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the battle. Longstreet had secretly sent an official complaint to Richmond against Bragg and was waiting for a reply. The fourteen other senior generals were on edge, as Francis Dawson discovered. He had been made acting chief of ordnance while his superior, Colonel Peyton T. Manning, recovered from a head wound, and his temporary promotion gave him a seat at the staff dinners. One night, Major Walton,

who I had always disliked heartily [wrote Dawson], said that when the Confederate States enjoyed their own government, they did not intend to have any damned foreigners in the country. I asked him what he expected to become of men like myself, who had given up their own country in order to render aid to the Confederacy. He made a flippant reply, which I answered rather warmly, and he struck at me. I warded off the blow, and slapped his face.

The next morning, Dawson asked Ross to deliver his challenge to Major Walton. Ross had relished the prospect of a duel, but he was deprived of the spectacle by Walton’s offer of a written apology. Dawson waited for two days. When none came, he sent Ross to see Walton again. The major informed him that he had changed his mind. Delighted, Ross responded that the major must choose his weapons, since the challenge still held. “This brought Walton to terms,” wrote Dawson, “and he made the apology I required.”22 Dawson felt vindicated, but he still had to dine with Walton every day.

The tensions in Bragg’s army increased until, on October 5, twelve generals signed a petition asking for him to be removed from his command. Francis Lawley hoped that Longstreet would take over from General Bragg. “I have done my very utmost to get him to the helm,” he wrote to a friend. “The disappointment and indignation of his own corps, if he is put under Bragg, will be great and dangerous.”23 Lawley was still feeling weak as well as unappreciated by his employers; he had recently received a reprimand from Mowbray Morris at The Times, who, in a momentary pang of editorial responsibility, had asked him to tone down his “extravagant partiality to the Southern Cause.”24

Lawley arrived from Richmond just as Bragg learned of the attempted coup against him. He was unsurprised by the “heartburning recrimination” that had infected all ranks of Bragg’s army.25 When Jefferson Davis arrived at the camp on October 9, Lawley assumed that the president had made the difficult journey expressly to remove the unpopular general. “The conclusion is irresistible,” Lawley told Times readers in his new spirit of semi-impartiality, “that General Bragg failed to convert the most headlong and disordered rout which the Federals have ever seen … into a crowning victory like Waterloo.” Cold, driving rain accompanied Davis’s visit. Francis Dawson had to dig a trench around their tent to keep the water from flooding in during the night. The rain did not deter wild hogs from feeding on the dead, but most other activity ceased. The guns could not be moved, as the wagons became stuck. “Few constitutions can stand being wet through for a week together,” wrote Ross. They were fortified, however, by the box of provisions Lawley had brought with him from Virginia. He had also arrived with a spare horse, which enabled the observers to follow President Davis as he visited the different headquarters. Davis stayed for five days, and every day the generals, the travelers, indeed the entire army, expected an announcement.

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On September 22, 1863, the telegraph office in Washington had erupted into frenzied activity as the first reports came through from Chickamauga. The message from General Rosecrans was blunt: “We have met with a serious disaster.”26 The news was bewildering to the cabinet. Their most recent message from Rosecrans had announced his effortless capture of Chattanooga. Although Lincoln and General Halleck had been concerned that General Burnside was taking too long to march from Knoxville to join forces with Rosecrans, it had never occurred to them that the Army of the Cumberland was in any real danger from Bragg. Tennessee had