Never Call Retreat (40 page)

But it was also true, here as elsewhere, that when Grant showed up things began to happen. People got busy; if new resources were available, he was the man who saw to it that they were used, and he wasted little time writing to Washington about it. There was a different atmosphere at Chattanooga now, and after the war an officer who was there tried to describe the change that came in with Grant: "We began to see things move. We felt that everything came from a plan. He came into the army quietly, no splendor, no airs, no staff. He used to go about alone. He began the campaign the moment he reached the field. Everything was done like music, everything was in harmony."
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Opening the Cracker Line turned out to be quite simple. Bragg's grip on the army's windpipe was much weaker than had been supposed, and it was quickly broken.

Opposite Chattanooga the Tennessee River turns left and flows south for two miles. Striking the northern end of Lookout Mountain (where Longstreet had his forbidding guns) it makes a 180-degree turn and goes north again, and in the big loop thus formed there is a long finger of land known as Moccasin Point. Across the base of this point there was in 1863 a little road, going west from Chattanooga to the riverbank opposite a place called Brown's Ferry, which was five miles from Chattanooga by water, but less than two miles by this road. From Brown's Ferry it was easy to get to Bridgeport, by road or by river, and although the Confederates had infantry at the ferry the guns on Lookout could not reach the place. So the Federals could break the blockade wide open if they could occupy Brown's Ferry and build a pontoon bridge there.

This they presently did, very neatly, floating pontoons down the river past the Confederate pickets by night, sending troops across at Brown's Ferry to rush the infantry out of there, and bringing Hooker's troops up from Bridgeport to occupy Lookout Valley. Neither Bragg nor Longstreet diagnosed the move until too late, and anyway nearly all of Longstreet's men were around on the eastern side of the mountain, with only one brigade to cover the country between the riverside batteries and Brown's Ferry. This brigade tried hard to hold its ground, and Longstreet sent three more brigades to help it, but Hooker sent in all of Howard's corps and half of Slocum's and after a bruising fight the Confederates were driven away. By October 29 the mopping-up was over. Now the Unionists held everything west of Lookout Mountain, Chattanooga was entirely out of danger, and the only surprise was the discovery that the great threat to the Federal army's life had really been applied very weakly.
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This weakness having been exposed and exploited, General Bragg went on to make a substantial mistake, inspired thereto by a dispatch from Mr. Davis, driven (as Mr. Davis was driven) by the fact that the necessities of the case compelled him to try to do more than he had means to do. It

was essential to beat this Yankee army at Chattanooga, essential also to recover Knoxville, held by Burnside; and at the end of October Mr. Davis wrote to Bragg to suggest that "you might advantageously assign General Longstreet with, his two divisions to the task of expelling Burnside." Bragg told Longstreet to make the move, and Longstreet took his men out of the lines and set off for east Tennessee on November 4, protesting gloomily (and correctly) that his force was not big enough to do the job. Working for Bragg did not seem to be the same as working for Lee, and to General Buckner Longstreet muttered that he could see that "this was to be the fate of our army—to wait till all good opportunities had passed, and then in desperation to seize upon the least favorable one."
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... all the good opportunities were gone forever, and now for three weeks Bragg's army waited, in meaningless expectation of nobody knew just what, inexplicably weakening itself while its enemy grew stronger; looking down from the encircling heights on Chattanooga in a queer, almost trancelike state, seeing too much but unable to profit by what it saw. There was an uncanny beauty in the spectacle, and Bragg told about it in a letter to bis wife: "Just underneath my H D Qtrs are the lines of the two armies, and beyond with their outposts and signal stations are the Lookout, Raccoon and Walden mountains. At night all are brilliantly lit up in the most gorgeous manner by the miriads of camp fires. No scene in the most splendid theater ever approached it."
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The moon was near the full, and there was an eclipse, putting a cold running shadow on the mountains and the plain and the men who were going to fight there—an omen, beyond doubt, if anyone could figure out what it meant. Bragg sent Buckner and his division away to help Longstreet, and Sherman and his tough western divisions reached the Federals, who by now were nearly twice as strong as the army that was trying to besige them. And at last, on November 24, Grant struck.

