: an emphatic and contemptuous resignation, refusal to accept further orders, and a challenge to his superior to try to discipline him for it—not to mention the threat of murder if they ever met again.56