Never Call Retreat (39 page)

It was hard to refute this, and it was equally hard to deny that Bragg apparently had this Yankee army locked up in its city of refuge. Rosecrans was too weak to fight his way out, his line of supply was at Bragg's mercy, and it seemed likely that he must eventually be starved into surrender. Yet the atmosphere around Bragg's headquarters was murky with fault-finding, and the hard things Bragg was saying about his principal lieutenants were matched, if not somewhat surpassed, by the hard things they were saying about him. There was enough back-biting going on, in short, to paralyze any army, and Mr. Davis faced just about what Mr. Lincoln faced after the battle of Fredericksburg. He had to go west and set things straight.

He reached Bragg's camp on October 9, and presently he had Bragg and his chief generals in for a round-table discussion of everybody's errors. His handling of the situation, admittedly, was incredibly clumsy, although things had reached a point where no conceivable deftness would be of much service; and presently Mr. Davis asked the assembled generals, one by one, whether they thought the army needed a new commander. One after another, in Bragg's presence, they said that they did think so, giving reasons, which boiled down to an almost universal feeling that Bragg was not up to his job. Regardless of where the fault lay, it was obvious that Bragg did not have the confidence of the men who were working for him.

Time to replace him, then? Possibly; yet—with whom? To appoint one of the lieutenant generals who had been leading the chorus against Bragg was more than Mr. Davis would do. Joe Johnston was available, but after all he had been top man in the west when both Tennessee and Mississippi were lost and Mr. Davis would have none of him; Longstreet got a snub for his pains when he advanced the man's name. Beauregard was busy at Charleston, and anyway Mr. Davis felt that the Confederacy's troubles in this part of the country had really begun when Beauregard led the Army of Tennessee and he wanted him in command no more than he wanted Johnston. The President did have a good deal of faith in Pemberton, who as a matter of fact had accompanied him on this trip, but judicious soundings revealed that the army would probably mutiny if Pemberton came in; his northern birth and the failure at Vicksburg weighed heavily against him. In the end there seemed to be nothing for it but to retain Bragg and support him, and this Mr. Davis did. He confirmed the removal of Polk and Hill, brought the absent Hardee back to take Polk's place, and returned to Richmond. The end of the Chickamauga chapter, like the beginning, would be Bragg's responsibility.
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Then and later, Mr. Davis was blamed for making a bad decision. Yet what the Army of Tennessee really needed was not only a new commander but also new muscle—more manpower, more transportation, more of all of the sinews of war so that it could surge forward and destroy the stubborn Federal army that had lost a battle but still clung to life. Mr. Davis limited himself to dealing with the command situation because there was nothing else he could do. He had given this army all the added strength there was to give, weeks earlier, and the victory at Chickamauga had followed. That victory had opened a gateway for the Confederate nation, but to go on through the gateway to independence achieved and full realization of the impelling dream—that needed more than Mr. Davis could provide. The armies could never be made substantially stronger than they were now. No losses, whether of men or of material resources or of faith itself, could ever again be made good. If the war was to be won it would have to be won with what was already in use. Chickamauga was a cruel hint that the Confederate horizon was immovable.

In shattering contrast there was what the battle meant to the North.

Here it showed what could be done rather than what could not be done. By demanding a greater effort it compelled men to see that a greater effort could in fact be made. It called on the President to do something that was physically within his power and the power of the nation; if there was to be failure it would be failure of will rather than of means. Responding to this defeat, the Federal government began to find the road to ultimate victory.

