The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

  Hood was in position on the left of Stewart, due west of Alexander’s Bridge. At the height of the uproar to his right front, though he was without orders, he put his two divisions in line abreast, Johnson on the left of Law, and started them forward at about 4 o’clock, by which time the racket up ahead had begun to subside. Tramping westward through the woods and brush, the Texas brigade, on the far right, went past one of Stewart’s Tennessee regiments, which had just returned, blown and bloody, from its brief penetration of the Union line. “Rise up, Tennesseans,” one of the advancing soldiers called, “and see the Texans go in!” Too weary to reply, let alone stand, Stewart’s fought-out infantry lay there panting and watching as Hood’s men swept past them, first the skirmishers, then the solid ranks of the main body, the pride of the Army of Northern Virginia, Lee’s hard hitters who had shattered many a Yankee line, from Gaines Mill to the Devil’s Den. Holding their attack formation as best they could in the heavy woods, these stalwarts broke into the clear near the LaFayette Road, a mile south of where Stewart had crossed it an hour ago, and went with a shout for a blue division drawn up to receive them on the west side of the road, apparently without supports on either flank.

  It was Davis, of McCook. His three brigades were struck by the rebel six with predictable results; for though the bluecoats stood for a time, firing nervously but rapidly into the long line of attackers, the limit of their endurance was soon reached. Both overlapped flanks gave way at once, as if on signal, and the center promptly buckled under the strain. Once more, however, as the unstrung Federals fled westward and the Confederates pursued them to within plain view of the Widow Glenn’s, yelling for all they were worth, a pair of blue divisions—the last two of the ten that would reach the field today—arrived most opportunely from the south, with all the patness of the cavalry in light fiction. Wood’s division of Crittenden’s corps was in the lead, coming down from Lee & Gordon’s Mill, and now it was the rebels who were outflanked; Johnson had to call a halt to meet the menace to his left, as did Law, beyond him on the right. Davis rallied and led his fugitives back into the fight at about the same time Sheridan’s division arrived from Crawfish Springs to tip the balance in favor of the Union. Halted, Johnson had to yield to this new pressure, and Law was obliged to conform: especially when Wilder’s Lightning Brigade, still detached from Reynolds and held by Rosecrans in reserve for such emergencies, added the weight of its multishot carbines to the fray. The two butternut divisions fell back to the east side of the road, which then became and remained the dividing line between the Confederate left and the Federal right. Sheridan, in accordance with his instinct for aggression, tried to press matters with a charge, but was repulsed, and Hood settled into a new line about a mile in advance of his old one. On the right, as the men of the Texas brigade retired through the woods, badly cut up by Wilder’s rapid-fire weapons in the final stage of their withdrawal, they came back to where they had called on Stewart’s blown and bloody Tennesseans to “rise up … and see the Texans go in.” The regiment was still there, fairly well rested from its exertions, and one of its members did not neglect the opportunity thus afforded. “Rise up, Tennesseans,” he called, “and see the Texans come out!”

  By now it was sunset and the third in this sequence of savage attacks was about to be launched at the far end of the line. Summoned for one more go at the Federal left, where the fighting had slacked as if by common consent though the issue was still in doubt, Cleburne left his position opposite Lee & Gordon’s at about the time Stewart’s drive on the enemy center was being repulsed and Hood’s was getting started against the right. Fording the Chickamauga well above Alexander’s Bridge, the use of which would have delayed their march, his men found the spring-fed water icy cold and armpit deep. Wet and chilled, they continued northward through the woods for another four miles to reach their jump-off position just after sundown. Across the way, Thomas now had five divisions, Reynolds having come on to join him while Negley stayed behind to plug the gap created when Van Cleve was driven rearward. “Old Pap,” as the solidly built Virginian’s soldiers liked to call him, had seen to it that Baird and Johnson, who were posted at the extremity of his line, were braced for the assault he was convinced would be renewed before the day was over, while Palmer, Reynolds, and Brannan, who continued his line southward in that order, were warned to be ready to lend a hand. When the sun went down behind Missionary Ridge and no new attack had developed, they began to tell each other he was wrong; until Cleburne exploded out of the darkling woods, directly in front of Baird and Johnson, and proved him emphatically right. The three gray brigades were in line abreast, covering more than a mile from flank to flank, with Cheatham in close support. Though little could be seen in the gathering darkness, the immediate impression was one of absolute chaos as Cleburne’s 5000 screaming men bore down on roughly twice that many defenders in the two blue divisions in their path. They charged with a clatter of musketry so tremendous that they seemed to be trying to make up for the disparity in numbers by the rapidity of their fire. That was in fact the case; Cleburne placed great stock in fast, well-aimed fire, and had drilled his troops relentlessly in rifle tactics, in and out of normal work hours, with just the present effect in mind. An Indiana captain later recorded that the advancing graybacks were “loading and firing in a manner that I believe was never surpassed on any battlefield during the rebellion,” and Cleburne himself declared soon afterwards that “for half an hour [the firing] was the heaviest I ever heard.”

