Terrible Swift Sword (12 page)

The next day, November 24, Sherman reached the north side of Missionary Ridge with his four divisions from Mississippi and attacked Bragg's right flank. A single stubborn division commanded by Patrick Cleburne threw back Sherman's divisions twice.

Hooker's three divisions simultaneously assaulted Lookout Mountain, fighting the “Battle above the Clouds.” The 12,000 men crept up the craggy, steep-sided mountain against a Rebel force of 2,400. That night, Bragg, conceding that the mountain was lost, pulled back its defenders and sent them to fortify Missionary Ridge against the Union attack on the center that he expected the next day.

During the morning and the afternoon of November 25, Sherman had resumed his attack on the north side of Missionary Ridge at Tunnel Hill. Major General Oliver O. Howard's two reserve divisions reinforced Sherman. But the result was the same as on the previous day.

When Grant's staff officers, whose field glasses had been trained on the ridge crest, reported seeing Rebels shifting to the north side of the ridge, they feared that a major counterattack was about to be launched against Sherman. Hooker's three divisions were now behind Missionary Ridge, advancing toward Rossville to cut the Rebel supply line. Grant realized that they would not be able to reach Sherman's lines until that night—far too late. To stop the further reinforcement of Sherman's adversary, Grant ordered Thomas to attack the center of Missionary Ridge with his 25,000-man Army of the Cumberland.

 

IT WAS CONCEIVED AS a limited attack, ending with the capture of the Rebel rifle pits at the base of the ridge—and no more. Its purpose was to freeze the Confederates on the ridgetop until Sherman broke through. Sheridan's and Wood's IV Corps divisions would execute the feint, along with XIV Corps, whose two divisions were led by Brigadier Generals Absalom Baird and Richard Johnson. Six guns fired in quick succession would signal the opening of the assault.
³⁰

At 3:40 p.m., the high-strung Granger, standing beside Grant and Thomas on Orchard Knob, raised and lowered his arm six times, shouting, “Fire!” each time. The four divisions surged toward Missionary Ridge, ranked north to south: Baird, Wood, Sheridan, and Johnson, with Wood and Sheridan leading. Beside himself with excitement, Granger leaped into a gun emplacement, personally sighted a field piece, and shouted, “Fire!” Visibly irritated, Grant told Granger to concentrate on commanding his troops and let the captain run his battery.

It was the sort of stirring scene that one might read about in accounts of the Napoleonic wars but that was rarely seen during the Civil War, when most battles were either fought in dense woods or spread over many miles. Twenty-five thousand Union troops marched across the floor of a natural amphitheater, watched by tens of thousands of troops from both armies. “With bands playing, flags flying, soldiers cheering and yelling, our men three lines deep in perfect alignment, poured out through the young cottonwood timber,” wrote Sylvanus Cadwallader of the
New
York Herald
. Heavy artillery from the Union forts in Chattanooga joined the batteries blazing away from Fort Wood.
³¹

Beyond the thin woods, an open plain of four to nine hundred yards, covered with felled trees, stretched to the foot of Missionary Ridge and the first line of Rebel rifle pits. Thomas's four divisions, advancing along a two-mile front, ran through “a most terrible tornado of shot and shell” toward the first line.

Sheridan never doubted that his men would capture the rifle pits, but he was unsure whether they could then hold them; with Rebels pouring down murderous fire from a second line of pits and the ridge crest, they might die there. He sent a staff officer, Captain J. S. Ransom, to ask Granger whether he was only to capture the lower positions or to press the attack upward.
³²

Without firing a shot, Sheridan's men captured the lower pits with just their bayonets. Most of the Rebels surrendered, but some of them ran up the mountain. The Yankees lay flat against the sharply angled ridge as the Rebels fired down on them with muskets and fifty cannons spewing grapeshot and canister.

