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By Root 1878 0

had all of it. At its base, fronting the plain, they had a stout line of trenches, and on the crest they had another line, studded with cannon. Halfway up, at the proper places, there were other trenches and rifle pits, manned by soldiers who knew what to do with their rifles when they got a Yankee in the sights. To the west, a detachment held Lookout Mountain — not the crest, which rose in a straight palisade no army could scale, but the steep sides which ran down from the foot of the palisade to the edges of the Tennessee. The detachment was not large, but the mountainside was steep and the Yankees were not up to anything menacing, and it was believed that this detachment ought to be able to hold its ground. Across the flat country between Lookout and the southwestern end of Missionary Ridge, there was a good line of fieldworks held by infantry and artillery. And at the upper end of Missionary Ridge, where the high country came down to the river a few miles upstream from Chattanooga, there was broken hilly ground held by some of the best men in all the Confederacy — the division of Irish-born Pat Cleburne, a tremendous soldier who had trained his men to the precise pattern which had been glimpsed by his pugnacious Irish eyes.

Bragg was right, by any standard anyone could use. His main position could not be taken by assault, not even if nearly a third of the Confederate army had been sent up toward Knoxville to squelch General Burnside.

The Army of the Cumberland held the low ground south of Chattanooga; Lookout Mountain looked down on it from one side and Missionary Ridge looked down on it from the other, and men who had heard abut Fredericksburg and Gettysburg, with their doomed charges on high ground, could look up at these heights and have disturbing thoughts. On November 23 Thomas moved his army forward. It drove Confederate skirmishers and advance guards off the plain and seized a little detached hill, named Orchard Knob, which came up out of the flat ground a little outside Chattanooga. If Thomas wanted to order an assault on Bragg’s position he had an excellent place to take off from, but there was little reason to think that this would help very much. Missionary Ridge was still five hundred feet high, and it was studded with Rebels from top to bottom.

This was the nut that U. S. Grant was expected to crack, and as he made his plans he did just what Thomas’s grumpy men had thought he would do. He gave the big assignments to Sherman and to Hooker, and to the outlanders these officers had brought in with them. The Army of the Cumberland would have the inglorious job of looking menacing and helping to pick up the pieces, while the men from the Army of the Tennessee and the Army of the Potomac had the starring parts.

Grant proposed to hit the two ends of the Confederate line at once. Hooker would strike at Lookout Mountain, and Sherman — moving his army upstream, across the river from Chattanooga, and crossing over by pontoons — would hit the upper end of Missionary Ridge. While they were breaking into the Confederate flanks, Thomas’s men could attack the center. The latter attack would not accomplish anything in particular, for it would be suicide to expect troops to take that tremendous height, but if they could apply enough pressure to keep Bragg from reinforcing his flanks their job would be done. Sherman and Hooker would win the battle.2

It was ordered so, and the men of the Army of the Cumberland got the full implication of it. They were veterans, and in any ordinary circumstances they would have been happy enough to let somebody else’s army do all of the heavy fighting. But these circumstances were not ordinary. Their pride had been bruised badly enough in recent weeks, and now it was being hit harder than ever. In the eyes of the commanding general, obviously, they were second-class troops. They waited in helpless, smoldering anticipation for the battle to begin.

It began on November 24, after a good many delays, when Hooker sent his Easterners forward from Lookout Valley to seize the mountain that looked