Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  The War Department in Richmond did not achieve similar control over southern railroads until May 1863, and thereafter rarely exercised this power. There was no southern counterpart of the U.S.M.R.R. The Confederate government was never able to coax the fragmented, rundown, multi-gauged network of southern railroads into the same degree of efficiency exhibited by northern roads. This contrast illustrated another dimension of Union logistical superiority that helped the North eventually to prevail.8

  But in 1862 the dependence of Union armies on railroads proved as much curse as blessing. "Railroads are the weakest things in war," declared Sherman; "a single man with a match can destroy and cut off communications." Although "our armies pass across and through the land, the war closes in behind and leaves the same enemy behind," Sherman continued. It was the fate of any "railroad running through a country where every house is a nest of secret, bitter enemies" to suffer "bridges and water-tanks burned, trains fired into, track torn up" and "engines run off and badly damaged."9 These experiences would ultimately teach Union generals the same lesson that Napoleon had put into practice a half-century earlier. The huge armies of the French emperor could not have been supplied by the wagon transport of that era, so they simply lived off the country they swarmed through like locusts.

  Buell was unwilling to fight this kind of war, and that led to his downfall. Braxton Bragg, the new commander of the Confederate Army of Mississippi (soon to be known as the Army of Tennessee), saw the opening created by Morgan's and Forrest's raids against Buell's supply lines. "Our cavalry is paving the way for me in Middle Tennessee and Kentucky," he wrote in late July.10 Bragg decided to leave 32,000 men in Mississippi under Van Dorn and Price to defend Vicksburg and central Mississippi. He planned to take the remaining 34,000 to Chattanooga, from where he would launch an invasion of Kentucky. Bragg hoped to repeat the Morgan and Forrest strategy on a larger scale. Buell would be forced to follow him and might present Bragg an opportunity to hit the Federals in the flank. If Grant moved to Buell's aid, Van Dorn and Price could strike northward to recover western Tennessee.

  8. Robert C. Black, The Railroads of the Confederacy (Chapel Hill, 1952); Thomas Weber, The Northern Railroads in the Civil War, 1861–1865 (New York, 1952); George E. Turner, Victory Rode the Rails (Indianapolis, 1953). At the beginning of the war there were 113 railroad companies in the Confederacy operating 9,000 miles of track of three different gauges.

  9. Quoted in Hattaway and Jones, How the North Won, 250.

  10. Foote, Civil War, I, 571.

  Forrest's and Morgan's cavalry would continue to harass the Union rear, while Bragg was also assured of cooperation from Edmund Kirby Smith's East Tennessee army of 18,000 men, who had been warily watching Buell's snail-paced advance toward Chattanooga. The Confederates believed Kentuckians to be chafing at the bit to join the southern cause. Bragg requisitioned 15,000 extra rifles to arm the men of the bluegrass he expected to join his army.

  Since taking over from the dismissed Beauregard in June, Bragg had been reorganizing and disciplining the army for a new campaign. A sufferer from ulcers and migraine, the short-tempered and quarrelsome Bragg was a hard driver. He sent several soldiers before a firing squad for desertion, and he executed one private who had disobeyed orders and shot at a chicken but hit a Negro instead. These measures seemed to work; desertion decreased and discipline improved. The boys in the ranks had learned, as one of them put it, that Bragg was a "man who would do what he said and whose orders were to be obeyed." But another Reb added that "not a single soldier in the whole army ever loved or respected him."11

  This hardly bothered Bragg; his main problem just now was to get his invasion force from Mississippi to Chattanooga. He came up with an ironic solution: he would send them by rail—not the direct 200-mile route along which Buell had been crawling for six weeks, but a 776-mile roundabout journey south to Mobile, northeast to Atlanta, and thence north to Chattanooga. He sent the infantry a division at a time beginning July 23; two weeks later they were all in Chattanooga. It was the largest Confederate railroad movement of the war.12 By mid-August, Bragg and Smith were ready to march forth on the great invasion. "Van Dorn and Price will advance simultaneously with us from Mississippi on West Tennessee," wrote an enthusiastic Bragg, "and I trust we may all unite in Ohio." In what he intended as an inspirational address to his troops, Bragg declared: "The enemy is before us, devastating our fair country . . . insulting our women, and desecrating our altars. . . . It is for you to decide whether our brothers and sisters of Tennessee and

  11. Bruce Catton, Terrible Swift Sword (Garden City, N.Y., 1963), 380; Foote, Civil War, I, 569.

  12. Bragg's supply wagons and artillery traveled by road and arrived later than the railborne foot soldiers. A year later Longstreet took two divisions with their artillery by rail from Virginia to Chickamauga, a greater distance than Bragg's troops traveled. But Longstreet's transfer involved 12,000 men compared with Bragg's 30,000.

