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

  Others “disappeared” as rapidly, even though they were out of earshot of their chief’s advice. McCook’s third great battle was also his third rout, and the greatest of the three. Like Davis and Sheridan, he made a brief attempt to stem the tide, then took off rearward, a leader in the race for safety, and those of his men who had not already bolted were quick to follow his example. Crittenden, too, was a part of the crush, but strictly on an individual basis. He had no troops left under him anyhow, the last of his three divisions having been detached to Thomas by midmorning, though Van Cleve himself was swept from the field with the remnant of the brigade that was wrecked by Law. Similarly, Negley became a fugitive when he led his rear brigade off on a tangent, then found his way to the left blocked by Johnson’s mile-deep penetration of the center. A few among the responsible commanders, such as Wilder, maintained control of their units, but they were the exception. “Many of the officers of all ranks,” according to another Indiana colonel, “showed by their wild commands and still wilder actions that they had completely lost their heads and were as badly demoralized as the private soldiers.”

  One among the exceptions was a young officer from McCook’s staff, who managed to skirt the confusion and get through to Thomas on the left. The Virginian told him to return the way he had come and bring up Davis and Sheridan to support his dangling right. He made it back to the Dry Valley Road, and as he rode westward alongside it—for the road itself was jammed with fugitives crowding it shoulder-to-shoulder and raising a waist-high cloud of dust—he appealed to various officers in the fleeing column, but to small avail. Although the rebel pursuit had broken off by now, they either would not believe him when he said so, or else they could not see in this any reason for slowing the pace of their retreat. “See Jeff, Colonel,” they told him, or “See Phil.” Appeals to the men themselves were even less successful. “We’ll talk to you, my son, when we get to the Ohio River!” one veteran replied, much to the amusement of his fellow trudgers. Finally, in McFarland’s Gap, the young staffer overtook Davis and Sheridan, and though the former expressed a doubtful willingness to give the thing a try, the latter wanted nothing further to do with the mismanaged contest he had just put behind him. “He had lost faith,” the colonel observed as he pushed on to gain the head of the column, up toward Rossville.

  There where the road forked, one branch leading northwest to Chattanooga, the other east through Rossville Gap, then south to the field on whose opposite flank the scramble had begun—the distance in each case was about four miles—Rosecrans and the remnant of his staff drew rein to breathe their horses. By now the battle racket had died down, screened by the loom of Missionary Ridge, and though by dismounting and putting their ears to the ground they could hear the rattle of small arms, which signified that Thomas was still in action with at least a part of his command, the lack of any rumble from his guns seemed to indicate that the left wing had not fared much better than the right. If this was so, the thing to do was establish a straggler line on the outskirts of Chattanooga, where the two sundered portions of the army could be reunited and rallied for a last-ditch stand with the deep-running Tennessee River at its back. For his own part, Old Rosy was determined to return to the field and share with whatever troops were left the final stages of their withdrawal, leaving to his chief of staff the task of bringing the fugitives to a halt and putting them into a new defensive position before the gray wave of attackers swept over them again. However, when he turned to Garfield and began to tell him all that would have to be done—the selection of proper ground, the assignment of units to their places in line, the opening of new channels of supply and communication, and much else—the chief of staff, confused by the complexity of what he termed “the great responsibility,” made a suggestion: “I can go to General Thomas and report the situation to you much better than I can give those orders.” Rosecrans thought this over briefly, then reluctantly agreed. “Well,” he said, “go and tell General Thomas my precautions to hold the Dry Valley Road and secure our commissary stores and artillery. [Tell him] to report the situation to me and to use his discretion as to continuing the fight on the ground we occupy at the close of the afternoon or retiring to a position in the rear near Rossville.”

