by Shelby Foote
He had hoped to have them in jump-off position within five days; that is, by November 20 for a dawn attack next morning; but, as he explained later, “the condition of the roads was such, and the bridge at Brown’s so frail, that it was not until the 23d that we got three of my divisions behind the hills near the point indicated above Chattanooga for crossing the river.”
He need not have fretted about those three lost days. They gained him much, as the thing turned out, and Grant as well. In fact, if he had been delayed one day longer, he not only would have profited still more; he would have been spared the considerable mortification he was to suffer two days later at the hands of Pat Cleburne, who in that case would not have been there. For Bragg had decided, only the day before Sherman got into his jump-off position unobserved, to double the strength of Longstreet’s 11,000-man infantry column by detaching another two divisions from the lines around Chattanooga to join him for the suppression of Burnside, under siege by then at Knoxville, and one of the two was Cleburne’s.
Old Peter had protested his own detachment in the first place, on the double grounds that he would not be strong enough to deal quickly with Burnside and that his departure would leave the main body, strung out along six miles of line, dangerously exposed to an assault by Grant, who already had been reinforced by Hooker and presumably would soon be joined as well by the even larger force marching eastward under Sherman. But Bragg, with what Longstreet described as a “sardonic smile,” declined either to cancel or strengthen the movement against Knoxville, and “intimated that further talk was out of order.” He had his reasons: largely personal ones, apparently, dating from the conference three weeks ago, at which the Georgian had volunteered the opinion that the Army of Tennessee would benefit from a change of commanders. Informing Davis, who had suggested the detachment in his letter two days earlier from Atlanta, that “the Virginia troops will move in the direction indicated as soon as practicable,” Bragg had added: “This will be a great relief to me.” That was on the last day of October, and four days later, despite his protest, Longstreet was detached. He took with him the divisions of McLaws and Hood—the latter now under Brigadier General Micah Jenkins, who was senior to Law and had superseded him on his arrival after Chickamauga—Alexander’s artillery, and Wheeler’s three brigades of cavalry. This gave him a total of about 15,000 effectives of all arms. His assignment was “to destroy or capture Burnside’s army,” which in turn had just over 25,000 troops in occupation of East Tennessee.
It was Longstreet’s belief that his best chance for success, under the circumstances, lay in striking before his adversary had time to concentrate his forces. But that turned out to be impossible, for a variety of reasons. Not the least of these was that he lacked the means of moving his pontoons except on flatcars, which meant that he had to cross the Holston River at Loudon, where the railroad ended because the bridge was out, rather than at some point closer than thirty air-line miles from his objective. To add to his woes, not only did the trains run badly off schedule, but he found no rations on hand when he reached Sweetwater, as he had been assured they would be, and had to mark time there while they were being brought in from the country roundabout. “The delay that occurs is one that might have been prevented,” he wired Bragg on November 11, “but not by myself.… As soon as I find a probability of moving without almost certain starvation, I shall move, provided the troops are up.” Bragg retaliated in kind. “Transportation in abundance was on the road and subject to your orders,” he shot back next day. “I regret it has not been energetically used. The means being furnished, you were expected to handle your own troops, and I cannot understand your constant applications for me to furnish them.” Old Peter pushed forward on his own, crossing at Loudon on the 13th, but reviewing the situation years later he remarked: “It began to look more like a campaign against Longstreet than against Burnside.”
In point of fact, although their methods differed sharply, the blue commander to his front was no less skillful an opponent than the gray one in his rear. Warned by Grant that a heavy detachment was headed in his direction, Burnside was not only on the alert for an attack; he was also mindful of his instructions to keep the enemy from returning to Chattanooga as long as possible. “Sherman’s advance has reached Bridgeport,” Grant wired on the day after the rebels crossed the Holston. “If you can hold Longstreet in check until he gets up, or by skirmishing and falling back can avoid serious loss to yourself and gain time, I will be able to force the enemy back from here and place a force between Longstreet and Bragg that must inevitably make the former take to the mountain passes by every available road.” Accordingly, Burnside did not seriously contest the Confederate advance. Abandoning Kingston, he called his scattered forces in from all points except Cumberland Gap, thus keeping that escape hatch open in the event of a disaster, and aside from a brief delaying action at Campbell Station on the 14th, about midway between Loudon and Knoxville, did not risk a sudden termination of the contest, either by a victory or a defeat. He had some 20,000 soldiers with him; more, he knew, than were in the column advancing on him. But it was not a battle he was after. It was time.
