Battle of Chickamauga

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of Chickamauga began almost by accident, when Union soldiers went looking for water. On the morning of the 19th of September 1863, pickets from Col. Daniel McCook's brigade moved toward Jay's Mill in search of a drink, stumbled into Confederate cavalry, and set off two days of fighting that would become the most significant Union defeat in the entire Western Theater of the American Civil War. By the time the guns fell silent on September 20, the casualty count had reached the second-highest of any battle in the war, surpassed only by Gettysburg. How did a Union army that had just captured Chattanooga without firing a shot end up fleeing in a rout? How did a single garbled order open a hole in the Federal line at precisely the worst possible moment? And how did one Union general, standing alone on a ridge called Horseshoe Ridge, hold long enough to save an army from destruction?

• 2. The Road to Chickamauga

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  Chattanooga was no ordinary city. It sat at the intersection of rail lines running north toward Nashville and Knoxville and south toward Atlanta, making it a vital supply hub and manufacturing center for the Confederacy. Situated between Lookout Mountain, Missionary Ridge, Raccoon Mountain, and Stringer's Ridge, it was also a naturally fortified position. President Abraham Lincoln and General-in-Chief Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck pressed Rosecrans relentlessly to seize it, understanding that controlling Chattanooga would open the road to Atlanta and the heartland of the South.

  Rosecrans had just completed his Tullahoma Campaign in the summer of 1863, forcing Bragg to abandon Middle Tennessee while sustaining only 569 Union casualties. He was not inclined to rush. By early August, Halleck was so frustrated that he ordered Rosecrans to move immediately and report daily on each corps's movements until crossing the Tennessee River. Rosecrans fired back that Halleck's demand carried a tone of "recklessness, conceit and malice" and argued he would be courting disaster without more time to accumulate supplies and transport wagons. His chief of staff, Brig. Gen. James A. Garfield, was the one subordinate who did not counsel delay; a politician by background, Garfield understood the value of being on record endorsing the Lincoln administration's priorities.

  Rosecrans devised a deception to mask his river crossing. Col. John T. Wilder moved his mounted infantry brigade north of Chattanooga and had his men pound on tubs and saw boards, sending wood scraps downstream to suggest raft construction. His artillery, commanded by Capt. Eli Lilly, bombarded the city from Stringer's Ridge for two weeks in an operation sometimes called the Second Battle of Chattanooga. The ruse worked. Bragg was convinced the Union crossing would come above the city.

• 3. Confederate Command in Crisis

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  Braxton Bragg's army was larger than it looked on paper, but the addition of troops came packaged with dysfunction. The Confederate government merged the Department of East Tennessee under Maj. Gen. Simon B. Buckner into Bragg's command, adding roughly 17,800 men. It also added a third subordinate with little respect for his commander. Lt. Gen. Leonidas Polk and Maj. Gen. William J. Hardee had already made their animosity toward Bragg well known; Buckner's attitude was shaped by Bragg's failed invasion of Buckner's native Kentucky in 1862 and by the loss of his independent command through the merger.

  The Confederate government also decided to reinforce Bragg from the east, sending Lt. Gen. James Longstreet with two divisions from his First Corps, Army of Northern Virginia. Chickamauga would mark the first large-scale Confederate movement of troops between theaters with the aim of achieving a temporary numerical advantage. Only five brigades from Longstreet's two divisions, roughly 5,000 effective soldiers, arrived in time for the second day of battle.

  Bragg had a persistent habit of bypassing his wing commanders to issue orders directly to their subordinates, a practice that sowed confusion and misdirection in the days before the battle. At Davis's Cross Roads on September 10 and 11, Bragg came within reach of destroying a Union division in McLemore's Cove, but a cascade of disobeyed and delayed orders by Hindman, Hill, and Cleburne let the opportunity slip. Historian Thomas Connelly would later write that Bragg's sporadic assaults on September 19 "only sapped Bragg's strength and enabled Rosecrans to locate the Rebel position."

• 4. The Name Itself

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  Peter Cozzens, author of This Terrible Sound, described the popular translation of Chickamauga as "river of death" as a "loose translation." The word's true origin is contested. Glenn Tucker presents at least three competing translations: "stagnant water" from the lower Cherokee tongue, "good country" from the Chickasaw, and "river of death" from the upcountry Cherokee dialect. Tucker argues the latter name did not arise from warfare but from the location where the Cherokee contracted smallpox.