As Brigadier General George Wagner's brigade began advancing from the captured positions toward the second line of rifle pits as Ransom and Fullerton returned with Granger's answer to Sheridan. Ransom stopped to tell Wagner that he and the rest of Sheridan's division—and all of Thomas's corps, for that matter—must stop at the lower rifle pits. Wagner ordered his men to return. Many of them were cut down by Rebel fire when they turned back.
³³

Ransom then informed Sheridan, who was riding through a ditch of entrenchments, flushing out skulkers. But Sheridan's two other brigades were already closing on the second line of gun pits. Sheridan refused to order “those officers and men who were so gallantly ascending the hill, step by step, to return.” In fact, thousands of Thomas's foot soldiers, without orders, were forging their way up the steep slope. Sheridan decided that he could only endorse his men's spontaneous decision to continue the attack all the way to the top—and so he ordered a charge on the ridge. His troops erupted in cheers.
³⁴

When Grant saw the bluecoats swarming toward the ridge crest, he angrily asked Thomas, “Who ordered those men up the ridge?” Thomas replied, “I don't know. I did not.” Grant then turned to Granger, who said the men had evidently started up the ridge without orders. “When those fellows get started, all hell can't stop them,” Granger said enthusiastically. Grant sourly remarked that someone would pay if the attack failed; he issued no further orders.
³⁵

Granger sent Fullerton and another staff officer, a Captain Avery, to Wood and Sheridan to ask them whether they had ordered their men up the ridge—and to proceed with the attack if they thought it could succeed. Sheridan told Avery that he had issued no such order until his men were already halfway to the crest, adding,
“We are going to take the ridge!” He asked Avery for his flask, waved it at a group of Confederate officers standing in front of Bragg's headquarters on the ridgetop, and shouted, “Here's at you!” As he took a drink, gunners on the ridge depressed two guns and fired on Sheridan and Avery, showering them with dirt. “Ah, that is ungenerous!” Sheridan shouted at them. “I shall take those guns for that!”
³⁶

It would have been hard work climbing the steep ridge even without musket and cannon fire raining down on the Yankees; the musket balls sounded like “the swarming of bees as they went rushing by.” The upper slope, cut by ravines, tilted at a forty-degree angle and was littered with fallen timber and talus.

Spurs projecting from the slope provided some cover. When the Yankees reached the second line of gun pits, sending the retreating Rebels panting up the last yards to the top, the gunfire from the summit faltered. The Rebels feared hitting their own men, and the guns could not be depressed to fire at so steep an angle. The Confederate gunners resorted to rolling short-fused shells and boulders down the hill.
³⁷

Shouting “Chickamauga! Chickamauga!” the Yankees boiled over the ridgetop in six places at once. Sheridan's men were first, according to Sheridan, Fullerton, and others. Wood's division also claimed the honor. A young soldier from Sheridan's division, Lieutenant Arthur MacArthur Jr. of the 24th Wisconsin, burst over the top crying, “On Wisconsin!” and planted the regimental flag on the Rebel works where everyone could see it.
³⁸

Charles Dana, watching the spectacle in awe from Orchard Knob, pronounced it “one of the greatest miracles in military history.”
³⁹
In just one hour, the Yankees had wrested possession of Missionary Ridge from the Rebels, ending the siege of Chattanooga. The Yankees cheered, shook hands, wept, and waved their caps to urge on their comrades who were still climbing. Sheridan joined in while giddily straddling a captured cannon.

An artillery blast wounded Rienzi seconds after Sheridan dismounted, and a colonel presented him with a gray charger that had belonged to one of Confederate major general John Breckenridge's staff officers. Sheridan named the horse Breckenridge and kept it as a second mount.

Bragg tried to rally his troops and was nearly captured instead. The Rebels bolted down the other side of the ridge. As they ran, many threw away their weapons and blanket rolls.

Confederate battle reports would blame the Rebel defeat on inept leadership by Bragg and Breckenridge. The latter was criticized for dividing his force between the ridge crest and lower gun pits. The men in the pits had been instructed to deliver fire, then rapidly retreat when pressed. But when they ran up the steep hill under fire and reached the ridge crest, they were too exhausted to fight.

