The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian (168 page)

But that was still in the future. For the present, Sherman pushed on eastward, crossing the Tennessee at Eastport to reach Florence by November 1, at which point, after three weeks on the go, he was about midway between Memphis and Chattanooga. To avoid the delay that would be involved in ferrying four divisions across Elk River, wide and bridgeless this far down, he marched up its north bank for a crossing by the bridge near Decherd, then followed the railroad down to Stevenson. He reached Bridgeport in advance of his troops on the night of November 13 to find a dispatch awaiting him from Grant, urging him to hurry ahead to Chattanooga for a conference. This he did the following day, proceeding via the Cracker Line, and rode into town that evening to be greeted by the superior he had not seen since he left him on crutches at Vicksburg in September. He was pleased to see that by now the crutches had been discarded; but when they rode out together next morning on a tour of inspection, finding himself confronted by the awesome loom of Lookout Mountain on the south, while to the east, against the long, shadowy backdrop of Missionary Ridge, “rebel sentinels, in a continuous chain, were walking their posts in plain view, not a thousand yards off,” Sherman was amazed. He had been told what to expect, but what he saw came as such a shock to him that he involuntarily exclaimed: “Why, General Grant, you are besieged!” Grant nodded. “It’s too true,” he said. And then he told him what he had in mind to do about it.

Thomas’s troops, he said—according to Sherman’s recollection of the briefing—“had been so demoralized by the Battle of Chickamauga that he feared they could not be got out of their trenches to assume the offensive.” That was where Sherman came into the picture; “he wanted my troops to hurry up, to take the offensive
first;
after which, he had no doubt the Cumberland army would fight well.” The attack was to be launched against Bragg’s extreme right, Grant explained: specifically against the northern end of Missionary Ridge, which he had reconnoitered and found unfortified. After crossing at Brown’s Ferry, Sherman would press on under cover of darkness and throw a pontoon bridge across the Tennessee four miles above Chattanooga, just below the mouth of Chickamauga Creek, for a surprise assault designed to strike the enemy ridge end-on and then sweep down it from the north, dislodging rebels as he went; Thomas meanwhile would fix them in position by threatening from the west, and Hooker would stand ready with his Easterners to lend a hand in whatever direction he was needed. Sherman
liked the sound of this, particularly his assignment to the leading role, but said that he would prefer to take a look at the terrain by daylight. So he and Grant, accompanied by Baldy Smith, crossed over to the north bank of the river, then up it to a hill overlooking the scene of the proposed attack on the opposite bank. He studied it as carefully as distance allowed, then returned before dark, well pleased by what he had seen. There was, however, a need for haste; Longstreet had been gone for better than ten days now and might get back before Sherman’s men were in position, in which case they would encounter that much more resistance. Accordingly, the Ohioan did not spend another night in Chattanooga, but returned instead to Bridgeport, again by way of the Cracker Line, to brief his four division commanders on the plan of attack and see that they got their troops on the march without delay.

He had hoped to have them in jump-off position within five days; that is, by November 20 for a dawn attack next morning; but, as he explained later, “the condition of the roads was such, and the bridge at Brown’s so frail, that it was not until the 23d that we got three of my divisions behind the hills near the point indicated above Chattanooga for crossing the river.”

He need not have fretted about those three lost days. They gained him much, as the thing turned out, and Grant as well. In fact, if he had been delayed one day longer, he not only would have profited still more; he would have been spared the considerable mortification he was to suffer two days later at the hands of Pat Cleburne, who in that case would not have been there. For Bragg had decided, only the day before Sherman got into his jump-off position unobserved, to double the strength of Longstreet’s 11,000-man infantry column by detaching another two divisions from the lines around Chattanooga to join him for the suppression of Burnside, under siege by then at Knoxville, and one of the two was Cleburne’s.

