This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [125]
Washington had been reminding him that what it wanted most of all was a Federal army moving into east Tennessee, but Rosecrans was beginning to see Buell’s point of view — that such a move was easier to plan in Washington than to execute on the spot. He concentrated at Nashville, perceived that Bragg and the Confederates were concentrated at Murfreesboro, less than thirty miles away, and on the day after Christmas, 1862 — a gloomy day, low clouds everywhere, a chilling mist in the air, with intermittent rain coming down to soak men’s clothing and spoil the roads — Rosecrans called his army out of its tents and set off southeast to find Bragg and fight him.
He was starting out with some forty-three thousand men. There were more than that in his command, but he was in enemy country infested by a great many highly active Confederate raiders, and he had to leave extensive details behind to guard bridges, supply lines, and wagon trains. Unfortunately most of the men taken for these details came from the troops of Rosecrans’s best corps commander, George Thomas, who would be short one entire division when the army went into action. Thomas, who had turned down the chance to replace Buell before Perryville, seems to have felt hurt when the government finally gave Buell’s job to Rosecrans, and Halleck was soothing him with kind words by letter — soothing him, as it finally would prove, not too effectively.4
Corps commanders with Thomas were Thomas L. Crittenden, son of the distinguished Kentuckian who had tried so hard and so unsuccessfully to work out a compromise between North and South in the final months before Sumter, and Alexander McD. McCook, a cheerful, bluff regular whose men had done most of the fighting at Perryville and who possessed a division commander who was just beginning to attract notice as a furious driving fighting man — a brand-new brigadier, recently a colonel of cavalry, by name of Philip Sheridan. Rosecrans spread his three corps out over the wet roads, and after marches made slow by sporadic skirmishing and cavalry fighting his troops pulled up in front of Murfreesboro on the evening of December 29.
On the following day, noticing that Bragg had all of his army drawn up in front of the town ready to fight, Rosecrans spread his own troops out into line — McCook off to the right, Thomas in the center, and Crittenden massed on the left, on the edge of icy Stone’s River, which came wandering down to curve west between Bragg’s army and Murfreesboro. As night came down, both Bragg and Rosecrans were determined to fight as soon as there was daylight.
By the oddest chance, each general had formed precisely the same battle plan — to hold with his right and attack with his left. Rosecrans would send Crittenden’s corps over the river to come in on Bragg’s right flank, breaking it and driving it out of action, while the rest of the army held on and waited for the breaks; Bragg, in his turn, proposed to mass troops on his left and crush the Federal right, trusting to elements on high ground behind the river to keep his right safe. Conceivably, the two armies might swing around each other like the halves of a revolving door. Even more conceivably, the army that struck first might very well win the battle.
The night was cold and the ground was wet, and campfires were alight. It occurred to Rosecrans to deceive his opponent and make him think the Federal right was longer and stronger than was actually the case, so campfires were lighted where no men camped, for two miles beyond McCook’s right. The strategy apparently backfired; Bragg saw and believed but simply ordered his own assaulting columns to sweep more widely to the west, which meant that when they struck they would extend far beyond McCook’s flank.5
Dawn came in cold and sullen. Awakening Federals felt that they had picked a gloomy place for a battle.