it existed, and there was no use to hope for any assistance from the War Department." The Secretary of War had "even gone so far as to say that he would be damned if he would give Rosecrans another man."* For, meantime, the high spirit and utter lack of caution in personal matters which so distinguished General Rosecrans had led to two other breaches with the Department. Either of them would have served to make his position as a successful General, vigorously prosecuting a triumphant campaign, sufficiently unpleasant. As a delaying General, furnishing excuses for not undertaking the campaign on which the Government, with all its power, was urging him, they were enough to work his ruin. Yet who can check a thrill of honest pride as he reads that an Ohio General, in such a plight, had still sturdy manhood enough left to send a dispatch like this to the all-powerful General-inChief: "MURFREESBORO', 6th March, 1863. "General: Yours of the 1st instant, announcing the offer of a vacant MajorGeneralship in the regular army to the General in the field who first wins an important and decisive victory, is at hand. As an officer and a citizen I feel degraded at such an auctioneering of honors. Have we a General who would fight for his own personal benefit when he would not for honor and his country? He would come by his commission basely in that case, and deserve to be despised by men of honor. But are all the brave and honorable Generals on an equality as to chances? If not, it is unjust to those who probably deserve most. "W. S. ROSECRANS, Major-General. "To Major-General H. W. Halleck, General-in-Chief." Under the merited sting of this incautious but unanswerable rebuke, General Halleck renewed his complaints, found fault with Rosecrans's reports, and his failures to report, and even criticised the expenses of his telegraphing! At last Rosecrans, chafing under one of these dispatches, with absolutely characteristic lack of prudence, was stung into saying: "That I am very careful to inform the Department of my successes, and of all captures from the enemy, is not true, as the records of our office will show; that I have failed to inform the Government of my defeats and losses is equally untrue, both in letter and in spirit. I regard the statement of these two propositions of the War Department as a profound, grievous, cruel, and ungenerous official and personal wrong." Was it wonderful now-human nature being, after all, only human nature— that Rosecrans's "official destruction was but a question of time and opportunity?" At last, thirteen days after every one of his corps and division Generals had in writing expressed his opposition to an effort to advance, General Rosecrans began his movement. Bragg lay heavily intrenched at Tullahoma, with advance positions at Shelbyville and Wartrace. By a series of combined movements which even General Halleck was forced officially to pronounce "admirable," ‡ Bragg's attention was completely taken up by Gordon Granger's dashing * Rep. Com. Con. War, ubi supra. †24th June, 1863. Halleck's Official Report. Report Sec. War, First Sess. Thirty-Eighth Congress. advance on Shelbyville, while the bulk of the army, hastily moving far to the enemy's right, seized the mountain gaps which covered his flank. Bragg perceived, too late, the extent of his loss, and made haste to expedite his retreat. Rosecrans pushed forward for a similar flanking movement on Tullahoma, but Bragg, foreseeing that Rosecrans's success would cut off his hope of retreat, made haste to get out of Tullahoma while he could, and precipitately retired behind the Tennessee River. Success had again justified General Rosecrans; but, brilliant as were these operations, they lacked the element of bloodshed which goes so far toward fixing the popular standard of appreciation. The very day on which he had begun the campaign had unfortunately proved the beginning of an unprecedented rain-storm which lasted for seventeen successive days. Through this the campaign was carried on; but for the delays which it compelled, Tullahoma would have been turned so speedily that Bragg would have found himself forced to battle on disadvantageous ground, and the history of the war in the South-West might have been changed. As it was, Rosecrans was fully warranted in his proud summing up: "Thus ended a nine days' campaign which drove the enemy from two fortified positions, and gave us possession of Middle Tennessee, conducted in one of the most extraordinary rains ever known in Tennessee at that period of the year, over a soil that became almost a quicksand. These results were far more successful than was anticipated, and could only have been obtained by a surprise as to the direction and force of our movements." His total loss was five hundred and sixty. He took sixteen hundred and thirty-four prisoners, six pieces of artillery, and large quantities of stores. General Rosecrans at once set about repairing the railroads in his rear, and hurrying forward supplies. By 25th of July the first supply train was pushed through to the Tennessee River. But already "the General-in-Chief began to manifest great impatience at the delay in the movement forward to Chattanooga." So Rosecrans mildly states it. The nature of these manifestations may be inferred from the correspondence. On 3d July General Halleck telegraphed positive orders to advance at once, and report daily the movement of each corps until the Tennessee River was crossed! Rosecrans, in astonishment, replied that he was trying to prepare for crossing, and inquired if this order was intended to take away his discretion as to the time and manner of moving his troops. Halleck's response was such as was never given under similar circumstances to any other General during the war: "The orders for the advance of your army, and that its progress be reported daily, are peremptory!" The War Department has not favored us with General Rosecrans's reply to this extraordinary order, but we are not without the means for determining its nature. He stated his plans,† showed the necessity of deceiving the enemy as to the intended point for crossing the Tennessee, insisted on not moving till he was ready, and requested that, in the event of the disapproval of these views, he * Rosecrans's Official Report Tullahoma Campaign. † Rosecrans's MS. Sketch of his Military Career, furnished under orders of War Department, in files of the Adjutant-General's office. should be relieved from the command of the army! This seems to have freed him from further molestation; but it needed no prophetic