Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War

by Charles Bracelen Flood

  Sherman surrendered. “Well, then, if you put it on that ground, I must accept.”

  Howard, accustomed to Grant’s businesslike manner with everyone else at headquarters, noted that when Grant talked to Sherman, he was “free, affectionate, and good humored.” The friendship was there for all to see.

  9

  CONFUSION AT CHATTANOOGA

  The military situation that developed at Chattanooga in the days from November 23 through November 25 bewildered almost everyone involved. In many battles, commanders lose some measure of their control of the situation, but at Chattanooga, this happened frequently. During the fighting, a number of the Union commanders behaved strangely, and people looking at the same actions on the same terrain said they saw different things. At a crucial point, Grant indecisively delayed a major attack. In the final hours of November 25, the eighteen thousand foot soldiers of Thomas’s division disregarded orders, took matters into their own hands, and achieved one of the great successes of the war by advancing to their objective with a nearly fanatical bravery. Miscommunications and misunderstandings occurred among generals on both sides. When it was over, there was reason to think that Grant slanted his report of the Battle of Chattanooga in a way that covered up both Sherman’s battlefield failure and his own uncharacteristic hesitation at a critical point. Sherman may have believed his own accounts of what happened in front of Chattanooga, but they were laden with inconsistencies.

  There were ample causes for confusion and disharmony. The weather thwarted Grant’s plans for Sherman’s movements. Union generals from both the Eastern and Western theaters of war were required to work together for the first time, with mixed results. There were rivalries and mistrust: although Thomas had saved the day when Rosecrans failed at Chickamauga, he had liked and admired Rosecrans and was reluctant to become his replacement. Beyond that, Thomas had strongly disagreed with some of Grant’s first ideas for movements that Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland should make in breaking the siege, plans that Grant himself revised. Hooker was a headstrong, outspoken man, a heavy drinker, and something of a rake. He felt for good reason that Grant’s favorite general, Sherman, had a low opinion of his military abilities, and this made him dislike them both.

  Friction existed on the Confederate side as well. Despite Braxton Bragg’s victory at Chickamauga, Longstreet had soon thereafter fired off a letter to the Confederate secretary of war in which he said of Bragg, “I am convinced that nothing but the hand of God can save us or help us as long as we have our present commander … Can’t you send us General Lee?” In the Union ranks, Sherman’s men, veterans of Shiloh and the Vicksburg campaign, thought of the Easterners as pampered, better-supplied, parade ground soldiers, an opinion that did not sit well with the men who had defeated Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia at Gettysburg.

  Finally, an eclipse of the moon took place during the first night of battle. A Union major conversant with mythology said that “it was considered a bad omen,” not for the Union troops but for the Confederates, because up on Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge they were closer to the capricious gods in their heavens. One account of all the discrepancies and unusual behavior reported at Chattanooga simply observed that “the most sensible explanation seemed to be that the eclipse of the moon had made everybody a little crazy.”

  After the action at Wauhatchie, Grant’s Confederate opponent Braxton Bragg had sent Longstreet and his corps off to try to capture Knoxville, then held by the Union general Ambrose Burnside. It is unknown whether this bad idea was Bragg’s or was an order from Jefferson Davis, but this sudden removal on November 3 of a force of twenty thousand men and eighty guns that had been facing Grant at Chattanooga, coupled with the arrival of Hooker’s eighteen thousand men, had given Grant a superiority in numbers. Sherman, who had arrived in advance of his divisions on November 14, and whose force could have joined him sooner if he had left his wagon trains behind in the last days of his march, found that his entire column was mired in autumn storms that stopped him from getting into position. (General Thomas was always to believe, with some evidence, that Grant delayed because he planned for Sherman to take the major role throughout and get the credit for it, and Sherman wrote Grant, “I need not express how I felt, that my troops should cause delay.” As for Grant, he tried to protect Sherman by shifting the blame to himself, saying that he should have ordered Sherman to rush on to Chattanooga without his wagons, and failed to do that.)