He got it, too. Arriving before Knoxville on November 17, Longstreet found the bluecoats skillfully disposed and well dug in. “We went to work, therefore,” he afterwards reported, “to make our way forward by gradual and less hazardous measures, at the same time making examinations of the enemy’s entire position.” For the better part of a week this continued, his caution enlarged by the knowledge that Burnside had more men inside the place than he himself had outside. Then on November 23 he received a message Bragg had written the day before, informing him that “nearly 11,000 reinforcements are now moving to your assistance.” Old Peter was to go ahead and defeat Burnside now, “if practicable”; otherwise he could wait for the additional strength already on the way. Having looked the situation over carefully for the past six days, without finding a single chink in the Federal armor, Longstreet decided that the “practicable” thing to do was wait a couple more.
Bragg’s decision to add weight to the blow aimed at Knoxville, seeking thereby to hasten the return of the detachment by giving it the strength to settle the issue there without additional delay, was based in part on a growing suspicion that Old Peter had been right, after all, when he warned of the danger involved in any prolonged weakening of the force in occupation of the six-mile line of intrenchments drawn around two sides of Chattanooga. Longstreet had been gone for nearly three weeks now, and all sorts of things had been happening down in the town, indicative of the fact that the blue commander had something violent in mind. Moreover, Sherman had reached Bridgeport the week before, then suddenly, after crossing at Brown’s Ferry, had disappeared as mysteriously as if the earth had swallowed up all four of his divisions. Bragg inferred that the Ohioan must have marched over Walden’s Ridge: in which case he was probably headed for Knoxville, with the intention not only of raising the siege but also of swamping the already outnumbered Longstreet. If this was so, the thing to do was beat him to the punch, using the speed made possible by the railroad, and settle the issue before he got there. Accordingly, having reorganized what was left of his army into two large corps of four divisions apiece—one under Hardee, who had replaced Polk, and one under Breckinridge, who had replaced Hill—Bragg decided to dispatch one division from each, Cleburne from Hardee, Buckner from Breckinridge, and send them to Knoxville at once. He no sooner reached this decision than he acted on it. Buckner being absent sick, and Preston having been called to Richmond, his troops were placed under Bushrod Johnson, who pulled them out of line on November 22 and shifted them rearward to Chickamauga Station, where they boarded the cars for a fast ride to Loudon and a march beyond the Holston. Cleburne followed next day to wait for the return of the cars that had carried Johnson up the line.
Consolidation of Walker’s two small divisions had reduced the army’s total from eleven to ten divisions, and of these, with Johnson and Cleburne gone,
Bragg now had a scant half dozen, containing fewer than 40,000 effectives of all arms. Hardee held the left of the semicircular line, with Stevenson posted on the crest of Lookout and eastward across the valley as far as Chattanooga Creek, Walker across the rest of the valley, and Cheatham on his right, occupying the south end of the line on Missionary Ridge, the rest of which was held by Breckinridge, with Stewart adjoining Cheatham and the other two divisions—Breckinridge’s own and Hindman’s, respectively under William Bate and Patton Anderson, the senior brigadiers—disposed along the northern extension of the ridge, but not all the way to the end overlooking the confluence of Chickamauga Creek and the Tennessee River, where the ground was so rough that Bragg had decided a few outpost pickets would suffice to hold it. The fact was, he had need to conserve his forces, especially since the latest of his two considerable detachments. Sidling left and right to fill the gaps created by the departure of Johnson and Cleburne, the troops disposed in three lines down the western face of the ridge were a good two lateral yards apart, not even within touching distance of each other. Admittedly this was a dangerous situation, but their chief depended on the natural strength of the position to compensate for what he lacked in numbers.
