Born to Battle

by Jack Hurst

  Ultimately, and understandably, Grant would feel he had little control. Much of this would be attributable to his favorite subordinate. Sherman’s performance would show that, for all his brilliance, he could be a very ordinary general when Grant’s example and leadership were not paramount in his consciousness.

  Sherman’s actions varied from trademark bursts of wild energy to episodes of seeming sleepwalking. Missing a steamboat after leaving his Chattanooga conference with Grant, he commandeered a big canoe and helped enlisted men paddle it all night to return to Bridgeport, where the rest of his force awaited. From then on, though, he tended more toward somnambulism and fright. On the march from Bridgeport up the valley beside Lookout Mountain to Browns Ferry and then across the Tennessee River into Chattanooga, he slowed the progress of his troops by not detaching his long wagon train and hurrying his combat forces on ahead of it. Some of his deliberate pace was justified. After marching across Tennessee, his troops were ragged and walking barefoot on frosty ground. Expected on November 9 at Bridgeport (where not nearly enough shoes and fresh uniforms awaited), his initial division did not arrive for another week. They would not reach the pontoons bridging the Tennessee River for nine more days.

  The road up Lookout Valley was wretched and pelted by rain and sleet. The wagons churned it into cold goo. Grant became so dissatisfied with the pace of the march that he likely would have criticized Sherman, had they not been such friends. Instead, Grant “says the blunder is his,” War Department official Dana reported to Secretary Stanton. Grant, Dana wrote, maintained that he should have ordered Sherman to leave behind the wagons. But, Dana added, “no one was so much astonished as Grant on learning that they had not been left, even without such orders.” Sherman, on the other hand, blamed himself.11

  The delays forced Grant to postpone an attack scheduled for November 21. Sherman’s column was still strung out between Bridgeport and Browns Ferry, but Grant felt he had no choice but to wait for them. Part of Grant’s old Vicksburg force, Sherman’s were the only ones in whom Grant now had faith. In a letter to Halleck on the evening of November 21, Grant described the woeful condition of Thomas’s starved troops and support animals. The letter perhaps also hints that Grant was becoming bitterly resigned to the weakness of Thomas’s army and its commander’s balking cooperation. He said he had ordered an attack two weeks before—the aborted one of November 8—but the horses and mules that had not already perished could barely move themselves. The Army of the Cumberland, the Ohio-rooted force that Don Carlos Buell had commanded before being replaced by Rosecrans and now Thomas, had barely survived Chickamauga. Its condition was “fixed and immovable,” Grant grumbled.12

  Grant’s tone with Sherman finally became tinged with restrained exasperation. On November 20 he wrote that he saw that the attack intended for November 21 could not happen, but could Sherman not be in position on November 22? Time, Grant said, was “of vast importance.” But more time passed. On November 22, with ammunition issued to his other troops and rations already cooked, Grant informed Sherman that his absence had required a delay of “yet another day.” He was to hurry on even if it meant leaving behind some of his units.13

  BATTLES FOR CHATTANOOGA: This map, drawn soon afterward, shows Grant’s and Bragg’s respective lines through the three days of conflict: it illustrates the original positions of Thomas in Grant’s center, Sherman on his left, and Hooker on his right. Orchard Knob, or Hill, is in map’s center; Tunnel Hill, where the Chattanooga & Knoxville Railroad passes through Missionary Ridge, is in the upper right quadrant; Lookout Mountain is in the bottom left quadrant; and Bragg’s troops are spread from Lookout Mountain up Missionary Ridge from Rossville nearly to Tunnel Hill.

  Longstreet now reportedly had Burnside besieged at Knoxville. Desperate, Grant turned to temporary stopgaps. On November 23, worrying thatBragg might march north to Knoxville to join Longstreet and overwhelm Burnside, Grant directed Thomas to drive Confederate pickets from his front at the base of Missionary Ridge to see if Bragg was retiring. Thomas complied. He ordered Brigadier General Thomas J. Wood to make a reconnaissance in force in front of the Confederate right-center on Missionary Ridge. There, enemy rifle pits crowned hundred-foot-high Orchard Knob.14

