THE BATTLE OF STONES RIVER
NO BETTER PLACE TO DIE
Peter Cozzens
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Urbana and Chicago
First Illinois paperback, 1991
© 1990 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights resesrved
Manufactured in the United States of America
4 5 6 7 8 C P 12 11 10
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cozzens, Peter, 1957–
No better place to die : the Battle of Stones River / Peter Cozzens.
p. cm.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-252-01652-1 (cl : alk. paper)/ISBN 978-0-252-1652-3
ISBN 0-252-06229-9 (pbk : alk. paper)/ISBN 978-0-252-06229-2
ISBN 0-252-02236-X (boxed set)/ISBN 978-0-252-02236-4
1. Murfreesboro, Battle of, 1862–1863. I. Title.
E474.77.C69
973.7'33—dc19 89-30577
CIP
CONTENTS
LIST OF MAPS
PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ONE / SUMMER OF HOPE, AUTUMN OF DESPAIR
TWO / THE ROSECRANS TOUCH
THREE / A HASTY ADVANCE
FOUR / WE LIVED LIKE LORDS
FIVE / TO MURFREESBORO
SIX / THE LINES WERE FORMING
SEVEN / BOYS, THIS IS FUN
EIGHT / MATTERS LOOKED PRETTY BLUE NOW
NINE / THE REBELS WERE FALLING LIKE LEAVES OF AUTUMN
TEN / ROSECRANS RALLIES THE RIGHT
ELEVEN / OUR BOYS WERE FORCED BACK IN CONFUSION
TWELVE / WHIRLWIND IN THE ROUND FOREST
THIRTEEN / WE LAID TO REST POOR BOYS GONE
FOURTEEN / THUNDER ON THE LEFT
FIFTEEN / THIS ARMY SHOULD BE PROMPTLY PUT IN RETREAT
SIXTEEN / BRAGG'S ARMY? HE'S GOT NONE
APPENDIX / THE OPPOSING FORCES IN THE STONES RIVER CAMPAIGN
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
SUBJECT INDEX
INDEX OF PERSONAL NAMES
MAPS
Middle Tennessee
Situation, 26 December, P.M.
The Opposing Armies on the Eve of Battle
31 December, 6:22 A.M., McCown Shatters the Union Right
7:30 A.M., Collapse of Johnson's Reserve
8:00 A.M., The Battle Comes to Sheridan
10:00 A.M., Sheridan's Final Position
1:00 P.M., Hardee at High Tide
2:00 P.M., Hazen Holds the Round Forest
2 January, 4:00 P.M., Breckinridge Attacks
4:45 P.M., Mendenhall Saves the Left
PREFACE
HISTORIANS have devoted more attention to the Civil War than to any other struggle in our nation's history. Gettysburg alone has been the subject of hundreds of books and articles; scores have been devoted to such lesser battles as Shiloh and Chancellorsville. By contrast, Stones River has been the subject of only three book-length studies, two of which were written by Northern eyewitnesses so decidedly partisan as to make their works of little value.
No account has fully told the story of this important campaign. From a tactical perspective, none has traced troop movements below the division and occasionally brigade level. The five-day Federal advance from Nashville and Bragg's response to it similarly have been neglected. And such critical moments of the battle itself as Phil Sheridan's defense of the Wilkinson Pike line, judged by many to be among the most determined stands against overwhelming numbers of the war, or Breckinridge's attack on the Federal left, a doomed assault with the poignancy of Pickett's charge, have remained shrouded in uncertainty.
I wrote No Better Place to Die to fill this gap in our understanding of the war. I have traced the campaign in its entirety, from its beginnings in Bragg's disastrous invasion of Kentucky to the dissension that rent the Army of Tennessee in the months following Stones River. The movement and combat of individual regiments, the character and generalship of commanders, the choices and constraints confronting leaders as the battle developed, and the larger impact of Stones River on the outcome of the war—I have tried to address each of these elements of the campaign in detail.
