The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian (149 page)

There were two interruptions, both of them drastic though only the first was violent. It came in the form of a shell that burst in the woods nearby, one of whose jagged splinters ripped through a book a mounted courier was reading and struck a staff colonel, knocking him from his place at the table and to the ground, where he lay gasping as if in the throes of death. Startled, his fellow staffers leaped up to staunch the expected flow of blood, but they could not find the wound. Reacting with his usual calm, Longstreet saw that the gasping was caused by a large bite of sweet potato, which had become lodged in the colonel’s windpipe when the iron fragment grazed him, and “suggested that it would be well to first relieve him of the potato and give him a chance to breathe. This done, he revived,” the general recalled; “his breath came freer, and he was soon on his feet.” That was the first interruption. The second
came soon after the other officers rejoined their chief at the table, and if it was less violent it was also a good deal more alarming in the end. It came in the form of a message from Bragg, from whom the commander of the left wing had heard nothing since the night before, requesting his attendance at a conference a short distance in rear of the new mile-long line that was being formed in the woods to the west of the LaFayette Road. Longstreet promptly rode to meet him amid the wreckage of what had been the Union right, and after giving him a brief description of the rout that had resulted in the capture of some forty guns, together with thousands of small arms and prisoners and no less than two square miles of ground, explained his decision to wheel right instead of left, as originally instructed, in order to complete the destruction of what remained of the blue army.

Bragg did not seem to share his lieutenant’s enthusiasm, and when the latter went on to suggest that the left wing be reinforced from the right, which would have little more to do than hold its ground once the attack was resumed on the south, the North Carolinian broke in testily: “There is not a man in the right wing who has any fight in him.” Taken aback, Longstreet at last saw what the trouble was. Bragg was miffed because his design for herding the bluecoats into McLemore’s Cove had gone astray; or as the Georgian later put it, “He was disturbed by the failure of his plan and the severe repulse of his right wing, and was little prepared to hear suggestions from subordinates for other moves or progressive work.” In other words, if he could not win in just the way he wanted, he did not care about winning at all, or anyhow he wanted no personal share in such a victory. So at any rate it seemed. This fairly incredible impression was strengthened, moreover, by the manner in which Bragg brought the conference to a close. “If anything happens, communicate with me at Reed’s Bridge,” he said curtly, and he turned his horse and rode in that direction, which would place him well in rear of the stalled right, as far as possible from the scene of the critical attack about to be launched by Longstreet on the left.

Old Peter scarcely knew what to make of his chief’s reaction. “From accounts of his former operations, I was prepared for halting work,” he afterwards wrote, understating the case in an attempt to bring in a touch of humor that was altogether lacking at the time, “but this, when the battle was at its tide and in partial success, was a little surprising.” However, as he returned to his new-drawn line to give the signal that would launch the assault designed to complete his half-won triumph, he soon recovered his aplomb, if not his accustomed heartiness. “There was nothing for the left wing to do but work along as best it could,” he said.

Thus Bragg, in effect, removed himself from management of the battle, but only after his opponent had removed himself, in fact and person,
not only from the battle but also from the field on which it was being fought. Whether out of petulance or panic, each of the two leaders reacted in accordance with his nature and his lights, for while the southern commander appeared to doubt that the contest was half won, Rosecrans had not seemed to question the evidence that it was considerably more than half lost. Not that he was a coward: Rich Mountain, Iuka, Corinth, and above all Stones River were sufficient refutation of the charge, and moreover his gloomy assessment was shared by those around him. With the exception of Lytle, whose sudden death was taken as confirmation of the majority opinion, no one with stars on his shoulders and a close-up look at the proportions of the rebel breakthrough failed to share the abrupt and general conviction that all was lost. Not only the army commander, but also his chief of staff, two of his three corps commanders, and four of his ten division commanders—in short, every man in charge of anything larger than a brigade on that quarter of the field—agreed that in the present instance, with the choice narrowed to flight or death or capture, discretion was the better part of valor. Practically of one accord, they all turned tail and ran and their troops ran with them, flecks of foam on the blue stream rushing northward up the Dry Valley Road and westward through McFarland’s Gap, eager to put the bulletproof mass of Missionary Ridge between themselves and their screaming gray pursuers.

Soon after getting off the order to Wood, Rosecrans had ridden to the right, accompanied by Dana and Garfield and several other members of his staff, intending to hurry the sidling movement that would thicken the thinned center. He was sitting his horse directly in rear of Davis, whose division was in motion, when Longstreet’s attack exploded dead ahead and to the immediate left front. Dana, who was badly in need of sleep, had dismounted for a nap in the grass; the first he knew of the impending breakthrough was when he was awakened by what he afterwards called “the most infernal noise I ever heard.” Startled—“Never in any battle had I witnessed such a discharge of cannon and musketry”—he looked up and saw something that alarmed him even more. Old Rosy was crossing himself. “Hello!” he thought. “If the general is crossing himself, we are in a desperate situation.” Sure enough, when he looked around he “saw our lines break and melt away like leaves before the wind.… The whole right of the army had apparently been routed.” Rosecrans by then had reached the same conclusion, for he turned to his staff and said in a voice surprisingly calm amid the confusion of the headlong rush which Dana would compare to melting leaves: “If you care to live any longer, get away from here.” His advice was so quickly taken that Dana did not even attempt a description of the dispersal or employ a single additional metaphor, mixed or otherwise. He simply remarked that “the headquarters around me disappeared.”

