Dixie Victorious: An Alternate history of the Civil War

by Peter Tsouras

  *29.

  Prentiss and Perry, From Manassas to Manila Bay, pp. 361–4.

  *30.

  Carter R. Powell, Carolina Cavaliers: The Civil War Career of the First North Carolina Cavalry, 1861–1863 (Durham, NC, 1972), p. 198.

  *31.

  OR, I, p. 27, pt. 1: pp. 567–8; pt. 3: pp. 1112, 1115, 1118–9. Following his hospitalization in Washington, D.C., Buford appeared to recover from his wound but took a turn for the worse in September. When told he could not survive, he supposedly alluded to the outcome at Reading and remarked: “I don’t care to live now, anyway.” See Peter Penn Gaskell, Service under Buford, Gregg, and Pleasanton [sic] (Elizabeth, NJ, 1869), p. 47.

  32.

  Cheney, Ninth New York Cavalry, pp. 109–12; Moyer, Seventeenth Pennsylvania Cavalry, pp. 63–5.

  *33.

  OR, I, 27, pt. 2: p. 819; Prentiss and Perry, From Manassas to Manila Bay, p. 380.

  *34.

  James Lee Coates, Gettysburg: The Beginning of the End (Boston, 1959), pp. 314–21.

  *35.

  Ibid., pp. 326–33.

  *36.

  Ibid.

  *37.

  David Yellin, Debacle at Pipe Creek (Garden City, NY, 1977), pp. 311–26. A revisionist account of the combat of July 15 is Bruce D. Venter, Kilpatrick the Superb (Shippensburg, PA, 2003), pp. 217–20, 454 and note.

  *38.

  Lafayette McLaws, “The Pipe Creek Campaign, July 5–30, 1863,” in Markham and Royce, Campaigns and Commanders, 4: pp. 609–18.

  *39.

  Yellin, Debacle at Pipe Creek, pp. 374–7; Richard Krauthamel, ed., “A ‘High Old Time’ on the Susquehanna: The Journal of Capt. G. W. Albritton, 3d Virginia Cavalry,” Military Annals of Pennsylvania 7 (May 1938): pp. 116–7.

  *40.

  McLaws, “Pipe Creek Campaign,” in Markham and Royce, Campaigns and Commanders, pp. 629–35; Charles O. Stambaugh, ed., Philadelphia and the Crisis of ’63: Eyewitness Accounts (Philadelphia, 1913), pp. 354–67. Historians almost universally condemn Meade for his timidity and vacillation throughout the operations of July and August. For a more sympathetic view, see Ted Zeman, Meade: Soldier, Savior, Scapegoat (Baton Rouge, LA, 2002) and Zeman’s “The Snapping Turtle Snaps: George G. Meade in the Pipe Creek Campaign,” in Russell F. Weigley and Richard J. Sommers, eds., New Directions in American Military History (Bloomington, Ind, 2003), pp. 114–52.

  *41.

  The literature on the righting in Berks County is voluminous. The most recent book-length treatment is Donald M. Lawless and Corinne Jacobs Lawless, Climax at Reading (New York, 2002), although nearly 50 years after its publication, the standard account remains that of the British historian C.J.T. Howlett-Pryce, Glory’s Last Stand: The Battle of Reading, September 10–11, 1863 (London and New York, 1956). See also: Gary Gallagher, ed., Even More Essays on the Battle of Reading, September 10–11, 1863 (Kent, Ohio, 1998).

  *42.

  Lee, Memoirs, 2:p. 603.

  7

  “MOVES TO GREAT

  ADVANTAGE”

  Longstreet vs. Grant

  in the West

  John D. Burtt

  “I desire to go to the west because there seems to be opportunities for all kinds of moves to great advantage.”

  General James Longstreet to Senator Louis Wigfall, February 4, 1863

  Dawn broke clear and cold in the northern Georgia forest on Monday, September 21, 1863. The acrid smell of smoke from smoldering brushfires drifted through the trees, only slightly masking the stench of death that permeated the area. Out of sight of the clearing lay the detritus of war: shattered trees, abandoned cannon, rifles and haversacks, dead horses and the Union and Confederate casualties from two days of savage fighting. The toll would ultimately reach over 34,000. Chickamauga Creek had indeed been a “River of Death.”

  Confederate Lieutenant General James Longstreet, commander of the Left Wing of Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee, stood talking to his aides, Colonels Moxley Sorrel and Payton Manning, about his plans for continuing the battle when a staff officer rode up and saluted.