  Word in the Federal camps had it that Grant regarded the Army of the Cumberland as spineless. To prove otherwise, Wood’s 8,000 infantrymen exceeded orders. Flanked by two more divisions, Phil Sheridan’s on the right and Sam Beatty’s on the left, they formed the center of a line stretching nearly two miles. Confederates gawked from Missionary Ridge, thinking it a huge review in Grant’s honor, until Wood and Sheridan advanced double-quick at 1:30 p.m. Six hundred pickets of the Twenty-fourth and Twenty-eighth Alabama on Orchard Knob got off only a single volley before 14,000 Federals swamped them.15

  Wood signaled Thomas from the top of Orchard Knob. What should he do now? He was well ahead of the rest of the Union line, and Thomas and Grant hesitated. Rawlins interjected an opinion. Like Grant, he thought first and foremost like a rifleman. It would be bad, Rawlins said, to withdraw Wood’s men and then make them retake the knob later. Grant agreed. “Intrench them and send up support,” he told Thomas.16

  Whereas forward elements of the Confederate right-center had been so easily pushed backward, the enemy’s left looked impregnable. On the southern side of Chattanooga, the Confederates sat atop Lookout Mountain, crowned by vertical bluffs thirty feet high near its top. These natural defenses were so formidable that some commanders on both sides thought a comparative handful of troops could probably hold the mountain, and after Wood took Orchard Knob, Bragg ordered the shifting of all but a brigade away from Lookout. Thomas, though, thought it might be taken, and his view had merit. A demonstration against Lookout might keep significant Confederate strength near that end of the line, away from the Federal target to the north on Bragg’s right. And if a Federal foray to Lookout broke through, it could reach Rossville and flank Bragg off Missionary Ridge.

  On November 23 the rain-swollen Tennessee River damaged the pontoon bridge at Browns Ferry and prevented Sherman’s fourth division from reaching the attack site. Grant, under continually increasing pressure to do something to aid Burnside in Knoxville, acquiesced to Thomas’s plan. He ordered the Sherman division cut off by the broken pontoon, Brigadier General Peter Osterhaus’s, to join Hooker in a jab against Lookout. If circumstances permitted, Grant said, Hooker could expand the jab into a knockout punch.17

  Fighting Joe was jubilant. On November 21 he had implored Thomas to give him a part in the impending battle, and with Grant’s approval, just after midnight on November 24, Thomas ordered him to make a demonstration. With fame in prospect, demonstration be damned. The ever-ambitious Hooker told his men they were to take—not just feint at—Lookout Mountain.18

  By evening of November 23, Sherman’s three remaining divisions had crossed Lookout Valley and camped northwest of the Tennessee River. Their march up the valley had been in Confederate view until they vanished behind wooded hills. Grant hoped this would mask the destination of Sherman’s men, so that Bragg could not tell whether they were heading for Knoxville to aid Burnside or beyond the north end of his line at Tunnel Hill, the crucial promontory through which ran the Chattanooga & Knoxville Railroad. A mile and a half east of the hill, the Chattanooga-Knoxville track joined the Western & Atlantic Railroad to Atlanta, Bragg’s lifeline.

  At midnight, a Sherman brigade boarded more than a hundred boats hidden in North Chickamauga Creek, well beyond the north end of Missionary Ridge. To aid secrecy, muskets remained unloaded until the last minute, preventing accidental firing. This brigade, Brigadier General Giles Smith’s, floated in silence down the Tennessee and landed two regiments just above Chickamauga Creek’s southern branch. They captured all but one of the Confederate pickets there while their comrades drifted past the creek mouth to occupy and fortify a low hill on the Tennessee’s east bank. The boats then began ferrying Sherman’s main body across the river.19

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p; Sherman had the advantage of surprise, but he moved with maddening caution. His lead elements fortified the first hill, then moved up five hundred yards to a higher one. No Confederate was in sight, but Sherman ordered entrenching on that hill too. He would not advance without all three of his divisions—those belonging to Brigadier Generals Morgan Smith, John E. Smith, and Hugh Ewing. The rear one, Ewing’s, fell behind schedule crossing the Tennessee. It took well into the afternoon of November 24 to get all three up. While his men were digging trenches where they were, Sherman got a friendly 11:20 a.m. note from Grant that showed rising concern about a question Sherman should have answered for himself hours earlier: “Does there seem to be a force prepared to receive you east of the ridge?”20

