The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian

by Shelby Foote

  Bragg could find nothing whatever to laugh about in his present situation. He had saved his army, but at the cost of abandoning Middle Tennessee. Moreover, with every horseback mile a torture to his boils, he was nearer than ever to the physical breakdown of which he had spoken earlier, and when a solicitous chaplain remarked from the roadside that he seemed “thoroughly outdone,” he replied: “Yes, I am utterly broken down.” Nor did he deny that he had been outdone tactically as well. “This is a great disaster,” he confided dolefully, leaning from his saddle to whisper the words into the chaplain’s ear.

  Beyond Cowan he transferred to a railway car for less discomfort and more speed. After pausing at Bridgeport to send a dispatch notifying the Adjutant General of his retreat, he reached Chattanooga early on July 4, at about the same time his telegram reached Richmond, where it served as a forecast of even darker ones that followed at staggered intervals with the staggering information of what had occurred on that same day at Gettysburg, Helena, and Vicksburg. Meantime his army continued its withdrawal. Descending the slopes of the Cumberland Plateau, it entered the lovely Sequatchie Valley, then turned south along the right bank of the Tennessee for a crossing downstream at Bridgeport, just beyond the Alabama line. Here Forrest gave over his rearguard duties to a brigade from Cheatham’s division, which was charged with maintaining a temporary bridgehead to discourage pursuit, and crossed the river in the wake of the rest of the army on the night of July 6, just three days short of the anniversary of his crossing northward as the spearhead of the advance into Kentucky. After a year of marching nearly a thousand miles and fighting two great battles, both of which he claimed as victories though both were preludes to retreat, Bragg was back where he started.

  Rosecrans was willing to leave him there for the present. At a cost of 570 casualties, including less than a hundred dead and barely a dozen missing, the Federals had captured no fewer than 1634 prisoners—many of them Middle Tennessee conscripts who came into the northern lines of their own accord, wanting no more of the war now that their homeland was no longer being fought for—and had inflicted, despite their role as attackers, about as many wounds as they had suffered. They were proud of themselves and proud of the chief who had planned and supervised the campaign that ended, so far as the foot soldiers were concerned, with Bragg’s retreat across the Elk on July 2. On that day, having moved into the abandoned rebel works at Tullahoma, they settled down for the first true rest they had enjoyed since setting off in their predawn marches from Murfreesboro, nine days back. Rain and mud, short rations, and all too little sleep had been their portion all this time; “It would be hard to find a worse set of used-up boys,” an Indiana infantryman confessed. But they were well enough rested, a few days later, to cheer heartily at the news of Vicksburg’s fall. Tremendously set up by their own recent success in a campaign which even the enemy newspapers were already calling “masterful” and “brilliant,” they figured that Chattanooga was next on the list, and they were ready to take it whenever Old Rosy gave the word.

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  In Washington, too, there was delight that the campaign had gone so well, although the fact that so much had been accomplished with so little bloodshed seemed rather to validate the opinion, urged for months, that the issue could have been forced much sooner to the same conclusion with a corresponding gain in time. The first discordant note, struck amid the general rejoicing, was sounded by Stanton on July 7 in a telegram informing Rosecrans that Vicksburg had fallen and that the Gettysburg attackers were in full retreat. “Lee’s army overthrown; Grant victorious,” the Secretary wired. “You and your noble army now have the chance to give the finishing blow to the rebellion. Will you neglect the chance?” Nettled that the goading thus was resumed almost before his weary men had time to catch their breath and scrape the mud from their boots and clothes—not to mention that the taunt preceded any official congratulations for an achievement which even the enemy had begun to refer to as masterful—Rosecrans managed, as was usual in such verbal fencing matches with his superiors, to give as good as, if not better than, he got. “You do not appear to observe the fact that this noble army has driven the rebels from Middle Tennessee,” he replied on that same day. “I beg in behalf of this army that the War Department may not overlook so great an event because it is not written in letters of blood.” Four days later, in hope of avoiding further prods and nudges of this kind, he listed for Halleck some of the difficulties he faced. These included the necessary replacement of a 350-foot railroad bridge across Duck River, as well as a long trestle south of there, the relaying of several miles of track, both on the main line down to Tullahoma and on the branch line out to Manchester and McMinnville, and the construction of new corduroy roads in order to get his wagon trains across the seas of mud. Then too, he noted, there was the problem of Burnside and his delayed advance on Knoxville, which would not only protect the flank of the Army of the Cumberland when move-out time came round, but would also complicate matters for the enemy on the opposite bank of the Tennessee. In short, Rosecrans wanted it understood by the general-in-chief and those with whom he was in daily contact, meaning Stanton and Lincoln, that “the operations now before us involve a great deal of care, labor, watchfulness, and combined effort, to insure the successful advance through the mountains on Chattanooga.”