  On November 23, Grant went ahead, giving only a secondary role to Sherman’s forces, which were now in position on his left flank. He swiftly seized Orchard Knob, a big hill three-quarters of a mile west of Missionary Ridge, and positioned Hooker’s troops for an attack the next day on Lookout Mountain. Grant said that at Chattanooga, unlike other battlefields, the commanders could see everything—a panorama in which one could in this case study the slopes up which the Union troops would have to attack and the positions near and at the top that the Confederates would be defending. On the next day, however, when Grant sent Hooker and his men up Lookout Mountain, recent heavy rains had created so much cloud and fog that the federal troops disappeared from Grant’s view in what became known as “the Battle above the Clouds.”

  Hooker was making a supreme effort to redeem himself for his failure against Lee and Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville. Not only did he throw his foot soldiers at the steep rock-strewn slope, but he also had his batteries of field artillery bring their horse-drawn cannon right up behind them. The horses struggled as they hauled the caissons and cannon up the slope through rocks and bushes, with the gunners heaving at the wheels and helping to pull with ropes. One of Sherman’s just-arrived officers, watching this from his temporarily quiet position near Missionary Ridge, found it hard to believe that these Easterners from the Army of the Potomac were doing something so aggressive. Speaking of Hooker, he turned to a fellow officer and said, “It isn’t possible the fool is taking artillery up there! … They’ll never get a gun back [intact]. Didn’t I tell you they’d better have stayed at home where they were well off—kid gloves and all?”

  The cannon finally could not be tugged farther up the twelve-hundred-foot slope. When they were unlimbered and turned uphill to face the enemy, they could not be elevated high enough to fire and still avoid hitting the Union foot soldiers advancing ahead of them, but everyone on that mountain, federal and Confederate, felt the spirit fueling this attack. When the Confederate artillerymen tried to fire down at the advancing Union troops, they could not depress the muzzles of their cannon sufficiently to aim at them, but they nonetheless kept shooting, to shore up the morale of the outnumbered Confederate infantrymen defending the trenches near and at the crest of the ridge. In the meantime, the storm clouds and fog had thickened. An account described how the attackers disappeared: “Up and up they went into the clouds, which were settling down upon the lofty summit, until they were lost from sight, and their comrades watching anxiously in the Chattanooga valley could hear only the booming of cannon and the rattle of musketry far overhead, and catch glimpses of fire flashing from moment to moment through the dark clouds.”

  Near the top, the Fortieth Ohio, which had come up the slope in the second wave of attackers, passed through the men of the first wave who were lying on the ground, panting from exhaustion and temporarily unable to advance another step. One of the men who had fought his way up at the very front cried out through the mist, “Here come fresh troops to relieve us. Go to it, boys. We’ve chased them up for you. Pour it into them! Give ’em hell!” The Fortieth Ohio charged right on over the crest; as they did, their commanding officer fell, shot through the heart. Beside him, the color-bearer carrying the regimental battle flag was killed.

  At two in the afternoon, the clouds were thicker than ever. With his men’s ammunition nearly gone and no targets left to shoot at that they could see, Hooker ordered his men to cease fire. No one on the top of Lookout Mountain was certain of what the situation was, nor was anyone else. Grant, sendi
ng a message to General Thomas about the overall picture, reported that on his left “General Sherman carried Missionary Ridge as far as the [railroad] tunnel with only slight skirmishing,” but Grant appeared uncertain of Hooker’s fate on Lookout Mountain, which was straight in front of him but wrapped in clouds. All Grant could suggest was to find an alternate route of attack if Hooker sent word that it was “impracticable to carry the top from where he is.”

  That was all Grant seemed to know about Hooker’s situation, and as night fell the rest of the Union soldiers down below Lookout Mountain had no idea of what had happened to their comrades whom they last saw advancing up the slope into the mists. All they knew was that it was silent up there in the dark.

