Whatever message Major Jenney sent, it stirred Grant into action. Rawlins received it, walked over to Grant, and started badgering him, telling him he must make Thomas attack. Colonel Wilson, also standing there, said that Grant strode over to Thomas and, “with unusual fire, ordered Thomas to command the attack.” Thomas promptly started issuing orders for his regiments to be ready for a signal: six quick cannon blasts in a row. When they heard the last boom, they were to advance and take the trenchlike enemy rifle pits at the base of Missionary Ridge. Grant was later to say that there had been difficulty in passing this order down to the forward commanders, and that the orders were to take the rifle pits at the bottom of the hill and then stop and reorganize “preparatory to carrying the ridge.”
When Thomas’s men heard that they were to enter the battle at last, they were eager to fight: a man of the Sixth Indiana said, “We were crazy to charge.” Thomas’s subordinate Brigadier General William B. Hazen found that every man in his brigade intended to line up and get into the attack: “All servants, cooks, clerks, found guns in some way.” When the signal of six successive cannon shots started at three-forty p.m., with the fifth shot everyone started running forward, cheering. A tremendous fusillade and barrage of enemy rifle and cannon fire poured down Missionary Ridge: a Union soldier said, “A crash like a thousand thunderclaps greeted us.” The fire came at them from everywhere: the rifle pits low on the slope, defensive positions halfway up, and the last line of trenches, six hundred feet up on the crest. Nothing stopped Thomas’s men. Encountering tree trunks that had either been knocked down by artillery or felled to slow their advance, the troops jumped, climbed, or vaulted over these obstacles, shouting and cursing as they rushed ahead. The enemy soldiers retreated from their rifle pits at the base of Missionary Ridge, firing as they backed up the slope.
As Thomas’s men leapt into the abandoned Confederate positions at the bottom of the slope, their officers began telling them to build up the back ends of the enemy holes, to protect themselves from the intense enemy fire still pouring down on them. They were to do that, and wait for further orders. The troops had other ideas; whatever Grant thought that they were supposed to do in terms of reorganizing “preparatory to carrying the ridge,” they were going up right then, and they began running upward into the enemy fire. For a minute their officers stood on the edge of the now-empty rifle pits, waving their swords at the backs of their advancing men and shouting orders that they should return; then they too started running up Missionary Ridge, trying to get in front of their troops. In a minute the first of the Union soldiers were overtaking the slowest of the retreating Confederates, and in another few minutes they were at the suddenly evacuated second line of enemy rifle pits, farther up the slope. Alternately shouting and gasping for air, no longer in any semblance of organized formations, Thomas’s men kept going.
Watching from Orchard Knob, Grant turned to Thomas, who was still standing in the appropriate place for a commander of one of Grant’s armies, and asked sternly, “Thomas, who ordered those men up the ridge?”
Thomas replied, “I don’t know. I did not.”
Grant turned to Thomas’s second in command. “Did you order them up, Granger?”
“No,” Granger answered. “They started up without orders. When those fellows get started all hell can’t stop them.”
Grant muttered that someone would face disciplinary action if the attack failed and went on watching. Regimental battle flags were advancing up Missionary Ridge, moving up through thickets, past boulders, fallen trees, and little suddenly appearing ravines. The enemy was firing, but few Union soldiers stopped to fire back. It had become a race to the top. The man carrying the banner of the Twenty-fourth Wisconsin, shouting the battle cry, “On, Wisconsin!” was Captain Arthur MacArthur, who would one day have a son named Douglas. On another part of the slope, Captain C. E. Briant of the Sixth Indiana had managed to get ahead of his entire company, but as he neared the crest a private named Tom Jackson started to sprint past him. The captain reached out and grabbed Jackson’s coattail, yanking him back as he forged ahead, but the private came on again and beat him to the top in the last yards. Looking down the reverse slope, Jackson called out to the winded men of his company who were coming over the top, “My God, come and see ’em run!”
