Buell might have survived the vendetta of Morton and Johnson, had it not been for Perryville. But that indecisive bloodbath, followed by the army's sluggish pursuit of Bragg, allowed the two governors to deliver the fatal blow. On 21 October, Morton sent Lincoln what was in effect an ultimatum: Replace Buell or lose the Northwest. It read: “An officer, just arrived from Louisville, announced that Bragg has escaped with his army into east Tennessee, and that Buell's army is countermarching to Lebanon. The butchery of our troops at Perryville was terrible. Nothing but success speedy and decided, will save our cause from utter destruction. In the Northwest distrust and dispair are seizing upon the hearts of the people.”
To Lincoln the solution was obvious, the more so as he himself had lost patience with Buell. Like Morton and Johnson, he was angry that Bragg had been allowed to withdraw without a decisive battle having been fought. To prevent further damage to Union morale, Lincoln issued peremptory orders instructing Buell to give chase over the mountains and into eastern Tennessee. He reminded the general of the importance of securing an area in which the largely loyal population already had suffered considerably at the hands of Confederate guerrillas, adding that the Army of the Ohio certainly could march anywhere Bragg's army did.
But Lincoln's admonitions went unheeded. Insisting that any advance be made from Nashville, Buell turned his army westward as soon as the last Rebel disappeared into the Cumberland Mountains. Lincoln had had enough. Motivated also by a desire to remove as many McClellan supporters as possible from the Union high command, he relieved Buell on 24 October, naming in his place Major General William Starke Rosecrans. Speaking for Governor Richard Yates of Illinois as well as for himself, Morton sent Lincoln the following telegram the next day: “We were to start tonight to Washington to confer with you about Kentucky affairs. The removal of General Buell and appointment of Rosecrans came not a moment too soon…. The action you have taken renders our visit unnecessary.”2
Rosecrans joined the army at Bowling Green on 30 October. The same general order that brought Rosecrans to the army also changed its name. The Army of the Ohio was now the Fourteenth Army Corps, composed of a left wing, right wing, and center. It was to be the principal Union force in the new Department of the Cumberland, embracing all of Tennessee east of the Tennessee River and such parts of northern Alabama and Georgia as might be taken by Federal arms. Long since lost to history, the title Fourteenth Army Corps proved to be a temporary designation. On 9 January 1863—a week after Stones River—the army was renamed the Army of the Cumberland, the name it was to carry to the war's end, and its wings became corps.3 (In keeping with tradition, the Union army at Stones River hereafter will be referred to as the Army of the Cumberland, despite its official designation as the Fourteenth Army Corps at the time of the battle.)
The change of names probably left the men unmoved, but they heartily applauded the change of commanders. “We were glad to be delivered of Buell,” wrote the sergeant major of the Fifty-first Indiana. “However good a military man General Buell may have been…he never won the love, and entirely lost the confidence, of the army he commanded,” noted Robert Stewart of the Fifteenth Ohio. “There was silent rejoicing everywhere when Rosecrans took his place.” The officers agreed. “I have just been up to Rosecrans's headquarters and had a shake of the old fellow's hand,” Colonel Hans C. Heg of the Fifteenth Wisconsin wrote just after the general's arrival. “You don't know how pleased everybody is at the change of Buell for him.” Colonel John Beatty of the Third Ohio was also favorably impressed. He characterized the army's new commander as “an educated officer, who has rubbed much against the world.”4
As much as the army delighted in the change, it was not entirely sure what to make of its eccentric new commander. At first glance, Rosecrans seemed typical of the generals who had come before him. There was little in his background to suggest eccentricity. Like most Union officers of comparable rank, Rosecrans had attended the United States Military Academy, where he graduated fifth in a class of fifty-six in 1842. Routine assignments followed. The Ohioan spent one year at Fortress Monroe and seven years along the eastern seaboard supervising the construction of various wharf, harbor, and coastal fortifications, with a three-year stint as an instructor at West Point sandwiched in between. In November 1853 his health broke down, and Rosecrans resigned his commission the following April.
