This Hallowed Ground (55 page)

Up the side of the ridge went the great line of battle. It was a parade-ground line no longer. The regimental flags led, men trailing out behind each flag in a V-shaped mass, struggling over rocks and logs as they kept on climbing. Confederate pockets of resistance on the slope were wiped out. Now and then the groups of attackers would stop for breath — the slope was steep, and it was easy to get winded — but after a moment or so they would go on again.

Looking down from the crest, the Confederates kept on firing, but the foreknowledge of defeat was beginning to grip them. The crest was uneven, and no defender could see more than a small part of his own line; but each defender could see all of the charging Federal army, and it suddenly looked irresistible. The defensive fire slackened here and there; men began to fade back from the firing line, irresolute; and finally the Federals were covering the final yards in a frantic competitive run, each regiment trying to outdo the others, each man trying to beat his fellows. A company commander, running ahead of his colors, grabbed the coattails of one of his men, to hold him back so that he might reach the crest first.
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No one could ever determine afterward what unit or what men won the race, and the business was argued at old soldiers’ reunions for half a century. Apparently the crest was reached at half a dozen places simultaneously, and when it was reached, Bragg’s line — the center of his whole army, the hard core of his entire defensive position — suddenly
and inexplicably went to pieces. By ones and twos and then by companies and battalions, gray-clad soldiers who had proved their valor in a great many desperate fights turned and took to their heels. Something about that incredible scaling of the mountainside had been just too much for them. Perfectly typical was the case of a Confederate officer who, scorning to run, stood with drawn sword, waiting to fight it out with the first Yankee who approached him. An Indiana private, bayoneted rifle in his grip, started toward him — and then, amazingly, laid down his weapon and came on in a crouch, bare hands extended. There was a primeval menace in him, more terrifying than bayonet or musket, and the officer blinked at him for a moment and then fled.

As resistance dissolved, the victorious Federals were too breathless to cheer. They tossed their caps in the air, and some of them crossed the narrow ridge to peer down the far side, where they saw what they had not previously seen — whole brigades of Confederates running downhill in wild panicky rout. The Federals turned and beckoned their comrades with swinging arms and, regaining their wind, with jubilant shouts: “My God! Come and see them run!”

General officers began to reach the crest. Sheridan was there, laying proudly possessive hands on the guns that had fired at him. The General Wood whose division had been ordered out of the line in that disastrous mismaneuver at Chickamauga was riding back and forth laughing, telling his men that because they had attacked without orders they would be court-martialed, each and every one. He found the private who had charged the Confederate officer bare-handed and asked him why he had done such a thing; the man replied simply that he had thought it would be nice to take the officer prisoner.
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The battle of Chattanooga was over now, no matter what Sherman or Hooker did. With a two-mile hole punched in the center of his line, Bragg could do nothing but retreat, and as his army began to reassemble on the low ground beyond the mountain, it took off for Georgia, with Cleburne’s men putting up a stout rear-guard resistance. Phil Sheridan got his division into shape and took off in pursuit, figuring that it might be possible to cut in behind Cleburne and capture his whole outfit, but his pursuit was little more than a token. The Army of the Cumberland was temporarily immobilized by the sheer surprise of its incredible victory. Nobody wanted to do anything but ramble around, yell, and let his chest expand with unrestrained pride.

Oddly enough, it was a long time before the soldiers realized that they themselves were responsible for the victory. They tended to ascribe it to Grant and to his good management, and they told one another that all they had ever needed was a good leader. One officer who had shared in all of this army’s battles wrote that during the uproar of this conflict
“I thought I detected in the management what I had never discovered before on the battlefield — a little common sense.” When Grant and Thomas came to the top of the ridge the men crowded about them, capering and yelling. Sherman himself was thoroughly convinced that the battle had gone exactly as Grant had planned it; to him the whole victory was simply one more testimonial to the general’s genius.
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Washington felt much the same way; but Washington also remembered that Burnside was still beleaguered in Knoxville, and when Lincoln sent a wire of congratulations to Grant he added the words: “Remember Burnside.” Grant started Granger off to the rescue with an army corps; then, figuring that Sherman would make a faster march — and feeling apparently a little disillusioned about Granger after noticing the man’s unrestrained excitement during the battle — he canceled the order and sent the Army of the Tennessee.