  Sherman had not reconnoitered during the protracted ferrying operation. Perhaps he thought that would attract Confederate attention, from which he seemed to shrink during this advance. He did not get all three of his divisions moving forward out of their hastily made breastworks before 1:30 p.m. He then inched his way forward, fearing an attack on his right by Confederates on Missionary Ridge. Because of the lack of reconnaissance, he did not know that no Confederates were near enough to make such an attack; the closest were two miles south. James Harrison Wilson, watching from one of the boats, concluded that “Sherman, with all his brilliancy, was not the man for such bold . . . operations.”21

  Had Sherman sent a lead element charging forward, he would have found his assigned target, Tunnel Hill, undefended. Adequate scouting also would have disclosed information even more critical. The ridge his men were advancing toward was not Tunnel Hill at all.22

  Sherman’s target was actually the next hill beyond the one he thought it was, and a deep vale intervened. Realization of his error sapped his remaining confidence. He was unquestionably frightened. While he had marched slowly onto the wrong hill, Confederates had rushed onto the right one. They now opened up with four artillery pieces.23

  The Federal crossing of the Tennessee had caught Bragg by surprise. He thought Grant’s attack might come from the Confederate right, but not this far right. He could not decide whether Sherman’s move was a massive diversion, so to counter the advance, he sent only a brigade of Tennesseans and Arkansans from the division of Major General Patrick R. Cleburne. Bragg kept the rest of Cleburne’s division in reserve. Lieutenant General William Hardee, commanding the entire Confederate right, did nothing until the massed Federals advanced out of their makeshift breastworks on the two minor ridges. Shortly afterward, at 2 p.m., Hardee sent a message to Cleburne to bring the rest of his division toward Tunnel Hill.24

  When Sherman’s skirmishers met Cleburne’s advance and its hasty cannon fire, the Federal general recoiled. He saw only three regiments on Tunnel Hill, but three were enough for the grief-addled general this time. Sherman started digging entrenchments again at around 4 p.m. Light would soon fade from another cold, late-autumn day that Sherman had squandered.25

  On the Federal right, Hooker used that day, November 24, to more advantage than Sherman had on the left. He was bent on making a bold showing at Lookout Mountain, and his troops shared the sentiment. His men—from New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania—were as proud as their commander. When Sherman’s tattered, shoeless Westerners had arrived from Memphis and marched past them in Lookout Valley a few days before, some Hooker men derided them as “Grant’s Vicksburg gophers.” The latter responded in kind. Passing the Thirty-third New Jersey—which was decked out in the exotic Zouave uniform of white leggings, red baggy pants, blue sash, short red cape, and blue tasseled red fez—one hooted in derision, “What elegant corpses they’ll make!”26

  Hooker did not get an early start up. He did not know until that morning that Osterhaus would be temporarily added to his force, swelling it to three divisions. And continual rain had swollen Lookout Creek, which his attackers had to cross. But by 9:45 a.m. they had done so and entered the fog and evergreens veiling the west side of the mountain. Bragg’s all but denuding of Lookout had yet to be completed. By 10:30 the Federals were fighting two pitifully stretched and overextended Confederate brigades, under Brigadiers Edward Walthall and John C. Moore, that constituted the lower defense of Lookout Mountain, fronting three more brigades on the crest. At 1:25 p.m., Hooker sent Thomas a self-glorifying report saying his troops were on the east side of Lookout following a brilliant performance with minimal loss and a harvest of 2,000 Confederate captives.27

  Hooker’s message was premature and inaccurate. The prisoner estimate was inflated, and Hooker’s men had yet to climb Lookout’s summit; they were merely in the process of ascending its steep eastern slope. And just after Hooker wrote Thomas, his men’s upward trek hit its toughest stretch. The narrow trails would not allow two men to proceed abreast, and Hooker feared enemy reinforcements would stop his fogbound Federals, whose visibility was negligible. He ordered his subordinate on the mountainside, Brigadier John Geary, to call a halt. But Geary was too far in their rear to control his men or know their situation. At 2:45 p.m., Hooker sent Thomas a far different note than that of an hour and a half earlier: “Can hold the line I am now on; can’t advance. Some of my troops out of ammunition; can’t replenish.”28

  For the first of several times in the battle for Chattanooga, Federal riflemen saved their generals. Because the bullet-shy Geary stayed well to the rear of his force, his men got no word to halt. They kept going. The brigade commanders had never even asked for ammunition or other aid; Geary beseeched Hooker for that on his own, prompting Hooker’s plea to headquarters. After his initial concern, however, his men’s progress reassured Hooker. By 4 p.m., he ordered them to dig in. As dusk fell, his men’s fires blazed on Lookout’s slope, elating the Federals facing Missionary Ridge to their left.

