The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian (145 page)

Hill would later refer caustically to the disjointed sequence of attacks, in which he himself had taken no part except to detach one of his divisions, as “the sparring of the amateur boxer, not the crushing blows of the trained pugilist,” and Bragg in turn would describe the action, so far, as nothing more than “severe skirmishing” engaged in by his various corps and division commanders, for the most part on their own, “while endeavoring to get into line of battle.” But no one knew better than Rosecrans, across the way in the Widow Glenn’s lamp-lighted parlor, how near a thing it had been for him at times. In addition to the day-long pounding his left had managed to absorb—including the blood-curdling twilight assault by what sounded like tens of thousands of fiends equipped with the latest style rapid-fire weapons—two rebel penetrations, one of his center and one of his right, had surged to within plain view of army headquarters, and of these the second had come so close that he and members of his staff had had to shout at one another in order to be heard above the din.

Some measure of his mounting concern could be seen in a series of telegrams sent to the War Department in the course of the day by Charles Dana, who had arrived from Vicksburg the week before to continue his services as a behind-the-scenes observer for Stanton. “Rosecrans has everything ready to grind up Bragg’s flank,” he reported from Crawfish Springs that morning, and at 1 p.m. he followed this up—or, rather, he failed to follow it up—with a somewhat less encouraging or at any rate less emphatic message, sent as he left for the scene of the fighting three miles north: “Everything is going well, but the full proportions of the conflict are not yet developed.” By 2.30 the telegraph line had
been extended to the Glenn house, and Dana kept the operator busy. “Fight continues to rage,” he wired. “Decisive victory seems assured.” At 3.20 he passed along a report from Thomas “that he is driving rebels, and will force them into Chickamauga tonight.” Though the center was being assailed by then, and the right was about to be, Dana was not fazed. “Everything is prosperous. Sheridan is coming up,” he announced at 4 o’clock. A near commitment at 4.30 as to the outcome—“I do not yet dare to say our victory is complete, but it seems certain”—was modified in the dispatch that followed at 5.20: “Now appears to be undecided contest, but later reports will enable us to understand more clearly.”

So it went; so it had gone all day. Despite his show of heartiness, what he mainly communicated was his confusion in attempting to follow a battle which, as he said, was “fought altogether in a thick forest, invisible to outsiders.” In that sense, even the army commander was an outsider. Except for a rearward trickle of reports, most of them about as disconcerted as Dana’s to Stanton, no one at headquarters could do much more than guess at what was happening in the smoky woods beyond the LaFayette Road. Rosecrans tried for a time, with the help of Mrs Glenn, to follow the progress of the fight by ear. She would make a guess, when a gun was heard, that it was “nigh out about Reed’s Bridge” or “about a mile fornenst John Kelly’s house,” and he would try to match this information with the place names on the map. But it was a far from satisfactory procedure, for a variety of reasons. The map was a poor one in the first place, and after a while the roar was practically continuous all along the front. A reporter thought he had never witnessed “anything so ridiculous as this scene” between Old Rosy and the widow. Presently, when Stewart’s men broke through the Federal center, she had to be removed to a place of greater safety, but Rosecrans, “fairly quivering with excitement,” continued to pace back and forth, rubbing his palms rapidly together as the sound of firing swelled and quickened. “Ah! there goes Brannan!” he exclaimed with obvious satisfaction. He might have been right; besides, the noise was about all he had to go on; but it did not seem to the reporter that the general understood the situation any better than the departed countrywoman had done. Still, he kept pacing and exclaiming, perhaps in an attempt to ease the tension on his nerves and keep his spirits up. “Ah—there goes Brannan!” he would say; or, “That’s Negley going in!”

Out on the line, when darkness finally put an end to the long day’s fighting, the troops had a hard time of it. “How we suffered that night no one knows,” a veteran was to recall. “Water could not be found; the rebels had possession of the Chickamauga, and we had to do without. Few of us had blankets and the night was very cold. All looked with anxiety for the coming of the dawn; for although we had given the enemy a rough handling, he had certainly used us very hard.”

