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By Root 1941 0

and had been sent down fron? Richmond to take command of one of Bragg’s army corps, watched the confused goings-on and reflected sadly that this army was not handled with the unworried competence he had been used to in Virginia. Hill had been depressed even before he joined Bragg. He had felt “the bitterness of death” in July, after learning of the Confederate defeats at Vicksburg and Gettysburg; the Confederacy, he believed, having been cut in half, would now be beaten in detail, and “the end of our glorious dream could not be far off.” But what he saw after he got to Georgia depressed him still more. The men in Bragg’s army were as good as any Lee had commanded, but something was seriously wrong at headquarters. Bragg had been given as fine an opening as a general could wish, but it was taking him forever to see it. When at last he did see it he seemed unable to do very much about it. 3

The Federals, meanwhile, were beginning to realize that they were in trouble. The private soldiers felt it. On September 11, when Thomas’s corps made camp east of the mountain, the men were vaguely uneasy. They sensed that innumerable enemies were all about them, with help a long way off — as veteran campaigners they knew enemy country when they saw it — and they were relieved when they saw Pap Thomas ride up, as stolid and unconcerned as if they were all back in camp at Murfreesboro, and settle himself massively on a stool under a tent fly to read dispatches and write orders. But the uneasy mood returned. Rosecrans had come wide awake at last and he was frantically ordering his scattered troops to concentrate a few miles south of Chattanooga, and the soldiers sensed that the high command had the jitters. As Thomas’s men went tramping north, following narrow roads through a gloomy country of limestone rocks and dense cedar thickets, they expected trouble. They had to make a forced march of it and they were kept on the road long after dark, and men who made the march wrote afterward about “the gloom and foreboding stillness of the autumn night.” For all that Thomas seemed so leisurely, it was recalled that when he bivouacked after midnight he told an aide not to let him sleep more than one hour.4

Bragg’s plan — when it finally took shape — was simple. He proposed to strike the Union left flank, driving the Army of the Cumberland away from Chattanooga — which was its only possible base of supplies and means of contact with the North — and penning it up in a tangle of dead-end mountain valleys where it could be destroyed. It was a perfectly good plan, and if it had been put into operation twenty-four hours earlier there would have been a Union disaster of the first magnitude. As it was, Bragg’s troops did not open their offensive until September 18, and it was the next morning before the battle actually began. Rosecrans had been given just time enough.

He had brought the Army of the Cumberland together in a stretch of comparatively level, heavily wooded country a dozen miles south of Chattanooga. To the east ran Chickamauga Creek, with the Rebels somewhere on its banks and with blue and gray skirmishers contending for possession of the fords and bridges. Off to the west loomed the endless blue mass of Lookout Mountain; and to the north, cutting the army off from the city, was the steep rampart of Missionary Ridge, a somewhat lower height which ran parallel to Lookout Mountain with Chattanooga in the valley between. There was a gap in Missionary Ridge at Rossville, and the road from Chattanooga came down through this gap and ran through the center of the army’s area of concentration. This road and the Rossville Gap the army must hold at all costs; to lose them would be to invite outright destruction.

The army occupied a line nearly six miles long, facing the east. Thomas held the left, looking toward the river crossings from which the main Confederate attack was likely to come, and the fighting began a little after dawn on September 19.

It was a bitter, confused fight, waged gallantly by armies whose commanders were not quite sure