  “General Longstreet, sir! General Bragg’s compliments, sir, and would you attend him at his headquarters immediately.”

  “My compliment to General Bragg,” replied Longstreet. “I fear I cannot leave my troops with the enemy still at my front. Please inform the general I will attend him as soon as the situation has cleared.”

  Instead of saluting and riding back, the major leaned over his horse’s neck and spoke more urgently, “General Bragg has been wounded, sir. We, the army, need you to come now.”

  Frowning, Longstreet turned to Sorrel and issued several orders to go to his division commanders. Then he and Manning mounted and followed the aide to Bragg’s headquarters near Thedford’s Ford.

  General Braxton Bragg tried sitting up in his ambulance when Longstreet appeared, but his doctor kept him still. Bragg had looked sickly and haggard to Longstreet when Longstreet had arrived late on September 19. Now the bloody bandages wrapping his right side accentuated his physical frailty, but had not mellowed the man’s irascible personality.

  “My condolences on your wounds,” Longstreet began.

  “My wounds don’t matter, sir,” Bragg snapped. “The army does. You are in command now, sir. The Army is yours.”

  Startled, Longstreet suppressed a smile. “Surely, one of the others, sir. I have just arrived.”

  “And done more than THEY ever did,” Bragg interrupted, pushing up from his cot. He sagged back. “Hill and Polk… worthless. Couldn’t gettheir troops going. This,” he gestured to his bloody side, “from having to givethe orders myself. Whole plan lost, another battle lost. You are senior, sir, thank God, and you will command.”

  Longstreet walked out of the tent a few minutes later. Awaiting him were the other commanders, Lieutenant Generals Leonidas Polk and his old friend, Daniel Harvey Hill, plus Major General Simon Buckner. He looked at them and said quietly, “Bragg has placed me in command of the Army.”

  Buckner and Hill nodded; Polk hesitated, and Longstreet knew he was comparing seniority of rank. Then the Bishop smiled and said, “Good. While I wish wounds on no man, I cannot help feeling grateful to that Yankee ball.” He turned and gestured north. “Liddell1 put skirmishers out this morning. The Yankees are gone. Forrest2 is looking for them as well.”

  Longstreet nodded. “See to your men, gentlemen. If the enemy is gone from these woods we need to find him.”

  “And when we do?” Hill asked.

  “We finish this fight.”3

  The Situation

  For the fledgling Confederate States of America, the summer of 1863 had not been a good one.

  Fresh from defeating Major General Joseph Hooker and the Union Army of the Potomac at Chancellorsville, General Robert E. Lee led his Army of Northern Virginia into Pennsylvania in June. Lee and Confederate President Jefferson Davis hoped that the invasion would spur on anti-war sentiment in the North and possibly bring foreign assistance to the Confederacy from France and Great Britain. The invasion led to the three-day battle at Gettysburg, where, after success on the first day, Lee’s soldiers tried to dislodge the Union Army, now led by Major General George Meade, from strong positions south of town. On July 3, Meade’s troops repulsed a massed charge by Major General George Pickett’s division and supporting units with nearly half of the 12,000 troops in the attack cut down. Lee retreated the following day leaving fully a third of his army on the field as casualties.

  In the west, after four months of floundering in the marshes and swamps around the Mississippi River fortress of Vicksburg, Union Major General Ulysses S. Grant cut loose from his lines of supply and communication and took his army across the river south of the fortress on May 1, 1863. In the next two weeks, his troops traveled nearly 180 miles, fought five battles and pinned 32,000 Confederate troops in Vicksburg. Seven weeks of siege ended with the surrender of the fortress on July 4, 1863. Although paroled, over 60 percent of Vicks
burg’s defenders simply deserted the Cause.

  Finally, after six months of inactivity following the hard fought victory at Stones River (Murfreesboro, Tennessee) on December 31, 1862—January 2, 1863, Major General William Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland moved against General Braxton Bragg’s Confederate Army of Tennessee. While feinting a direct assault toward Bragg’s base at Tullahoma, Rosecrans maneuvered the bulk of his army onto Bragg’s flank, threatening his lines of communication with the rest of the Confederacy. The move forced Bragg to withdraw from his fortifications and evacuate Middle Tennessee. At the cost of only 560 casualties and ten days, the Army of the Cumberland captured Tennessee’s most productive region.

