by Alan Huffman
At one point during the first day of fighting, Mathew Tolbert’s 39th Indiana was cut off from the main army, along with the 2nd Indiana Cavalry, in which Perry Summerville fought, and was not reunited with the main army until sunset, at Crawfish Springs, where the 38th continued to fight well into the night. The flashing volleys of guns and cannons created what one soldier described as “a display of fireworks that one does not like to see more than once in a lifetime.” By then the fields and forests were a wreckage of splintered farm buildings and trees, as if a tornado had passed through, and littered with wounded and dying men.
The temperature fell rapidly after dark, and few of the soldiers had blankets or water. Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Harrison, commanding the 39th, instructed his troops to gather all the canteens they could find, which turned out to be about a thousand, and deliver water to the men languishing on the field. Soldiers from both sides, as well as local civilians, roamed the dismal scene by the light of lanterns, trying to tend to the injured and the dead. A group including Confederate soldier Sam Watkins encountered a party of women probing the darkness for their men, the hems of their dresses no doubt stained with dirt and blood. When one of the women located her husband cold on the ground, Watkins watched her fall to her knees, cradle his face in her hands, and cry out. He helped her carry the body away, staggering past bodies with grotesquely cocked arms and legs, and men who moaned and begged for water.
Through the night the men of the 39th busied themselves building breastworks for the fight they knew would resume the next day, a Sunday, or if not then, the day after. There was talk that the generals might avoid fighting on the Sabbath, but it was impossible to tell, and they had to be ready. It was too cold, and most of the men were too jumpy to sleep anyway, so they labored on their trenches and breastworks, bolstering them with whatever materials they could find—logs, sections of rail fences, rocks. There was only so much anyone could do to prepare, but if you were smart you did what you could, made sure your weapons were in order and, as the actual moment of the battle approached, tended to last-minute details, such as relieving yourself, because no one wanted to need to pee during a fight. In the final moments before a battle, men prayed or sang favorite songs. Sometimes they recalled the death of a friend, to stoke the desire for revenge. Maybe they tried to purge their minds of disturbing images, like the sunburned face of a Rebel who had pointed his gun at them the day before but for some reason did not fire, whose upper lip curled back menacingly and whose knife-edged features and angular jaw brought to mind the head of a poisonous snake. It was crucial to find the right place to be when the moment came, to ignore the tightness in your chest, your racing heart and quivering knees, the lump in your throat, the dry mouth, the nervous belching. Most of all, you had to forget the worrisome thoughts the veterans were always planting in the less experienced soldiers’ minds. No one ever forgot the first time they watched someone die, they said, though the shock was muted somewhat by repetition, which was a good thing because otherwise no one would continue to fight.
Even the experienced soldiers were out of their element during a battle on the scale of Chickamauga. Over time a soldier might learn to decipher patterns, to speculate on the basis of past experience about how the fight would unfold, and to consider whom he could count on. But there was no way to fully understand or to plan for barely controlled chaos. The soldiers’ clear narrative arcs, their judgments of others, their understanding of all the variables that came into play, would be created afterward. At the time there were only the simultaneous battles within and without: The physical conflict with the enemy and the interplay of emotions and reason that governed survival on the fly. Inevitably, some details could never be reconciled. Maybe a soldier fired at a Rebel kid in a floppy hat with holes in his pants, and the bullet hit him and he fell over in the weeds and no one saw him, and he lay kicking but not dying, so that whenever the soldier stole a glance the kid was always still there, writhing, unnoticed, and for the long half-second he glanced, he could already imagine the impact of the bullet he left himself open to—exploding his head like a gourd that someone had balanced on a fence rail. Maybe a soldier accidentally shot one of his own men and no one else knew, and he never told. Some episodes would never fit into a veteran’s life afterward, but a soldier did what he had to do to survive. Whether he succeeded, and whether he crossed an unacceptable line, he had to move on. The challenge was far from over.
In the heat of battle there was often too much happening for soldiers to feel rationale fear, but they almost always felt it beforehand. One soldier wrote that “it is the belief of nine out of ten who go into battle that that is their last. I have never gone into battle that I did not expect to be killed.” A soldier might convince himself and everyone else that he was brave, then run like a hen caught in the open by a pack of dogs, then become brave again as he crouched alone in the thundering trees. Each variable contained infinite sub-variables. None of it made sense except in hindsight.
At first light on the second day of Chickamauga, fog settled over the bottomlands, and there was talk that if the generals were willing to fight on a Sunday, they would not do so when no one could see. But the fog burned off, and the Sabbath was more or less forgotten. The first shot pierced the air on the Widow Glenn’s farm at about 11 a.m., and soon hundreds of screaming Rebels poured from the brambles at the foot of the long sloping field, heads down so that the tops of their hats showed, unleashing a fusillade of gunfire that, along with the Yankees’ replies, shrouded the scene with smoke. The Widow Glenn’s house was hit by an exploding shell and burst into flames.
