The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian (153 page)

Such was the unhappy state of affairs in the Army of Tennessee, the men hungry and disgruntled and the generals bitterly resentful, on the morrow of what Longstreet, in his letter to Richmond, called “the
most complete victory of the war—except, perhaps, the first Manassas,” he added, remembering past glory and gladder times.

Beyond the semicircular rim of earthworks, down in the town and off at the far end of the chain of command leading back to Washington, a scapegoat hunt was also under way. McCook and Crittenden had already been relieved, ostensibly for flight in time of danger, yet it had not escaped notice that the winner in the headlong race for safety was the man who consented to their removal. Stanton, for one, observed caustically that the two corps commanders had “made pretty good time away from the fight, but Rosecrans beat them both.”

Moreover, the reverse had come in sudden and sharp contrast to expectations Old Rosy himself had aroused. “The army is in excellent condition and spirits,” he had telegraphed soon after darkness ended the first day’s fighting, “and by the blessing of Providence the defeat of the enemy will be total tomorrow.” Lincoln did not like the sound of this, finding it reminiscent of Joe Hooker, and when he learned next evening that the army had been routed, he claimed to have foreseen such a turn of events. “Well, Rosecrans has been whipped, as I feared,” he said. “I have feared it for several days. I believe I feel trouble in the air before it comes.” Nor was the general’s immediate reaction of a kind to encourage hope that he would make an early recovery from the setback. “We have met with a serious disaster,” he notified Halleck soon after he reached Chattanooga; “extent not yet ascertained. Enemy overwhelmed us, drove our right, pierced our center, and scattered troops there.” Despite his own gloom, which was heavy, Lincoln tried to lift the Ohioan’s. “Be of good cheer,” he wired him late that night. “We have unabated confidence in you and in your soldiers and officers.… We shall do our utmost to assist you. Send us your present posting.” But the general, in his reply the following morning, gave no indication that he would attempt to stay in the town he had fallen back on. In fact, he expressed some doubt that he could do so, even if he tried: “Our loss is heavy and our troops worn down.… We have no certainty of holding our position here.” Such irresolution was disturbing in a commander. What was more, when the President asked him next day to “relieve my anxiety as to the position and condition of your army,” Rosecrans replied in effect that his faith was not so much in himself or his army as it was in Providence. “We are about 30,000 brave and determined men,” he wired; “but our fate is in the hands of God, in whom I hope.”

Lincoln soon emerged from his gloom. The important thing, as he saw it, was not that Rosecrans had been whipped at Chickamauga, but that he still held Chattanooga. As long as he did so, he could keep the Confederates out of Tennessee and also deny them use of one of their most important railroads. “If he can only maintain this position,
without [doing anything] more,” the President told Halleck, “the rebellion can only eke out a short and feeble existence, as an animal sometimes may with a thorn in its vitals.” By now, after three days’ rest and no pursuit, Rosecrans had recovered a measure of his resolution. “We hold this point, and cannot be dislodged except by very superior numbers,” he wired on September 23, although he made it clear that this depended on “having all reinforcements you can send hurried up.” Lincoln had been doing his best in this respect, instructing Halleck to order troops to Chattanooga from Vicksburg and Memphis, while he himself undertook to prod Burnside into marching fast from Knoxville. When Burnside replied that he was just then closing in on Jonesboro, which lay in the opposite direction, the President lost his temper. “Damn Jonesboro,” he said testily, and returned to his efforts to get the ruff-whiskered general to swing west. This proved so difficult, however, that he decided in the end to leave him where he was, covering Knoxville; Rosecrans would have to be reinforced from elsewhere. And that same night, September 23, Lincoln met with Stanton, Halleck, Chase, and Seward, together with several lesser War Department officials, in an attempt to determine just where such reinforcements could be found.