  Hooker ordered Geary to prepare to advance into Chattanooga Valley next morning. He predicted Bragg’s all but isolated left wing would flee Lookout by dawn.29

  The next morning, November 25, the Confederates were indeed gone. They had hurried northeast to join the rest of Bragg’s army on Missionary Ridge across the Chattanooga Creek valley from Lookout. Hooker sent the Eighth Kentucky to the crest of Lookout Mountain to plant the Stars and Stripes, whose fluttering folds wrought cheers from the six-mile Union line to their left. Thomas ordered Hooker to leave two regiments on Lookout and move the rest of his troops down the eastern slope and toward Missionary Ridge. But the Confederates had burned the bridge over Chattanooga Creek. Stymied, Hooker had to put engineers to rigging a dry crossing.30

  Six miles north, at the other end of the Union line, Sherman remained in his personal fog. He had more than three divisions, some 16,000 men, while his opponent on Tunnel Hill, Pat Cleburne, could muster just 4,000. But Sherman’s men were worn-out. All night long most had been kept at their picks and shovels or pushing cannon up their muddy hill, fortifying their position on orders from their insecure commander. Perhaps Sherman’s mind was flashing back to the Confederate horde that burst yipping out of the morning mist onto his astonished camps at Shiloh. Whatever the case, he had used up much of his troops’ energy. He also ignored a midnight Grant order to attack at dawn. He did not direct his men to lay down their shovels until 8 a.m. on November 25. The sun by that point was two hours high.31

  Then his belated assault resembled a feint. With nine brigades at his disposal, Sherman used just two to make the attack, holding the others in reserve. Loyalty to Sherman caused Grant—very uncharacteristically—to make the same mistake, letting his favorite subordinate squander the main chance while neglecting his other officers. Such use as he made of Hooker was an afterthought, a concession to Thomas born of desperation with Sherman’s languor. And he held back Thomas altogether. The Virginian was not itching to fight anyway. He wanted to wait until Bragg’s flanks were turned before facing his daunting task: assaulting head-on up a five-hundred-foot-high ridge gashed with rifle pits.

  Grant was thoroughly thwarted. All depended on Sherman, whose performance was pathetic. Sherman’s verbal at
tack order on November 25—issued to his brother-in-law and foster brother, Brigadier General Hugh Ewing—amounted to a shrug. “I guess, Ewing, if you’re ready, you might as well go ahead,” he said. “Keep up the formation till you get to the foot of the hill.” What then? Ewing asked. “Oh,” said Sherman, “you may go up the hill if you like—if you can.” He added that Ewing should not call for aid until he really needed it.32

  This diffidence communicated none of the urgency of Grant’s attack order, and Ewing can hardly be blamed for reacting the way he did. The 1,100 men he and Sherman sent directly against Tunnel Hill mounted an unsynchronized two-pronged assault. Split into two detachments under two separate commanders, Brigadier General John Corse and Colonel John Loomis, they tried to capture the hill separately. Loomis’s four regiments of Illinoisans and Indianans to Corse’s west did little more than watch as their comrades struggled up the hill. Loomis took his position under heavy cannon fire from both flanks as well as from the hill. Having been told by Ewing to “under no circumstances . . . bring on a general engagement,” he obeyed.33

  Around 10 a.m., Sherman’s manner swung from cavalier to frantic. Colonel Theodore Jones of the Thirtieth Ohio, who had initiated the morning’s combat by taking the rifle pits on the ridge in front of Tunnel Hill, was sent to inform Sherman of the stiffened opposition. By then Sherman had learned Grant was unhappy with his lack of progress. Sherman’s tone became all but contemptuous as he ordered Jones to return to his battered command and charge. “Time,” Sherman declared, “is everything.”34