A comrade who walked up beside Jackson recalled, “It was the sight of our lives. Gray clad men rushed wildly down the hill into the woods, tossing away knapsacks, muskets and blankets as they ran.” (In the rout, Bragg was nearly captured; four thousand of his scattered troops were eventually taken prisoner.)
Now the higher officers began catching up to the men who had been supposed to reorganize at the bottom of the slope and wait for orders. Brigadier General Thomas J. Wood came over the crest on his horse. After shouting “You’ll all be court-martialed!” at a crowd of his men, he laughed delightedly. As General O. O. Howard rode up the slope, he stopped near the top to try to comfort a dying soldier. In answer to his question of where he was hurt, the man replied, “Almost up, Sir.” When Howard explained that he meant what part of the man’s body had been hit, not where he had been on the slope, the soldier said again, “Oh, I was almost up and but for that”—he finally pointed to his mortal wound—“I’d have reached the top.”
Gasping from their efforts, the victors compared notes. The color-bearer of the Thirty-eighth Indiana told his comrades who were still coming over the crest, “A fellow of the Twenty-second Indiana was up here first, but he wouldn’t have been if I hadn’t had on my overcoat.” A captain of the Nineteenth Illinois had come up unscathed but was now examining his overcoat and discovered fourteen bullet holes in it.
Sherman’s report of what his men were doing while all this was going on described his own force as having “drawn vast masses of the enemy to our flank” and said that “it was not until night closed in that I knew that the troops in Chattanooga [Thomas’s men] had swept across Missionary Ridge and broken the enemy’s centre. Of course the victory was won, and pursuit was the next step.”
Sherman added that he ordered his reserve “to march at once” and “push forward,” but the only officer who successfully exploited the situation was Brigadier General Philip Sheridan, a short, fiery West Pointer who was the son of Irish immigrants. Sheridan had been one of the Union generals brought south with his men to face the emergency at Chattanooga. Now, while Union soldiers of all ranks acted in the spirit of “My God, come and see ’em run!,” Sheridan quickly organized a combination of moves to follow the fleeing Confederates; in an effort that did not stop until two in the morning, men of his division captured seventeen hundred prisoners and seventeen artillery pieces. Praised by Grant for his “prompt pursuit,” Sheridan had redeemed an earlier indifferent performance at Chickamauga and soon would return to the Northern theater of war, from which he would emerge as the Union’s great cavalry leader.
The Battle of Chattanooga, a most important strategic victory for the North, was finally over. The most brilliant part of it had been the impromptu assault on Missionary Ridge, which took the troops exactly fifty minutes to execute. Charles Dana had witnessed this final attack. At four-thirty that afternoon, his first report to Washington began, “Glory to God! The day is decisively ours. Missionary Ridge has just been carried by a magnificent charge of Thomas’s troops, and rebels routed.” The following day he added, “The storming of the ridge by our troops was one of the greatest miracles in military history. No man who climbs the ascent by any of the roads that wind along its front can believe that eighteen thousand men were moved in tolerably good order up its broken and crumbling face unless it was his fortune to witness the deed … Neither Grant nor Thomas intended it.”
That was the reality; as soon as the battle finished, the interpretations of what had happened during the great victory began. Hooker recalled that, soon after Missionary Ridge was taken, he heard Grant say, “Damn the battle! I had nothing to do with it.” Grant almost immediately sent Sherman a let
ter that started with, “No doubt you witnessed the handsome manner in which Thomas’s troops carried Missionary Ridge this afternoon, and can feel a just pride too in the part taken by the forces under your command in taking first so much of the same range of hills, and then in attracting the attention of so many of the enemy as to make Thomas’ part certain of success.”