Stanton, having heard that evening from Dana that the Army of the Cumberland, outnumbered, dejected, and under fire from the heights inclosing Chattanooga on the south and east, could not hold out for more than a couple of weeks unless it was promptly and substantially reinforced, had called the midnight conference to suggest a solution to the problem. Since Burnside apparently could not be budged, and since the troops ordered from Vicksburg and Memphis would have to make a slow overland march for lack of any means of transportation, the Secretary proposed that Rosecrans be sent a sizable portion of the Army of the Potomac, which could make the trip by rail. Lincoln and Halleck objected that this would prevent Meade from taking the offensive, but Stanton replied: “There is no reason to expect General Meade will attack Lee, although greatly superior in force, and his great numbers where they are are useless. In five days 30,000 could be put with Rosecrans.” The President doubted this last, offering to bet that no such number of men could even be brought to Washington within that span of time. Still, it was clear that something had to be done, and when Seward and Chase sided with their fellow cabinet member Lincoln allowed himself to be persuaded. Unless Meade intended to launch an immediate offensive, two of his corps would be detached at once and sent to Chattanooga. These would be Howard’s and Slocum’s, and they would be commanded by Joe Hooker, who was conveniently at hand and unemployed. Aside from this reduction of the force proposed and this choice of a leader, which rather galled him, Stanton was given full charge of the transfer operation, with instructions to arrange it as he saw fit. He flew into action without delay. The meeting broke up at about 2 o’clock in
the morning, and at 2.30 he got off a wire to Meade, directing him to have the two corps ready to load aboard northbound trains by nightfall, and another to Dana, informing him that the reinforcements would be sent. “[We] will have them in Nashville in five or six days from today,” he declared, “with orders to push on immediately wherever General Rosecrans wants them.”

Telegrams were also sent—in fact had been sent beforehand, so confident was the Secretary that the council would approve his plan—to officials of three of the several railroads involved, requesting them to “come to Washington as quickly as you can.” By noon of the 24th they were in Stanton’s office, poring over maps and working out the logistical details required for transporting four divisions, together with their guns and wagons, from the eastern to the western theater, 1200 circuitous miles across the intervening Alleghenies. Four changes of cars were necessary, two at unbridged crossings of the Ohio, near Wheeling and Louisville, and two more at Washington and Indianapolis, where there were no connecting tracks between the roads that must be used. Hooker was authorized to commandeer all the cars, locomotives, plants, and equipment that he deemed necessary, but no such action had to be taken, so complete was the co-operation of all the lines. Before sundown of the following day, just forty-four hours after Dana’s warning reached the War Department, the first trainload of soldiers pulled into Washington from Culpeper, the point of origin down in Virginia. By the morning of the 27th, two days later, 12,600 men, together with 33 cars of field artillery and 21 of baggage, had passed through the capital, and at 10 o’clock that evening Stanton wired former Assistant Secretary Thomas A. Scott, who had returned to his prewar duties with the Pennsylvania Railroad and was posted at Louisville to regulate the operation west of the mountains: “The whole force, except 3300 of the XII Corps, is now moving.” Within another two days Scott reported trains pulling regularly out of Louisville, and at 10.30 the following night—September 30—the first eastern troops reached Bridgeport, precisely on the schedule announced at the outset, six days back. By October 2, nearly 20,000 men, 10 six-gun batteries with their horses and ammunition, and 100 carloads of baggage had arrived at the Tennessee railhead. “Your work is most brilliant,” Stanton wired Scott. “A thousand thanks. It is a great achievement.”

It was indeed a great achievement, this swiftest of all the mass movements of troops in history, and most of the credit belonged to the Secretary of War, who had worked feverishly and efficiently to accomplish what many, including the Commander in Chief, had said could not be done. Under his direction, the North had given its answer to the South’s strategic advantage of occupying the interior lines; for though the Confederates had stolen a march and thereby managed, in Forrest’s phrase, to “get there first with the most men,” the Federals had promptly
upped the ante by moving farther and faster with still more. In the final stages of the operation, Wheeler’s raiders delayed some of the supply trains by tearing up sections of track, but all got through safely in the end. “You may justly claim the merit of having saved Chattanooga,” Hooker wired Stanton on October 11, after posting his four divisions to prevent a rebel crossing below the town and a descent on the hungry garrison’s rear. The Secretary was pleased to hear so, just as he had been pleased the week before at the evidence that he had been right in rejecting doleful objections that Lee would attack if Meade’s army was weakened by any substantial detachment of troops to Rosecrans. “ ‘All quiet on the Potomac,’ ” he had informed the Chattanooga quartermaster on October 4. “Nothing to disturb autumnal slumbers.… All public interest is now concentrated on the Tennessee.”