“The next seven years,” Ohio journalist Whitelaw Reid wrote, “were to Lieutenant Rosecrans years of more varied than profitable activity.” He enjoyed modest success, first as president of the Canal Coal Company of Cincinnati, then at the head of the Cincinnati Coal Oil Company. While with the coal company he invented a round lamp wick and a new method of manufacturing soap; at the coal oil company he labored after-hours in his laboratory trying to perfect a pure, odorless oil. During one such experiment a safety lamp exploded, and Rosecrans was so badly burned that he was bedridden for eighteen months.
Rosecrans's recovery coincided with the outbreak of the war. Major General George B. McClellan, commander of the Ohio militia, immediately requested his appointment as staff engineer officer, but Governor William Dennison had other ideas. He assigned to Rosecrans the task of procuring arms for the state's newly recruited volunteer regiments. On 21 June 1861 Rosecrans received a much-desired field commission as colonel of the Twenty-third Ohio; four days later he was elevated to the rank of brigadier general in the Regular Army. McClellan again requested his services. This time Little Mac was successful, and Rosecrans performed admirably under him at Rich Mountain in western Virginia, where his discovery of an obscure mountain path around the Confederate flank resulted in a spectacular Union victory. When McClellan was called to Washington after Bull Run, Rosecrans assumed command of the Department of West Virginia. There he remained until April 1862, when he too was summoned to Washington. After only three short weeks in the office of the secretary of war, Rosecrans was back in the field commanding a portion of Grant's army at Corinth. There on 4 October he defeated a Confederate attempt to take the city and cut Grant's line of communications in Mississippi. For this timely victory he was given command of the Department of the Cumberland.5
Despite Rosecrans's conventional background, the army learned quickly that its new commanding general was anything but moderate in temperament. Erudite, animated, indefatigable, Rosecrans possessed many of the qualities of genius. But he could also be indiscreet, intolerant, and mercurial, with an impulsiveness that suggested instability under pressure. The Ohioan's idiosyncratic personality elicited strong reactions from those with whom he came in contact, and a person's opinion of the general depended largely on which side of himself Rosecrans chose to reveal most often in the observer's presence. To Left Wing commander Thomas Crittenden, Rosecrans was “of the first order of military mind…both brave and generous.” The normally critical J. Warren Keifer thought him a “great soldier,” a “man of many attainments.” But even his staunchest supporters acknowledged the general's shortcomings. Attributing Rosecrans's gallantry under fire to his impulsiveness, Crittenden believed it at the same time a serious liability, as it led him to issue too many orders during combat.
Critics took Crittenden's observation one step further. Contemporary accounts suggest that Rosecrans was hampered by stuttering—that he stammered and faltered even while routinely addressing a line of soldiers during a review. In combat, if his defamers may be believed, his stuttering rendered him incoherent. Said New York Herald correspondent William Shanks: “I have known him, when merely directing an orderly to carry a dispatch from one point to another, grow so excited, vehement, and incoherent as to utterly confound the messenger. In great danger as in small things, this nervousness incapacitated him from the intelligible direction of his officers or effective execution of his plans.”6
Although Shanks seldom had anything good to say about anyone, there was more than a little truth in his allegation, as shown by the following unfortunate incident involving Colonel John Beatty, a victim
of the general's rage in a situation that scarcely merited such vehemence. Lying in his tent one night after Stones River, Beatty was awakened by an unexpected caller who introduced himself as an officer from Stokes's Chicago Board of Trade Battery. The officer claimed to have been ordered to report to Beatty for a reconnaissance mission. Having no knowledge of any such mission, Beatty dismissed the matter as a case of mistaken identity and suggested to the officer that he report instead to Brigadier General Sam Beatty of Van Cleve's division. The officer followed Beatty's advice. The Ohioan had just fallen back to sleep when there came another knock at his tent door. Assuming it to be the same importunate young officer, Beatty again told him to see Sam Beatty. The tired colonel thought no more of the incident until the following morning, when he was handed a note directing him to conduct a reconnaissance toward Nashville with a regiment of infantry and Stokes's battery, a reconnaissance that was to have begun nine hours earlier. Realizing his error, Beatty rode at once to army headquarters to explain to the commanding general the reasons for his failure to undertake the reconnaissance. Rosecrans flew into a rage. In the presence of fellow officers and civilians he chastised Beatty in language “most ungentlemanly, abusive, and insulting.” Beatty's first impulse was to strike his commanding general. Thinking the better of it, he instead turned and left the room as quickly as possible. “Death would have had few terrors for me just then,” he recalled later. “I had never felt such bitter mortification before, and it seemed to me that I was utterly and irreparably disgraced.” Beatty was a scrupulous officer whose recollections are forthright and honest. We therefore may assume the incident to have occurred as presented.7
