The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian (161 page)

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Rosecrans was relieved on the day of the Buckland Races, exactly one month after the opening day of Chickamauga, whose loss had resulted
first in his retreat, then in his besiegement, and finally in his removal from command. Grant left Louisville by rail next morning, October 20, spent the night in Nashville, and went on the following day to Stevenson, Alabama, for an early evening conference with Rosecrans, who had left Chattanooga the day before, promptly on receipt of Grant’s wire, because he had not wanted to encourage by his presence any demonstrations of regret at his departure from the army he would have commanded for a full year if he had lasted one week longer. It was untrue that he had intended to evacuate the beleaguered town, as Dana had told Stanton he had it in mind to do; in point of fact, he had been hard at work for the past ten days with his chief of engineers on plans for solving the acute supply problem as a prelude to resuming the offensive. Moreover, though he disliked Grant and knew quite well that Grant returned the feeling, his devotion to their common cause enabled him not only to share with the incoming general, who had just ordered his removal, his recently worked-out plans for lifting the siege, but even to do so cordially. “He came into my car,” Grant subsequently wrote, “and we held a brief interview, in which he described very clearly the situation at Chattanooga, and made some excellent suggestions as to what should be done. My only wonder was that he had not carried them out.”

After the conference, Old Rosy took up his journey north and Grant proceeded to Bridgeport, where he spent the night. Next morning, with his crutches strapped to the saddle like a brace of carbines—for he still could not manage afoot without them—he began the sixty-mile horseback trek up the Sequatchie Valley and over Walden’s Ridge, made necessary by the long-range rebel guns on Raccoon Mountain commanding the direct approach to Chattanooga, which was less than half the roundabout distance the army trains were obliged to travel if they were to maintain a trickle of supplies for the hungry bluecoats cooped up in the town. At Jasper, ten miles out, the party stopped for a visit with Oliver Howard, who had established his corps headquarters there soon after his arrival from Virginia two weeks before. In the course of their talk Howard saw Grant looking intently at an empty whiskey bottle on a nearby table. “I never drink,” the one-armed general said hastily, anxious lest his reputation for sobriety be doubted by his new commander, whatever shortcomings the latter himself might have in that regard. “Neither do I,” Grant replied, straight-faced, as he rose and hobbled out on his crutches to be lifted back onto his horse. Beyond Jasper—particularly around Anderson’s Crossroads, the halfway point, where Wheeler had wrought such havoc twenty days ago—he began, like Browning’s Childe Roland, to get an oppressive firsthand notion of the difficulties in store for him ahead. Rain had turned low-lying stretches of the road into knee-deep bogs, and other stretches along hillsides had been made almost impassable by washouts; the crippled general had to be carried over the worst of these, which were too
unsafe to cross on horseback. Ten thousand mules and horses had died by now, either by rebel bayonets or from starvation, and a great many of their carcasses were strewn along the roadway, offensive alike to eye and nose and conscience, especially for a man who loved animals as much as Grant did. Perhaps not even the field of Shiloh, with its grisly two-day harvest still upon it, offended him more than what he encountered in the course of the present two-day ride up that quiet valley and over that barren ridge, which he descended late on October 23 to regain the north bank of the Tennessee, immediately opposite the town that was his goal.

In some ways Chattanooga itself was worse; for there, in addition to more dead and dying horses, you saw the faces of the soldiers, which showed the effects not only of their hunger—“One of the regiments of our brigade,” a Kansas infantryman was to testify, “caught, killed, and ate a dog that wandered into camp”—but also the dejection proceeding from their month-old defeat at Chickamauga and the apparent hopelessness of their present tactical situation, ringed as they were by the rebel victors on all the surrounding heights. Grant crossed the river just before dark, riding carefully over the pontoon bridge, and went at once to see Thomas, who had promised four days ago to “hold the town till we starve.” This was something quite different, Grant now discerned, from saying that the army would be able to live there, let alone come out of the place victorious. “I appreciated the force of this dispatch … when I witnessed the condition of affairs which prompted it,” he afterwards declared. The night was cold and rainy. He could see the campfires of the Confederates, gleaming like stars against the outer darkness, above and on three sides of him, as if he stood in the pit of a darkened amphitheater, peering up and out, east and west and south.

