The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian

by Shelby Foote

  So far as Grant himself was concerned, the issue had been decided as soon as the pontoon bridge was thrown and the bridgehead secured at Brown’s Ferry. His mind had moved on to other matters, even before the night action at Wauhatchie seemed for a moment to threaten the loss of what had been won. “The question of supplies may now be regarded as settled,” he wired Halleck that evening, four hours before Geary came under attack. “If the rebels give us one week more time I think all danger of losing territory now held by us will have passed away, and preparations may commence for offensive operations.”

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  Pleased though he was by the prospect, as he saw it from his Chattanooga headquarters now that the Cracker Line was open, Grant would have felt even more encouraged if he somehow had been able to sit in on the councils across the way, on Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, and thus acquire firsthand knowledge of the bitterness that had prevailed for the past month in the camps of his adversaries. Bragg’s dissatisfaction with several of his ranking lieutenants for their shortcomings during the weeks that preceded Chickamauga—willful ineptitudes, as he saw it, which had cost him the opportunity to destroy the Federal army piecemeal, in McLemore’s Cove and elsewhere—was matched, if not exceeded, by their dissatisfaction with his failure, as they saw it, to gather the fruits of their great victory during the weeks that followed. Resentment bred dissension; dissension provoked criminations; recriminations led to open breaks. Polk and Hindman had departed and Harvey Hill was about to follow, relieved of duty by the army commander; while still another top subordinate—more nearly indispensable, some would say, than all the rest combined—had left under his own power. This was Forrest.

  His contention that “we ought to press forward as rapidly as possible” having been ignored on the morning after the battle, the Tennessee cavalryman was sent northwest with his division, four days later, to head off or delay a supposed Union advance from Knoxville. No such threat existed, but Forrest did encounter enemy cavalry hovering in that direction and drove them helter-skelter across the Hiwassee, then through Athens and Sweetwater, slashing at their flanks and rear, to Loudon, where the survivors managed to get beyond his reach by crossing the Tennessee, eighty miles above Chattanooga and less than half that far from Knoxville. Having determined that no bluecoats were advancing from the latter place, he was on his way back across the Hiwassee, September 28, when he received a dispatch signed by an assistant adjutant on Bragg’s staff. “The general commanding desires that you will without delay turn over the troops of your command previously ordered to Major General Wheeler.” There was no explanation, no mention of the raid that Wheeler was about to make on the Federal supply line: just the peremptory order to “turn over the troops of your command.” Forrest complied, of course, but then, having done so, dictated and sent through channels a fiery protest. “Bragg never got such a letter as that before from a brigadier,” he told the staffer who took it down. A couple of days later, during an interview with the army commander, he was assured that he would get his men back as soon as they returned from over the river, and he was granted, in the interim, a ten-day leave to go to La Grange, Georgia, to see his wife for the first time since his visit to Memphis to recuperate from his Shiloh wound, a year and a half ago. While he was at La Grange, sixty miles southwest of Atlanta, he received an army order issued just after his interview with Bragg, assigning Wheeler “to the command of all the cavalry in the Army of Tennessee.” Since his oath—taken in early February, after the Donelson repulse and their near duel—that he would never again serve under Wheeler was well known at headquarters, this amounted to a permanent separation of Forrest and the troopers he had raised on his own and seasoned, shortly afterward, on his December strike at Grant’s supply lines in West Tennessee. Moreover, he took the order as a personal affront and he reacted in a characteristically direct manner. Interrupting his leave, he went at once to see the commanding general, accompanied by his staff surgeon as a witness.

  Bragg received him in his tent on Missionary Ridge, rising and offering his hand as the Tennessean entered. Forrest declined it. “I am not here to pass civilities or compliments with you, but on other business,” he said, and he launched without further preamble into a heated denunciation, which he punctuated by stabbing in Bragg’s direction with a rigid index finger: “I have stood your meanness as long as I intend to. You have played the part of a damned scoundrel, and are a coward, and if you were any part of a man I would slap your jaws and force you to resent it. You may as well not issue any more orders to me, for I will not obey them … and I say to you that if you ever again try to interfere with me or cross my path it will be at the peril of your life.” And having thus attended to what he had called his “other business,” he turned abruptly and stalked out of the tent. “Well, you are in for it now,” his doctor companion said as they rode away. Forrest disagreed. “He’ll never say a word about it; he’ll be the last man to mention it. Mark my words, he’ll take no action in the matter. I will ask to be relieved and transferred to a different field, and he will not oppose it.”