Burnside, as it turned out, was in no serious trouble. Longstreet had made a night attack on his lines and had been repulsed, after which he drew his troops off and menaced the Union garrison from a distance. Sherman’s men relieved the Knoxville situation without difficulty, except that the pace at which Sherman drove them marched them practically out of their shoes. They found the Federals in Knoxville ragged and hungry — the food allowance had been reduced to a daily issue of salt pork and bran bread, so unappetizing that it took a half-starved man to eat it — but things had not been as bad in Knoxville as they had been in Chattanooga before Grant’s arrival, and Sherman and his officers were slightly nonplused when Burnside and his staff welcomed them with an elaborate banquet. One of Burnside’s officers explained later that the whole town had been ransacked to get such a meal together; both soldiers and civilians had felt that they ought to make some tangible expression of their gratitude to the men who had raised the siege. Sherman fumed privately over what he considered the military folly of trying to occupy Knoxville at all, and the effort to nudge Longstreet off to a safer distance involved a good deal of highly uncomfortable winter campaigning, but the danger was over. Before too long, full railroad connections with Chattanooga were restored, which meant that plenty of food and clothing could come in. Half of the army came gaily down to the station to greet the first train — a ten-car freight train which, when the doors were opened, turned out by some triumph of military miscalculation to be loaded with nothing but horseshoes.
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Back in Chattanooga the soldiers prepared for winter and for the spring campaign that would follow. Grant was turning Nashville into one of the greatest supply bases on the continent, and the railway connection with Chattanooga was being restored and strengthened; in the spring Grant would take Atlanta and Mobile, and he wanted everything
ready. Meanwhile he rode out one day with Thomas, Baldy Smith, and other officers to look at the battlefield of Chickamauga. A young staff officer stuck as close to Grant as he could, hoping to hear some profound comment by the victor of Chattanooga on the scene of the most desperate fight the Army of the Cumberland had ever had. He was disappointed. Grant made only one remark that the staff man could remember, and it was nothing much for the history books. Looking about at one place where all the trees were scarred and splintered by bullets, the general observed: “These trees would make a good lead mine.”
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Pap Thomas also made a remembered remark about this time. During the battle of Chattanooga it had occurred to him that the little hill of Orchard Knob would make a beautiful burying ground for Union soldiers slain in battle, and not long after the fight he ordered a proper military cemetery laid out there, detailing whole regiments to help in the work. The chaplain who was going to be in charge of burial services when everything was ready came to him and asked if the dead should be buried by states — Ohioans here, Hoosiers there, Kentuckians over yonder, and so on. Thomas thought about it and then shook his head.

“No — no, mix ’em up, mix ’em up,” he said. “I’m tired of states’ rights.”
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States’ rights, as a matter of fact, had made its last great counterattack, and the Confederacy had passed the last of the great might-have-beens of the war. Its supreme attempt to restore the lost balance had failed. By making the greatest effort it could make — pulling together a large army even at the cost (never risked before or afterward) of taking men from Lee’s army — it had made its final bid for victory at Chickamauga. It could not again make such an effort, and it would not again have a chance to make the tide flow in the other direction. The Army of the Cumberland might have been destroyed at Chickamauga but was not destroyed; it might have been starved into surrender at Chattanooga, but that had not happened; and now Bragg’s wrecked army was recuperating in north Georgia, Bragg himself replaced by cautious little Joe Johnston, and from this time on the Confederacy could hope to do no more than parry the blows that would be leveled against it. The dream that had been born in spring light and fire was flickering out now, and nothing lay ahead but a downhill road.