However, on the afternoon of the day Cleburne pulled back to follow Johnson up to Knoxville, Bragg was given cause to believe that his judgment was about to be challenged in the stiffest kind of way. Grant advanced a large body of troops—apparently Thomas’s whole army—due east from Chattanooga, as if he intended to have an all-out try at breaking the thin-spread center of the rebel line. Though the mass of bluecoats called a halt about midway across the plain and began to intrench a new line just beyond range of the batteries on Missionary Ridge, Bragg was alarmed into recalling Cleburne, whose men were loading onto the cars when the summons reached him. Early next morning, November 24, the southern commander received a still greater shock in the form of a dispatch from an outpost on the right. Four blue divisions were crossing the Tennessee River immediately below the mouth of Chickamauga Creek, apparently for an assault on the practically undefended north end of the ridge. It was Sherman, the dispatch added, and Bragg knew at last that the Ohioan had not gone off to Knoxville, as he had supposed, but rather had gone into hiding behind the hills above Chattanooga, massing for the attack now being launched. Hastily, he passed the word for Cleburne, whose troops had returned overnight from Chickamauga Station, to double-time his division northward and repulse if he could the four-division assault which, if successful, would flank the Confederates off the ridge their commander had believed to be impregnable: until now.
As was his custom when confronted with delays, long or short—including the four-month delay above Vicksburg, early this year—Grant used the three days, spent waiting for Sherman to get into position, to polish up the plan he had designed for Bragg’s discomfort, improvising variations which he believed would make it at once more certain and complete. Such strain as there was, and admittedly there was much, was not so much on his own account as on Burnside’s, and perhaps less on Burnside’s account than on the reaction of the Washington authorities to the news that Knoxville was besieged, cut off from telegraphic communication with the outside world. “The President, the Secretary of War, and General Halleck were in an agony of suspense,” Grant afterward recalled. “My own suspense was also great, but more endurable,” he added, “because I was where I could do something to relieve the situation.”
What he specifically had in mind to do, as he had told Burnside the week before, was to “place a force between Longstreet and Bragg” by throwing the latter into retreat and cutting the rail supply line in his rear, thus obliging Old Peter to raise his siege and “take to the mountain passes by every road” in search of food. At that time he had intended to leave the real work to Sherman and his Army of the Tennessee, with the Cumberland and Potomac troops more or less standing by to lend such help as might be needed. Thomas, for instance, was to menace but not attack the enemy center, while Hooker—reduced to a single division by the subtraction of Howard’s two, which crossed at Brown’s Ferry to be available as a reserve for the forces north and east of Chattanooga—stood guard at the foot of Lookout Valley, below Wauhatchie, to prevent a rebel counterstroke from there. But now, as he waited for Sherman to come up, Grant perceived that if Fighting Joe were strengthened a bit he might take the offensive on the right, against Lookout itself, and thus discourage Bragg from reinforcing his assailed right from his otherwise unmolested left. Accordingly, Thomas was ordered to send Cruft’s division from Granger’s corps to Hooker, and when Sherman’s rear division, under Osterhaus, was kept from crossing by a breakdown of the pontoon bridge at Brown’s Ferry, it too was sent to Hooker and replaced by another from Thomas, under Davis, who was detached from Palmer’s corps. Thomas thus was reduced from six to four divisions, while Sherman still had four, Hooker three, and Howard two. Such a distribution seemed ideal, considering the assignments of the three commanders and the fact that the last was available as a reinforcement for the first.