Confederate engineers had also mistakenly positioned the upper defensive line on the ridge's geographical crest, which was higher and farther from the edge than the preferred “military crest” would have been. A brigade commander who dug in on the military crest, Brigadier General Arthur Manigault, repelled the attack on his sector.
⁴⁰

 

WHILE THE CELEBRATION CONTINUED on the ridge crest, Sheridan led two of his brigades down the east side of the ridge in pursuit of Bragg's army. Alone among the victors, Sheridan's troops doggedly followed Bragg's retreating army in the hope of capturing his wagon train. Moving quickly without artillery along a road toward Chickamauga Creek, they captured prisoners, guns, and supply wagons during a series of small, sharp clashes with the Rebel rearguard.
⁴¹

On a high hill a mile from Missionary Ridge, Rebel infantry and eight guns made a stand, and as darkness fell, Sheridan's men for the second time that day found themselves clinging to a hillside, with canister and minié balls whizzing by them. As the moon rose behind the hill, Sheridan was treated to “a medallion view of the column . . . . as it crossed the moon's disk and attacked the enemy.” The Union soldiers drove the Confederates from the hill, capturing two guns and some wagons. It was, Sheridan wrote, “a gallant little fight.”
⁴²

Sheridan rousted Granger from bed at midnight to urge him to throw the rest of IV Corps into the pursuit. Granger told him they had done enough that day. When Sheridan persisted, Granger authorized him to press on to Chickamauga Creek and promised to send troops if Sheridan encountered organized enemy forces. Not encountering significant resistance, but not wishing to continue alone, Sheridan engaged in “a little deception”: he had two regiments simulate a firefight. He hoped this would compel Granger to send reinforcements. The ruse didn't work.

The marathon pursuit ended when the Rebels crossed Chickamauga Creek, where Sheridan's men captured more wagons, ammunition, guns, small arms, and prisoners. The Confederates were in such a hurry to get over the creek and frustrate pursuit that they burned a pontoon bridge before all of their troops had crossed.

At 2 a.m., the exhausted Yankees made their camp near Chickamauga Station. Sheridan was frustrated by the Union command's failure to even try to destroy Bragg's retreating army.
⁴³

 

GRANT VISITED SHERIDAN'S FORWARD camp later that day. When he learned about the missed opportunity to crush Bragg, he, too, was disappointed. “With the instinct of military genius [Sheridan] pushed ahead. If others had followed his example we should have had Bragg's army,” Grant wrote.

Later, Grant's growing dissatisfaction with Granger reached its acme when Granger delayed in starting for Knoxville with a relief expedition to reinforce Burnside. Grant replaced him with Sherman. “I have lost all faith in his energy and capacity to manage an expedition of the importance of this one,” Grant wrote General in Chief Henry Halleck.
⁴⁴

 

WHEN SHERIDAN RETURNED TO Missionary Ridge, he found that in his absence, Brigadier General William Hazen's brigade from Wood's division had seized eleven guns that Sheridan had captured on the ridge crest the previous day. Sheridan vehemently protested that the guns were his division's prizes, not Hazen's. He continued to object in his battle report (the guns “were appropriated while I was pushing the enemy on to Chickamauga Station,” he indignantly wrote) and in his
Personal Memoirs
, where he scorned “some high officers . . . . who were more interested in gleaning that portion of the battle-field over which my command has passed than in destroying a panic-stricken enemy.”

Until the late 1880s, Hazen and Sheridan feuded over which of them had reached the top of Missionary Ridge first and who was entitled to the guns. In his 1885
A Narrative of Military Service
, Hazen devoted fifty-six pages, replete with supporting letters and reports from Union and Confederate officers and soldiers, to the subject. He claimed that his brigade rightfully claimed the guns after reaching the summit of Missionary Ridge before Sheridan. Three years later, in his
Personal Memoirs
, Sheridan dismissed “the absurdity of [Hazen's] deduction” and insisted that the eleven guns were his division's prizes. He then added three pages of excerpts from his subordinates' battle reports to prove that they had captured the guns.
⁴⁵

 

OF THE 6,000 MEN Sheridan led into battle, 1,300 fell wounded or dead on the approaches to Missionary Ridge and on its steep slopes. In his report, Sheridan described their conduct as “more than heroic.” His division captured 1,762 Rebels and seventeen artillery pieces—a figure that included the eleven disputed cannons.

In his after-action report, Grant conspicuously praised Sheridan for pursuing Bragg's army all the way to Chickamauga Station. “To Sheridan's prompt movement, the Army of the Cumberland and the nation are indebted for the bulk of the capture of prisoners, artillery and small-arms that day. Except for his prompt pursuit, so much in this way would not have been accomplished.”
⁴⁶