Old Peter had protested his own detachment in the first place, on the double grounds that he would not be strong enough to deal quickly with Burnside and that his departure would leave the main body, strung out along six miles of line, dangerously exposed to an assault by Grant, who already had been reinforced by Hooker and presumably would soon be joined as well by the even larger force marching eastward under Sherman. But Bragg, with what Longstreet described as a “sardonic smile,” declined either to cancel or strengthen the movement against Knoxville, and “intimated that further talk was out of order.” He had his reasons: largely personal ones, apparently, dating from the conference three weeks ago, at which the Georgian had volunteered the opinion that the Army of Tennessee would benefit from a change of commanders. Informing Davis, who had suggested the detachment in his letter two days earlier from Atlanta, that “the Virginia troops will move in the
direction indicated as soon as practicable,” Bragg had added: “This will be a great relief to me.” That was on the last day of October, and four days later, despite his protest, Longstreet was detached. He took with him the divisions of McLaws and Hood—the latter now under Brigadier General Micah Jenkins, who was senior to Law and had superseded him on his arrival after Chickamauga—Alexander’s artillery, and Wheeler’s three brigades of cavalry. This gave him a total of about 15,000 effectives of all arms. His assignment was “to destroy or capture Burnside’s army,” which in turn had just over 25,000 troops in occupation of East Tennessee.

It was Longstreet’s belief that his best chance for success, under the circumstances, lay in striking before his adversary had time to concentrate his forces. But that turned out to be impossible, for a variety of reasons. Not the least of these was that he lacked the means of moving his pontoons except on flatcars, which meant that he had to cross the Holston River at Loudon, where the railroad ended because the bridge was out, rather than at some point closer than thirty air-line miles from his objective. To add to his woes, not only did the trains run badly off schedule, but he found no rations on hand when he reached Sweetwater, as he had been assured they would be, and had to mark time there while they were being brought in from the country roundabout. “The delay that occurs is one that might have been prevented,” he wired Bragg on November 11, “but not by myself.… As soon as I find a probability of moving without almost certain starvation, I shall move, provided the troops are up.” Bragg retaliated in kind. “Transportation in abundance was on the road and subject to your orders,” he shot back next day. “I regret it has not been energetically used. The means being furnished, you were expected to handle your own troops, and I cannot understand your constant applications for me to furnish them.” Old Peter pushed forward on his own, crossing at Loudon on the 13th, but reviewing the situation years later he remarked: “It began to look more like a campaign against Longstreet than against Burnside.”

In point of fact, although their methods differed sharply, the blue commander to his front was no less skillful an opponent than the gray one in his rear. Warned by Grant that a heavy detachment was headed in his direction, Burnside was not only on the alert for an attack; he was also mindful of his instructions to keep the enemy from returning to Chattanooga as long as possible. “Sherman’s advance has reached Bridgeport,” Grant wired on the day after the rebels crossed the Holston. “If you can hold Longstreet in check until he gets up, or by skirmishing and falling back can avoid serious loss to yourself and gain time, I will be able to force the enemy back from here and place a force between Longstreet and Bragg that must inevitably make the former take to the mountain passes by every available road.” Accordingly, Burnside did not seriously contest the Confederate advance. Abandoning Kingston, he called
his scattered forces in from all points except Cumberland Gap, thus keeping that escape hatch open in the event of a disaster, and aside from a brief delaying action at Campbell Station on the 14th, about midway between Loudon and Knoxville, did not risk a sudden termination of the contest, either by a victory or a defeat. He had some 20,000 soldiers with him; more, he knew, than were in the column advancing on him. But it was not a battle he was after. It was time.

He got it, too. Arriving before Knoxville on November 17, Longstreet found the bluecoats skillfully disposed and well dug in. “We went to work, therefore,” he afterwards reported, “to make our way forward by gradual and less hazardous measures, at the same time making examinations of the enemy’s entire position.” For the better part of a week this continued, his caution enlarged by the knowledge that Burnside had more men inside the place than he himself had outside. Then on November 23 he received a message Bragg had written the day before, informing him that “nearly 11,000 reinforcements are now moving to your assistance.” Old Peter was to go ahead and defeat Burnside now, “if practicable”; otherwise he could wait for the additional strength already on the way. Having looked the situation over carefully for the past six days, without finding a single chink in the Federal armor, Longstreet decided that the “practicable” thing to do was wait a couple more.