  By contrast with this generally held picture, and as an example of the conflicting stories that were to come out of the days at Chattanooga, a seemingly impeccable source offered an entirely different description of the conditions that night. Charles Dana was back with the army. No longer acting as an unofficial spy for Secretary of War Stanton (after Vicksburg he had written Stanton that yes, Grant drank, but the situation was under control), he had been named assistant secretary of war and, on an inspection trip, had been with the Army of the Cumberland since Chickamauga. He said this of those hours when no one including Grant knew where Hooker and his men were: “A full moon made the battlefield as plain to us in the valley as if it were day, the blaze of their camp fires and the flash of their guns displaying brilliantly their position and the progress of their advance.” He did, however, concur that “no report of the result was received that night.”

  Whatever the midnight weather conditions—and in all accounts the weather did eventually clear—during the night every Confederate soldier left on Lookout Mountain was being quietly marched down the reverse slope in a skillful movement over to Missionary Ridge, where Sherman’s men were now ready for full-scale action. At first light the next morning, November 25, thousands of Union soldiers in the valley stared up as the dark mass of Lookout Mountain began to be visible. The dawn sky was clear and the air frosty. As the sun rose, they saw the Stars and Stripes flying at the very top of the mountain, and they began to cheer. A salute from fifty cannon was fired in honor of Hooker’s men. At the summit, the exhausted soldiers heard the army’s bands far below play “Hail to the Chief” in tribute to them.

  Although most of the Confederates had been able to avoid being captured to this point in the battle, a number were taken prisoner, many of them wounded. As one of these men was being herded along to the rear, his group was halted beside a road to make way for several Union generals and their staffs who were crossing a bridge on horseback. The Confederate remembered this: “When General Grant reached the line of ragged, filthy, bloody, starveling, despairing prisoners strung out on each side of the bridge, he lifted his hat and held it over his head until he passed the last man of that living funeral cortege. He was the only officer … who recognized us as being on the face of the earth.”

  After Lookout Mountain, it was Sherman’s turn to go into action. Grant’s plan apparently was to take Missionary Ridge, to the left of Lookout Mountain as he faced it on Orchard Knob, by having Sherman make the major attack on it from its northeast or left end, with Hooker striking it from its southwest end. One reasonable interpretation of the plan was that Sherman was to break through and keep going along the top of Missionary Ridge, “rolling up” the rebel lines running along the crest by hitting them from the side.

  Thomas, who had saved the day at Chickamauga but still wanted to avenge that overall defeat, stood beside Grant on Orchard Knob. In command of eighteen thousand men who also wanted to show what they could do, it appeared that Thomas and his subordinate Gordon Granger were being held back from attacking the center of Missionary Ridge while Grant’s favorite, Sherman, and “Fighting Joe” Hooker, who now had the credit for taking Lookout Mountain, were given the chance to collapse the Confederate defense by attacking Missionary Ridge from its flanks. Many of Thomas’s officers believed that Sherman’s attack was to be the main effort. Sherman, on the other hand, wrote in his official report of the battle that he had received orders from Grant that included the information “that General Thomas would attack early in the day.” Later in the report, he repeated this, again underlining for emphasis: “I had watched for the attack of General Thomas ‘early in the day.’”

  Those standing around Grant on Orchard Knob noticed that their usually dead-calm commander seemed nervous. He soon had reason to be. Sherman was marching his divisions down into a gap in Missionary Ridge that, until the day before, Sherman had not known existed. One account had it that the maps furnished to him showed Missionary Ridge as having a continuous crest, whereas, in the skirmishing the day before, he had discovered that, coming at it from the side, he had not reached his objective, Tunnel Hill, but was on another hill, short of that, and still had to deal with a deep ravine that ran between his men and the place they were supposed to be. Stunned by the discovery, Sherman stopped where he was, fortified his side of the ravine, and, having thrown away the momentum Grant so prized in military movements, spent the night there.