The battle of Chattanooga was both a solid achievement and an incredible bit of military melodrama. The whole battlefield was the amphitheater, and the soldiers were spectators and actors at the same time, which had something to do with the way the battle came out. It did not go at all as Grant had planned it, and yet in a strange way he was dominant throughout. In a place where the spectacular was commonplace the picture that lasts the longest is the glimpse of Grant standing on a hill and watching his men break the Confederate line with a charge he had not ordered . . . clamping his jaw on a cigar and remarking that somebody was going to catch it if this charge did not succeed.

The original battle plan was dictated by the shape of the ground. Bragg's army faced Chattanooga in a long crescent, one horn of the crescent touching the Tennessee above town, the other touching it below. Upstream the Confederates held Tunnel Hill, an uneven wooded knob standing a little way back from the water's edge, and downstream they held Lookout Mountain; and the long center of the crescent rested on Missionary Ridge, three hundred feet high, with steep sides, a line of infantry dug in at the base and another, supported strongly by artillery, all along the crest. The whole position was tough but the center was toughest of all, so Grant elected to hit at the flanks: Sherman was to attack above the city and Hooker was to strike at Lookout, leaving Thomas to face Missionary Ridge and to put on enough pressure to keep Bragg from taking troops away from his center to reinforce his flanks.

Hooker's job was easier than had been anticipated, and it produced a fragrant legend. Where the northern end of Lookout Mountain reaches the Tennessee there is a low fore-shore, wide enough for a highway and a railroad right of way, and then there is a long slope, rocky and timbered but not unendurably steep, rising to the base of the great Lookout Mountain precipice. This goes a thousand feet above the river, jutting against the sky like the prow of some fabulous ship out of Valhalla—magnificent to see, but without military significance. The Confederates had a flag and a signal station up there, but their real defensive position was on the lower slope, and it was on the slope that Hooker's men attacked them. The Federals swung around the mountain with their left on the river and their right touching the base of the precipice; they were not so much fighting uphill as fighting along the side of a hill, and as they advanced they found that Bragg had not put enough men in this position to hold it. The Confederates made a good fight but they were badly outnumbered and Hooker's men swept the field clean, knocked Bragg's left entirely away from the mountainside

. . . and during the night sent details up the tall cliffs to
raise the flag on the crest. And in the morning the sun burned away the early mists and the whole army saw the flag there, and talked fatuously about "the battle above the clouds"; and Hooker's exiles from the Army of the Potomac found that they were heroes, and did nothing whatever to dilute the fable.          

Sherman's luck was just the opposite of Hooker's. Under Grant, pre-battle reconnaissance was not left to staff engineer officers, but was made by the top brass in person, and Grant and Thomas and Sherman had carefully studied Bragg's right before the battle began—and, with the bad luck that sometimes ironically besets the diligent, had unanimously fallen into error. They believed that the high ground held by Bragg's right was the northern end of Missionary Ridge, and that if it could be taken the whole line would collapse. Actually, Tunnel Hill was separate, isolated from the ridge by deep ravines and a tangle of rocky broken country: as powerful a defensive position as any army could hope to find. Bragg's right was commanded by Polk's replacement, General Hardee, and Hardee had entrusted Tunnel Hill to the division led by Irish-born General Pat Cleburne, a crack combat outfit under one of the Confederacy's best soldiers. Altogether Sherman's men had an impossible assignment. They found this out when they attacked on November 24, and although they took the northern tip of the ridge they could not carry Tunnel Hill. Next day, while Hooker's people mopped up at the other end of the line, Sherman's soldiers renewed the attack and got nowhere.

Looking down the whole length of the Confederate line, Grant and Sherman and other Federal officers saw powerful reinforcements moving from the center to reinforce Cleburne; or, at any rate, they thought they did, although they apparently were under some sort of hallucination, because nothing of the kind was really happening. What mattered, however, was what Grant thought he saw, and shortly after noon on November 25 he told Thomas to have his men carry the Confederate trenches at the base of Missionary Ridge. A full-dress assault on the ridge itself might come later, but for the moment this move was simply a battlefield maneuver designed to keep Bragg from strengthening his right.
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And so—acting on faulty knowledge his own eyes had given him, trying to balk a move his opponent was not really making—Grant launched the blow that won the battle.