  The result was that Halleck stepped up the prodding. “You must not wait for Johnston to join Bragg,” he wired on July 24, “but must move forward immediately.… There is great dissatisfaction felt here at the slowness of your advance. Unless you can move more rapidly, your whole campaign will prove a failure.” A confidential letter written that same day put the issue even more bluntly: “The patience of the authorities here has been completely exhausted, and if I had not repeatedly promised to urge you forward, and begged for delay, you would have been removed from your command.” This was a familiar threat, and Rosecrans met it much as he had done before. “I say to you frankly,” he replied on August 1, “that whenever the Government can replace me by a commander in whom they have more confidence, they ought to do so, and take the responsibility of the result.” He followed this with an expanded list of the difficulties in his path, but once more with results quite different from the ones he had hoped to bring about. “Your forces must move forward without further delay,” Halleck snapped back at him three days later. “You will daily report the movement of each corps till you cross the Tennessee River.” Rosecrans could scarcely believe his eyes. But when he inquired, by return wire, “if your order is intended to take away my discretion as to the time and manner of moving my troops,” Old Brains replied that this was precisely his intention: “The orders for the advance of your army, and that its movements be reported daily, are peremptory.” On August 6, a Thursday, the Middle Tennessee commander started a dispatch with what seemed a definite commitment—“My arrangements for beginning a continuous movement will be completed and the execution begun by Monday next”—only to proceed at once to enlarge on the difficulties and to request either that the order be modified or else that he be relieved of his command. He may or may not have been bluffing; in any case it did not work. Halleck was relentless. “I have communicated to you the wishes of the Government in plain and unequivocal terms,” he replied next day. “The object has been stated, and you have been directed to lose no time in reaching it. The means you are to employ, and the roads you are to follow, are left to your own discretion. If you wish to promptly carry out the wishes of the Government, you will not stop to discuss mere details.”

  Old Rosy had one string left to his bow: an out-of-channels appeal made early that month to Lincoln, in hopes that he would intervene on the side of the field commander. “General Halleck’s dispatches imply that you not only feel solicitude for the advance of this army but dissatisfaction at its supposed inactivity,” he had written, thus extending to the Commander in Chief an invitation to step into the argument with a denial that this was so. On August 10—the “Monday next” which Rosecra
ns had set as the date on which he would march, though he did not—Lincoln replied at length. “I have not abated in my kind feeling for and confidence in you,” the letter began encouragingly, but then went into a review of the anxiety the writer had felt because of the Middle Tennessee general’s immobility while Bragg was sending troops to Johnston for the relief of Vicksburg. As strategy, Lincoln added, this “impressed me very strangely, and I think I so stated to the Secretary of War and General Halleck.” In the present case, moreover, he had doubts about the wisdom of accumulating such vast amounts of food and equipment as a prelude to the move on Chattanooga. “Does preparation advance at all? Do you not consume supplies as fast as you get them forward? … Do not misunderstand,” he said in closing. “I am not casting blame upon you. I rather think, by great exertion, you can get to East Tennessee. But a very important question is, Can you stay there? I make no order in the case—that I leave to General Halleck and yourself.” In other words, he would not intervene. Old Rosy’s bow was quite unstrung, even though the President ended his letter with further expression of his personal good will. “And now, be assured that I think of you in all kindness and confidence, and that I am not watching you with an evil eye. Yours very truly, A. Lincoln.”