Others “disappeared” as rapidly, even though they were out of
earshot of their chief’s advice. McCook’s third great battle was also his third rout, and the greatest of the three. Like Davis and Sheridan, he made a brief attempt to stem the tide, then took off rearward, a leader in the race for safety, and those of his men who had not already bolted were quick to follow his example. Crittenden, too, was a part of the crush, but strictly on an individual basis. He had no troops left under him anyhow, the last of his three divisions having been detached to Thomas by midmorning, though Van Cleve himself was swept from the field with the remnant of the brigade that was wrecked by Law. Similarly, Negley became a fugitive when he led his rear brigade off on a tangent, then found his way to the left blocked by Johnson’s mile-deep penetration of the center. A few among the responsible commanders, such as Wilder, maintained control of their units, but they were the exception. “Many of the officers of all ranks,” according to another Indiana colonel, “showed by their wild commands and still wilder actions that they had completely lost their heads and were as badly demoralized as the private soldiers.”

One among the exceptions was a young officer from McCook’s staff, who managed to skirt the confusion and get through to Thomas on the left. The Virginian told him to return the way he had come and bring up Davis and Sheridan to support his dangling right. He made it back to the Dry Valley Road, and as he rode westward alongside it—for the road itself was jammed with fugitives crowding it shoulder-to-shoulder and raising a waist-high cloud of dust—he appealed to various officers in the fleeing column, but to small avail. Although the rebel pursuit had broken off by now, they either would not believe him when he said so, or else they could not see in this any reason for slowing the pace of their retreat. “See Jeff, Colonel,” they told him, or “See Phil.” Appeals to the men themselves were even less successful. “We’ll talk to you, my son, when we get to the Ohio River!” one veteran replied, much to the amusement of his fellow trudgers. Finally, in McFarland’s Gap, the young staffer overtook Davis and Sheridan, and though the former expressed a doubtful willingness to give the thing a try, the latter wanted nothing further to do with the mismanaged contest he had just put behind him. “He had lost faith,” the colonel observed as he pushed on to gain the head of the column, up toward Rossville.

There where the road forked, one branch leading northwest to Chattanooga, the other east through Rossville Gap, then south to the field on whose opposite flank the scramble had begun—the distance in each case was about four miles—Rosecrans and the remnant of his staff drew rein to breathe their horses. By now the battle racket had died down, screened by the loom of Missionary Ridge, and though by dismounting and putting their ears to the ground they could hear the rattle of small arms, which signified that Thomas was still in action with at least a part of his command, the lack of any rumble from his guns
seemed to indicate that the left wing had not fared much better than the right. If this was so, the thing to do was establish a straggler line on the outskirts of Chattanooga, where the two sundered portions of the army could be reunited and rallied for a last-ditch stand with the deep-running Tennessee River at its back. For his own part, Old Rosy was determined to return to the field and share with whatever troops were left the final stages of their withdrawal, leaving to his chief of staff the task of bringing the fugitives to a halt and putting them into a new defensive position before the gray wave of attackers swept over them again. However, when he turned to Garfield and began to tell him all that would have to be done—the selection of proper ground, the assignment of units to their places in line, the opening of new channels of supply and communication, and much else—the chief of staff, confused by the complexity of what he termed “the great responsibility,” made a suggestion: “I can go to General Thomas and report the situation to you much better than I can give those orders.” Rosecrans thought this over briefly, then reluctantly agreed. “Well,” he said, “go and tell General Thomas my precautions to hold the Dry Valley Road and secure our commissary stores and artillery. [Tell him] to report the situation to me and to use his discretion as to continuing the fight on the ground we occupy at the close of the afternoon or retiring to a position in the rear near Rossville.”

So while Garfield set out eastward on a ride that would take him in time to the White House—though not for long; the assassin’s bullet would find him before he had been four months in office—Rosecrans took the left-hand fork that led to Chattanooga. But now the shock set in. The nearer he drew to the city the more depressed he became, as if some sort of ratio obtained between his distance from the battlefield and his realization of the enormity of his position as a commander who had deserted his army in its bloodiest hour of crisis. When he pulled rein at last, about 3.30, in front of the three-story residence where departmental headquarters had been established eleven days ago, he was so exhausted in body and broken in spirit that he had to be assisted to dismount. “The officers who helped him into the house did not soon forget the terrible look of the brave man, stunned by sudden calamity,” an observer remarked, and added: “In later years I used occasionally to meet Rosecrans, and always felt that I could see the shadow of Chickamauga upon his noble face.”

Dana arrived immediately behind him, having become separated from the others in what he called “the helter-skelter of the rear.” That he too was much depressed by what he had seen, though his depression took a different form, was obvious from the wire he got off to Stanton at 4 o’clock, as soon as he had had time to catch his breath. “My report today is of deplorable importance,” he informed the Secretary. “Chickamauga is as fatal a name in our history as Bull Run.” Still badly shaken,
he described the onslaught of the rebels, which was unlike anything he had seen at Vicksburg, his one previous experience of war. “They came through with resistless impulse, composed of brigades formed in divisions. Before them our soldiers turned and fled. It was wholesale panic. Vain were all attempts to rally them.” He was as uncertain of what would happen next as he was of the army’s losses up to now, but he ventured a guess or two in both directions. “Davis and Sheridan are said to be coming off at the head of a couple of regiments in order, and Wilder’s brigade marches out unbroken. Thomas, too, is coming down the Rossville road with an organized command, but all the rest is confusion. Our wounded are all left behind, some 6000 in number. We have lost heavily in killed today. The total of our killed, wounded, and prisoners can hardly be less than 20,000, and may be much more.… Enemy not yet arrived before Chattanooga. Preparations making to resist his entrance for a time.”