In general, I have treated the campaign chronologically. Although not formally divided into parts, this book may be considered segmentally. Chapters 1 through 4 provide background: they describe the state of both armies following the battle of Perryville, introduce the primary actors, and explain the planning and preparation that preceded the campaign. In chapters 5 and 6, the campaign unfolds as the Army of the Cumberland advances on Murfreesboro. Chapters 7 through 15 are devoted to the battle itself. The final chapter presents an evaluation of the impact of Stones River and its effects on the contending armies. An appendix following the main text lists the opposing forces in the Stones River campaign.
Although Stones River was a tactical draw, it had far-reaching consequences. The impact of Stones River on the Confederacy was decidedly negative. Not only were some ten thousand irreplaceable veterans killed, wounded, or captured, but Tennessee was effectively lost and the high command of the South's principal Western army hopelessly divided.
For the Union the results were felt less on the battlefield, where over thirteen thousand were lost, or in the army high command than on the home front and abroad. Bragg's retreat after the battle gave the North a victory at a time when defeat would have made the Emancipation Proclamation look like the last gasp of a dying war effort and perhaps brought England and France into the war on the side of the Confederacy.
Stones River is worthy of study on another, more personal level as well. In few other battles were the characters of the commanding generals so completely eccentric. And in fewer still did the level of support offered each commander differ so greatly. Although a scarcity of resources plagued Southern field commanders throughout the war, during Stones River this normal state of want was heightened by the policies of an administration that acted as though Tennessee were a strategic backwater, rather than the key to the Confederate heartland. As Thomas Connelly ably demonstrated in his seminal study of the Army of Tennessee, Autumn of Glory, Richmond routinely accorded the army “second-class treatment” and acted without a sound appreciation of Western problems. Compounding Bragg's difficulties was an administrative system that divided the West into highly legalistic departments that the Army of Tennessee was expected to defend but from which it could draw neither food, nor recruits, nor equipment. Even within his own geographical department, Bragg faced competition for resources. While he was driving north through Kentucky in the fall of 1862, Confederate Commissary General Lucius Northrop's agents were combing Middle Tennessee for corn, wheat, cattle, and hogs. Able to offer more than Bragg's agents, they diverted much of the region's foodstuffs to the commissary depot in Atlanta for use by Lee's army.
If those in Richmond were indifferent to the fate of Bragg and his army, a majority of the senior officers of the Army of Tennessee behaved in a manner openly destructive of both it and the authority of the commanding general. In the weeks following Perryville, Bragg faced a cabal that grew increasingly militant. Led by Leonidas Polk, the group worked through informal channels and a myriad of subgroupings to engineer Bragg's removal. Polk maintained a regular correspondence with sympathizers in Richmond, while Tennessean Ben Cheatham, Kentuckian John C. Breckinridge, and others appealed to the support they enjoyed at home and from home-state regiments that constituted personal armies within the army.
Bragg, then, faced both
dissension from inside the army and the cavalier support of an often indifferent administration in Richmond. Rosecrans, on the other hand, labored under no such handicaps. Although some—most notably Grant—doubted his fitness for high command, most were willing to give him a chance to prove himself. From the day he assumed command of the Army of the Cumberland, Rosecrans never wanted for the essential material of war. Washington filled his interminable requests—for pontoon bridges, repeating rifles, more pontoons, more rifles—as rapidly as the War Department was able, asking only that he use the equipment in battle. And although Rosecrans had his share of incompetent subordinates, of whom Thomas Crittenden and Alexander McCook as wing commanders were shining examples, he did not have to worry that personal enmity or the ambitions of factious lieutenants would stand in the way of the rapid execution of his orders.
As you follow the two armies to the banks of Stones River, bear in mind these considerations. Perhaps then you will agree with me that it is not surprising that Rosecrans won or that Bragg lost, but that Rosecrans came so close to defeat, and Bragg so near victory.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE staffs of a number of institutions have been most helpful in the conduct of my research for this book. I especially wish to thank Bonnie Demick and Rose Hane of the Seymour Library, Knox College, for their assistance during my numerous visits to the Ray D. Smith Civil War Collection, held by the college. I would also like to thank the staff of the U.S. Military History Institute at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, not only for manuscript materials cited in the bibliography, but also for generously providing photocopies of passages from regimental histories and personal narratives not otherwise available. Similarly, I am grateful to the staff of the War Library and Museum of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, Philadelphia, for copies of articles carried in MOLLUS publications. I also wish to thank Mrs. T. D. Winstead of the Hardin County Historical Society, Elizabethtown, Kentucky, for making available materials pertaining to the Orphan Brigade's participation in the battle. I also wish to thank Mike Mullins for his many thoughtful suggestions as he read the manuscript.