  This time there was no last-minute outside help; unlike Crittenden and McCook, Thomas had to fight with what he had when he was hit. After all, however, what he had was half the army, and though he lost a pair of guns, three stands of colors, some 400 captured men, and nearly a mile of ground on his outer flank, it was enough to stave off disaster. When full darkness put an end to what another Hoosier called “a display of fireworks that one does not like to see more than once in a lifetime,” the blue line was severely contracted but unbroken. Baird and Brannan were forced back to the LaFayette Road on the left and right, but the three divisions between them maintained an eastward bulge of about 600 yards at its deepest. Cleburne’s men, bedding down wherever they happened to be when the order reached them to stop firing, could hear the Federals hard at work beyond the curtain of night, felling trees to be used in the construction of breastworks along the contracted bulge of their new line. Shivering in their still-wet clothes, for the night was unseasonably cold for September, the listening Confederates knew only too well that they would have to try to overrun those breastworks in the morning.

  Back at his campfire near Alexander’s Bridge, Bragg was telling his corps commanders—all but Longstreet, who would get his instructions when he arrived near midnight, and Hill, who afterwards explained that he had not been able to locate the command post in the darkness—that the army’s objective remained the same as yesterday: “to turn the enemy’s left, and by direct attack force him into McLemore’s Cove.” Kershaw arrived after dark with his two brigades, completing a fast march from the Ringgold railhead, and was sent at once to Hood. By way of final preparation, Breckinridge was ordered to take position on Cleburne’s right, extending the gray line northward in an attempt to outflank Thomas, while Hindman made a shorter march to get between Hood and Preston on the left. These three divisions, so far uncommitted, would complete the order of battle for tomorrow’s attack, which Polk was scheduled to open at dawn on the far right and which would then be taken up in sequence, corps by corps, all down the line.

  Hill would later refer caustically to the disjointed sequence of attacks, in which he himself had taken no part except to detach one of his divisions, as “the sparring of the amateur boxer, not the crushing blows of the trained pugilist,” and Bragg in turn would describe the action, so far, as nothing more than “severe skirmishing” engaged in by his various corps and division commanders, for the most part on their own, “while endeavoring to get into line of battle.” But no one
knew better than Rosecrans, across the way in the Widow Glenn’s lamp-lighted parlor, how near a thing it had been for him at times. In addition to the day-long pounding his left had managed to absorb—including the blood-curdling twilight assault by what sounded like tens of thousands of fiends equipped with the latest style rapid-fire weapons—two rebel penetrations, one of his center and one of his right, had surged to within plain view of army headquarters, and of these the second had come so close that he and members of his staff had had to shout at one another in order to be heard above the din.

  Some measure of his mounting concern could be seen in a series of telegrams sent to the War Department in the course of the day by Charles Dana, who had arrived from Vicksburg the week before to continue his services as a behind-the-scenes observer for Stanton. “Rosecrans has everything ready to grind up Bragg’s flank,” he reported from Crawfish Springs that morning, and at 1 p.m. he followed this up—or, rather, he failed to follow it up—with a somewhat less encouraging or at any rate less emphatic message, sent as he left for the scene of the fighting three miles north: “Everything is going well, but the full proportions of the conflict are not yet developed.” By 2.30 the telegraph line had been extended to the Glenn house, and Dana kept the operator busy. “Fight continues to rage,” he wired. “Decisive victory seems assured.” At 3.20 he passed along a report from Thomas “that he is driving rebels, and will force them into Chickamauga tonight.” Though the center was being assailed by then, and the right was about to be, Dana was not fazed. “Everything is prosperous. Sheridan is coming up,” he announced at 4 o’clock. A near commitment at 4.30 as to the outcome—“I do not yet dare to say our victory is complete, but it seems certain”—was modified in the dispatch that followed at 5.20: “Now appears to be undecided contest, but later reports will enable us to understand more clearly.”

  So it went; so it had gone all day. Despite his show of heartiness, what he mainly communicated was his confusion in attempting to follow a battle which, as he said, was “fought altogether in a thick forest, invisible to outsiders.” In that sense, even the army commander was an outsider. Except for a rearward trickle of reports, most of them about as disconcerted as Dana’s to Stanton, no one at headquarters could do much more than guess at what was happening in the smoky woods beyond the LaFayette Road. Rosecrans tried for a time, with the help of Mrs Glenn, to follow the progress of the fight by ear. She would make a guess, when a gun was heard, that it was “nigh out about Reed’s Bridge” or “about a mile fornenst John Kelly’s house,” and he would try to match this information with the place names on the map. But it was a far from satisfactory procedure, for a variety of reasons. The map was a poor one in the first place, and after a while the roar was practically continuous all along the front. A reporter thought he had never witnessed “anything so ridiculous as this scene” between Old Rosy and the widow. Presently, when Stewart’s men broke through the Federal center, she had to be removed to a place of greater safety, but Rosecrans, “fairly quivering with excitement,” continued to pace back and forth, rubbing his palms rapidly together as the sound of firing swelled and quickened. “Ah! there goes Brannan!” he exclaimed with obvious satisfaction. He might have been right; besides, the noise was about all he had to go on; but it did not seem to the reporter that the general understood the situation any better than the departed countrywoman had done. Still, he kept pacing and exclaiming, perhaps in an attempt to ease the tension on his nerves and keep his spirits up. “Ah—there goes Brannan!” he would say; or, “That’s Negley going in!”