  So while Garfield set out eastward on a ride that would take him in time to the White House—though not for long; the assassin’s bullet would find him before he had been four months in office—Rosecrans took the left-hand fork that led to Chattanooga. But now the shock set in. The nearer he drew to the city the more depressed he became, as if some sort of ratio obtained between his distance from the battlefield and his realization of the enormity of his position as a commander who had deserted his army in its bloodiest hour of crisis. When he pulled rein at last, about 3.30, in front of the three-story residence where departmental headquarters had been established eleven days ago, he was so exhausted in body and broken in spirit that he had to be assisted to dismount. “The officers who helped him into the house did not soon forget the terrible look of the brave man, stunned by sudden calamity,” an observer remarked, and added: “In later years I used occasionally to meet Rosecrans, and always felt that I could see the shadow of Chickamauga upon his noble face.”

  Dana arrived immediately behind him, having become separated from the others in what he called “the helter-skelter of the rear.” That he too was much depressed by what he had seen, though his depression took a different form, was obvious from the wire he got off to Stanton at 4 o’clock, as soon as he had had time to catch his breath. “My report today is of deplorable importance,” he informed the Secretary. “Chickamauga is as fatal a name in our history as Bull Run.” Still badly shaken, he described the onslaught of the rebels, which was unlike anything he had seen at Vicksburg, his one previous experience of war. “They came through with resistless impulse, composed of brigades formed in divisions. Before them our soldiers turned and fled. It was wholesale panic. Vain were all attempts to rally them.” He was as uncertain of what would happen next as he was of the army’s losses up to now, but he ventured a guess or two in both directions. “Davis and Sheridan are said to be coming off at the head of a couple of regiments in order, and Wilder’s brigade marches out unbroken. Thomas, too, is coming down the Rossville road with an organized command, but all the rest is confusion. Our wounded are all left behind, some 6000 in number. We have lost heavily in killed today. The total of our killed, wounded, and prisoners can hardly be less than 20,000, and may be much more.… Enemy not yet arrived before Chattanooga. Preparations making to resist his entrance for a time.”

  Some of this was useful to the Washington authorities as an estimate of the situation resulting from the sudden turn of fortune—surprisingly so, in light of the fact that it amounted to little more than guesswork by a rattled nonprofessional who had seen only a portion of the field—but much of it was about as inaccurate as might have been expected. This last applied in particular to the reference to Thomas. Not only was he not “coming down the Rossville road,” as Dana claimed, but even as the telegrapher clicked away at the doleful message composed in haste and panic, the Virginian was fighting hard, resisting the combined assaults of both Confederate wings in a climactic struggle to maintain the integrity of the position he had held all morning against one. In the end—that is, before nightfall—his skill and determination in continuing this odds-on fight with what remained of the blue force after its commander had fled with a full third of the troops who had composed it at the outset, would win him the name by which he would be known thereafter: “The Rock of Chickamauga.”

  Indeed, there was much about him that was rocklike, not alone in the sense of being “the right kind of man to tie to,” but also in appearance, especially when viewed from up close. According to a soldier observer, his “full rounded, powerful form,” six feet in height and well over two hundred pounds in weight, “gradually expands upon you, as a mountain which you approach.” Moreover, in addition to sheer bulk, he gave an impression of dogg
edness and imperturbability. “This army doesn’t retreat,” he had said in a similar crisis at Stones River, despite the evidence to the contrary, and it was obvious from his manner that the same thing applied here, so far at least as concerned the two thirds of the army still on the field and in his charge. Brannan’s gatelike swing had ended on the rising ground in his left rear; there he posted his division, extending his right westward along the convenient eastern spur of Missionary Ridge. Single brigades from the variously shattered and scattered commands of Wood, Van Cleve, and Negley, combined with those of Brannan, provided the equivalent of two divisions for the defense of this new line, and Thomas reinforced it further by detaching one brigade each from Johnson and Palmer, who stood at the bulging center of the north-south line confronting Polk. The east-west position was one of great natural strength, heavily wooded and uphill for attackers, but whether or not it could be held against as savage a fighter as Longstreet would depend in the final analysis on the troops who occupied it. Thoroughly aware of this, as he also was of the fact that they had already backpedaled once today under pressure from the same gray veterans who were massing now for a follow-up assault, Thomas moved among them in an attempt to stiffen their resolution for what he knew was coming. “This hill must be held and I trust you to do it,” he told Harker, who replied: “We will hold it or die here.” Thomas rode on, and presently came to one of Harker’s regimental commanders, Colonel Emerson Opdycke. “This point must be held,” he told him. The Ohio colonel agreed. “We will hold this ground,” he said, “or go to heaven from it.” Opdycke’s men nodded approval of his words, but whether they really meant it remained to be seen.