  Kentucky shall remain bondmen and bondwomen of the Abolition tyrant or be restored to the freedom inherited from their fathers."13

  Kirby Smith started first and moved fastest. With 21,000 men (including one of Bragg's divisions) he left Knoxville on August 14 and struck northward toward the Cumberland Gap, which had been captured by a Union force of 8,000 two months earlier. Not wishing to assault this Thermopylae, Kirby Smith bypassed it and continued northward, leaving behind a division to watch the Federals at the Gap. Smith moved with a speed that Lincoln wished his generals could emulate. In two weeks he reached Richmond, Kentucky, 150 miles from Knoxville and only 75 miles south of Cincinnati, whose residents were startled into near panic by the approach of the rebels. At Richmond, Smith encountered his first significant opposition, a division of 6,500 new recruits never before under fire. The southerners surged forward with a rebel yell on August 30 and drove the Yanks back, killing or wounding more than a thousand and capturing most of the rest at a cost of fewer than five hundred southern casualties.

  Smith's army occupied Lexington and prepared to inaugurate a Confederate governor in the nearby capital at Frankfort. Meanwhile Bragg's thirty thousand had marched northward from Chattanooga on a parallel route about a hundred miles to the west of Kirby Smith. As they crossed the border into Kentucky, Bragg paused to issue a proclamation:

  Kentuckians, I have entered your State . . . to restore to you the liberties of which you have been deprived by a cruel and relentless foe. . . . If you prefer Federal rule, show it by your frowns and we shall return whence we came. If you choose rather to come within the folds of our brotherhood, then cheer us with the smiles of your women and lend your willing hands to secure you in your heritage of liberty.14

  Kentucky women treated the ragged soldiers to plenty of smiles. But few of the men came forward to fight for the South. Most of those inclined to do so had joined the Confederate army a year earlier; the others preferred to join a winner, and Bragg had not yet proved himself that—even though his army captured a Union garrison of four thousand at Munfordville only sixty miles south of Louisville. Perhaps Kentuckians understood what Bragg did not yet realize: his "invasion" was really

  13. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 16, pt. 1, p. 749; Foote, Civil War, I, 584.

  14. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 16, pt. 2, p. 822.

  a large-scale raid. The rebels had neither the manpower nor the resources to convert a raid into an occupation and defense of the state against aroused Federal countermeasures. Already Buell had been reinforced to a strength of 55,000 by two divisions from Grant, with another on the way, while 60,000 new Union recruits were organizing in Louisville and Cincinnati.

  Bragg's apparent military success and political failure caused his mood to fluctuate from elation to despondency. On September 18 he wrote to his wife: "We have made the most extraordinary campaign in military history." But a few days later he expressed himself "sadly disappointed in the want of action by our friends in Kentucky. We have so far received no accession to this army. . . . Enthusia
sm runs high but exhausts itself in words. . . . The people here have too many fat cattle and are too well off to fight. . . . Unless a change occurs soon we must abandon the garden spot of Kentucky to its own cupidity."15

  As Buell's army backtracked toward Louisville, Bragg was in a position to attack its flank. But knowing himself outnumbered he was eager to unite with Kirby Smith, who was still in the Lexington-Frankfort area a hundred miles to the east. Bragg asked Smith to link up with him at Bardstown, a point halfway between the two Confederate armies and only thirty-five miles south of Louisville. There the combined forces could fight the decisive battle for Kentucky. Meanwhile the two commanders took time out to witness the inauguration of Kentucky's Confederate governor. They hoped that this symbolic action might encourage timid Kentuckians to jump off the fence onto the southern side.