Bragg’s complaint that the Federals had “more than double our numbers” was untrue in regard to the time he made it his excuse for not rapidly following up the advantage gained at Chickamauga. In fact, when McLaws arrived—with two of his own and one of Hood’s brigades, plus the First Corps artillery, which soon was posted atop Lookout Mountain—the Confederates became numerically superior. But now that Hooker had crossed the Alleghenies with nearly 20,000 reinforcements, the situation was reversed. It was the besiegers who were outnumbered. This novel condition, rarely paralleled in military annals, was about to become more novel still; Sherman was on the way from Vicksburg, via Memphis, with another five divisions. Even when he reached Chattanooga, the Army of the Cumberland would not have “more than double” the number of troops in the Army of Tennessee, but it already had a considerable preponderance without him. Although there was still the menace of starvation—an Illinois private was complaining, tall-tale style, that since Chickamauga he and his comrades had eaten “but two meals a day, and one cracker for each meal”—Rosecrans at least could relax his fears that Bragg was going to drive him into the river with a sudden, downhill infantry assault. The rebels lacked the strength, and no one knew this better than their chief. A graver danger, so far as the northern commander was personally concerned, lurked at the far end of the telegraph wires linking his headquarters to those of his superiors in Washington. This applied in particular to the headquarters of the Secretary of War, whose original mistrust of his fellow Ohioan was being confirmed almost daily in the confidential reports he received from Dana, his special emissary on the scene.

Immediately after the battle, the former Brook Farmer had been glad to “testify to the conspicuous and steady gallantry of Rosecrans on the field”; he put the blame for the defeat on “that dangerous blunderhead McCook” and on Crittenden, whom he considered derelict and incompetent. Before the month was out, however, he had begun to sour on Old Rosy. “He abounds in friendliness and approbativeness.” Dana
wired on the 27th, “[but] is greatly lacking in firmness and steadiness of will. He is a temporizing man.… If it be decided to change the chief commander”—there had been no intimation that such a thing was being considered; Dana brought it up of his own accord—“I would take the liberty of suggesting that some Western general of high rank and great prestige, like Grant, for instance, would be preferable as his successor.” Three days later he favored Thomas for the post, saying: “Should there be a change in the chief command, there is no other man whose appointment would be so welcome to this army.” As for the present leader, Dana informed Stanton “that the soldiers have lost their attachment for [him] since he failed them in the battle, and that they do not now cheer him until they are ordered to do so.” In the course of the next two weeks, the first two in October, the Assistant Secretary’s conviction became even more pronounced in this regard. “I have never seen a public man possessing talent with less administrative power, less clearness and steadiness in difficulty, and greater practical incapacity than General Rosecrans. He has inventive fertility and knowledge, but he has no strength of will and no concentration of purpose. His mind scatters; there is no system in the use of his busy days and restless nights.… Under the present circumstances I consider this army to be very unsafe in his hands.” Thus Dana, on the 12th. Six days later, after passing along a report that the soldiers were shouting “Crackers!” at staff officers who moved along them to inspect the fortifications, he added the finishing touches to his word portrait of a man in control of nothing, least of all himself: “Amid all this, the practical incapacity of the general commanding is astonishing, and it often seems difficult to believe him of sound mind. His imbecility appears to be contagious.… If the army is finally obliged to retreat, the probability is that it will fall back like a rabble, leaving its artillery, and protected only by the river behind it.”

He might have spared himself and the telegrapher the labor of composing and transmitting this last in his series of depositions as to the general’s unfitness for command; for by now, although he would not find it out until the following day, the purpose he intended had been achieved. Stanton had been passing his dispatches along to the Commander in Chief, who had found in them a ready confirmation of his own worst suspicions. Despite this, and because he had not yet decided on a replacement, Lincoln had continued his efforts to stiffen Old Rosy’s resolution. On October 12, for instance, while Dana was observing the “scattered” condition of the Ohioan’s mind, Lincoln wired: “You and Burnside now have [the enemy] by the throat, and he must break your hold or perish.” Rosecrans replied that afternoon, complaining that the corn was ripe on the rebel side of the Tennessee, while “our side is barren.” Nevertheless, and in spite of this evidence of divine displeasure, he closed by remarking, much as before, that “we must put our trust in God, who never fails those who truly trust.” Commendable though
such faith was, particularly after all the Job-like strain that had been placed on it of late, the President would have preferred to see it balanced by a measure of self-reliance. And not only did this quality appear to be totally lacking in the commander of the army now holed up in Chattanooga, but it had begun to seem to Lincoln that ever since Chickamauga, as he told his secretary, Rosecrans had been acting “confused and stunned, like a duck hit on the head.”