Chattanooga was said to be an Indian word meaning “mountains looking at each other,” and next morning Grant perceived the aptness of the name. He saw on the left the long reach of Missionary Ridge, a solid wall that threw its shadow over the town until the sun broke clear of its rim, and on the right the cumulous bulge of Raccoon Mountain. Dead ahead, though, was the dominant feature of this forbidding panorama. Its summit 1200 feet above the surface of the river at its base, Lookout Mountain rose, a Union correspondent had remarked, “like an everlasting thunder storm that will never pass over.” Seen as Grant saw it now, wreathed in mist, the journalist continued, “it looms up … and recedes, but when the sun shines strongly out it draws so near as to startle you.” Grant was to see it that way too, in time, but for the present what impressed him most were the guns posted high on the slopes and peaks and ridges, all trained on the blue army here below. With the help of glasses he could even see the cannoneers lounging about
in careless attitudes, as if to emphasize by their idleness the advantage they enjoyed. “I suppose,” he said years later, “they looked upon the garrison of Chattanooga as prisoners of war, feeding or starving themselves, and thought it would be inhuman to kill any of them except in self-defense.”

With two thirds of his practically useless cavalry sent away, Thomas had about 45,000 effectives in his Army of the Cumberland, and though nothing had yet been done to relieve the most pressing of their problems—the hunger that came from trying to live on quarter-rations—Dana at least had been quick to inform Stanton, on the day of Grant’s arrival “wet, dirty, and well,” that “the change at headquarters here [under Thomas] is already strikingly perceptible. Order prevails instead of universal chaos.” For one thing, there had been a complete reorganization, a top-to-bottom shake-up, in the course of which regiments were consolidated, brigades re-formed, and divisions redistributed. Formerly there had been eleven of these last; now there were six, assigned three each to two instead of the previous four corps. Palmer had succeeded Thomas, and Granger had been placed at the head of a new corps formed by combining his own with those of the departed Crittenden and McCook. Sheridan, Wood, and Brigadier General Charles Cruft, Palmer’s successor, commanded the three divisions under Palmer; Johnson, Davis, and Baird the three under Granger. The other five division commanders had been disposed of or employed in various ways; Negley was sent North, ostensibly for his health, while Steedman and Van Cleve were made post commanders of Chattanooga and Murfreesboro, and Reynolds and Brannan were respectively appointed to be chiefs of staff and artillery, directly under Thomas. Grant approved of all these arrangements, some of which had been effected by Rosecrans, but as he examined the tactical situation confronting the reorganized army—including the alarming discovery that there was not enough ammunition for one hard day of fighting—he found it altogether bleak. “It looked, indeed, as if but two courses were open,” he afterwards remarked: “one to starve, the other to surrender or be captured.”

Not only did the Confederates have the tactical advantage of gazing down on their opponents with something of the complacency of marksmen contemplating fish in a rain barrel; they also had a numerical advantage. Bragg had close to 70,000 veterans on those heights and in the intervening valleys. This would be considerably overmatched, of course, when and if the Federal reinforcements arrived. Hooker was already standing by, near Bridgeport, with some 16,000 effectives—exclusive, that is, of service personnel—in the four divisions he had brought from the Army of the Potomac, while Sherman was working his way east along the Memphis & Charleston Railroad with another 20,000 in the five divisions of his Army of the Tennessee, and Burnside
had about 25,000 around Knoxville in the four divisions of his Army of the Ohio. This gave a total of well over 100,000 men in the four commands. Even without Burnside, who now definitely was not coming—though he was strategically useful where he was, as a bait or a menace, hovering eastward off Bragg’s flank—the combination of Thomas, Hooker, and Sherman would give Grant nearly half again as many troops as stood in the ranks of his gray besiegers. First, though, he must get them into Chattanooga, and before he could do that he would have to find a way to feed them when they got there, since otherwise they would only increase the number of hungry mouths and speed the garrison’s already rapid progress toward starvation. That was what it came to every time, no matter how many angles the problem was seen from: the question of how to open a new supply line, supplementing or replacing the inadequate, carcass-littered one that led back over Walden’s Ridge and down the Sequatchie Valley to the railhead depots bulging with food and ammunition at Stevenson and Bridgeport.