These thirteen blue divisions, containing in all about 75,000 effectives, were to be employed by Grant in the following manner against the 43,000 effectives in Bragg’s seven divisions. Sherman’s effort on the left was still to be the main one, his orders being “to secure the heights on the northern extremity [of Missionary Ridge] to about the railroad tunnel before the enemy can concentrate against him,” then drive southward down the crest, dislodging graybacks as he went. To assist in this, Thomas would menace the rebel center, fixing the defenders in position, and Howard would hold his corps “in readiness to act either with [Thomas] or with Sherman.” Hooker meanwhile would deliver a secondary attack on the far right, and if successful—although this seemed unlikely, considering the difficulties of terrain on that quarter of the field—was to cross Lookout Mountain and Chattanooga Valley for a descent on Rossville, where he would turn sharp left and, matching Sherman’s effort from the opposite direction, sweep northward up Missionary Ridge; at which point in the proceedings, with the rebel army clamped firmly between the two attackers north and south, Thomas’s feint against the center might be converted into a true assault that would mean the end of Bragg.
One possible source of difficulty was a growing bitterness between the Federal armies, especially those of the East and West. “The Potomac men and ours never meet without some very hard talk,” one of Sherman’s veterans wrote home. Westerners jeered at Easterners as paper-collar soldiers. “Bull Run!” they hooted, as if they themselves had never been whipped in battle. Resentful of the fact that the “Virginians,” as they sometimes referred to these transfers from the eastern theater, had always had first call on new equipment and such luxuries as the quartermaster afforded, they would remark as they slogged past Hooker’s bivouacs: “Fall back on your straw and fresh butter,” and they would add, looking rearward over their shoulders: “What elegant corpses they’ll make in those fine clothes!” After this would come the ultimate insult, delivered sotto voce from the roadside as the Easterners minced by: “All quiet on the Potomac.” The latter in turn were disdainful, looking down their noses at the western soldiers, who preferred Confederate-style blanket rolls to knapsacks, walked with the long, loose-jointed stride of plowmen, and paid their officers little deference. “Except for the color of their uniforms, they looked exactly like the rebels,” a New Yorker observed with unconcealed distaste. Individual confrontations were likely to produce at least a verbal skirmish. One of Blair’s men, for example, wandering over for a look at Slocum’s camps, was surprised to see the corps insignia—a five-pointed star—sewn or glued or stenciled onto practically everything in sight, from the flat crowns of forage caps to the tailgates of wagons. “Are you all brigadier generals?” he inquired, in real or feigned amazement. An Easterner explained that this was their corps badge, and asked: “What’s yours?” The Westerner bristled. No such device had been known out here before, but he was unwilling to be outdone. “Badge, is it?” he sno
rted. For emphasis, he slapped the leather ammunition pouch he wore on his belt, just over his liver. “There, by Jesus! Forty rounds in the cartridge box and twenty in the pocket.” In time, that would become his own XV Corps insignia—a cartridge box inscribed “Forty Rounds”—but tempers were not sweetened by such exchanges, in which neither antagonist took any care to disguise his low opinion of the other as a dude or a backwoodsman.
Nor were matters improved when the men of the three armies learned of their respective assignments in Grant’s plan for lifting the siege of Chattanooga. This applied in particular to members of the Army of the Cumberland, whose role it was to stand on the defensive, merely bristling, while the other two armies “rescued” them by attacking on the left and right. Perhaps, too, they had heard by now of Grant’s expressed concern that “they could not be got out of their trenches to assume the offensive.” On top of all this, Thomas himself was hopping mad: not at Grant, though doubtless he masked some resentment he must have felt in that direction, but at Bragg, whose headquarters were plainly visible on the crest of the ridge across the way. A letter had arrived from the North for a Confederate officer, and Thomas, having determined that it was harmless from the security point of view, sent it through the lines with a note attached, requesting his one-time battery commander to pass it along. The letter came back promptly, with a curt indorsement on the note: “Respectfully returned to General Thomas. General Bragg declines to have any intercourse with a man who has betrayed his State.” Thomas was incensed. “Damn him,” he fumed; “I’ll be even with him yet.” Sherman, who was present, observed that the Virginian’s poise, reputed to be impervious to shock, was shakable after all, at least when he was touched where he was tender. “He was not so imperturbable as the world supposes,” the Ohioan testified years later, recalling Old Pap’s reaction to the snub from his former superior and friend.