This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [189]
Burnside’s men had had their troubles. The march down from Kentucky had led them over desolate mountains, along roads so bad that hundreds of horses and mules foundered and died. Transport became so inadequate that each soldier had to carry from sixty to eighty pounds on his back, plus eight days’ rations. The men tried to lighten this load by eating their rations as fast as they could, supplementing their diet with corn and blackberries gathered along the way. They also threw away most of their inedible freight, and as a result they were poorly equipped when they reached Knoxville. They did not like the rugged mountain country, and one soldier, looking back on the long hike, wrote bitterly: “If this is the kind of country we are fighting for I am in favor of letting the Rebs take their land and their niggers and go to hell for I wouldn’t give a bit an acre for all the land I have seen in the last four days.”6
Still, things were pleasant in Knoxville. Much of Lincoln’s old eagerness to get a Federal army into east Tennessee was based on the belief that this area was full of Union sentiment, and the soldiers found that this belief was justified. Crowds lined the streets to cheer when the men marched into Knoxville; one old man stood on the sidewalk, eyes uplifted, crying: “Glory! Glory! I have been enslaved but now I am free.” Country people visited the Union camps with gifts of pie and cake and other things to eat, and an Illinois cavalryman noted that “the oft-repeated story of the loyalty of the people of east Tennessee had never been exaggerated.” It was not hard to get enough meat and bread from the country around Knoxville to keep the army fed, even if things like coffee, sugar, and salt were almost unobtainable — to say nothing of clothing, medical supplies, and ammunition. The real trouble was that Burnside’s supply line, which ran through Cumberland Gap, was so long and difficult that it was in effect worthless. If his army was to be supplied, the supplies would have to come up from Chattanooga, and that could not be done until Bragg had been driven away.7
Then, in a misguided moment, Bragg detached Longstreet and sent him off with fifteen thousand veterans to take Knoxville and capture Burnside’s army.
Of all the mistakes Bragg made in this fall of 1863 — and he made quite a number — this was probably the worst. (Long after the war someone suggested to Grant that Bragg must have supposed that he could afford to send Longstreet away because of the belief that his position on Missionary Ridge was impregnable. Grant looked down his stubby nose, grinned quietly in his sandy beard, and remarked: “Well, it was impregnable.”)8 The move did not do Burnside any particular harm, and it fatally weakened the Confederate army for the battle that was about to be fought. But in the early days of November, when news of the move got abroad, it did give Grant some bad moments. The tone of the daily telegrams he was getting from Washington began to be very shrill.
On November 7 Grant ordered Thomas to attack Bragg’s right in order to compel Bragg to recall Longstreet and his men. Thomas was as willing a fighter as ever wore a uniform, but he had to reply that he could not comply with this order: he had no horses and no mules, and as a result he could not move one piece of artillery. Grant, in turn, had to tell Washington that he could not attack just yet; he must wait for Sherman and the Army of the Tennessee, and Burnside would have to get along somehow for a few weeks longer.9
While Grant waited for Sherman, he began to find that the situation at Chattanooga was in some respects unusual. The Confederates had been holding their dominant position for so long that they seemed to look on all of the Yankees in Chattanooga as their ultimate prisoners; regarding them so, they found little reason to make a tough war out of it. Grant went out one day to inspect the Federal lines, and he