Finally, I wish to express my deepest gratitude to Dan Weinberg, proprietor of the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop in Chicago, for his interest and assistance in seeing this manuscript brought to publication.
CHAPTER ONE
SUMMER OF HOPE, AUTUMN OF DESPAIR
GENERAL Braxton Bragg needed a scapegoat. Defeat in Kentucky had cast a pall over his army and the nation; retreat into Tennessee transformed the loss into a clamor for the general's dismissal. For much of this, Bragg had only himself to blame. His buoyant predictions of victory and subsequent rapid advance into Kentucky had excited the imagination and hopes of the Confederate people who, reading the exuberant dispatches emanating from the Army of the Mississippi as it pushed northward, came to expect nothing less than the total restoration of Confederate authority over the border region. The sudden collapse of the autumn campaign, coming in the wake of Lee's withdrawal from Maryland, left them profoundly shaken, and their shattered expectations erupted into a wave of censure that none were more anxious to ride than Bragg's own most-senior lieutenants. As the army filed through the Cumberland Gap and out of Kentucky, lieutenant generals William J. Hardee and Leonidas Polk urged President Davis to recognize that only a change of commanders could save the army and salvage Confederate fortunes in the West. Their allegations echoed throughout the South. In Richmond, “earnest and angry” debate shook the floor of the Confederate Congress as members endorsed a resolution reflecting the demands of Hardee and Polk. The Southern press, never known for its self-restraint, quickly added its voice to the clamor.
As much as he might wish to protect his longtime friend, Davis could not ignore the demands of the general's defamers, who were legion and powerful. On the other hand, the president had no intention of relieving Bragg without a hearing, and so he summoned the general to Richmond to present his version of the campaign. Bragg lost no time. Perhaps sensing an opportunity to shift blame for the Kentucky debacle to his subordinates, he boarded an eastbound train out of Knoxville the morning after Davis's message was delivered to him.1
Although many were only too anxious to heap responsibility for the sorry state of affairs in the West on the North Carolinian's shoulders, his abandonment of Kentucky was merely the culmination of a chain of events predating Bragg that had left the Confederate heartland vulnerable, its people fearful and discouraged. In fact, many thoughtful Southerners believed that the nadir actually had been reached four months earlier, in June 1862, when Pierre G. T. Beauregard's Army of the Mississippi, principal defender of the heartland, relinquished Corinth to three converging Union armies without firing a shot, thereby conceding the northern tip of Mississippi, and with it the vital Memphis and Charleston Railroad. Not only did Beauregard's withdrawal result in the cutting of a rail artery that had pumped supplies critical to the survival of the Confederacy eastward to the Atlantic, but it opened the way to a Federal advance on Chattanooga, gateway to the Deep South.
It was at this moment, under the shadow of impending doom, that Braxton Bragg replaced Beauregard as commander of the Army of the Mississippi, then lying idle at Tupelo. Several weeks later, he was elevated to command of all Confederate forces between Mississippi and Virginia.
Bragg faced three immediate challenges: he must protect Chattanooga, reopen the Memphis and Charleston Railroad, and recover at least a portion of Tennessee.
As the defense of Chattanooga was most urgent, Bragg rushed the division of Major General John P. McCown to the threatened city. After several weeks of correspondence with the commander of the Department of East Tennessee, Major General Edmund Kirby Smith, Bragg elected to transfer his entire army to Chattanooga. In doing so, he countered an advance against the city by Major General Don Carlos Buell's Army of the Ohio, which, despite a head start of over a month, had moved at a snail's pace.