Under such conditions, despite much loss of sleep both nights before, work on the construction of breastworks was welcome as a means of keeping warm, as well as a diversion from thoughts of tomorrow. For Rosecrans, however, there could be no release from the latter; it was his job. He could take pride in the fact that his line, though obliged to yield an average mile of ground throughout its length today, was not only intact but was also considerably shorter than it had been when this morning’s contest opened. Then too, word had come that Halleck at last was doing all he could to speed reinforcements to North Georgia; urgent appeals had gone from Washington to Burnside and Grant, at Knoxville and in Mississippi, directing them to send troops to Chattanooga in all haste, and similar messages had been dispatched to Hurlbut at Memphis, Schofield in Missouri, and John Pope in far-off Minnesota. It was a comfort to Rosecrans to know that in time there would be these supports to fall back on. Meanwhile, though, he had to fight with what he had on hand, and he was by no means sure that this would be enough, since prisoners had been taken from no less than a dozen regiments known to have arrived just yesterday from Virginia. How many others had come or were arriving tonight he did not know, for the captives were nearly as close-mouthed under interrogation as the Texas captain had been this afternoon, but intelligence officers had little trouble identifying these “Virginians” by their standard gray uniforms, which were in natty contrast to the “go-as-you-please” garments worn in the western armies. Occasionally, too, a scrap of information could be extracted by goading the prisoners into anger. “How does Longstreet like the western Yankees?” one was asked in a mocking tone, and he replied with a growl: “You’ll get enough of Longstreet before tomorrow night.”

This might be nothing more than wishful rebel thinking. On the other hand it might be an informed and accurate prediction. At any rate, whichever it was, Rosecrans decided—as he had done under similar circumstances on New Year’s Eve almost nine months ago—that he would do well to call a council of war for the triple purpose of briefing his principal subordinates on the over-all situation, of obtaining their recommendations as to a proper course of action, and of enabling him, at some later date, to shift at least a share of the blame in event of a defeat. Besides, he had a natural fondness for conference discussions, especially late-at-night ones, whether the subject was strategy or religion. The council accordingly convened at headquarters at 11 o’clock that evening. Most of those present, including the three corps commanders, had attended the conference held at the close of the first day’s fighting in the last great battle; the difference was in the staff. “Poor Garesché,” as Rosecrans had referred to the previous chief of staff after his head was blown off by a cannonball, had been replaced in January by Brigadier General James A. Garfield, a thirty-two-year-old
former Ohio schoolteacher, lawyer, lay preacher, and politician, whose warm handclasp seemed to one observer to convey the message, “Vote early. Vote right,” and whose death, at the hands of an assassin who voted both early and right and then failed to get the appointment to which he believed this entitled him, would occur exactly eighteen years from today, partly as a direct result of what was going to happen here tomorrow. Big-headed, with pale eyes and a persuasive manner—like Hooker, he was a protégé of Secretary Chase’s, and up to now his most notable service in the war had been as a member of the court-martial that convicted Fitz-John Porter—Garfield opened the council by displaying for the assembled generals a map with the positions of all the Union divisions indicated, along with those of the Confederates so far as they were known; after which Rosecrans called for individual opinions as to what was to be done. McCook and Crittenden—the Ohioan, according to an obviously unfriendly fellow officer, had
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a weak nose that would do no credit to a baby” and a grin that gave rise to “suspicion that he is either still very green or deficient in the upper story,” while the Kentuckian was characterized more briefly as “a good drinker,” one of those men, fairly common in the higher echelons of all armies, who “know how to blow their own horns exceedingly well”—had little to contribute in the way of advice, each perhaps being somewhat chagrined by the loss of one of his three divisions, detached that morning to reinforce the left, and somewhat subdued by the near-destruction of one of his remaining two in the course of the afternoon. Not so Thomas, who differed as much from them in outlook, or anyhow in the emphatic expression of his outlook, as he did in appearance. Ponderous and phlegmatic, he was described by another observer as “not scrimped anywhere, and square everywhere—square face, square shoulders, square step; blue eyes with depths in them, withdrawn beneath a pent-house of a brow, features with legible writing on them, and the whole giving the idea of massive solidity, of the right kind of man to ‘tie to.’ ” Though he slept through much of the conference—not only because it was his custom (he had done the same at Stones River) but also because he had spent the last two nights on the march and most of today under heavy attack—he repeated the same words whenever he was called on for a tactical opinion: “I would strengthen the left.” But when Rosecrans replied, as he did each time, “Where are we going to take it from?” there was no answer; Thomas would be back asleep by then, propped upright in his chair.

