Terrible Swift Sword (9 page)

After Stones River, four 3rd Division officers who had abandoned their colors and regiments were marched to the center of a hollow square formed by the division. Sheridan ordered them to surrender their swords—to his black servant, for Sheridan said he would not “humiliate” any soldier by requiring him to touch the sullied weapons. The servant then cut all rank insignia from the men's coats, and an order was read announcing their dismissal from the service. They were drummed out of the camp. No division officer abandoned his colors after this ritual humiliation, Sheridan wrote.
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DURING THE LONG ENCAMPMENT at Murfreesboro, Sheridan's command style came into sharper focus. He was like many successful Union generals in his high levels of energy and stamina, and he was able to think clearly even when he had
not slept for days. Leading from the front and exhorting his men from his big gelding, Rienzi, Sheridan was an inspiring figure.

He was also surprisingly modest. Henry Castle, acting quartermaster sergeant for the 73rd Illinois, one day went to division headquarters seeking information. He nearly rode over a young man in shirtsleeves sitting on a stump, smoking a cigar. The startled man asked, “Who the—are you, anyhow?” Castle replied that he was seeking the division quartermaster's advice on obtaining cattle.

The man proceeded to advise Castle on selecting and butchering cattle and distributing the meat. As the man was concluding his soliloquy on these subjects, a staff officer rode up, saluted, and addressed him as General Sheridan. Horrified by his mistake, Castle stammered out an apology for his “unceremonious approach.” It was entirely understandable, replied Sheridan, because he was not wearing rank insignia. He added that Castle should not hesitate to consult him if he had further questions about his military duties.
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During the interregnum Sheridan improved his intelligence operations, convinced by the Rebel surprise attack at Stones River of the great importance of gathering accurate information about the enemy. One day, a stranger appeared at his headquarters, offering to supply him with information about the Army of the Tennessee. An intelligent, bustling little man, James Card was from eastern Tennessee, a region of hills and hollows where subsistence farmers eked out a marginal living. Most of them also supported the Union. From selling religious tracts throughout Middle and East Tennessee and Georgia, Card had gained a thorough knowledge of the roads and people. Sheridan hired him to serve as a scout, guide, and intelligence agent.
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THERE WAS A STRATEGIC reason for keeping the Army of the Cumberland idle at Murfreesboro until summertime. With General Ulysses Grant marching on Vicksburg, Bragg's army must be kept pinned down in Middle Tennessee so that it would not reinforce the Mississippi Rebels. And so, Rosecrans's army scarcely stirred until June 23, when James Card and his brothers reported that Bragg was on the move. The Union army broke camp and headed south .
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The Army of the Cumberland's march through Middle Tennessee and Bragg's deft withdrawal were at once a master's seminar in maneuver and a maddening game of cat and mouse. Every Rosecrans movement designed to place Bragg's army in jeopardy was foiled by Bragg slipping away. By marching on Liberty Gap, Rosecrans hoped to turn Bragg's army at Shelbyville. But when the Yankees reached Shelbyville, Bragg was gone. Sheridan approached Tullahoma, halting six miles away so that the army could mass for an all-out attack on the Rebel storage depot. When the Yankees finally pounced, the Confederates were not there.
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Sheridan learned that a Rebel cavalry brigade and some infantry had stopped on Monteagle Mountain, where the University of the South had been founded three years earlier by several Episcopal bishops—one of them Confederate general Leonidas Polk. But when Sheridan reached the mountaintop on July 5 with 1,200 cavalrymen and an infantry brigade, the Rebels were gone. Sheridan sent the units back to his division.

Weary after ten days of campaigning, Sheridan requested that a handcar be sent to the mountaintop to carry him and Colonel Frank Sherman to the bottom. He and Sherman began walking down the track to meet the handcar. But no handcar came, and it grew dark.