The first panicky messages from Chattanooga, indicating that all (including fortitude) had perhaps been lost, quickly gave way to more hopeful advices, both from General Rosecrans and from Mr. Dana. There was no more talk about continued retreat, and on September 23 Dana told Secretary Stanton that the general "has determined to fight it out here at all hazards"; he had 35,000 effectives, said Dana, and could probably hold out for two or three weeks without help, but for safety he ought to get 25,000 men as reinforcements.
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After weeks of ineffectual fretting about the situation in Tennessee the government at last had something it could get its teeth into, and the President held a conference with Secretary Stanton and General Halleck and got quick action. On the Rapidan, General Meade was ordered to pack up two army corps and send them to Washington at once. Being human, Meade chose two slightly sub-standard outfits, Howard's XI Corps and Slocum's XII Corps, both of which were under-strength and somewhat looked down upon by the rest of the army. But they did have man-power and an unrealized potential, and Joe Hooker was taken off the shelf and put in charge of them, and they began to move without delay. General Slocum, to be sure, had so low an opinion of Hooker, as a soldier and as a human being, that he protested against serving under him, saying that it would be degrading and that he would like to resign; the War Department refused to accept his resignation and he stayed on the job, apparently with an unwritten understanding that his personal contacts with Hooker could be held to a minimum. Stanton assembled railroad presidents, state governors, War Department functionaries, and quartermaster officers, and the movement went with a rush. The first troop trains left Washington on September 25 forty-eight hours after Dana's message arrived, four days later the head of the column reached Louisville, and in just under twelve days 20,000 soldiers, ten batteries of field artillery, and a hundred cars of baggage had been put down in Bridgeport, Alabama, thirty miles west of Chattanooga.
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It was quite an achievement. In a way it was less remarkable than the Confederate transfer of Longstreet's men, because the Confederacy had so much less to work with, but as a demonstration of the power of the North it was most impressive; it showed a smoothly running machine, directed by able technicians, delivering what was needed promptly and without lost motion. It was supplemented by another troop movement which went more slowly but was perhaps even more important; from Mississippi Grant sent Sherman and four divisions of the veterans who had taken Vicksburg, 17,000 men in all, and they left Vicksburg by steamer on October 3, went up the river to Memphis, and then headed east along the line of the Memphis & Charleston, repairing that badly battered railroad as they went. The repairs delayed them, and it was six weeks before they got to Bridgeport, but the delay did no real harm. Long before they reached the scene the gate that the Confederacy had opened at Chickamauga had been slammed shut, once and for all, and the hour of crisis had passed.
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In the first weeks of October the danger that Rosecrans might be starved into surrender was perfectly genuine. When he retired into his defensive lines at Chattanooga the general incautiously withdrew a brigade that had been holding the northern end of Lookout Mountain, a massive height that looked down on the Tennessee River a few miles below the city, and when Bragg's army came up Longstreet was promptly sent to occupy this point. As a result the Federal army was effectively besieged even though it was by no means surrounded. All of its supplies came down from Nashville by rail, and the railroad from Nashville joined the Memphis & Charleston at Stevenson, Alabama, ten miles southwest of Bridgeport. From Stevenson and Bridgeport the supplies could be moved to Chattanooga by rail, by river, or by road; but all three routes were commanded now by Longstreet's guns on Lookout Mountain so that it was impossible to use any of them, and Rosecrans' army was slowly but surely being strangled.