From his position near the burning house, Colonel Harrison watched the renewed contest unfold. Men swept through the shadowy forests into the open sun, guns and sabers glinting, shouting and raising clouds of dust, while canister shot and cannonballs and bullets tore through the air with whistles and screams. Harrison believed his position was strong. He commanded the field of fire. He could cover a retreat if necessary. His men seemed to be performing well, though it soon became evident that they were engaged in a terrible sideshow to an even worse fight taking place to the north, near the Snodgrass cabin. Harrison did not know precisely what was happening there, but for that matter it was unclear from moment to moment what was going down on the Widow Glenn’s farm. There was just the blinding smoke and deafening noise, men shouting wordlessly, faces streaming with muddy sweat and blood. The fight whirled first one way and then the other, growing in size, contracting and then spreading out again. Through his field glasses Harrison watched for outcroppings of strength and weakness, and for feints, trying to read ahead. It was like a fast and violent game of chess. Men ran headlong into the check, dropped back, and then delivered crowning blows. Here and there the injured could be seen crawling away. They seemed to be generally attracted to a distant stock pond, where they crowded the water’s edge, vying for space with lost and riddled horses.
It seemed impossible that men could charge through the melee and not get hit by something; yet, most of the bullets spent themselves ineffectively. By some estimates, nine out of ten bullets fired during an average Civil War battle failed to find their mark, and many more were dropped in the excitement of loading on the run. Some men never fired their guns at all but only ran with them, more or less as menacing props. But there were more than enough bullets to go around, and each one that was dropped held the potential to get the fumbling shooter killed, leaving open the window just long enough for someone else’s bullet to reach him. It was no easy matter to load a gun under such conditions, often while running, with shaking hands, as thousands of men fired at you. It was a maddeningly painstaking process: Tear open the cartridge with your teeth, empty the gunpowder into the barrel, tamp the minié ball into the barrel with your thumb, pull out the ramrod to push the bullet home, cock the hammer, insert a percussion cap over the nipple, and finally pull the trigger. Eventually the loading became second nature, even mindless, but it was still slow, and it was
done with the knowledge that at that moment someone might be taking careful aim at you. The men of the 39th were fortunate to have repeating Spencer rifles, which could fire up to seven bullets in a row before the magazine needed reloading, and turned out to be a stunning advantage. The guns were an excellent investment that some soldiers had made with their own money before they were standard issue in the Union Army. But even the Spencers had to be loaded again and again, and there was little consolation in knowing that the Rebels had to reload, too. When a bullet hit a man, every soldier within earshot recognized the awful thud.
To Colonel Harrison, watching from his hill, it appeared that the Rebels were losing ground. The noise of the battle seemed to be inching incrementally back toward the line of trees. Then he watched in dismay as the blue-coated troops on his left began to waver, and the shape of the battle again changed. Suddenly the Union line was breached. His men could not see what was happening; they were aware only of the ebb and flow, of the sharp rattle of musketry, rifle and cannon fire fading away or growing more distinct, increasing in volume. A distant cheer might be the only indication of victory or loss. But Harrison could see that his troops, together with Wilder’s horsemen on his right, were about to be cut off from the main army again. In a matter of moments they ceased to be part of an organized force. Using the buglers, flag signals, and shouts carried through the noise, he directed his troops to begin pulling back, and soon a courier arrived with orders for a retreat toward the long escarpment of Lookout Mountain, and from there back to Chattanooga. The fighting began to fragment. The firing grew sporadic and scattered. The 39th withdrew past the burning embers of the Widow Glenn’s house, fighting backward, into the trees.
By then the situation was similarly dire near the Snodgrass cabin. Rosecrans, whose reputation would never fully recover, reportedly turned to his staff and said in a surprisingly calm voice, “If you care to live any longer, get away from here.” Union General Charles Anderson Dana, a former journalist who would later be assistant secretary of war, said he knew his line was in trouble when he saw Rosecrans crossing himself.
As the Union troops retreated a Confederate general noted the grandeur of the scene, with flags waving and weaponry flickering in the sun, but Watkins, the Rebel soldier, found the aftermath bleak. “Men were lying where they fell, shot in every conceivable part of the body,” he later wrote. “Some with their entrails torn out and still hanging to them and piled up on the ground beside them, and they still alive. Some with their under jaw torn off, and hanging by a fragment of skin to their cheeks, with their tongues lolling from their mouths, and they trying to talk…And then to see all those dead, wounded and dying horses, their heads and tails drooping, and they seemed to be so intelligent as if they comprehended everything.”
At the end of the two-day fight, more than three thousand Union and Confederate troops were dead and more than thirty thousand had been wounded or captured, including Mathew Tolbert, whose whereabouts was now unknown.