  Forrest was right in his prediction; Bragg neither took official notice of the incident nor disapproved the cavalryman’s request for transfer, which was submitted within the week. He was wrong, though, in his interpretation of his superior’s motives. Braxton Bragg was no coward; he was afraid of no man alive, not even Bedford Forrest. Rather, he was willing to overlook the personal affront—as the hot-tempered Tennessean, with far less provocation, had not been—for the good of their common cause. He knew and valued Forrest’s abilities, up to a point, and by not pressing charges for insubordination—which would certainly have stuck—he saved his services for the country. Partly, no doubt, this was because he saw him as primarily a raider, not only a nonprofessional but an “irregular,” and as such less subject to discipline for irregularities, even ones so violent as this. Others of higher rank in his army were less direct in their denunciations, but he exercised no such forbearance where they were concerned. Polk and Hindman and Hill, for instance; these he saw as regulars, and he treated them as such, writing directly to the Commander in Chief of their “want of prompt conformity to orders,” as well as of their “having taken steps to procure my removal in a manner both unmilitary and un-officerlike.”

  He had particular reference to Hill in this, and he was right. In fact, there existed in the upper echelon of his army a cabal whose purpose was just that, to “procure [his] removal,” and to do so by much the same method he himself had been employing; that is, by complaining individually and collectively to the President and the Secretary of War. Davis had received by now Polk’s letter stigmatizing Bragg for “palpable weakness and mismanagement,” and had also read Longstreet’s note to Seddon, protesting “that nothing but the hand of God can save us or help us as long as we have our present commander.” These he sought to deal with indirectly, on October 3, by explaining at some length to Bragg why he had recommended that the charges against the departed Polk not be pressed. “It was with the view of avoiding a controversy, which could not heal the injury sustained and which I feared would entail further evil,” he wrote, adding that to persist would involve a full-scale investigation, “with all the crimination and recrimination there to be produced.… I fervently pray that you may judge correctly,” he said in closing, “as I am well assured you will act purely for the public welfare.” He hoped that this appeal to Bragg for a reduction of the pressure from above would serve to lessen the tension elsewhere along the chain of command; but he received a document, two days later, which showed that tension to be even greater than he had supposed. It came in the form of a round robin, a petition addressed to the President and signed by a number of general officers, including Hill and Buckner. While admitting “that the proceeding is unusual among military men,” the petitioners contended that “the extraordinary condition of affairs in this army, the magnitude of the interests at stake, and a sense of the responsibilities under which they rest to Y
our Excellency and to the Republic, render this proceeding, in their judgment, a matter of solemn duty, from which, as patriots, they cannot shrink.”

  Their grounds for concern were stated at some length. “Two weeks ago this army, elated by a great victory which promised to be the most fruitful of the war, was in readiness to pursue the defeated enemy. That enemy, driven in confusion from the field, was fleeing in disorder and panic-stricken.… Today, after having been twelve days in line of battle in that enemy’s front, within cannon range of his position, the Army of Tennessee has seen a new Sebastopol rise steadily before its view. The beaten enemy, recovering behind its formidable works from the effects of his defeat, is understood to be already receiving reinforcements, while heavy additions to his strength are rapidly approaching him. Whatever may have been accomplished heretofore, it is certain that the fruits of the victory of the Chickamauga have now escaped our grasp. The Army of Tennessee, stricken with a complete paralysis, will in a few days’ time be thrown strictly on the defensive, and may deem itself fortunate if it escapes from its present position without disaster.” Having thus stated the problem, the generals then went on to propose a solution that was at once tactful and explicit. “In addition to reinforcements, your petitioners would deem it a dereliction of the sacred duty they owe the country if they did not further ask that Your Excellency assign to the command of this army an officer who will inspire the army and the country with undivided confidence. Without entering into a criticism of the merits of our present commander, your petitioners regard it as a sufficient reason, without assigning others, to urge his being relieved, because, in their opinion, the condition of his health totally unfits him for the command of an army in the field.”