There it was: the beginning of the debate as to whether Sherman’s attacks on the flank did in fact draw off large Confederate reinforcements whose absence weakened the enemy center. Sherman wanted to believe not only that this had happened but also that the entire strategy had been to do just that. In a letter to his brother John, he wrote, “The whole philosophy of the Battle was that I should get by a dash the extremity of Missionary Ridge from which the enemy would be forced to drive me,” and later commented that “the whole plan succeeded admirably.” The overall victory was indeed a military success, but the evidence is that Grant had intended Sherman’s effort to be the winning attack that broke through on the northeast flank of Missionary Ridge and went right along its crest, with Thomas playing a secondary role in the center, and that Sherman failed in that assignment.
Like Sherman, Grant believed what he wanted to believe. In an official report of the action, he said, “Discovering that the enemy in his desperation to defeat or resist the progress of Sherman was weakening his center on Missionary Ridge, determined me to order the advance at once. Thomas was accordingly directed to move forward his troops, constituting our center.” The “at once” is difficult to comprehend. Grant, a man of proven military intuition who said that at Chattanooga the commanders could see every part of the battlefield perfectly, had been watching Sherman unsuccessfully attack the enemy’s right flank all day. Why it took Grant until after three in the afternoon to discover that the enemy was sending reinforcements to face Sherman that were “weakening his center on Missionary Ridge”—something that Colonel Wilson of Grant’s own staff said was not the case—is either a mystery, or his statement was simply a convenient way of covering for Sherman and of putting the best face on a day when it was other men who won a crucial Union victory.
Reverting to his usual form, Grant wanted to keep up the momentum gained by scattering Bragg’s forces on Missionary Ridge and ordered Sherman and Thomas to pursue the fleeing Confederates, who were heading for Atlanta, as quickly as they could go. Once again, however, as happened after Shiloh and Vicksburg, the Union troops were exhausted, and some of the Confederate forces eluded the follow-up movements that would have destroyed them completely.
Meanwhile, Grant had remained constantly aware of Burnside’s threatened situation at Knoxville. On November 27, two days after the victory at Missionary Ridge, Burnside wrote Grant that he had no more than a few days’ supplies left and might have to surrender by December 3. Grant turned to Sherman, whose men were still spent from their part in the battle, and ordered Sherman to organize and lead an eighty-five-mile forced march to aid Burnside. (Sherman was to say that he did not want his men to have to make this grueling march, and reluctantly started them off for Knoxville.)
After six days of pushing his men along through cold weather on frozen roads that tore up the soles of their boots, Sherman rode into Knoxville at the head of his troops. The first thing he saw was a pen “holding a fine lot of cattle, which did not look much like starvation.” Burnside (whose way of wearing his facial hair gave rise to the term “sideburns”) and his officers were “domiciled in a large, fine mansion, looking very comfortable.” After having a turkey dinner with them, served at a table complete with linen and silver, Sherman observed to Burnside that this did not look like the headquarters of a starving army on the verge of surrender. Burnside admitted that he had exaggerated his plight; in the meantime, on November 29, his troops had thrown back decisively an attack made by Longstreet, who gave up the effort to take Knoxville on December 3—the day that Burnside had told Grant he might have to surrender Knoxville—and withdrew his badly beaten forces far into the hills to the north to reorganize. The siege that Sherman’s men had made a suffering march to help lift no longer existed. Still, Burnside said, he felt better about the overall situation, now that Sherman’s reinforcements had arrived.
By now, Sherman’s men were in the condition in which he had expected to find Burnside’s troops; he described his soldiers as suffering in the cold with “bleeding feet wrapped in old clothes or portions of blankets that could ill be spared from shivering shoulders.” Sherman set about making them comfortable, giving them rest and getting them resupplied and reequipped. Then, while his troops were marched back to the Chattanooga area, Sherman traveled west to Nashville, where Grant, who had been joined there by Julia, was conferring with some generals of his recently enlarged command.
There in the capital of Tennessee, Grant took Sherman and several other generals to pay a call on Andrew Johnson, who was to become far more important in their lives than they—or anyone—could then imagine. The sixty-three-year-old Johnson had been the one senator from the South who did not resign from the United States Senate at the time of secession—an act of loyalty to the Union deeply appreciated by Lincoln, who subsequently appointed the Tennesseean a Union brigadier general and named him to the position he now held, that of the state’s military governor.
