The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian (150 page)

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 doggedness 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.

Steep though the price was, the gain was great. Not only had they shored up and prolonged Brannan’s overlapped western flank; they also had brought with them from McAfee’s Church a hard-hitting battery of three-inch rifles, which added the weight of their metal to the blue resistance, and no less than 95,000 rounds of small-arms ammunition. This last was in particular demand, because the army’s main ordnance supply train had been involved in McCook’s collapse and flight, and Thomas’s soldiers were burning up what they had on hand at a fearful rate; an Ohio regiment of 535 men, for example, would expend nearly 45,000 rounds of rifle ammunition before the day was over. In the face of such fiery opposition—an average expenditure of better than 80 rounds per man, including casualties—it was no wonder that Longstreet pronounced Johnson’s “key of the battle,” by which the Tennessean meant the hilly spur along whose slopes the east-west Union line was drawn, “a rough one.”

Returning from his conference with the disgruntled Bragg, Old Peter arrived to find Kershaw checked on the right and Johnson and Hindman just going in on the left. Like them, he had thought it probable that a determined nudge would persuade the bluecoats to continue their retreat, but when the second attack was repulsed—disclosing, as he said later, that the defenders were “full of fight, even to the aggressive”—he
knew he was in for trouble. Hindman, who had been struck in the neck by a fragment of shell but declined to quit the field, agreed with this revised assessment, subsequently reporting that while he “never saw Confederate soldiers fight better,” he had “never known Federal troops to fight so well.” However, Longstreet wasted no time on regret that Kershaw had jumped the gun, committing his two brigades before the six at the far end of the line were ready, or that Johnson, conversely, had not swept around the open flank before Granger arrived to brace it. Instead, he sent word for them to keep up the pressure on the two extremities while Preston was massing his three brigades, only one of which had seen any action so far in the battle, for an assault on the blue center. Then at last, with Law coming in on Kershaw’s left and Stewart on his right, the second of Old Peter’s clenched-fist blows would dispose of what had survived the devastation of the first.