  But the ceremony was rudely interrupted by the booming of advancing Union artillery. Goaded by a disgusted Lincoln and an angry northern press, Buell had finally turned to strike his rebel tormentors. For the past month his larger, better-equipped army had seemed to do nothing to stop the Confederate invasion. All through September, Halleck had kept the wires humming with messages prodding Buell to action: "Here as elsewhere you move too slowly. . . . The immobility of your army is most surprising. Bragg in the last two months has marched four times the distance you have." If Buell did not get moving he would be removed. Speaking figuratively (one hopes), Halleck warned that "the

  15. Catton, Terrible Swift Sword, 413; O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 16, pt. 2, p. 876; David Urquhart, "Bragg's Advance and Retreat," Battles and Leaders, III, 602; Grady McWhiney, "Controversy in Kentucky: Braxton Bragg's Campaign of 1862," CWH, 6 (1960), 23.

  Government seems determined to apply the guillotine to all unsuccessful generals. . . . Perhaps with us now, as in the French Revolution, some harsh measures are required."16

  Buell got the point, and in the first week of October he got moving. He had organized his army into a striking force of 60,000 men—fully a third of whom, however, were raw recruits who had not yet fired a shot in anger. Bragg and Smith had 40,000 veterans in the vicinity, but they were scattered across a front of sixty miles from Lexington to Bardstown. Buell sent one division on a feint toward Frankfort (this was the force that disrupted the inauguration) while marching the remainder in three mutually supporting columns toward Bragg's main army at Bardstown. Bragg was deceived by the feint, which pinned nearly half of the Confederate force in the Frankfort area while Buell's three main columns bore down on the rest, commanded in Bragg's absence by Bishop Leonidas Polk. Outnumbered two to one, the bishop retreated and sent appeals to Bragg for reinforcements.

  The sequel was much influenced by both armies' search for water in the drought-parched countryside. With only 16,000 men, Polk took up a defensive position just west of the Chaplin River at Perryville on October 7. That evening one Union corps arrived and attacked unsuccessfully to gain control of the few stagnant pools in a tributary of the river. Commanding the most aggressive division in this corps was Philip Sheridan, a small, bandy-legged man whose only distinctions in the prewar army had been pugnacity and a handlebar mustache. The pugnacity served him well once the war gave him a chance. Languishing as a quartermaster captain during the conflict's first year, he obtained field command of a cavalry regiment by a fluke in May 1862 and within weeks had proved himself so able ("he is worth his weight in gold," wrote one superior) that he had been promoted to brigade command and in September to division command. At dawn on October 8, Sheridan's thirsty division attacked again and gained control of the creek as well as the hills beyond. During the day the rest of Buell's main force filed into line on the left and right of Sheridan.

  But thereafter Buell lost the initiative in a battle that set a new record for confusion among top brass on both sides. Still believing that the main part of Buell's army was at Frankfort, Bragg ordered Polk's 16,000 to attack the fragment (as he thought) at Perryville. In early afternoon a reluctant Polk sent two of his three divisions against the two divisions

  16. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 16, pt. 2, pp. 530, 421.

  holding the Union left. The rebels were in luck, for one of these blue divisions was composed of new troops. In an attempt to calm their fears the previous evening, two generals and a colonel had pointed out the high odds against any given man being killed in a particular battle. In the first wave of the Confederate assault next day all three officers were killed.17 The green troops broke, sweeping the other Union division back with them a mile or more before reinforcements halted the rout. Meanwhile in the center, Sheridan attacked the remaining southern division and drove it back through the streets of Perryville. Less than half of the Union army was engaged in this fighting, while a freak combination of wind and topography (known as acoustic shadow) prevented the right wing and Buell himself from hearing the battle a couple of miles away. Not until a courier came pounding back to headquarters on a sweat-lathered horse did the Union commander know that a battle was raging. By then the approaching darkness prevented an attack by the Union right against the lone rebel brigade in its front. Buell ordered an assault all along the line at dawn, but when the Yanks went forward next morning they found the rebels gone. Finally recognizing that he faced three times his numbers at Perryville, Bragg had retreated during the night to link up with Kirby Smith—several days too late.

