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By Root 1894 0

timber-land where lay more than thirty thousand dead or wounded men. And on the winding road through the Rossville Gap the rear guard of the Army of the Cumberland gloomily plodded on toward Chattanooga. The last stand along Thomas’s line had been very fine, and in later years the men would take enormous pride in it, but right now they felt shame and disgrace; they had held on gallantly and they had prevented complete disaster, but still they had been licked and now they were in full retreat. They marched in silence, and one soldier remembered: “While not a word was said, all knew that we were whipped and were retreating from the field. This was new medicine to us … it was bitter, and did not go down very well.”10

3. The Pride of Soldiers

There was no way out and there was no way in. Chattanooga lay at the end of the passage. Eastward there was nothing at all, except for General Burnside and the fifteen thousand men with whom he had occupied Knoxville, and these people were one hundred and fifty miles away, utterly unable to do anything except collect cattle and forage from the east Tennessee countryside and wonder how long the Confederates would let them stay there. To the north there was a barren wasteland of mountains which neither man nor beast could cross unless somebody carried food for the journey. To the south there was Bragg’s army, its campfires glittering at night all along the high rampart of Missionary Ridge, crossing the open plain, and extending across to Lookout Mountain. And to the west …

To the west ran the road to the outer world, the road to food and reinforcements and the infinite strength of the Federal government, a road that might have wound across the mountains of the moon for all the use the Army of the Cumberland could make of it.

Lookout Mountain shouldered its way clear to the bank of the Tennessee River, with a highway and a railroad clinging to the slopes of its northern extremity; and armed Confederates lived on top of this mountain, so close that if they chose they might almost have tossed rocks in the river and on the highway and the railroad. Not so much as a case of hardtack, a side of bacon, or a bale of hay could get into Chattanooga for the use of the Army of the Cumberland unless these Confederates consented, and they had drawn their lines on top of Lookout Mountain for the express purpose of withholding their consent. Rosecrans’s army was besieged, and although it had escaped destruction at Chickamauga the chances now seemed quite good that it would presently die of simple starvation in Chattanooga. If it stayed where it was it would quickly run out of food — the men were on half rations already, and the horses were dying so fast that it would soon be impossible to move any of the artillery — and if it tried to retreat it would have to go over the mountains north of the river; and the roads there were so bad and so roundabout and the country was so completely empty that an army which tried to retreat by that route would disintegrate in less than a week.

Downstream from Chattanooga, twenty-five or thirty miles away, there was the town of Bridgeport. The Memphis and Charleston Railroad ran through Bridgeport, and from their great supply base at Nashville the Federals could bring vast quantities of supplies to Bridgeport. The trouble was that the Confederates controlled the Chattanooga end of the route. If an army quartermaster at Bridgeport tried to get around this roadblock he would have to make a sixty-mile detour, sending his wagon trains north of the river through the almost impassable mountain country. This had been tried over and over, and the northern road was marked every rod of the way by the bodies of dead horses and the wreckage of broken wagons, but it did not do any good; no wagon train that went this way could carry very much except the forage which its own animals had to eat in order to make the trip. Couriers or small detachments of armed men could make the journey without great difficulty, but no wagon train or large body of troops could do it without coming