  Having lost this ultimate appeal for a delay, Rosecrans finally began his march on August 16. This time, the recuperative halt had lasted not six months, as at Murfreesboro, but six weeks. It was time enough, however, for his purpose. Now as then, once he got moving he moved fast, with much attention to detail and much dependence on deception.

  Burnside had begun his march on Knoxville the day before, after similar difficulties with the Washington authorities were brought to a head by a similar direct order for him to get moving, ready or not. In point of fact, despite the impatience of those above him, he had had excellent reasons for delay. First, when he was about to move in early June he was stripped of his veteran IX Corps, which went to Vicksburg under Parke. While waiting for its return he began assembling another, composed of inexperienced garrison troops brought forward from such places as Cincinnati, and sent a mixed brigade of 1500 cavalry and mounted infantry under Colonel William P. Sanders to look into conditions beyond the mountainous bulge of the horizon. Sanders, a thirty-year-old Kentucky-born West Pointer, set out on June 14, and in the course of the next nine days he not only disrupted rebel communications throughout East Tennessee, but also destroyed a number of bridges along the vital Tennessee & Virginia Railroad, including a 1600-foot span across the Holston River. He returned on June 23, elated by his success, which he reported was due in large part to the friendliness of natives whose loyalty to the Union had not been shaken by more than two years of waiting in vain for deliverance from Confederate oppression. Much encouraged, Burnside might have set out then and there with his green corps—thus matching Old Rosy’s advance on Tullahoma, which got under way next morning—except that it was at this point that John Hunt Morgan exploded in his rear, necessitating the employment of all his cavalry in a chase through the Copperhead-infested region north of the Ohio, which the raiders crossed near Brandenburg on the night of July 8 after a wild ride northward through Kentucky, capturing blue detachments as they went and provoking alternate reactions of fear and elation in the breasts of the loyal and disloyal in their path.

  On July 2, about midway between Nashville and Barbourville, Morgan crossed the upper Cumberland with eleven regiments, 2460 men in all, and a section of rifled guns. Four of his five brothers rode with him, Calvin, Richard, Charlton, and Thomas, and his brother-in-law Colonel Basil Duke commanded the larger of his two brigades; so that the raid was in a sense a family affair. Indeed, in an even more limited sense, it was a private affair. His disobedience of Bragg’s orders regarding a crossing of the Ohio, which he had intended from the start, was based on the conviction that no mere “ride,” even if the itinerary included Louisville, Frankfort, and Lexington, would accomplish his objective of stopping Rosecrans or Burnside, who would simply let the Bluegrass region look out for itself while they marched south, respectively, through Middle and East Tennessee. On the other hand, a strike into Indiana and Ohio could not so easily be ignored, either by them or by their superiors, for political as well as military reasons. As for the danger, though admittedly it was great, Morgan thought it might not prove so extreme as it appeared. Boldness was sometimes its own best protection, as he had demonstrated often in the past, and this was the epitome of boldness. Once across the Ohio he intended to ride east, through or around Cincinnati, always keeping within reach of the river, which was reported to be seasonally low, for a recrossing into Kentucky whenever the pressure on the north bank grew too great. Or at the worst, if this maneuver proved impractical, he would continue east and north for a juncture with Lee in Pennsylvania and a return by easy stages to his proper theater of the war. This would be an affair not only for the history books and tactics manuals of the future, but also for the extension and enlargement of the legends and songs already being told and sung in celebration of earlier, lesser horseback exploits by Morgan and his “terrible” men: an inheritance, in short, to be handed down to Confederate patriots yet unborn, including the child his young wife was about to bear him down in Tennessee. And so it was; so it became; though not precisely in the form intended.