At the council held nine months ago in the rain-lashed cabin beside the Nashville pike, the discussion had centered mainly on whether the army should retreat; but here tonight, in the small log house on the field of Chickamauga, the word was used only in connection with the rebels. The decision, committed to paper for distribution as soon as it was reached, was that the Federals would hold their ground. Unless
Bragg withdrew under cover of darkness—there was some conjecture that he might, though it was based more on hope than on tangible evidence, of which there was not a shred that indicated a change in his clear intention to destroy them—they would offer him battle tomorrow, on the same terms as today. At this late hour, in point of fact, that seemed not only the bravest but also the safest thing to do, considering the risk a retreating army would run of being caught, trains and all, strung out on the roads leading back through Rossville and McFarland’s gaps to Chattanooga, which was a good ten miles from the Widow Glenn’s. There would be minor readjustments, though not of Granger’s three-brigade reserve force, which was instructed to remain where it was, covering Rossville Gap and holding that escape hatch open in case of a collapse. To lessen the chances of this last, which would be most likely to occur as a result of a rebel breakthrough, Rosecrans directed that his ten-division line of battle along the LaFayette Road was to be strengthened by further contraction. Thomas would hold his five divisions in their present intrenched position on the left, and McCook would move his two northward to connect with Negley’s division, on Thomas’s right, while Crittenden withdrew his two for close-up support of the center or a rapid shift in whichever direction they were needed, north or south. When all this had been discussed and agreed on, Garfield put it in writing and read it back, and when this in turn had been approved it was passed to the headquarters clerks for copying. By now it was midnight. While the generals were waiting for the clerks to finish their task, Rosecrans provided coffee for a social interlude, the principal feature of which was a soulful rendition by “the genial, full-stomached McCook,” as one reporter called him, of a plaintive ballad entitled “The Hebrew Maiden.”

Possibly Thomas slept through this as well; possibly not. In any event, it was 2 o’clock in the morning before he returned to his position on the left, where he found a report awaiting him from Baird, who warned that his division, posted on the flank, could not be extended all the way to the Reed’s Bridge road, as ordered, and still be strong enough to hold if it was struck again by anything like the twilight blow that had sent it reeling for more than a mile until darkness ended the fighting. Thomas made a quick inspection by moonlight and arrived at the same conclusion, then sent a message back to headquarters, explaining the trouble and requesting that Negley, who had been halted and thrown in to shore up the crumbling center while on his way to the left that afternoon, be ordered to resume his northward march and rejoin his proper corps, the critical outer flank of which was in danger of being crushed for lack of support or turned for lack of troops to extend it. Rosecrans promptly agreed by return messenger, as he had done to all such specific requests from his senior corps commander; Negley would march at dawn. Reassured, Thomas at last bedded down under a large
oak, one of whose protruding roots afforded a pillow for his head, and there resumed the sleep that had been interrupted, if not by McCook’s singing, then at any rate by the breakup of the council of war, some time after midnight.

He woke to Sunday’s dawn, already impatient for Negley’s arrival. The sun came up blood red through the morning haze and the smoke of yesterday’s battle, which still hung about the field. “It is ominous,” the chief of staff was saying, back at the Widow Glenn’s, as he pointed dramatically at the rising sun. “This will indeed be a day of blood.” Thomas needed no sign to tell him that, but he was growing increasingly anxious about his unsupported flank, which the army commander had assured him would be reinforced without delay. The sun rose higher. Presently it was a full hour above the land-line, and still Negley had not arrived. Rosecrans himself came riding northward about this time, however, and though his face was drawn and puffy from strain and lack of sleep, he spoke encouragingly as he drew rein from point to point along the line. “Fight today as well as you did yesterday,” he told his troops, “and we shall whip them!” This had a somewhat mixed effect. “I did not like the way he looked,” a soldier later recalled, “but of course felt cheered, and did not allow myself to think of any such thing as defeat.”