It was barely possible, of course, for wagon trains to make a long detour from Bridgeport, moving up the Sequatchie Valley on the north side of the Tennessee and then crossing the barren plateau of Walden's Ridge to the riverbank opposite Chattanooga, but the army could not really be supplied this way. The route was sixty miles in length, the roads were all but completely impassable, there was no forage for horses or mules anywhere along the way, and a loaded wagon needed eight days to make a one-way trip. No wagon could take a full load because it had to carry the hay and grain its own team needed. (For a modern parallel: a long truck route wholly devoid of filling stations, with each truck obliged to carry fuel for the round trip.) Since the army needed several hundred tons of freight every day, this route was totally inadequate. To make matters worse, Confederate Joe Wheeler took his cavalry across the river early in October, caught one of the toiling wagon trains, and destroyed three hundred wagons before Federal cavalry drove him away. Ten days later a civilian who crossed Walden's Ridge saw five hundred army wagons stalled, horses and mules all too weak from hunger to move. For a final note of gloom: if the army ever had to retreat its only escape route would be this terrible road over Walden's Ridge, on which it would almost certainly disintegrate.
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Mr. Dana kept Washington posted on all of this, and he was growing more and more pessimistic. He said that Rosecrans seemed to be in a daze, lacked administrative capacity, and could neither see the impending catastrophe nor do anything to prevent it. Dana at last predicted that the army would have to retreat within a fortnight unless it got the river route open, and he asserted that Rosecrans was doing nothing to open it. The War Department had posted Dana at this army's headquarters to keep it informed, as it had sent him to report on Grant a few months earlier, and this was the information it was getting. Rosecrans' standing sank to zero when, on top of all of this, his own chief of staff, Brigadier General James A. Garfield, quietly told various important people (including Secretary Chase and a reporter for the New York
Tribune)
that Rosecrans had fled from the field at Chickamauga in a panic, hurrying off to Chattanooga while Garfield, more heroically, rode back to join Thomas and share the glory of that last stand on Snodgrass Hill. The
Tribune
printed the gist of the story, Mr. Chase ceased to be a heart-and-soul supporter of General Rosecrans, and the administration had had enough.
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In the middle of October it acted. Having sent 37,000 men to Chattanooga it now sent one more—U. S. Grant.

Grant had had a difficult summer. Ever since Vicksburg he and his army had been wasted; Washington had not let him make the campaign he thought he ought to make, sending him instead to New Orleans to see what General Banks needed from him in connection with the unfortunate Sabine Pass expedition. In New Orleans, Grant's disgust with this way of making war exploded, before witnesses. Banks gave him his fastest and most spirited horse to ride, Grant rode so hard that he and the horse took a fall, injuring Grant's leg so badly that he had to go about on crutches for weeks afterward; and Banks in pious shock wrote to Mrs. Banks: "I am frightened when I think that he is a drunkard."
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Presumably Washington heard about this and ignored it: needing the best Federal general to repair the damage at Chattanooga, it unhesitatingly sent Grant, crutches and all.

It sent him clothed with full authority. The day when the right hand did not know what the left hand did was over. Grant was given command over everything between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi, except for Banks' preserve around New Orleans. Secretary Stanton, who met him at Indianapolis and rode down to Louisville with him, told him that the War Department, if Grant wished, would when it announced his appointment announce also that Rosecrans had been replaced by Thomas. Grant did wish, and Rosecrans got the news next day, October 19, a month after the fateful battle opened. He left at once for his home in Ohio, getting first an effusive farewell from his troops; he might have lost caste with his generals but the enlisted men were for him all the way. They were hard-case veterans, quick to disown any officer whose nerve failed him, and they simply refused to blame Rosecrans for anything he did or did not do at Chickamauga; they remembered his amazing personal bravery at Stone's River, and the encouragement he had given them there, and the way he had somehow been on the private soldier's side ever since he took command of the army, and now they were genuinely sorry to see him go. They liked Pap Thomas and they respected Grant . . . but Old Rosey had the touch.

On October 23 Grant reached Chattanooga. Less than a week later the river route to Bridgeport was open, supplies were coming in freely, all danger of starvation was over, and the Federal army had regained the initiative and Bragg was back on the defensive. The only question remaining was when Grant would drive Bragg away.
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There had been a military miracle, in short, and it must be said that not all of it was Grant's doing by any means. Plans for opening the river route—the Cracker Line, the soldiers called it, because it brought the hardtack crackers that were the army's stand-by—had been drawn, at Rosecrans' direction, by the army's chief engineer, General William F. Smith: Baldy Smith himself, who had so notably lost faith in Burnside after Fredericksburg, and had helped others to lose faith; working now with unworried efficiency. Thomas had ordered Smith's plan put into effect as soon as he took command, and Grant simply approved Thomas' order and saw to it that people got busy. It is possible that the siege would have been broken even if Grant had stayed in Vicksburg. He was more a symbol than a moving cause; the government was going to apply every needed resource to the job at hand, and Grant's arrival testified to that fact.