sagacity now to see that only "time and opportunity" were waited for at the War Department. It was on 5th August that General Halleck telegraphed his peremptory orders to move, and received in reply the tender of the command. General Rosecrans quietly waited till the dispositions along his extended line were completed, till stores were accumulated, and the corn had ripened so that his horses could be made to live off the country. On the 15th he was ready. The problem now before General Rosecrans was to cross the Tennessee River and gain possession of Chattanooga, the key to the entire mountain ranges of Eastern Tennessee and Northern Georgia, in the face of an enemy of equal strength, whose business it was to oppose him. Two courses were open. Forcing a passage over the river above Chattanooga, he might have essayed a direct attack upon the town. If not repulsed in the dangerous preliminary movements, he would still have had upon his hands a siege not less formidable than that of Vicksburg, with difficulties incomparably greater in supplying his army. But, if this plan was not adopted, it then behooved him to convince the enemy that he had adopted it; while, crossing below, he hastened southward over the ruggedest roads, to seize the mountain gaps whence he could debouch upon the enemy's line of supplies. More briefly, he could either attempt to fight the enemy out of Chattanooga, or to flank him out. He chose the latter. By the 28th the singular activity of the National forces along a front of a hundred and fifty miles had blinded and bewildered Bragg as to his antago nist's actual intentions. Four brigades suddenly began demonstrating furiously against his lines above Chattanooga, and the plan was thought to be revealed! Rosecrans must be about attempting to force a passage there, and straightway began a concentration to oppose him. Meantime, bridges having been secretly prepared were hastily thrown across, thirty miles further down the river at different points, and before Bragg had finished preparing to resist a crossing above, Rosecrans, handling with rare skill his various corps and divisions, had securely planted his army south of the Tennessee, and, cutting completely loose from his base of supplies, was already pushing southward, his flank next the enemy being admirably protected by impassable mountains. For Bragg, but one thing was left. As he had been forced out of Shelbyville, out of Wartrace, out of Tullahoma, precisely so had the same stress been placed upon him by the same hand in his still stronger position; and in all baste he evacuated Chattanooga, leaving it to the nearest corps of Rosecrans's army to march quietly in and take possession. The very ease of this occupation was to prove its strongest element of danger. For men, seeing the objective. point of the campaign in our hands, forgot the columns toiling through mountains away to the southward, whose presence there alone compelled the Rebel evacuation. But for them the isolated troops at Chattanooga would have been overwhelmed. Thenceforward there was need of still greater Generalship to reunite the scattered corps. They could not return by the way they had gone, for the moment they began such a movement Bragg, holding the shorter line, and already re-enforced by Longstreet's veteran corps of the Army of Northern Virginia, could sweep back over the route of his late retreat. Plainly they must pass through the gaps, and place themselves between Bragg and Chattanooga, before the stronghold-beyond a mere tentative possession-could be within our grasp. And so it came about that a battle-the bloody one of Chickamauga-was fought to enable our army to concentrate in the position which one of its corps had already occupied for days without firing a shot. Unfortunately the concentration was not speedy enough. Indeed, there are some plausible reasons for believing that Rosecrans was for a few days deceived by his easy success into a belief that Bragg was still in full retreat. Certainly the General-in-Chief and the War Department did all they could to encourage such an idea; and even after Rosecrans, (every nerve tense with the struggle to concentrate his corps), was striving to prepare for the onset of the re-enforced Rebel army, General Halleck informed him of reports that Bragg's army was re-enforcing Lee, and pleasantly added that, after he had occupied Dalton it would be decided whether he should move still further southward! But now Bragg had gathered in every available re-enforcement; Longstreet from the East, Buckner from Knoxville, Walker from the army of Jos. E. Johnston, militia from Georgia,* and, waiting near Lafayette, hoped to receive the isolated corps of Rosecrans's army as they debouched through the gaps, and annihilate them in detail. For a day or two it looked as if he would be successful; Rebel critics insist that he might have been, and he himself seems disposed to blame his subordinates. One way or another, however, he failed. Rosecrans gathered together his army, repelling whatever assaults sought to hinder the concentration, yielding part of the line of the Chickamauga, and marching one of the corps all through the night before the battle. On 19th September Bragg made his onset-with certainly not less than seventy thousand men. Rosecrans had fifty-five thousand. Bragg's plan was to turn his antagonist's left, and thus clear the way into Chattanooga. But, most fortunately, the left was held by George H. Thomas. Shortly after the attack began, Rosecrans, divining the danger, strengthened Thomas's corps with one or two divisions. Disaster overtook us at first, artillery was lost, and ground yielded, but Thomas re-formed and advanced his lines, regained all that had been lost, sustained every shock of the enemy, and at night held his positions firmly. Meanwhile the contest on other parts of our line had been less severe, and had ended decidedly to our advantage. But it was seen that we were outnumbered, and as they came to think how every brigade in the whole army, two only excepted, had been drawn into the fight, the soldiers began to realize the dispiriting nature of the situation. Through the night the last of Longstreet's corps came up, led by himself, and Bragg prepared for a more vigorous onset on the National left. Rosecrans transferred another division (Negley's) to Thomas, and placed two more in reserve, to be hurried to Thomas's aid if needed. At daybreak† he galloped along the Raising Bragg's force, according to Rosecrans's estimate, to ninety-two thousand men. † 20th September, 1863. |