  They meant it. About 2 o’clock, while Longstreet was returning from his unprofitable conference with Bragg, Kershaw assaulted the left of the new Federal position with the demidivision composed of his own South Carolina brigade and Barksdale’s Mississippians, now under Brigadier General Ben G. Humphreys. “Ranks followed ranks in close order, moving briskly and bravely against us,” a defender later wrote. These were the men who had taken the Wheat Field and the Peach Orchard, eighty days ago at Gettysburg, and they were determined to do as well this afternoon at Chickamauga. They did not; not yet, at any rate. Harker’s troops, together with those in Brannan’s left brigade and the brigade from Palmer, under Brigadier General William Hazen, fired their rifles with such steadiness and precision that the gray ranks faltered, withered, and fell back. Kershaw, who had thought one hard rap would cause the bluecoats to continue their withdrawal, was unwilling to admit that this had been disproved so quickly. After a pause for realignment he again sent his two brigades forward against the Union there. The result was the same. They surged up the slope, then fell back down it, having taken losses quite as heavy as before. Still unconvinced, he tried a third assault, and suffered a third repulse. Such uphill work was about as exhausting as it was bloody. One regimental commander reported that his men were “panting like dogs tired out in the chase.” In the course of the last charge, he would recall, he had seen a fifteen-year-old soldier lagging behind and weeping, and when he told him that this was no time for hanging back out of fear, the boy explained that his trouble was not fright but exasperation. “That aint it, Colonel,” he wailed between sobs. “I’m so damned tired I can’t keep up with my company.” Convinced at last, and perceiving that even his full-grown men were winded, Kershaw called a halt at the base of the hill to watch for some sign that the Federals were weakening their left to meet the attack that was being launched by now against their right by Johnson and Hindman, off at the far end of the line.

  Thomas might well have weakened his embattled left to reinforce his threatened right, outnumbered and overlapped as it was by the two butternut divisions being massed in the woods below, except that he received unexpected help at just this critical juncture. All morning, up near McAfee’s Church, which was two miles east of Rossville and about twice that distance from the hilly spur where Brannan staged his rally, Gordon Granger had fretted because his one-division Reserve Corps, charged with guarding the Rossville Gap in case it was needed as an escape hatch, was being kept from the battle he could hear raging to the south. About 11 o’clock—an hour and a half after Polk began his delayed attack and shortly before Longstreet scored the breakthrough that threw Davis and Sheridan off the field and swung Brannan out of his place in the disintegrating center of the Union line—he and his chief of staff climbed a haystack in an attempt to see something of what was going on. All they saw, far down the LaFayette Road, was a boiling cloud of dust and smoke with the fitful yellow flash of batteries mixed in at its base, but Granger soon arrived at a decision. “I am going to Thomas, orders or no orders!” he declared, snapping his glasses back in their case. The staffer was more cautious. “And if you go,” he warned, “it may bring disaster to the army and you to a court martial.” Granger was a career man, West Point ’45, and normally an avoider of such risks; but not now. “There’s nothing in our front but ragtag, bobtail cavalry,” he said. “Don’t you see Bragg is piling his whole army on Thomas? I am going to his assistance.” And with that he climbed down off the haystack and ordered Steedman to prepare to march at once with two of his brigades, leaving the third behind to continue holding the Rossville escape hatch open in the event of a collapse by the main body, which he would soon be joining, four miles south.