  For both sides this climactic battle of a long campaign turned out to be anticlimactic. Casualties were relatively high in proportion to the numbers engaged—4,200 Federals and 3,400 Confederates—but neither side really "won." Buell missed a chance to wipe out one-third of the rebels who had invaded Kentucky; Bragg and Smith failed to clinch their invasion with a smashing blow that might have won Kentuckians to their side. After Perryville the contending armies maneuvered warily for a few days without fighting. With supplies short, the sicklist lengthening, and a larger army in his front, Bragg succumbed to pessimism once again and decided to abandon the campaign. To the accompaniment of mutual recrimination among some of his generals and a growing chorus of criticism from the southern press, Bragg ordered his weary men to retrace their steps to Knoxville and Chattanooga. Summoned later to Richmond to explain the failure of his campaign, Bragg apparently satisfied Davis, who kept him in command and expressed a confidence in the general shared by a decreasing number of southerners.

  Buell followed the retreating rebels gingerly. From Washington came a string of telegrams urging him to attack, or at least to drive Bragg out

  17. Charles C. Gilbert, "On the Field of Perryville," Battles and Leaders, III, 57n.

  of east Tennessee and accomplish Lincoln's cherished goal of recovering that unionist region. "Neither the Government nor the country can endure these repeated delays," Halleck wired Buell. Back to Washington went telegrams from Buell explaining that he could not pursue faster lest his army outmarch its supplies. Halleck replied in words that reflected Lincoln's impatience with this general who, like McClellan, seemed more adept at framing excuses than taking action. "You say that [east Tennessee] is the heart of the enemy's resources; make it the heart of yours. Your army can live there if the enemy's can. . . . [The president] does not understand why we cannot march as the enemy marches, live as he lives, and fight as he fights."18 It was no good. Buell was not the general to march and fight while living off the country. When he made clear his intent to re-establish a base at Nashville instead of going after the rebels, Lincoln removed him and named William S. Rosecrans to command the renamed Army of the Cumberland.

  Events 300 miles away in Mississippi had influenced both Bragg's decision to retreat and Lincoln's decision to appoint Rosecrans. Just after the battle of Perryville, Bragg received word of the defeat of Van Dorn and Price in the battle of Corinth four days earlier. Since Bragg's hope for a successful invasion had been contingent on a similar northward thrust by the troops he had left behind in Mississippi, this defeat compounded his discouragement. The Union commander at Corinth was Rosecrans. While Buell h
ad failed to keep the rebels out of central Tennessee and Kentucky, Rosecrans had earned credit in Lincoln's eyes by keeping them out of west Tennessee.

  On September 14, Price's 15,000 troops had driven a small Union force from the railroad town of Iuka in northern Mississippi. This was a first step in the contemplated invasion of Tennessee. Grant thought he saw an opening for a counterattack. He devised a plan to trap Price in Iuka between converging Union forces. Grant sent two divisions under General Edward Ord eastward along the railroad from Corinth and ordered two others under Rosecrans to circle up on Iuka from the south for an assault on Price's flank while Ord attacked his front. But this pincers movement went awry, as such maneuvers often did in an era when communications depended on couriers. Smelling the trap, Price attacked Rosecrans's advance units south of town on September 19 while Ord (accompanied by Grant) was still three miles to the west. Here too an acoustic shadow masked all sound of the fighting from Ord, whose

  18. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 16, pt. 2, pp. 638, 626–27.

  troops remained in blissful ignorance of Rosecrans's battle a few miles away. In a short, sharp contest the outnumbered Yankees gave a good account of themselves and inflicted more casualties than they received. But after nightfall Price got away to the south on a road that Rosecrans had neglected to block. When the Union pincers finally closed next morning, they grasped an empty town.

  Grant had at least stopped Price's thrust northward. But the enterprising Missouri rebel marched his little army to join Van Dorn for another try. With a combined mobile force of 22,000 they attacked the main Union position at Corinth. The Confederates ran into more than they bargained for—21,000 men commanded by Rosecrans, a tough and skillful fighter. On October 3 the southerners assaulted the outer defenses north of Corinth with the screaming elan and willingness to take high casualties that had become their trademark. During a long, hot day they drove the Yankees back two miles to the inner defenses. Next morning the rebels attacked again, but after early success they succumbed to exhaustion and thirst in the ninety-degree heat. By noon a Union counterattack had put Van Dorn and Price to flight.