But there was another side to Rosecrans's character. The same nervous energy that rendered him “incomprehensible” under the stress of combat and produced outbursts of rage made him a voracious worker under routine conditions. “Labor was a constitutional necessity with him,” wrote W. D. Bickham of the Cincinnati Commercial. Rosecrans began the duty day at 10:00 A.M.—rising earlier on Sundays and Wednesdays to attend mass—and worked well into the night, seldom retiring before 2:00 A.M. and often laboring until dawn. In the field, to the chagrin of his staff, the commanding general was apt to be the first out of his blankets in the morning and the last to dismount at night. Nor did the completion of the day's work, in garrison or in the field, necessarily promise a respite for Rosecrans's weary staff. As Bickham observed while a guest at army headquarters throughout the Stones River campaign: “When lectures were concluded, orders executed, correspondence all disposed of, somewhere about midnight—an hour earlier or later was altogether immaterial—dull care was dismissed and pleasure assumed supremacy.”
Unfortunately for his staff, the general's idea of pleasure was to keep his young aides, with whom he was affable and affectionate, awake all night while he ruminated aloud on religion in general and Catholicism in particular. To Rosecrans, the Catholic church was supreme and infallible; all other theological systems were mere corruptions of the church. The general brooked no dispute on this point. Having embraced Catholicism over the objections of his staunchly Methodist parents while a cadet at West Point, Rosecrans displayed the sort of dogmatism common in adult converts to any faith. He attended mass faithfully and took his friend and confidant, the Reverend Father Patrick Treacy, to the field so as not to be separated from the rituals of the church.8
Rosecrans, in short, was unique. Perhaps, for all his eccentricities, he was the only true genius to command a Union army in the field; certainly he was among the most colorful.
Whatever the Ohioan's shortcomings, the Army of the Cumberland needed a commander with Rosecrans's energy and enthusiasm in the weeks following Perryville. The Kentucky campaign had shattered morale. Rosecrans found himself faced with regiments that had not been paid in six months, officers without any means of subsisting, and troops deserting by the thousands. Fully one-fourth of the army was absent; some 26,482 were elsewhere by authority, but a startling 6,484 had left without authority, in effect, deserted. Other problems equally serious beset the army. To begin with, the cavalry was useless. By Rosecrans's own estimation, fully half lacked weapons of any kind. As long as the mounted arm of the Army of the Cumberland remained impotent, the security of Confederate lines of communication and supply was guaranteed. Union communication and supply lines were in a shambles by contrast. The railroad between Louisville and Nashville, upon which the Federals were dependent both for supplies from Louisville and communication with Nashville, had been ruined by marauding bands of Rebel cavalry. From the Green River, where Rosecrans's army was concentrated, to Nashville the track was almost entirely wrecked.9
Not only had communications with Nashville been severed, but it appeared that the city itself might fall. Reports received at army headquarters in the early days of November warned that elements of the Army of the Mississippi of unknown strength were threatening the Tennessee capital. Although the force menacing Nashville proved to be nothing more than a small cavalry outfit led by the intrepid John Hunt Morgan, Rosecrans, not knowing this, had to act. Marching orders went out, and the Army of the Cumberland filed onto the road to Nashville. McCook's Right Wing led the way. Breaking camp on 4 November, it entered Nashville three days later, just as the pickets of Brigadier General James Negley's garrison command drove away the last of Morgan's troopers. McCook wired Rosecrans that the city was safe and that the latest intelligence placed the Confederate army at Murfreesboro. A much-relieved Rosecrans rode into the capital six days later.10
Having successfully met the most immediate threat to his command, the Ohioan turned his attention to the army's remaining problems. Rosecrans had provided a glimpse of things to come with the promulgation of General Order Number Four on 3 November, in which he appealed to his officers and men to help him bring the army to “a state of discipline at least equal to that of the Rebels.” That same day the War Department granted him the authority to dismiss officers for “satisfactory military reasons.”