It would be said that the 39th had kept the Rebels engaged long enough to enable the rest of the Union Army to form a new line of defense and eventually to make an orderly retreat. The Confederate Army, meanwhile, missed a chance to fully rout its retreating enemy, meaning its strategic victory was nil. Still, everyone on the Union side knew the day had been lost.
The 39th was among the last to leave the field. They were at the end of a long retreating column, along a road crowded with stragglers, weary disoriented troops, and horses and mules pulling gun caissons, wagons, and ambulances. Perry Summerville’s 2nd Indiana Cavalry, which was not far ahead, had been worn down before the fighting at Chickamauga even began, after reconnoitering through northern Alabama and Georgia for two weeks, destroying Confederate salt works, capturing stragglers and Rebel pickets, and driving away or running from enemy cavalry.
The Rebel cavalry sporadically assailed the retreating column most of the way, but by nightfall the Union Army arrived at its stronghold in Chattanooga. From there, Summerville and the rest of the 2nd continued north toward Bridgeport, Tennessee, where they would spend the next few weeks chasing Confederate guerillas and ferrying supplies across the river. By then, the battle was on its way into history, and when Tolbert and Maddox finally arrived in Nashville, the only record of Mathew’s whereabouts was a dispatch noting that he had been wounded and was in the hands of the enemy. Prison camps were squalid, dangerous, disease-ridden places, particularly in the South, and Andersonville, the nearest in Georgia, was by far the worst. But Tolbert likely had more than just his brother’s capture to worry about. He had a lot to learn, and he had to learn it on the run. More than sixty different bugle calls directed the choreography of military life, and a mistake in understanding could be fatal. Added to that, the 39th was about to be reconfigured as the 8th Indiana Cavalry, and Tolbert, who had experience plowing behind a horse, would have to learn quickly how to shoot, and avoid being shot, from the back of one.
THERE IS A REASON WHY recollections of dangerous episodes tend to be more vivid. The same part of the brain that prompts sudden emotional reactions initiates the storage of memory, so memories that illustrate the greatest threat naturally tend to receive highest priority. But because the nervous system becomes extremely selective under emotional stress, and the brain later analyzes and even updates memories with new information, how an event is recalled can be as unpredictable as the event itself. That is why the men of the 2nd Indiana could be frequently cited for gallantry on the battlefield but at other times be said to be ill disciplined, thieving, rude to other soldiers and civilians, and gutless during a fight. The truth may be immediate and undeniable, but the record evolves over time.
All the conflicting forces that war brought to bear—the weather, the individual soldiers’ moods, the acumen of the generals, and the lay of the land—were subject to continual change. In camp, on the battlefield, and on the march, everyone triangulated to determine the character of those they fought alongside, and a significant failure of courage or strength would likely follow a man all the way through. The ability to gauge the impact of such behavior might be difficult when the threat was actually unfolding, but everyone wanted to be remembered as the guy others could count on, like the sergeant in the 2nd Indiana who braved enemy fire to retrieve a dying comrade deserted by the retreating infantry. No one wanted to be remembered as the guy who got someone killed.
There was always posturing in the aftermath of a crucial encounter, and J. Walter Elliott seemed particularly concerned with framing his experiences, sometimes even as they unfolded. He suffered three almost embarrassingly minor war wounds, none of which qualified as a red badge of courage. He missed the battle of Perryville because of a spider bite, got shot in the tip of his ring finger the day before Chickamauga, and was lightly grazed in the shoulder by a bullet during the actual battle. Yet, he incorporated those awkward episodes into a plausibly valiant identity by playing up both the best and the worst. There is no evidence that he actually lied, but he made the truth work for him.
To some extent everyone was intent on composing what Stephen Crane, in his Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage, described as the song of their life. The stories the soldiers had been told by others and would later tell themselves were part of an evolving survival equation, illustrating what worked and what did not, who could be counted on in times of danger, and how their actions might be viewed in hindsight.
After Chickamauga, the slightly wounded Elliott was directed to a military hospital in Nashville, but he chose instead to remain at large in the city until it was besieged. This would be an important detail in his accounts. A new front was taking shape along Missionary Ridge, just east of town, and he wanted to be there. The battle would restore the Union Army’s position in the region, and it would give those involved stories that they could be proud to tell. With the help of reinforcements, the Yankees routed the Rebels at Missionary Ridge, opening the way for a drive into Georgia, and after a year of relentless cavalry
raids, foraging expeditions, and ambushes, General Sherman would embark upon his infamous March to the Sea. For Elliott, Tolbert, Maddox, and Summerville, it would also usher in a series of personally fateful events.
From all appearances, Elliott tried to do what was right as a soldier, even considering his doctor’s excuse at Perryville, which might have been justified. But after undergoing a mortal threat, a person has a tendency to accommodate, rationalize, and lay or deflect blame. A soldier who misses a fight because of a spider bite can be seen as a dangerous variable, and Elliott was intent on creating a narrative in which his perception of honor and presence of mind were on full display.