The answer came out of a conference with Thomas and his chief engineer, W. F. Smith, who had served in the same capacity under Rosecrans. This was that same “Baldy” Smith who had led a corps at Fredericksburg but had been transferred out of the Virginia army—as a result, it was said, of his inability to get along with Hooker any better than he had with Burnside—and had commanded the Pennsylvania militia that stood off Jeb Stuart at Carlisle during the Gettysburg campaign, after which he had been given his present assignment with the army down in Tennessee. A Vermont-born West Pointer, short and portly, thirty-nine years old and described by a fellow staffer as having “a light-brown imperial and shaggy mustache, a round, military head, and the look of a German officer, altogether,” Smith was still a brigadier, despite the lofty posts he had filled, because Congress refused to confirm his promotion on grounds that he had been deeply involved in the machinations against Burnside: as indeed he had, for he was by nature contentious, ever quick to spot and carp at the shortcomings of his superiors. Grant had not seen him since their Academy days, twenty years before, but he was greatly taken with him on brief reacquaintance, mainly because Smith had arrived, on his own and in conferences with Rosecrans, at what he believed was the answer to the question of how to open a new and better supply line back to Bridgeport. It was based of course on geography, but it was also based on daring. The Tennessee River, which flowed due west past Chattanooga, turned abruptly south just beyond the town, then swung back north as if by rebound from the foot of Lookout Mountain. Two miles upstream, on the western side of the point of land inclosed by this narrow bend—Moccasin Point, it was called, from its resemblance, when seen from above, to an Indian shoe—was Brown’s Ferry, an excellent site for a crossing because it was beyond the reach of all but the longest-range guns on Lookout and only a mile from the
pontoon bridge already in use north of the town. From Brown’s Ferry the river flowed on north, then turned south again, around the long northwestern spur of Raccoon Mountain, to describe a second and longer bend, along whose base a road led westward through Cummings Gap to another Tennessee crossing known as Kelley’s Ferry, and from there along the right bank of the river down to Bridgeport.

Here then was the ideal route: save for one drawback. The rebels held it. They had guns emplaced on Raccoon Mountain and pickets advanced to the river itself, squarely athwart the coveted approaches to the gap through which the road connecting the two ferries ran. But Smith had the answer to this as well, a tactical solution employing the principles of speed and stealth to achieve surprise and, with surprise, success. Crossing at Bridgeport, a force from Hooker would follow the railroad east around the south flank of the mountain, then move north under cover of darkness, still following the railroad through Wauhatchie, to close upon Brown’s Ferry from the rear. Meanwhile, and also under cover of darkness, a force from Thomas would advance on the same point in two columns, one marching overland, first across the pontoon bridge at Chattanooga, then west across the narrow base of Moccasin Point, and the other floating noiselessly downriver in pontoon boats, past the sheer north face of Lookout, to spearhead the crossing at Brown’s Ferry, capture the gray outpost there, and hold on while the boats were being anchored and floored over by an engineer detachment so that the column approaching by land could cross as reinforcements; whereupon the two forces, one from Hooker and one from Thomas, would combine for mop-up operations, opening Cummings Gap to clear the road leading west to Kelley’s Ferry and dislodging the enemy guns on Raccoon Mountain. Once this was done, the new supply route—half the length of the old one over Walden’s Ridge, and a good deal less than half as tortuous—would be securely in Federal hands; the troops in Chattanooga could go back on full rations, refill their cartridge boxes and limber chests, and prepare to deal with the graybacks still on Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge.