The Lost Gettysburg Address (20 page)

What Anderson did not know was that while he and the entire
right wing of the army had been swept from the field, two of his
favorite officers were gallantly buying Rosecrans the time he needed
to redeploy his forces and prevent a crushing defeat.
Generals Philip
H. Sheridan and
Joshua W. Sill had been mutual friends since their
days at West Point. Sill had been Anderson’s division commander
until shortly before the army left Nashville, when he opted for
command of a brigade under Sheridan. An Ohio native, Sill was revered
by his men for his intelligence and his fine character. Unlike the rest
of McCook’s divisional commanders, Sheridan had his men up and
ready at four o’clock in the morning. He and Sill had met McCook
two hours earlier and warned him of an early morning attack.
McCook had appeared unconcerned.

About 7:30 a.m. the South Carolina and Alabama brigade of
Colonel Arthur M. Manigault attacked Sill’s position with typical
fury, pushing back the Thirty-Sixth Illinois and the Eighty-Eighth
Illinois. As General Sill rode up to rally his troops for a
counter-attack, a bullet tore through his brain, killing him in an instant. After
several hours of intense fighting, hordes of Confederate infantry were
closing on the divisions of Sheridan and
Brigadier General James S.
Negley like a vise, surrounding them on three sides. Sheridan’s and
Negley’s brave stands came at a terrible cost until finally the brigades
of
Major General Lovell H. Rousseau arrived to relieve them. The
rebel onslaught was reaching its peak, and victory for the Butternuts
appeared close at hand.

Rousseau’s reinforcements filed past the brigades of
Colonel
William Grose to his right, when they were met with a furious
assault and their left flank thrown back. Grose ordered the Sixth Ohio,
commanded by
Anderson’s nephew Nicholas, along with the
Thirty-Fourth Indiana, to his front right, while other regiments faced
southeast in V-shaped formations to defend the Nashville Pike. Colonel
Nicholas Anderson’s troops and the Hoosiers watched as crazed and
confused Union soldiers from Sheridan’s and Negley’s divisions fled
by in haste. When they finally cleared their ranks, the oncoming
rebels were a mere one hundred yards distant. A desperate firestorm
erupted. The Thirty-Fourth Indiana was overwhelmed almost before
the men could fire a shot. Nicholas Anderson’s troops withstood the
first volley with considerable loss but responded bravely, exchanging
fire for about twenty minutes.

The Confederates were so close that Nicholas ordered his men
to fix bayonets and prepare for hand-to-hand combat. Before he
could give the command to charge, however, he found himself
out-flanked on both sides and was forced to retreat. Nineteen men,
including his adjutant and five color-bearers, died there. In all, 112
were wounded. The Sixth Ohio had held its ground for forty minutes
and prevented a breakthrough to the pike. Unlike that of his uncle,
Nicholas’s battle was far from over. He had been wounded in the
thigh but refused to leave the field. The Sixth Ohio replenished its
ammunition and formed a line of battle astride the Nashville Pike.
More men of Nicholas’s regiment died while holding that position
just west of a landmark known as the Round Forest, where
Colonel
William B. Hazen was making a determined defense of the Union
left. Hazen held his position all day in the most contested section of
the battlefield.
³

General Rosecrans, who seemed to be everywhere during the
battle, cheering on his forces and adjusting his strategy, was riding to
the Round Forest in the early afternoon. Without warning, a
twelve-pound shell cut through the air and decapitated chief-of-staff Julius
Garesche, splattering Rosecrans with the blood and brains of his
best friend. Rosecrans appeared shaken for a moment then turned to
Sheridan and told him that good men must die in battle.

By nightfall the Union Army still held the Nashville Pike. Both armies
had sustained horrendous casualties in what was fast becoming one of
the bloodiest major battles of the Civil War.
Confederate commander
Bragg was encouraged following the first day of battle. Although he
had not achieved his ultimate goal, his men had demolished nearly
a third of the Union Army and captured more than three thousand
prisoners. His telegram to Richmond implied victory. “God has
granted us a Happy New Year,” he boasted. Rosecrans spent the first
part of the evening riding through the lines, consulting with his
division commanders, and encouraging the rank and file. He then
assembled a council of war. The shell-shocked
McCook had seen enough
slaughter and wanted to head back to Nashville.
Generals George
Thomas and
Thomas Crittenden wanted to remain in position and
fight. Rosecrans decided to stay.
⁴

On New Year’s Day both armies rested. Most of the adversaries
respected an informal truce so that they could tend to the wounded
and bury their dead.
Nicholas Anderson had time on his hands as he
rested his wounded leg and wondered what the next day would bring.
The Harvard graduate and lover of literature composed a poem that
day that revealed his feelings about the gallant men lost in the terrible
battle:

STONE RIVER, JAN 1, 1863

The day had sped. The night winds wildly moan

Their wintry chorus o’er the prairie West;

Weird wandering shadows, lengthening, floating, on

To angels’ realms find refuge in their breast.

Hark to the sound! The engine’s rushing blast

Thrills the hamlet as it rattles past.

 

An aged father totters to the door.

“Great battle fought!” He trembles at the cry;

The dim-eyed mother breathes a broken prayer

For souls now hushed in death and victory.

Resounds the shout,— “the battle surely won!”

Ah! Where their boy who to the war has gone?

 

The prattler, standing by his mother’s knee,

Lists to the shout, and eager clasps her hand:

“Oh tell me, mamma, where in Tennessee

Is papa now, and where his patriot band?”

He hears the sob; he startles at the tear,

And quivering lips which faintly murmur, “Where?”

 

Sleep silently, brother, husband, son, and sire,

Where violet blooms bedeck thy heather bed!

There let us raise the monumental spire

To mark the tomb of brave unnumbered dead.

Rear high the shaft above the sweeping river,

Of martyrdom and love, a sign forever!
⁵

The foes dug trenches and repositioned their troops for the next
phase of the battle. Rosecrans tightened his formation and sent
Van
Cleve’s division to the far left, across the Stones River to an eminence
on the east bank. This was a shrewd move, as the hill commanded a
view of the open fields in front of his army. It was the perfect location
to place artillery batteries. Bragg received no report of this movement
until the following morning, when his own plan was already decided.
It proved to be a critical missing piece of information.

Former Kentucky senator and presidential candidate
John C.
Breckenridge commanded a division in the corps of
Confederate
Lieutenant General William J. Hardee. Breckenridge’s troops were
massed on the east side of Stones River, facing the Union left wing.
Frustrated by inaccurate reports of enemy troop movements on the
first day of the battle, the Kentuckian inspected the Union positions
personally on the morning of January 2. When he saw Union troops
dug in on a hill near McFadden’s Ford, he became concerned. Dozens
of artillery pieces aimed on an attacking force from this position
meant that his planned attack would be sure suicide. Breckenridge
reported his findings to Bragg, whose response was curt. He ordered
Breckenridge to take the hill. By sending the victory telegram to
Richmond two days earlier, Bragg had committed himself to another
attack. He could not back down now.

Breckenridge returned to his command and related the orders
to his brigade commanders. One of these brigades was an eclectic
mix of volunteer units from Kentucky. These men were volunteers
who formed the First Kentucky Brigade, more popularly known as
the Orphan Brigade. They had been thus named due to the fact that
Kentucky was initially neutral, forcing supporters of the Confederacy
to enlist in nearby Tennessee.
General Roger W. Hanson, commander
of the Orphan Brigade, exploded with rage when he heard the orders
from Breckenridge. If
Bragg insisted on murdering his own troops, he
threatened, Hanson would kill him first. Breckenridge and another
officer had to physically restrain Hanson until he calmed down. The
men were instructed to advance rapidly to within a hundred yards of
the enemy, fire, then claw their way through the underbrush, and
finally attack their opponents with bayonets. The Union gunners were
ready with fifty-seven cannons in position by four in the afternoon to
meet the expected onslaught.

Nicholas Anderson and his Sixth Ohio stood in the rear of four
lines of battle when Breckenridge’s attack began. The Confederates
ran across the fields and hurled themselves into the Union lines.
Sergeant Samuel Welch of the Fifty-First Ohio described the
simultaneous first volleys. “It seemed to me that both lines  .  .  .  were
annihilated,” Welch observed, as dozens of men from either side fell. The
Union soldiers fled “like blackbirds,” according to
Jervis D. Grainger
of the Sixth Kentucky Infantry. The men had to cross the icy river
sixty feet wide and two feet deep, then scale a twenty-foot limestone
bluff with enemy bullets striking the rocks as they climbed. “My idea
was that the Army of the Cumberland was rapidly passing out of
existence,” Welch recalled. When the beleaguered bluecoats finally
crested the riverbank, they found
Negley’s reinforcements waiting
there to aid them.
⁶

Major General Thomas L. Crittenden, commander of the Union
left wing, relied on his chief of artillery,
Major John Mendenhall,
to time the firing of the cannons. They waited until as many of
the Confederates were exposed in the open field as possible before
all fifty-seven guns fired at once. The result, according to Colonel
Charles Anderson, was “the most stupendous and continuous fire of
artillery  .  .  .  in a small space ever heard on this continent.” In just
a few minutes the rebels lost an astounding eighteen hundred men.
⁷

Negley’s and
Hazen’s brigades then crossed the river and began a
counterattack against Breckenridge’s decimated division. Grose’s
brigade, including Nicholas Anderson’s Sixth Ohio, also moved forward
against Breckenridge’s right flank. For the first time in the Battle of
Stones River, a large portion of the Confederate army was in retreat
under withering fire. Just two hours after Breckenridge’s attack, the
Union Army had advanced to the enemy’s original breastworks. Two
more hours of sharp fighting finally dislodged the rebels from their
trenches, forcing them to retire. Rosecrans’s left wing pulled back
into a defensive position before nightfall. It was a stunning turn of
events.

The Battle of Stones River was over. The Northern press was
ecstatic at the result. The editor of the
Louisville Journal
wrote that the
Rosecrans name was famous before but “had now become
immortal.” The timing could not have been better for the Lincoln
administration. The president’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation
on New Year’s Day had transformed the conflict into a virtual
holy war. Although it angered many in Ohio and other northern
states, Lincoln’s groundbreaking executive order effectively ended
Confederate hopes for assistance from Britain or France. The
military victory also opened the door to an eventual invasion of the South
from Nashville through Chattanooga and into Georgia. “God bless
you and all with you,” Lincoln gushed. He later told Rosecrans, “You
gave us a hard-earned victory, which, had there been a defeat instead,
the nation could scarcely have lived over.” For the soldiers the end of
the battle was hardly a cause for celebration. Close to nineteen
thousand men in blue and gray lay dead or wounded. Heaps of body parts
piled up outside field hospitals and unburied corpses stiffened on the
battlefield. Both armies felt eviscerated and needed time to recover
physically and mentally from the terrible experience.
⁸

Anderson wrote to his eldest daughter from the newly named
Camp Sill, on the east side of Stones River, that evening. Although his
wounds were minor, the pain was real and kept him awake at night.
His persistent fever caused his doctor to fear that he might have
contracted typhoid fever. He sent his suit of clothes to his daughters
“marred as you see by the traitors,” but the torn and bloody uniform
was later stolen from a holding area at Nashville. Rumors swirled
around the camp that the enemy had retreated south more than fifty
miles to Fayetteville, Tennessee. Others speculated that Bragg had
been reinforced by
Major General James Longstreet and was
preparing for another great battle. In reality,
Bragg was making yet another
escape to lick his wounds and ponder how such a promising tactical
triumph had devolved into a bloody strategic defeat.

For the next ten days, as Anderson recovered in camp two miles
south of Murfreesboro, the press and other pundits were busy
critiquing the performance of the principal leaders of both armies.
Anderson was not as critical of
McCook as others. The attack had
been a complete surprise after all, he reasoned. “What more could he
do?” Anderson asked. Bragg’s plan was excellent, he admitted, but
the rebels “unaccountably failed in vigor in following it up.” What
Anderson did admit, and what McCook’s critics were quick in
pointing out, was the fact that the Union right wing was spread too wide
and too thin, with no real reserves and no natural shields on its right
flank. But Anderson was being too kind to his friend. If Sheridan had
been in McCook’s place, the entire right wing of the Army of the
Cumberland would have been up and ready at four in the morning.
Countless lives might have been saved.
⁹