  Out on the line, when darkness finally put an end to the long day’s fighting, the troops had a hard time of it. “How we suffered that night no one knows,” a veteran was to recall. “Water could not be found; the rebels had possession of the Chickamauga, and we had to do without. Few of us had blankets and the night was very cold. All looked with anxiety for the coming of the dawn; for although we had given the enemy a rough handling, he had certainly used us very hard.”

  Under such conditions, despite much loss of sleep both nights before, work on the construction of breastworks was welcome as a means of keeping warm, as well as a diversion from thoughts of tomorrow. For Rosecrans, however, there could be no release from the latter; it was his job. He could take pride in the fact that his line, though obliged to yield an average mile of ground throughout its length today, was not only intact but was also considerably shorter than it had been when this morning’s contest opened. Then too, word had come that Halleck at last was doing all he could to speed reinforcements to North Georgia; urgent appeals had gone from Washington to Burnside and Grant, at Knoxville and in Mississippi, directing them to send troops to Chattanooga in all haste, and similar messages had been dispatched to Hurlbut at Memphis, Schofield in Missouri, and John Pope in far-off Minnesota. It was a comfort to Rosecrans to know that in time there would be these supports to fall back on. Meanwhile, though, he had to fight with what he had on hand, and he was by no means sure that this would be enough, since prisoners had been taken from no less than a dozen regiments known to have arrived just yesterday from Virginia. How many others had come or were arriving tonight he did not know, for the captives were nearly as close-mouthed under interrogation as the Texas captain had been this afternoon, but intelligence officers had little trouble identifying these “Virginians” by their standard gray uniforms, which were in natty contrast to the “go-as-you-please” garments worn in the western armies. Occasionally, too, a scrap of information could be extracted by goading the prisoners into anger. “How does Longstreet like the western Yankees?” one was asked in a mocking tone, and he replied with a growl: “You’ll get enough of Longstreet before tomorrow night.”

  This might be nothing more than wishful rebel thinking. On the other hand it might be an informed and accurate prediction. At any rate, whichever it was, Rosecrans decided—as he had done under similar circumstances on New Year’s Eve almost nine months ago—that he would do well to call a council of war for the triple purpose of briefing his principal subordinates on the over-all situation, of obtaining their recommendations as to a proper course of action, and of enabling him, at some later date, to shift at least a share of the blame in event of a defeat. Besides, he had a natural fondness for conference discussions, especially late-at-night ones, whether the subject was strategy or religion. The council accordingly convened at headquarters at 11 o’clock that evening. Most of those present, including the three corps commanders, had attended the conference held at the close of the first day’s fighting in the last great battle; the difference was in the staff. “Poor Garesché,” as Rosecrans had referred to the previous chief of staff after his head was blown off by a cannonball, had been replaced in January by Brigadier General James A. Garfield, a thirty-two-year-old former Ohio schoolteacher, lawyer, lay preacher, and politician, whose warm handclasp seemed to one observer to convey the message, “Vote early. Vote right,” and whose death, at the hands of an assassin who voted both early and right and then failed to get the appointment to which he believed this entitled him, would occur exactly eighteen years from today, partly as a direct result of what was going to happen here tomorrow. Big-headed, with pale eyes and a persuasive manner—like Hooker, he was a protégé of Secretary Chase’s, and up to now his most notable service in the war had been as a member of the court-martial that convicted Fitz-John Porter—Garfield opened the council by displaying for the assembled generals a map with the positions of all the Union divisions indicated, along with those of the Confederates so far as they were known; after which Rosecrans called for individual opinions as to what was to be done. McCook and Crittenden—the Ohioan, according to an obviously unfriendly fellow officer, had “a weak nose that would do no credit to a baby” and a grin that gave rise to “suspicion that he is either still very green or deficient in the upper story,” while the Kentuckian was characterized more briefly as “a good drinker,” one of those men, fairly common in the higher echelons of all armies, wh
o “know how to blow their own horns exceedingly well”—had little to contribute in the way of advice, each perhaps being somewhat chagrined by the loss of one of his three divisions, detached that morning to reinforce the left, and somewhat subdued by the near-destruction of one of his remaining two in the course of the afternoon. Not so Thomas, who differed as much from them in outlook, or anyhow in the emphatic expression of his outlook, as he did in appearance. Ponderous and phlegmatic, he was described by another observer as “not scrimped anywhere, and square everywhere—square face, square shoulders, square step; blue eyes with depths in them, withdrawn beneath a pent-house of a brow, features with legible writing on them, and the whole giving the idea of massive solidity, of the right kind of man to ‘tie to.’ ” Though he slept through much of the conference—not only because it was his custom (he had done the same at Stones River) but also because he had spent the last two nights on the march and most of today under heavy attack—he repeated the same words whenever he was called on for a tactical opinion: “I would strengthen the left.” But when Rosecrans replied, as he did each time, “Where are we going to take it from?” there was no answer; Thomas would be back asleep by then, propped upright in his chair.