  At least the beginning was propitious, the entry into Kentucky despite the presence of some 10,000 soldiers Burnside had posted along the Cumberland with instructions to prevent just that. The raiders penetrated the screen without encountering anything more substantial than a small detachment of cavalry beyond Burkesville, which they easily brushed aside. Late the following night, however, while taking a rest halt at Columbia, they heard bluecoats on the north bank of the Green preparing earthworks from which to challenge any attempt to cross the bridge. They were five companies of Michigan infantry, and next morning, not wanting to leave them active in his rear, Morgan sent in a demand for their surrender. “On any other day I might,” the Federal colonel replied, smiling, “but on the Fourth of July I must have a little brush first.” By way of testing his earnestness and the strength of his position, the raiders gave him what he sought: to their regret, for they were repulsed with a loss of 80 killed and wounded, out of less than 600 engaged, having inflicted fewer than 30 enemy casualties, most of whose hurts were superficial. Morgan crossed the river elsewhere, convinced by now that he should have done so in the first place, and pressed on through Campbellsville to camp that night near Lebanon, where he had his second fight next day. Here the challengers were a regiment of Union-loyal Kentuckians, whose colonel replied in the Wolverine vein to a note demanding instant capitulation. “I never surrender without a struggle,” he said grimly. This time the attack was made by both Confederate brigades for a quick settlement of the issue, however bloody. After some savage house-to-house fighting, the Federals fell back to the railroad station, where they finally yielded under assault. More than 400 prisoners were taken, along with valuable medical supplies, again at a cost of about 80 casualties for the attackers. But for Morgan personally the price was steeper than any comparison of cold figures could possibly indicate. Tom, the youngest of the brothers with him, was killed in the final volley fired before the white flag went up. The four surviving brothers buried him in the garden of a sympathetic Lebanon preacher, then resumed their ride northward, though with much of the glory and all of the gladness already gone from the raid for them.

  In Bardstown on July 6, hoping to throw his pursuers off his trail, Morgan feinted simultaneously north and east by sending fast-riding columns toward Louisville and Harrodsburg, but swung the main body westward through Garnettsville to Brandenburg, where an advance detachment seized two small steamers for crossing the wide Ohio. This was accomplished between noon and midnight, July 8, despite some interference from a prowling Union gunboat that hung around, exchanging shots with the two rebel guns, till it ran out of ammunition. Their crossing completed, the raiders burned the steamers against the Indiana bank
and pushed on six miles northward before halting for what little was left of the night. As they approached the town of Corydon next morning they found a sizable body of Hoosier militia drawn up to contest their entrance. Not wanting to take time to go around them, Morgan decided to go through them; which he did, scattering the home guardsmen in the process—they suffered a total of 360 casualties, of whom 345 were listed as missing—but at a cost to himself of 8 men killed and 33 wounded. Nor was that the worst of it. Taking the midday meal at a Corydon hotel, he learned from the innkeeper’s daughter that Lee had been whipped six days ago at Gettysburg and was on his way back to Virginia. This meant that Morgan’s alternate escape plan, involving a hookup with the invaders in Pennsylvania, was no longer practical, if indeed it had ever been. Apparently undaunted, he pressed on northward, that day and the next, through Palmyra to Salem, just over forty air-line miles from the Ohio and less than twice that far from Indianapolis. The Indiana capital was in a turmoil, its celebration of the great double victory at Gettysburg and Vicksburg brought to an abrupt and woeful end by news that Morgan was over the river with 10,000 horsemen and on his way even now to capture and sack the city. Church and fire bells rang the alarm, and a crowd turned out in front of the Bates House to hear Governor Morton read the latest dispatches. More than 60,000 citizens responded throughout the state to his appeal for militia volunteers, as many as possible of those who were immediately available being posted along the southern outskirts of the capital, toward Martinsville and Franklin, with orders to stop the gray raiders at all costs.