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had seen from afar had darkened to a scene of gore and horror. “The impression left on me by my walks the next day through those blood-stained woods,” he wrote later, “fixed a conviction in my mind, a conviction of the absolute and essential wickedness of those who talk lightly of war and still more of those who lightly begin a war.”34 Thompson was ready to return home. “Now I am tired to death,” he wrote. His ship was not leaving until December 23, but Thompson felt he had witnessed enough suffering and intended to spend the final weeks of his stay in America visiting friends and enjoying himself as a tourist. His opinion of the North had grown higher still now that he understood the great suffering endured by its people.

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“God be praised for this victory, which looks like the heaviest blow the country has yet dealt at rebellion,” George Templeton Strong wrote in New York after hearing the news from Chattanooga. “Meade’s army again reported in motion and across the Rapidan,” he added to his diary entry. “The nation needs one or two splendid victories by its Eastern armies to offset those gained in the West.”35

Two days later, on November 29, General Longstreet received a wire from Jefferson Davis confirming the Confederate defeat at Chattanooga and ordering him to abandon his siege at Knoxville so that he could provide support to Bragg. The telegram had come an hour too late for eight hundred Confederate and thirteen Federal soldiers. One of the worst-planned assaults of the war had just taken place in front of Burnside’s defenses. Francis Dawson was so sickened by the fiasco that he could not bear to write about it in his memoir. All he could say about the twenty minutes of slaughter was that Longstreet’s attack “failed utterly.”

The Confederates began to march away from Knoxville on December 4. Fearing that General Sherman was on his way to help Burnside, Longstreet decided it would be safer to retreat farther east rather than head south toward Georgia. “The men suffered frightfully,” wrote Dawson. “It is no exaggeration to say that on such marches as they were obliged to make in that bitter weather they left the bloody tracks of their feet on the sharp stones of the roads.” Longstreet, stricken with remorse and self-doubt, wished to be relieved of command. His request was denied, but President Davis did accept General Bragg’s resignation. The general blamed the defeat on the cowardice of his troops and the personal animosity of his commanders without ever examining his own part in either cause. President Davis had no other alternative than to recall his stubborn opponent General Joe Johnston and order him to take command of Bragg’s Army of Tennessee.

In the Federal army, General Burnside, too, asked to be relieved. He was satisfied that his reputation as a commander had been redeemed by the capture of the Cumberland Gap and the defense of Knoxville. No longer would he be known solely for the disaster at Fredericksburg and the humiliating “Mud March” of January 1863. The real victor of the Cumberland Gap, Colonel De Courcy, was also determined to leave the army. The War Department, not interested in deciding the contest between a departing general and his disgruntled colonel, had never responded to De Courcy’s complaints. He was saved from becoming bitter by the loyal support and admiration of the soldiers who had been with him on the campaign. “It was the unanimous opinion of the officers in De Courcy’s brigade that this trouble actually grew out of jealousy caused by the brilliant result of De Courcy’s tactics,” Lieutenant Colonel McFarland of the 86th Ohio Infantry later claimed. “It will be borne in mind that 2500 men, well protected by rifle-pits, forts, and cannon, had surrendered to 800, who were without effective support of any kind.”36 The injustice meted out to De Courcy so grieved his old regiment that on December 19 the officers and men of the 16th Ohio Volunteer Infantry presented him with a commemorative sword, sash, and belt. Captain Hamilton Richeson declared:

Officers there are who command the