The man who recorded the details of this meeting and the rest of the day was Brigadier General Grenville Dodge, a former civil engineer, businessman, and lobbyist. In addition to commanding troops, Dodge did exceptional service for Grant in constructing and repairing bridges and railroad tracks, and quietly ran the largest and most effective network of spies, including notable women spies, that either side possessed during the war.
As Grant led his handful of generals into Andrew Johnson’s handsome, well-furnished new house, he became aware of the contrast in appearance between Johnson, sitting there in comfort, and that of his officers, some of whom had come straight from the rough conditions of living in the field. (Dodge called them “a hard-looking crowd.”) When Grant apologized for the way they all looked, Johnson responded by studying them with what Dodge termed “a very quizzical eye.” Then the governor began to give these soldiers who did the fighting an exhortation about the evils of their Confederate enemies, saying that he would show the rebels no mercy. To emphasize a point in his gratuitous tirade, Johnson pounded his fist on a piano so hard that these combat leaders, used to cannon fire, jumped when he did it. Dodge felt himself “rather disgusted” by this self-righteousness, because his experience with Andrew Johnson was that “I hardly ever got my hands on rebel stock or supplies that I did not find Johnson trying to pull them off” for his own benefit.
After they left Johnson’s house, Sherman told his colleagues that Hamlet was to be performed in a local theater that evening, and they went to see it. Looking down from their seats in the first row of the balcony, they saw many Union soldiers in the audience. The play began, and the actors performed so badly that some of the soldiers began laughing. Sherman turned and said angrily, “Dodge, that is no way to play Hamlet!” He went on criticizing the performance in such a loud voice that Dodge warned him that the soldiers would look up at the balcony, recognize Grant and Sherman, and begin cheering them. It would bring the play to a halt. Sherman continued making his disparaging comments, “so indignant,” as Dodge put it, “that he could not keep still.” This went on until Hamlet’s graveyard soliloquy, in which Hamlet picks up the skull of “Poor Yorick.” At that point a soldier in the back of the theater called out, “Say, pard, what is it, Yank or Reb?” This produced a complete uproar; amid the confusion, Grant led Sherman and his other generals out of the theater and off to have supper. Sherman said that he wanted to have some oysters, and they ended up in a basement oyster shop. Halfway through their meal, the female proprietor, who could see that they were Union officers but had no idea that one of them commanded the entire region from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River, came to their table. Apologizing, she explained that the
hour of the army-imposed military curfew had arrived and that her restaurant must close. Rather than telling her that she was talking to the de facto law of the land, Grant accepted the situation with good grace. He and his fellow generals stood up and left.
While Sherman was still in Nashville, Grant gave him permission to go home to Lancaster for a week’s leave at Christmas. Before he left, Sherman had a troubled conversation with Grant about the rumors he had heard of various officers criticizing his leadership at Chattanooga. Grant remained completely supportive of Sherman and discussed plans for campaigns that they would undertake in the coming new year, with Sherman playing his usual important role.
Nonetheless, it was true that Sherman’s reputation had suffered, both among some of the Union generals and by newspaper accounts that Grant characterized as “being calculated to do injustice.” Thomas, determined to have full recognition of his men’s brilliant action at Missionary Ridge, was not the only one with an axe to grind. Hooker, pleased by his own success at Lookout Mountain, wrote his friend Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, a man close to Lincoln and also a friend of Sherman’s father-in-law, that Sherman’s repulses at Missionary Ridge could “only be considered in the light of a disaster … Sherman is an active, energetic officer, but in my judgment is as infirm as Burnside. He will never be successful. Please remember what I tell you.” (On the other hand, Sherman was a few weeks away from receiving a joint resolution of Congress, thanking him and his men “for their gallantry and heroism in the battle of Chattanooga, which contributed in a great degree to the success of our arms in that glorious victory.”)
Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War Page 28