With Chattanooga secure, Bragg met Kirby Smith on 31 July, ostensibly to discuss future operations. But if Kirby Smith had expected to have a voice in what was about to transpire, he was disappointed—the North Carolinian had already decided on his next move. Since assuming command of the Army of the Mississippi, Bragg had entertained a number of Kentucky's leading citizens, all of whom offered assurance of their state's fidelity and of the willingness of her men to join the Confederate service, should Bragg's army but appear on bluegrass soil. Bragg was convinced. A successful thrust into the state, he believed, not only would relieve pressure on the Deep South, but would return much of Tennessee to the Confederacy. And, if his Kentucky guests were correct, his army would be augmented by thousands of desperately needed volunteers. For the moment Bragg's enthusiasm was contagious, and Kirby Smith returned to his Knoxville headquarters committed to a joint advance. Before leaving, he told Bragg: “I will not only cooperate with you, but will cheerfully place my command under you subject to your orders.”2
Despite the apparent agreement between Bragg and Kirby Smith, their subordinates doubted the prospects of a campaign in which neither general commanded the other, and in which neither was willing to relinquish his autonomy, Kirby Smith's pledge to the contrary notwithstanding. As Bragg's chief of cavalry, Brigadier General Joseph Wheeler, later wrote, mere agreement as to intent was a poor substitute for unified command, particularly in an operation calling for the synchronized movement of two armies.3
But could Bragg have exercised such authority effectively had it been his? Contemporaries were skeptical. The dyspeptic martinet was having trouble enough with his own subordinates. Witness the experience of Major General Richard Taylor, son of former president Zachary Taylor and a shrewd observer, who visited army headquarters in Chattanooga just prior to the invasion of Kentucky. At dinner one evening, Taylor inquired casually about a widely esteemed division commander. In the presence of his staff, Bragg retorted that the officer in question was “an old woman, utterly worthless.” Taylor was shocked. “Such a declara
tion privately made would have been serious,” he noted, “but publicly, and certain to be repeated, it was astonishing.” Retiring with Bragg to a private room, Taylor asked with whom he intended to replace the general. With no one, Bragg answered. “I have but one or two fitted for high command, and have in vain asked the War Department for capable people.” From that moment Taylor doubted that the Kentucky campaign would succeed.4
Taylor's encounter was painfully typical of dealings people had with the commanding general. Bragg seemed to repel men with disarming ease. To the visiting Englishman Arthur Freemantle, he was “the least prepossessing of the Confederate generals.” Photographs of Bragg confirm this. Bushy black eyebrows and a stubby, iron-grey beard were the only distinguishing features of an otherwise plain, almost cadaverous countenance, the work of years of dyspepsia, dysentery, and chronic headaches, afflictions that also conspired to sour his temper and enfeeble him, so much so, according to an intimate, that he was unable to endure long periods of stress or responsibility. Richard Taylor agreed. He suggested simply that Bragg “furnished a striking illustration of the necessity of a healthy body for a sound intellect.” Even Bragg's staunchest supporters admonished him for his quick temper, general irritability, and tendency to wound innocent men with barbs thrown during his frequent fits of anger. His reluctance to praise or flatter was exceeded, we are told, only by the tenacity with which, once formed, he clung to an adverse impression of a subordinate. For such officers—and they were many in the Army of the Mississippi—Bragg's removal or their transfer were the only alternatives to an unbearable existence.
As their leaders endured Bragg's indignities, so the men in ranks suffered the more palpable sting of the general's rigid and unyielding brand of discipline. The “martinet of the old army” had a reputation, not entirely gratuitous, for shooting liberally for insubordination, as the following story, then circulating throughout the army and the country, demonstrates. During the retreat from Shiloh, when absolute stealth was imperative, Bragg directed that no gun be discharged, death being the penalty for disobedience. A drunk young Rebel chose to flout the order with a few random shots at a chicken along the roadside. The chicken escaped unscathed, but not so the soldier, who was summarily shot for having betrayed the route of march. Not surprisingly, given the army's antipathy to Bragg, the incident became exaggerated in the telling. The unlucky soldier was said to have been condemned by Bragg for having killed a chicken. Similar tales followed. Some whispered that the commanding general had had a man shot for stealing apples, others insisted that he had hanged sixteen more from a single tree for an unspecified offense. It is pointless to demonstrate the absurdity of these accusations. What is significant is that many men within the Army of the Mississippi believed them, and that is more damning to Bragg's reputation than a score of battlefield reverses.5
No Better Place to Die- The Battle of Stones River Page 1