  Whatever Sherman now expected, this morning his men soon came under a withering fire from several angles. The terrain at the northeast end of Missionary Ridge was such that it was hard for Sherman to send much of his numerically superior force up the narrow slope at one time, and his first attack was decisively thrown back. Then a counterattack made by the outnumbered Confederates captured five hundred of his men and eight of his regimental battle flags. Sherman went on attacking all morning, losing men and failing to advance, while on Orchard Knob Grant made no sign that Thomas, who stood a few yards from him, should throw his eighteen thousand soldiers of the Army of the Cumberland at the long center of the ridge. In his official report, Sherman was to say that he saw “vast masses” of Confederate reinforcements being sent to oppose him, reinforcements that would otherwise have remained in the middle of Missionary Ridge awaiting Thomas’s attack. Several Union generals concurred in Sherman’s statement, but that was not the conclusion reached by Colonel James Harrison Wilson, Grant’s inspector general. Wilson later reviewed other reports and documents, including a statement by the Confederate officer commanding the artillery on Missionary Ridge that no reinforcements were sent to oppose Sherman, and decided that no such movements occurred.

  A possible reason for Sherman’s belief that his attacks were encountering constantly replenished Confederate forces was that the fighting abilities of the one division opposing his four divisions may have led him to overestimate how many enemies his men faced. Its commander was Major General Patrick Ronayne Cleburne, an Irishman born in Cork on St. Patrick’s Day, who as a young man served in the British Army before coming to the United States and settling in Arkansas, where he became a pharmacist and then a lawyer. Cleburne had risen quickly within the Confederate Army, and the brigade he commanded at Shiloh fought valiantly in that defeat, losing nearly 40 percent of its men. In subsequent actions on battlefields ranging from Richmond and Perryville in Kentucky to the Confederate victory at Chickamauga, Cleburne was wounded three times and earned the confident loyalty of his soldiers. Promoted to lead the division that was repelling Sherman’s attacks on Missionary Ridge, his regiments, some of which he had led for two years, were filled with combat veterans from Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas. Cleburne’s men were fighting with everything they had, and more: in addition to firing their weapons, they hurled back one of Sherman’s attacks by rolling large rocks down the slope at the advancing Union troops and then threw stones at them.

  At noon, still attacking, making no progress, and able to see that Thomas’s forces were not advancing up the center slope of Missionary Ridge, Sherman had a signalman wave his handheld flags, asking Grant, “Where is Thomas?” From Orchard Knob, Grant signaled back that Thomas was starting to move, but in fact Thomas was standing right there beside Grant, just where he was supposed to be and
easily accessible for Grant to command, and that was not happening.

  Now the officers of Grant’s staff began conferring among themselves, some yards away from Grant. Their understanding was that Grant had told Thomas to hold his attack until Sherman turned the enemy’s right flank and Hooker turned the left, but both Sherman and Hooker were stopped where they were. Wilson noted that Grant, still standing there silently, looked discouraged. Something had to be done. Grant’s chief of staff Rawlins walked up to him and said that surely it was time for Thomas’s division to go into action.

  Grant turned, went the few steps to Thomas, who was studying the enemy trenches on Missionary Ridge through his binoculars, and said, “Don’t you think it’s about time to advance against the rifle pits?”

  Thomas, who was to say that he was resentful of being held back while Grant gave Sherman the chance to win the day, gave no answer and kept studying the enemy positions through his glasses.

  More time passed, with Sherman’s men trying to move forward and failing, while Grant and Thomas stood immobile within a few yards of each other. It is certain that both Grant and Thomas, like all the generals in the Union and Confederate armies, knew what had happened at Gettysburg, four months before, when Lee had finally sent Pickett’s division and other units up Cemetery Ridge—a slope far less formidable than the rocky, steeper, six-hundred-foot-high face of Missionary Ridge—only to see those able, willing, experienced men slaughtered in a doomed charge that sealed the fate of the battle.

  At three in the afternoon, after his fourth major attack was bloodily repulsed, Sherman stopped to rest his men. On Orchard Knob, seeing and hearing the cessation of action, Grant sent Sherman a message by signal flag: “Attack again.” At this point, as Sherman remembered it, “I thought ‘the old man’ was daft, and sent a staff officer [Major L. B. Jenney] to inquire if there was a mistake.” Jenney said that Sherman did not send him, but told him, “Go signal Grant. The orders were that I should get as many as possible in front of me and God knows there are enough. They’ve been reinforcing all day.”