  Within half an hour the march was under way. Granger’s remark that Bragg was “piling his whole army on Thomas” had been in error at the time he made it; Longstreet had not yet gone in. But now that the remaining half of the Confederate force had been committed, with the resultant abolition of the Federal right, the statement was in the rapid process of becoming quite literally true; so that Granger’s decision, though based in part on an erroneous assumption, turned out to be militarily sound; Thomas was indeed in need of help, and it was fortunate for him that Granger began his four-mile march before the need existed, let alone before it became acute. Even so, there were delays. About noon, a mile down the LaFayette Road, the lead brigade was taken under fire by a pair of batteries in position on the flank. Steedman was obliged to go from column of march into line of battle, facing east to meet this threat from what turned out to be a sizable detachment of Forrest’s men. Blue skirmishers, moving against the guns, caused the rebel troopers to give ground; yet when the skirmishers returned the graybacks followed, resuming their harassing tactics. Finally, in exasperation—for he was a short-tempered man at best—Granger sent for the third brigade to come down from McAfee’s Church and hold the troublesome horsemen off while he took up his march, southwest now across the fields and through the woods in order to approach the nearly beleaguered Thomas from the rear. A mile short of the blue flank the second delay occurred; but it was brief, consisting of nothing more than a short wait for part of Negley’s division to get out of the way, which it soon did, being hard on the go for Rossville and deliverance from chaos. The two columns passed each other, one headed into and the other out of the battle, and Granger rode ahead to report that his two brigades were close at hand.

  He was a hard-mannered regular, originally from upper New York State, a veteran of Mexico and the Indian wars, shaggy in looks, brusque in speech, and not much liked—either by his troops, who resented a strictness that sometimes prescribed horsewhipping for minor camp offenses, or by his fellow officers, who found him uncongenial—but Thomas had seldom been as glad to see anyone as he was to see Granger, whom he greeted with a handshake and a smile that was all the broader because he had thought the column approaching his rear was hostile. That would indeed have been the final straw; for Kershaw’s attack was in full career on his left by now, and Hindman and Johnson were massing their divisions for an advance on the right, which they overlapped. When they began to move forward, out of the woods and onto an intervening ridge, Granger saw the problem at a glance. “Those men must be driven back,” he said. Thomas agreed. “Can you do it?” he asked. Granger nodded grimly. “Yes,” he said
. “My men are fresh, and they are just the fellows for that work. They are raw troops and they don’t know any better than to charge up there.”

  Whether the basis for their conduct was ignorance, sheer heroism, or a combination of both, the men of the reserve corps were indeed “the fellows for that work.” Steedman, who was forty-seven, Pennsylvania born, a former printer, Texas revolutionist, and Ohio legislator—“a great, hearty man, broad-breasted [and] broad-shouldered,” whose face, according to an admirer, was “written all over with sturdy sense and stout courage”—brought them up on the double and committed them with no more delay that it took to tell a staff officer to see that his name was spelled correctly in the obituaries. Leading the charge on horseback, he saw his green troops waver at their first sight of the enemy up ahead; whereupon he grabbed the regimental colors from an Illinois bearer alongside him and waved the rippling silk to draw their attention. “Go back, boys, go back,” he roared, “but the flag can’t go with you!” They did not go back; they went forward, still with Steedman in the lead, but now on foot; for the rippling blue of the colors had attracted the attention of the rebels, too, with the result that his horse had been shot from under him. Badly shaken by the fall, the general got up and hobbled forward, still brandishing the flag and roaring, “Follow me!” Ahead, the graybacks gave ground before such fury and determination, then rallied and counterattacked. However, the bluecoats had the ridge by then and held it, though at the cost of losing one fifth of their number within their first twenty minutes of combat. And that was only the beginning; they would lose as many more in the next three hours. In fact, of the 3700 men in the two brigades, nearly half—1788—would be casualties by sundown.