It made a fabulous spectacle: four divisions in a line two miles wide, flags flying, ranks carefully dressed (the Army of the Cumberland had always been a bit particular about infantry drill), moving toward the base of the great mountain wall whose crest was all white with gunsmoke; both armies watching an advance as dramatic as Pickett's charge, and to all appearances as hopeless. Thomas' men reached the base of the ridge, took the trenches there, and then found that they could not stay there because the Confederates on top of the ridge had the whole line under a murderous plunging fire which the Federals could neither hide from nor silence. Grant and Thomas were a mile in the rear, there was no time to wait for new instructions, the only way out of this box was straight ahead—and that way, suddenly, the four divisions took. By regiments and brigades, tentatively at first and then in a desperate all-embracing rush, swept forward by battlefield madness and by the impromptu orders of their own officers, the Federals went scrambling up the side of Missionary Ridge.
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Far in the rear Grant looked on, impassive once he realized that nobody near him had ordered this incredible attack and that the only thing to do was to watch and wait for victory or disaster.
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Beside him was Thomas, equally impassive but more majestic about it; and on top of Missionary Ridge Bragg's soldiers also watched, hardly believing what they saw, sensing finally that what was coming up the mountain was defeat. Perhaps their worst handicap was that they could see all of the enemy's strength and none of their own; each infantryman could see no more of his army than his own platoon or regiment, but out in front he could see 20,000 Federals all of whom seemed to be coming straight at him. All at once it was too much to take, and some of the best soldiers in the Confederacy broke and ran for the rear, abandoning a position which the furious Bragg insisted could have been held by a skirmish line. Long afterward, one of Bragg's veterans told a Union officer: "You Yanks had got too far into our inwards," and Bragg himself felt that his men had been able to see too much.
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However it came about, Bragg's line broke in half, the

center of it all gone, Missionary Ridge gone with it, the battle irretrievably lost; and the Army of Tennessee drew off southeastward to the Georgia railroad town of Dalton, with Cleburne's division fighting a stiff rear-guard action to keep the catastrophe from becoming complete. On the crest of Missionary Ridge victorious Federal soldiers capered and yelled, flourishing captured battle flags, straddling captured cannon, "completely and frantically drunk with excitement." Grant wanted to press forward in full pursuit, believing that "an army was never whipped as badly as Bragg was" and that he could push this one clear out of the Confederacy; but he did not think he had enough rations or wagons for a long march across a harsh mountain country, and Washington was ordering him to send help to Burnside, who was believed to be in dire peril, besieged at Knoxville by Longstreet.
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Anyway, the memory of Chickamauga was a powerful reminder of the trouble a Yankee general could get into, making too impetuous a pursuit in this part of the country. Vigorous pursuit was not made, and it really did not matter much. The Confederate grip on Chattanooga had been broken. Now the North could get on with the war.

CHAPTERFIVE

The Impossibilities

1. The Impassable Gulf

AFTER THE FALL of 1863 their paths divided sharply. The two Presidents had been implacable foes all along, but so far they had gone on parallel courses. They met similar problems with similar expedients, faced the same sort of men in Cabinet, in Congress and in uniform, and if they had different thoughts they at least thought in the same way and related the items thought about to the same basic values. The government at Richmond in the first two and one-half years of war was simply the government at Washington transposed to a different key.

But now the war itself changed. The Presidents after all were its creatures. It imprisoned them even as they shaped it; requiring greatness of them, it determined the form this greatness could take. After this fateful autumn the parts these men had to play became very different. Mr. Lincoln was compelled to look in one direction and Mr. Davis was compelled to look in another direction entirely. It became necessary, in short, for Mr. Lincoln to think about what was going to happen after the war ended; Mr. Davis had to concentrate on ways and means by which the war could be kept from ending. For one man the horizon was expanding, for the other it was growing fatefully narrower, and each man had to do what he could.