Bragg’s decision to add weight to the blow aimed at Knoxville, seeking thereby to hasten the return of the detachment by giving it the strength to settle the issue there without additional delay, was based in part on a growing suspicion that Old Peter had been right, after all, when he warned of the danger involved in any prolonged weakening of the force in occupation of the six-mile line of intrenchments drawn around two sides of Chattanooga. Longstreet had been gone for nearly three weeks now, and all sorts of things had been happening down in the town, indicative of the fact that the blue commander had something violent in mind. Moreover, Sherman had reached Bridgeport the week before, then suddenly, after crossing at Brown’s Ferry, had disappeared as mysteriously as if the earth had swallowed up all four of his divisions. Bragg inferred that the Ohioan must have marched over Walden’s Ridge: in which case he was probably headed for Knoxville, with the intention not only of raising the siege but also of swamping the already outnumbered Longstreet. If this was so, the thing to do was beat him to the punch, using the speed made possible by the railroad, and settle the issue before he got there. Accordingly, having reorganized what was left of his army into two large corps of four divisions apiece—one under Hardee, who had replaced Polk, and one under Breckinridge, who had replaced Hill—Bragg decided to dispatch one division from each, Cleburne from Hardee, Buckner from Breckinridge, and send them to Knoxville at once. He no sooner reached this decision than he acted on it. Buckner being absent sick, and Preston having been called to Richmond,
his troops were placed under Bushrod Johnson, who pulled them out of line on November 22 and shifted them rearward to Chickamauga Station, where they boarded the cars for a fast ride to Loudon and a march beyond the Holston. Cleburne followed next day to wait for the return of the cars that had carried Johnson up the line.

Consolidation of Walker’s two small divisions had reduced the army’s total from eleven to ten divisions, and of these, with Johnson and Cleburne gone, Bragg now had a scant half dozen, containing fewer than 40,000 effectives of all arms. Hardee held the left of the semicircular line, with Stevenson posted on the crest of Lookout and eastward across the valley as far as Chattanooga Creek, Walker across the rest of the valley, and Cheatham on his right, occupying the south end of the line on Missionary Ridge, the rest of which was held by Breckinridge, with Stewart adjoining Cheatham and the other two divisions—Breckinridge’s own and Hindman’s, respectively under William Bate and Patton Anderson, the senior brigadiers—disposed along the northern extension of the ridge, but not all the way to the end overlooking the confluence of Chickamauga Creek and the Tennessee River, where the ground was so rough that Bragg had decided a few outpost pickets would suffice to hold it. The fact was, he had need to conserve his forces, especially since the latest of his two considerable detachments. Sidling left and right to fill the gaps created by the departure of Johnson and Cleburne, the troops disposed in three lines down the western face of the ridge were a good two lateral yards apart, not even within touching distance of each other. Admittedly this was a dangerous situation, but their chief depended on the natural strength of the position to compensate for what he lacked in numbers.

However, on the afternoon of the day Cleburne pulled back to follow Johnson up to Knoxville, Bragg was given cause to believe that his judgment was about to be challenged in the stiffest kind of way. Grant advanced a large body of troops—apparently Thomas’s whole army—due east from Chattanooga, as if he intended to have an all-out try at breaking the thin-spread center of the rebel line. Though the mass of bluecoats called a halt about midway across the plain and began to intrench a new line just beyond range of the batteries on Missionary Ridge, Bragg was alarmed into recalling Cleburne, whose men were loading onto the cars when the summons reached him. Early next morning, November 24, the southern commander received a still greater shock in the form of a dispatch from an outpost on the right. Four blue divisions were crossing the Tennessee River immediately below the mouth of Chickamauga Creek, apparently for an assault on the practically undefended north end of the ridge. It was Sherman, the dispatch added, and Bragg knew at last that the Ohioan had not gone off to Knoxville, as he had supposed, but rather had gone into hiding behind the hills above Chattanooga, massing for the attack now being launched.
Hastily, he passed the word for Cleburne, whose troops had returned overnight from Chickamauga Station, to double-time his division northward and repulse if he could the four-division assault which, if successful, would flank the Confederates off the ridge their commander had believed to be impregnable: until now.