  Despite these successes, war weariness was striking hard above the Mason-Dixon Line, as well as below, after two bloody years of war. In the North, the anti-war faction of the Democratic Party, titled Copperheads by their Republican opponents, pushed hard against the war. Clement L. Vallandigham, a Peace Democrat from Ohio, stated the problem clearly when asking, “What has this wicked war accomplished?” He became so effective at drumming up opposition that the military commander of Ohio had him arrested and convicted of treason. The arrest and trial embarrassed Lincoln and his administration so much that he commuted the sentence and had Vallandigham simply deported to the Confederacy.

  New draft laws that required all men from ages 20 to 45 to enroll added fuel to the peace effort. Any congressional district that failed to meet troop quotas through volunteers could use the lottery draft to fill the ranks. However, the law allowed draftees to “buy” a replacement soldier, leading to the Democratic charge that Lincoln waged a poor man’s war. Draft riots broke out in Northern cities with the worst being a four-day reign of destruction in New York City.

  In the South, draft laws also caused considerable hardship, but inflation and food shortages hurt far worse. Prices for staples like sugar and salt rose 9,000 percent—when they were available at all. The exhilaration from the early 1863 successes crashed heavily with the losses at Gettysburg, Vicksburg and Tullahoma. Southern governors all screamed for troops to protect their states, and the Confederate military leadership was in shambles. President Davis remained locked in a feud with General Joe Johnston over the loss of Vicksburg; Bragg was feuding with virtually all of his subordinates.

  After the disasters, Davis had to reassess Confederate options. His focus on the East had led to Gettysburg. Other opinions pointed to Middle Tennessee as a viable option for a Confederate counterstroke. General P.T. Beauregard, former commander of the Army of Tennessee, suggested combining Johnston’s Mississippi troops, Simon Buckner’s Eastern Tennessee troops and reinforcement’s from Lee’s Army with Bragg to attack Rosecrans. Lee’s top subordinate, James Longstreet, seconded the idea, which would leave Lee on the defensive in Virginia while he took an independent command to Georgia. Davis finally conceded to that option and ordered Longstreet to take two divisions of his First Corps troops to join with Bragg. Unfortunately, it took another Confederate disaster to force the decision. For, while Davis and his advisors argued, the Union moved first.

  In mid-August, Rosecrans put his troops in motion again in a complicated maneuver aimed at the vital city of Chattanooga. William Starke Rosecrans, a 43-year-old Ohioan, had graduated from West Point in 1842. He had missed the Mexican War, but had performed well under McClellan in West Virginia and under Grant in Mississippi. Best known for his defense of Corinth when attacked by Earl Van Dorn’s Rebel army, he replaced Don Carlos Buell as the head of what became the Army of the Cumberland in November 1862. A month later he clashed with Bragg at Stones River.

  Rosecrans’s August target, Chattanooga, was one of the Confederacy’s most important cities for a variety of strategic reasons. First, it held the junction of three key railroad companies’ systems whose lines radiated out in virtually all directions. Second, it sat as one of the few centers for heavy industry in the South; coal and copper were mined in the nearby mountains and sent throughout the Confederacy. Third, its location allowed access to Knoxville in East Tennessee, and the backdoor of Virginia as well as Georgia and the Deep South. Important strategically, Chattanooga took on an even more important morale role for the battered Confederacy, especially after the loss of Vicksburg. Union leaders knew this well. Abraham Lincoln noted to General-in-Chief Henry Halleck that, if the Union took Chattanooga, “the rebellion can only eke out a short and feeble existence, as an animal sometimes may with a thorn in its vitals.”4

  For his maneuver, Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland consisted of 13 divisions split into four corps. The largest corps, the XIV Corps under Major General George Thomas, consisted of four divisions and 16,000 troops. XX Corps and XXI Corps, under Major Generals Alexander McCook and Thomas Crittenden, each had three divisions and 10,500 and 13,900 respectively. Rosecran’s Reserve Corps, under Gordon Granger, technically held three divisions and 11,600 men, but a full division stayed in Nashville to guard that important city. Finally, the Army of the Cumberland fielded some 10,000 cavalry. One significant part of the cavalry was Colonel John T. Wilder’s Lightning Brigade of mounted infantry. Ostensibly, part of Fourth Division/XIV Corps (4/XIV),5 Wilder’s troopers, armed with Spencer repeating rifles, acted as an independent cavalry brigade most of the time.