  James Mooney, writing in Myths of the Cherokee, offered a different view entirely. He recorded Chickamauga as the more common spelling for Tsïkäma'gï, a name that "has no meaning in their language" and that may derive from an Algonquian word referring to a fishing or fish-spearing place. The most linguistically plausible etymology traces the word to the Chickasaw word chokma, meaning "be good," combined with the verb ending -ka. The Chickasaw town of Chickamauga was located at the foot of Lookout Mountain, just miles from where the armies would clash.

• 5. The Fatal Order

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  At about 10:50 a.m. on September 20, Brig. Gen. Thomas J. Wood received an order that would shatter the Union line. Rosecrans had been misinformed that Brig. Gen. John M. Brannan had already pulled his division out of the front, and dictated an order for Wood to close up on Maj. Gen. Joseph J. Reynolds and support him. The order was written not by chief of staff Garfield, who was busy drafting orders for other units, but by Frank Bond, Rosecrans's senior aide-de-camp, described as generally competent but inexperienced at order-writing.

  Wood could see that Brannan was still on his left flank. The military term "close up on" meant to move adjacent to Reynolds, which was physically impossible with Brannan in the way. The only interpretation that made tactical sense was to withdraw from the line, march behind Brannan, and form up behind Reynolds. Wood spoke with corps commander McCook, who Wood later claimed agreed to fill the resulting gap; McCook maintained he lacked the units to cover a division-wide hole.

  At 11:10 a.m., Longstreet gave the order to move. Maj. Gen. Bushrod Johnson's division advanced across the Brotherton field and reached, by coincidence, precisely the point where Wood's division was pulling out. Johnson's left brigade, commanded by Col. John S. Fulton, drove directly through the gap. The Confederate strike force of 10,000 men, arranged eight brigades deep on a narrow front, crashed through. Historian Harold Knudsen described this deployment as similar in style to the German Schwerpunkt, achieving an attacker-to-defender ratio of 8:1. The few Union soldiers in the sector ran in panic. Rosecrans himself was swept from the field.

• 6. The Rock of Chickamauga

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  Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas did not flee. As the right wing of the Army of the Cumberland collapsed around him, Thomas assumed overall command of the forces that remained and pulled them into a defensive position on Horseshoe Ridge, also known as Snodgrass Hill, near the tiny house of George Washington Snodgrass. Units arriving in disarray began erecting hasty breastworks from felled trees.

  The first organized regimental unit to reach the ridge was the 82nd Indiana, commanded by Col. Morton Hunter, part of Brannan's division. Among the reinforcements that followed was the 21st Ohio, armed with five-shot Colt revolving rifles. Historian Steven E. Woodworth called the actions of the 21st Ohio "one of the epic defensive stands of the entire war." The regiment's 535 men expended 43,550 rounds over the course of the engagement. Without them, historian Woodworth judged, the right flank of the position might have been turned by Kershaw's 2nd South Carolina at 1 p.m.

  Three miles north at McAfee's Church, Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger eventually lost patience waiting for orders and on his own initiative sent south the two brigades of Maj. Gen. James B. Steedman's division and the brigade of Col. Daniel McCook. Steedman's men arrived just as Bushrod Johnson's division was threatening to overwhelm the ridge's western flank. Longstreet later wrote that there were 25 assaults in all on Snodgrass Hill. At 4:30 p.m. Preston's division made several attempts of its own. Thomas held until twilight, then withdrew his men to Rossville under cover of darkness. The message Garfield sent to Rosecrans that night gave Thomas his lasting name: "Thomas is standing like a rock."

• 7. Aftermath

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  Three Union regiments were left behind on Horseshoe Ridge without sufficient ammunition when the general withdrawal began. The 22nd Michigan, the 89th Ohio, and the 21st Ohio held their positions and were ordered to fix bayonets. They held until they were surrounded by Preston's division, then surrendered. Their stand bought the time Thomas needed to get the rest of the army out.

  Rosecrans reached Chattanooga to organize the city's defenses. The Confederate army occupied the heights surrounding the city, including Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, besieging it. Despite Longstreet's victory on the southern end of the battlefield, Bragg recognized that he had merely driven his opponents toward their escape route; the chance to destroy the Army of the Cumberland had passed. Bragg told Longstreet flatly, "There is not a man in the right wing who has any fight in him." Longstreet had been enjoying a leisurely lunch of bacon and sweet potatoes with his staff while the fighting raged on Snodgrass Hill.

  The siege that followed at Chattanooga would set the stage for the next major campaign of the war, with Union forces ultimately reinforced under Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. Brig. Gen. Benjamin Helm, mortally wounded while leading his Orphan Brigade of Kentuckians against Thomas's breastworks on the morning of September 20, was the favorite brother-in-law of Abraham Lincoln, a detail that made the casualty lists of Chickamauga reach all the way to the White House.