  Authorship of the document was afterwards disputed. Some said Buckner wrote it, others Hill. Bragg, for one, believed he recognized the hand of the latter in the phrasing, but Hill denied this; “Polk got it up,” he said. Whoever wrote it, Davis decided that what it called for—particularly in a closing sentence: “Your petitioners cannot withhold from Your Excellency the expression of the fact that, as it now exists, they can render you no assurance of the success which Your Excellency may reasonably expect”—was another presidential journey west. “I leave in the morning for General Bragg’s headquarters,” he wired Lee, who was preparing to cross the Rapidan that week, “and hope to be serviceable in harmonizing some of the difficulties existing there.”

  He left Richmond aboard a special train, October 6, accompanied by two military aides, Colonels William P. Johnston and Custis Lee—sons of Albert Sidney Johnston and R. E. Lee—his young secretary, Burton Harrison, and the still-disconsolate John Pemberton, for whom no commensurate employment had been found in the nearly three months since his formal release from parole. Personally this saddened Davis almost as much as it did the unhappy Pennsylvanian, whom he admired for his firmness under adversity. But the truth was, there was much of sadness all around them as they traveled through the heartland of the South, in the faces of the people in their shabby towns and on their neglected farms, in the condition of the roadbeds and the cars, and even in the itinerary the presidential party was obliged to follow. The Confederacy’s shrinking fortunes were reflected all too plainly in the fact that this second western journey was necessarily far more roundabout than the first had been in December, when Davis had gone directly to Chattanooga by way of Knoxville. Now the compass-boxing route led south through Charlotte and Columbia, then westward to Atlanta, and finally north, through Marietta and Dalton, to Chickamauga Station. That other time, moreover, he had extended his trip to include what he called “the further West,” but this would not be possible now, the area thus referred to having fallen, like Knoxville and Chattanooga itself, under Federal occupation. Reaching Bragg’s headquarters on Missionary Ridge, October 9, he conferred in private with the general, who unburdened himself of a great many woes by placing the blame for them on his subordinates; regretfully declined the proffered services of Pemberton as a replacement for Polk, though he was still unwilling to restore the latter to duty; and, in conclusion, submitted his resignation as commander of the Army of Tennessee. This Davis refused, not wanting to disparage the abilities of the only man under whom a Confederate army had won a substantial victory since the death of Stonewall Jackson, back in May. That evening he presided over a council of war attended by Bragg and his corps commanders, Longstreet, Hill, Buckner, and Cheatham, who had taken over from Polk, pending the outcome of the bishop’s current set- to with his chief. After what Davis later described as “a discussion of various programmes, mingled with retrospective remarks on the events attending and succeeding the battle of Chickamauga”—in the course of which he continued his efforts “to be serviceable in harmonizing some of the difficulties”—he inquired whether anyone had any further suggestions. Whereupon Longstreet spoke up. Bragg, he said, “could be of greater service elsewhere than at the head of the Army of Tennessee.”

  An embarrassing silence followed: embarrassing at any rate to Bragg, who looked neither left nor right, as well as to Davis, who after all had come here to compose differences, not to create scenes that would enlarge them. After a time, however, he asked the other generals how they felt about the matter, and all replied that they agreed with what had just been said—particularly Hill, who seemed to relish the opportunity this afforded for an airing of his views. Bragg sat immobile through the painful scene, his dark-browed face expressionless. Without giving any opinion of his own, Davis at last adjourned the council. But next day, when he sounded Longstreet on his willingness to accept the command in place of Bragg, the Georgian declined. “In my judgment,” he explained later, “our last opportunity was gone when we failed to follow the success at Chickamauga, and capture or disperse the Union army, and it could not be just to the service or myself to call me to a position of such responsibility.” He had, however, a suggestion: Joseph E. Johnston. Davis bridled at the name, which Longstreet said “only served to increase his displeasure, and his severe rebuke.” This in turn caused Old Peter to tender his resignation, but Davis, as he said, “was not minded to accept that solution to the premise.” At the close of the interview, Longstreet afterwards wrote, “the President walked as far as the gate, gave me his hand in his usual warm grasp, and dismissed me with his gracious smile; but a bitter look lurking about its margin, and the ground-swell, admonished me that the clouds were gathering about headquarters of the First Corps even faster than those that told the doom of the Southern cause.”