Now, with the army settled into camp around Nashville, Rosecrans applied his authority. Incompetent or otherwise unfit officers were stripped of their rank and marched from camp in the presence of their troops; officers’ leave was slashed drastically and all soldiers, officers and enlisted men alike, were required to present written passes on demand when outside their camps. Within camp, discipline was tightened. Five roll calls now sounded during the duty day; those failing to muster for any were subject to harsh and summary punishment. Camp life also became more regulated, so that the day passed much the same, regardless of the unit to which a soldier was assigned. Every morning between 4:00 and 5:30 A.M. the fife and drum roused the camps with the familiar sound of reveille. The orderly sergeant called roll, and those failing to respond were placed on extra duty. Breakfast followed. After a thorough police of the unit area, sick call was sounded. The orderly sergeant presented the company sick to the regimental surgeon, whose responsibility it was to distinguish the legitimately ill from the malingerers. At 8:00 came guard mount. A part of the detail was assigned to picket duty, the remainder to camp guard. As the guards walked their two-hour shift, stopping all who attempted to leave camp to insure that they had passes signed by the colonel, the extra-duty personnel swept the company area and adjacent grounds. The remainder of the company busied itself with drill until noon, when dinner was served. Battalion drill followed dinner and continued until 4:00 P.M., when the men broke for supper. Additional drill or perhaps a dress parade ended the duty day, and tatoo sounded at 9:00 P.M.11
All of these actions had the effect Rosecrans desired. Morale improved. Being more evenly distributed through the ranks, his brand of discipline succeeded where Buell's had failed. Sensing the change, the men rapidly developed respect for their new commander.
Their respect turned to affection as Rosecrans made his presence felt in the camps. Despite his aversion to public speaking, the Ohioan seemed to enjoy reviewing and inspecting the troops. He would examine their equipment wi
th the exactitude of a drill sergeant. The private without a canteen was asked when it was lost and why another had not been obtained. If he replied that he was unable to get one, Rosecrans enjoined him to go to his captain and demand the item: “Bore him for it! Bore him in his quarters! Bore him at meal time! Bore him in bed! Bore him; bore him; bore him.” The captain was to bore his colonel, the colonel his brigade commander, the brigadier his division commander, the division commander his wing commander, until it reached the commanding general himself. “I'll see then,” Rosecrans said, “if you don't get what you want.” Whether done for “theatrical effect,” as Shanks suggested, or sincere, the men appreciated the attention that Rosecrans gave them.12
Rosecrans followed his own advice in seeking to improve his cavalry. As his troops were to bore their superiors for needed equipment, so Rosecrans doggedly appealed to the War Department in the early days of November. To properly arm his troopers he demanded from Stanton five thousand repeating rifles, of which he eventually received three thousand. And with only half of his assigned cavalry present for muster—a portion of these being “chiefly valuable for their capacity to evade danger and good service”—Rosecrans pleaded for a chief of cavalry capable of restoring order and discipline. His object was the talented David Stanley, then commanding a division under Grant. Rosecrans applied for Stanley's services with an annoying persistence, alternately writing Henry Halleck and Edwin Stanton, until in late November his request was granted.13
No Better Place to Die- The Battle of Stones River Page 3