The anticipated easy trip down the mountain became a dangerous adventure: in the nearby cabins lived hostile Southerners; the tracks on which they walked tie to tie dropped off into black chasms. Falling often on the uneven roadbed in the dark, they slogged eleven miles without meeting the handcar. They reached their camp around midnight. Sheridan later learned that the handcar crew was captured after taking a wrong turn. Sore and bruised for months, Sheridan had many occasions to repent his lark.
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BRAGG'S LONG WITHDRAWAL ENDED at Chattanooga, a ragged town of wooden sidewalks and rutted dirt roads ringed by picturesque mountains and ridges. Located on the banks of the foaming Tennessee River, it was the crossroads of the Confederacy's two most important railroads: the East Tennessee & Virginia, which ran north and south, and the Memphis & Charleston, running east and west. It was the perfect springboard for any new Rebel offensive.
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To prepare the ground for operations against Chattanooga, Sheridan's division was sent to Bridgeport, Alabama, southwest of Chattanooga. There, he established a supply depot and chose a place to build a bridge over the Tennessee River to provide Rosecrans's army a pathway into Chattanooga.

On August 29, Sheridan began building the bridge. In one day, 1,500 men felled trees to make 1,500 logs while foragers stripped planking from nearby barns and homes. On September 1, the bridge was completed—an astounding feat to accomplish in so short a time. Sheridan's division and other units crossed the bridge the next day.
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Newspaper correspondent William F. G. Shanks happened to witness a vivid display of Sheridan's temper when he was accompanying Major General George Thomas by train to show off the new bridge and the repaired railroad line. When the train inexplicably stopped and the delay dragged on, Sheridan asked the conductor, a burly six-footer, to get the train moving again. The conductor boorishly replied that he only obeyed orders from his military railroad superintendent.

At that, Sheridan sprang to his feet, slugged the conductor two or three times, and kicked him off the train, Shanks wrote. Sheridan ordered the train forward, and he and Thomas resumed their conversation as though nothing had happened. When informed of the incident, Rosecrans admonished Sheridan not to interfere with railroad employees. Sheridan replied that the man was “saucy and impertinent.”
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The Army of the Cumberland finally marched on Chattanooga, only to discover that Bragg's army had withdrawn from the city on September 8.

Rosecrans sent two of his three army corps through the mountain gaps southeast of Chattanooga in the hope of locating Bragg's army, presumed to have withdrawn deep into Georgia. The third he kept in Chattanooga. The two corps probing southeastward—one of them Alexander McCook's XX Corps, to which Sheridan's division belonged—lost contact with one another.

 

SHERIDAN, TOGETHER WITH MOST of the division and brigade commanders, began to suspect that Bragg was not marching to Atlanta. This was a disturbing thought because if Bragg's army was nearby, it might attack Rosecrans's now dispersed army corps and cut them off from their supply base in Chattanooga on the other side of the mountains.
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On September 9, Sheridan summoned James Card and asked him to find an East Tennessean willing to slip through the Rebel lines in Georgia to learn what Bragg was up to. He would have preferred to send Card, but the Rebels knew him; Card and one of his brothers had been captured that spring while on one of Sheridan's missions. They had escaped from the Chattanooga jail before they could be sentenced for spying.
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Card found a Unionist who had been persecuted by Rebel guerrillas and wanted to move to the West. He agreed to locate Bragg's army if Sheridan would buy his livestock to pay for his relocation costs. Sheridan readily consented.

Sheridan's spy found Bragg's army in the Pigeon Mountain area of north Georgia. After infiltrating the Rebel camp, the spy was arrested. He managed to escape somehow, then to slip through the enemy picket line in the dark by crawling on his hands and knees and grunting like a wild hog.

He reached the Union lines on September 12 with the sobering information that Bragg was just twenty miles away and that he intended to fight. Moreover, Lieutenant General James Longstreet's vaunted I Corps was on its way from Virginia to reinforce Bragg.

 

AFTER GENERAL THOMAS “STONEWALL” Jackson's death at Chancellorsville in May, imperturbable Longstreet had become Robert E. Lee's right hand. Grand strategy
was Longstreet's new passion. He rightly believed that the Rebel army could utilize its interior lines of transportation to overwhelm the Yankees at any given point by shifting troops from one theater to another.