The shadows were rising that winter, tragically lit by a pale light of southern valor and endurance which were not enough to win and which the victorious Federals glimpsed as they looked back on the immediate past. A man in the 46th Ohio recalled strolling along the fighting line at the northern end of Missionary Ridge, the day after the battle of Chattanooga had ended, and looking down at the unburied body of a dead Confederate, and he wrote:

“He was not over 15 years of age, and very slender in size. He was clothed in a cotton suit, and was barefooted — barefooted, on that cold and wet 24th of November. I examined his haversack. For a day’s ration there was a handful of black beans, a few pieces of sorghum and a half dozen roasted acorns. That was an infinitely poor outfit for marching and fighting, but that Tennessee Confederate had made it answer his purpose.”
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E
IGHTEEN
hundred and sixty-four came in, and it would be the worst year of all — the year of victory made certain, the year of smoke and destruction and death, with an old dream going down in flames and an unfathomable new one taking form in the minds of men who hardly knew what they dreamed. Steadily and inescapably a new rhythm was being felt. The revolutionary times which old General Scott had detected away back in the early days, when hotheaded little Captain Lyon had to be equipped with irregular authority to meet a fantastic situation in Missouri, were enforcing their own hard rules. Visibly drawing nearer to its end, the war had paradoxically become a thing that could not be stopped.

Thoughtful Southerners saw the narrowing circle and the rising shadows and cried that the fight must continue to the final limits of endurance. The Confederate Congress, adopting a resolution addressed to constituents back home, touched the edge of hysteria in its fervor. If the Washington government (said this resolution) called for restoration of the old Union it was merely setting a cruel trap for the deluded; there could be no reunion, because the only possible relation between the reunited sections would be that between conqueror and conquered, and “nothing short of your utter subjugation, the destruction of your state governments, the overthrow of your social and political fabric, your personal and public degradation and ruin, will satisfy the demands of the North.”
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If there was in this the desperate overstatement common to wartime propaganda, there was nevertheless reason for thoughtful Southerners to feel this way. The attempt to make an independent confederacy had been, in a sense, nothing more than a despairing effort to do something
about the problem of slavery. The war was a great forced draft applied to a long-smoldering flame, and under its white heat the problem was changing. Not for nothing was slavery called “the peculiar institution,” and its chief peculiarity seemed to be that it would not stay put. It changed when it came under examination; the question now was not so much what could be done about slavery as what could be done about the Negro, and this in turn was becoming a problem of what to do about white society itself. There was material here for an almost unlimited overthrow of human institutions, because existing institutions had been built, by and large, on the happy assumption that the basic problem would not have to be faced at all.

Lincoln himself had shared in this belief. Ten years earlier he had confessed that if he had all earthly power he would not know what to do about slavery; it was a wrong that cried for settlement, but millions of Negroes were physically here in America, and if they were not slaves they would be free men, headed for ultimate equality with white men; and “we cannot … make them equals.” More recently — in the middle of 1862 — he had protested to a Maryland correspondent that all thinking Southerners must know that “I never had a wish to touch the foundations of their society.” Yet the foundations were being touched with a hand of iron, and no one was more disturbed by this than Lincoln. As recently as July 31, 1863, he had seemed to be less than certain about the Emancipation Proclamation itself. Writing about this proclamation (to a general who had asked for guidance), he seemed to be brooding about a decision not yet final: “I think I shall not retract or repudiate it. Those who have tasted actual freedom I believe can never be slaves or quasi-slaves again. For the rest, I believe some plan, substantially being gradual emancipation, would be better for both black and white.”
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Yet even as he brooded the decision had been made, if not by the President, by the war itself. In that same summer Grant had written bluntly: “Slavery is already dead and cannot be resurrected. It would take a standing army to maintain slavery in the South if we were to make peace today, guaranteeing to the South all their former constitutional privileges.” And grim Sherman was contemptuously saying: “All the powers of earth cannot restore them their slaves any more than their dead grandfathers.”
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Now, early in 1864, Sherman’s soldiers were making fairly substantial strides with an operation that the Congress at Richmond would undoubtedly have considered part of the overthrow of the southern social and political fabric; they were doing it in a wild rough holiday mood, with taunting, boisterous laughter, simply as a means of getting on with the war.