  At the same time that Rosecrans began moving toward Chattanooga, Major General Ambrose Burnside attacked through the Cumberland Gap into East Tennessee toward Buckner’s troops in Knoxville. On September 2, the Union took Knoxville as Buckner withdrew his forces to join Bragg. On September 9, Chattanooga fell. The loss of the two cities forced Davis to order Longstreet’s troops to move west, but now their journey went the long way through Atlanta to reach Bragg, doubling the distance they had to travel.

  Under the mistaken impression that he faced a demoralized Army of Tennessee, Rosecrans continued his risky maneuver, with his corps becoming increasingly separated and vulnerable to an attack by a reinforced Bragg. In sharp contrast to Rosecrans’s beliefs, Bragg was preparing to attack his opponent and defeat the separate columns in detail.

  With the belated concurrence of Jefferson Davis, Braxton Bragg’s Army swelled with reinforcements from all over the Confederacy. He ultimately controlled some nine divisions split into corps under Buckner, Polk, D.H. Hill, and Major General William H.T. Walker. Longstreet would add two more divisions when he arrived. Unfortunately for the Confederacy, the status of command in Bragg’s Army, riddled with dissension and bitterness, rendered reinforcement nearly moot. Most of Bragg’s subordinates felt that any order from Bragg was automatically wrong and obedience therefore discretionary. In two separate instances, on September 11 at McLemore’s Cove and on September 13 at Lee and Gordon’s Mill, subordinates bungled attack orders from Bragg or simply disobeyed them. The Union troops escaped the traps, and Rosecrans started to concentrate his army.

  Bragg decided he could wait no longer to attack, despite the fact that all of his reinforcements had yet to arrive. He fielded more than 60,000 troops and for the first time actually outnumbered his Union foe, although he did not know it. He maneuvered to attack on September 18 to interpose his army between Rosecrans and Chattanooga. The attack was only partially successful, with several bridges over Chickamauga Creek captured against a stubborn defense by Union cavalry and Wilder’s mounted infantry. The added delay allowed Rosecrans’s scattered troops to close up and Bragg faced a much larger, more difficult battle the next day.

  Fighting on September 19 became confused in the forests as opposing units blundered into frontal assaults or onto enemy flanks. Both sides fell exhausted by the end of the day. That night Longstreet himself arrived with more troops, bringing Bragg’s army to some 68,000 men minus the day’s casualties. Bragg gave the new arrival command of the army’s Left Wing, a change in command structure that threw more confusion into the Rebel ranks. A dawn attack by Leonidas Polk’s Right Wing fell victim to the confusion and got underway late. Polk’s troops struck hard at the dug-in Union brigades
but lost heavily despite the occasional success at finding an exposed flank.

  Fate stepped in on the side of the Confederacy toward noon. In an effort to close a non-existent gap in his lines, Rosecrans ordered a division to fill it, inadvertently creating a real gap. Longstreet’s massed wing struck this real gap around 11.00 a.m., and shattered half the Union army, sending it reeling back toward Chattanooga. George H. Thomas, commander of the Union XIV Corps, averted total disaster, however, by calmly rallying Union troops on Snodgrass Hill and repulsing everything the Confederates threw at him until late in the afternoon. When September 20 drew to a close, Thomas withdrew toward Chattanooga, leaving the battered, but victorious Rebels in possession of the field. Their victory, however, had cost them almost 25 percent of their strength.

  Longstreet in Command

  Frustrated, James Longstreet stood on Missionary Ridge overlooking Chattanooga, watching Rosecrans’s defeated Union troops preparing to defend the town. Ironically the Confederates had built many of the city’s fortifications themselves when they had hoped to defend it. Minor skirmishing over the past two days had pushed the Union troops out of Rossville and off Lookout Mountain, but the new commander of the Army of Tennessee could see that the initial reports that Rosecrans planned to evacuate the town had been false.

  Longstreet’s initial plan had been to take his army across the Tennessee River north of the city and envelop it from the rear. But his plan proved impossible for a variety of logistical reasons. First, there had been the question of food—his army had little. The railroad from Atlanta was fragile and broke down far too often, delaying the delivery of rations. In addition, the movement of his own troops from Virginia had obstructed food deliveries. Four more of his brigades had just arrived, with one brigade and his artillery train still coming. The second problem was one of transport off the rail. His army was seriously short of wagons to transport supplies forward. Again, his movement from Virginia had magnified the problem because his troops had not brought wagons with them. Finally, the army had no pontoon train, limiting their river crossing points to easily defended fords.