Longstreet had persuaded Lee and Confederate president Jefferson Davis to permit him to bring troops from Virginia to Bragg's army. Together, they would drive Rosecrans's army from Chattanooga, and Bragg would then return to the offensive in Tennessee.

On September 8, the day Bragg evacuated Chattanooga, two divisions from Longstreet's I Corps began streaming into Richmond to board worn-out trains for the long trip over rickety tracks to northern Georgia. With Knoxville now in Union hands, the 12,000 troops had to make a much longer journey through southern Virginia and both Carolinas to reach their staging area at Catoosa Station, Georgia.
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ALARMED BY MOUNTING EVIDENCE that the Confederates were planning to attack him, Rosecrans issued a flurry of orders to hasten the reconcentration of his three corps. They were spread over fifty-seven miles of heavily wooded hills southeast of Chattanooga, on the lee side of Missionary Ridge.

On September 17, the units had reached supporting distance of one another, and Rosecrans was on the scene. Scouts reported that Confederate troops were just three or four miles distant.

On September 18, a wall of dust arose from the Pigeon Mountain area, moving northward. It was Longstreet's two divisions. Suspecting that the Rebels outnumbered his men—they, in fact, did, 66,000 to 58,000—Rosecrans prepared for a defensive battle.

Flowing through the area where the two armies were forming for battle was the sluggish, tannin-stained Chickamauga Creek, whose Cherokee name has been variously said to mean “bad water,” “good country,” and “river of death”—the latter becoming the popular translation after what would happen there.
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SEPTEMBER–NOVEMBER 1863

SEPTEMBER 20, 1863–CHICKAMAUGA CREEK, GEORGIA—The blood-red sunrise was portentous, even if lingering smoke from the previous day's fighting was its cause. “This will indeed be a day of blood,” predicted Brigadier General James A. Garfield, chief of staff to Major General William Rosecrans, commander of the Army of the Cumberland. Puffy-faced from lack of sleep, Rosecrans rode along the Union lines, encouraging his men.

Phil Sheridan had not slept either. During a meeting of division and corps commanders the night before, there was “much apprehension for the future” because of the large Confederate troop formations in the area. Major General George Thomas, who commanded the XIV Corps, had roused himself from his intermittent naps, whenever Rosecrans addressed him, to say, “I would strengthen the left.” The meeting ended about midnight, coffee was brought in, and for reasons unknown
XX Corps commander Major General Alexander McCook felt moved to sing the ballad “The Hebrew Maid.”

Afterward, Sheridan had paced for hours, wondering whether he had done everything possible to prepare his men for the coming battle. As the sun poked above the horizon, a Confederate attack was expected momentarily. But none came.
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ON SEPTEMBER 19, VETERANS of both armies had remarked on the ferocity of the fighting, although Braxton Bragg described it as “skirmishing.” It was far more than that. A division from Thomas's corps on the Union left had started it by fording Chickamauga Creek to engage what it thought was merely an enemy brigade.

The collision exploded into a raging battle pitting four of Thomas's six divisions—half of Rosecrans's army was concentrated in Thomas's sector—against large Rebel forces in the dense woods. The terrific noise made by myriad artillery batteries and thousands of muskets sounded to an Alabama soldier “as if all the fires of earth and hell had been turned loose in one mighty effort to destroy each other.” (Decades later, local sawmills would reject logs from Chickamauga because embedded minié balls, grapeshot, and shell fragments fouled the saw teeth.) Amid the furious combat, the soldiers saw an owl fly up, only to be attacked by crows. One infantryman was heard to exclaim, “Moses, what a country! The very birds are fighting!”
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The fighting had spread down the line to Thomas Crittenden's XXI Corps in the center and then to McCook's XX Corps on the right. There, at about 4 p.m., Major General John Bell Hood's two divisions from the Army of Northern Virginia struck Jefferson C. Davis's division. Sheridan's timely arrival with two brigades from Lee and Gordon's Mills, south of the battlefield, and the appearance of Thomas Wood's division from Crittenden's corps had stopped Hood's attack. But Sheridan described it as “an ugly fight” in which he had lost a brigade commander, Colonel Luther P. Bradley.