  If Davis was pained, if a bitter look did lurk in fact about the margin of his smile, it was small wonder; for he was being required to deal with a problem which came more and more to seem insoluble. Though Bragg’s subordinates, or former subordinates, all agreed that he should be removed, none of those who were qualified was willing to take his place. First Longstreet, then Hardee, on being questioned, replied that they did not want the larger responsibility, while Polk and Hill, Buckner and Cheatham, either through demonstrated shortcomings in the case of the former pair or lack of experience in the latter, were plainly unqualified. Lee had been suggested, but had made it clear that he preferred to remain in Virginia, where there could be no doubt he was needed. Joe Johnston, on the other hand, had once been offered the command and once been ordered to it, and both times had refused, protesting that Bragg was the best man for the post. Besides, if past performance was any indication of what could be expected from a general, to appoint Johnston would be to abandon all hope of an aggressive campaign against the cooped-up Federals.… Davis thought the matter over for three days, and then on October 13 announced his decision in the form of a note to Bragg: “Regretting that the expectations which induced the assignment of that gallant officer to this army have not been realized, you are authorized to relieve Lieutenant General D. H. Hill from further duty with your command.” It had been obvious from the outset that one of the two North Carolinians would have to go. Now Davis had made his choice. Bragg would remain as comma
nder of the army, and Hill—an accomplished hater, with a sharp tongue he was never slow to use on all who crossed him, including now the President—would return to his home state.

  In addition to concerning himself with this command decision, in which Bragg emerged the winner more by default than by virtue of his claim, Davis also inspected the defenses, reviewed the troops, and held strategy conferences for the purpose of learning what course of action the generals thought the army now should take. Basically, Bragg was in favor of doing nothing more than holding what he had; that is, of keeping the Federals penned up in the town until starvation obliged them to surrender. He felt sure that this would be the outcome, and he said so, not only now but later, in his report. “Possessed of the shortest road to the depot of the enemy, and the one by which reinforcements must reach him,” he would still maintain in late December, “we held him at our mercy, and his destruction was only a question of time.” When Davis expressed dissatisfaction with his apparent lack of aggressiveness, Bragg came up with an alternate plan, suggested to him earlier that week in a letter from Beauregard, who, as was often the case when he had time on his hands—Gillmore and Dahlgren were lying idle just then, licking the wounds they had suffered in the course of their recent and nearly fruitless exertions, outside and just inside Charleston harbor—had turned his mind to grand-scale operations. In Virginia and elsewhere the Confederates should hold strictly to the defensive, he said, so that Bragg could be reinforced by 35,000 troops, mainly from Lee, in order to cross the Tennessee, flank the bluecoats out of Chattanooga, and crush them in an all-out showdown battle; after which, he went on, Bragg could assist Lee in administering the same treatment to Meade, just outside Washington. He suggested, though, that the source of the plan be kept secret, lest the President be prejudiced against it in advance by his known dislike of its originator. “What I desire is our success,” Old Bory wrote. “I care not who gets the credit.” So Bragg at this point, being pressed for aggressive notions, offered the program as his own, expanding it slightly by proposing that a crossing be made well upstream for a descent on the Federal rear by way of Walden’s Ridge. Davis listened with interest, Bragg informed Beauregard, finding merit in the suggestion; he “admitted its worth and was inclined to adopt it, only”—here was the catch; here the Creole’s spirits took a drop—“he could not reduce General Lee’s army.” That disposed of the scheme Bragg advanced as his own, and the true author’s hopes went glimmering.