This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [197]
Pap Thomas also made a remembered remark about this time. During the battle of Chattanooga it had occurred to him that the little hill of Orchard Knob would make a beautiful burying ground for Union soldiers slain in battle, and not long after the fight he ordered a proper military cemetery laid out there, detailing whole regiments to help in the work. The chaplain who was going to be in charge of burial services when everything was ready came to him and asked if the dead should be buried by states — Ohioans here, Hoosiers there, Kentuckians over yonder, and so on. Thomas thought about it and then shook his head.
“No — no, mix ’em up, mix ’em up,” he said. “I’m tired of states’ rights.”13
States’ rights, as a matter of fact, had made its last great counterattack, and the Confederacy had passed the last of the great might-have-beens of the war. Its supreme attempt to restore the lost balance had failed. By making the greatest effort it could make — pulling together a large army even at the cost (never risked before or afterward) of taking men from Lee’s army — it had made its final bid for victory at Chickamauga. It could not again make such an effort, and it would not again have a chance to make the tide flow in the other direction. The Army of the Cumberland might have been destroyed at Chickamauga but was not destroyed; it might have been starved into surrender at Chattanooga, but that had not happened; and now Bragg’s wrecked army was recuperating in north Georgia, Bragg himself replaced by cautious little Joe Johnston, and from this time on the Confederacy could hope to do no more than parry the blows that would be leveled against it. The dream that had been born in spring light and fire was flickering out now, and nothing lay ahead but a downhill road.
The shadows were rising that winter, tragically lit by a pale light of southern valor and endurance which were not enough to win and which the victorious Federals glimpsed as they looked back on the immediate past. A man in the 46th Ohio recalled strolling along the fighting line at the northern end of Missionary Ridge, the day after the battle of Chattanooga had ended, and looking down at the unburied body of a dead Confederate, and he wrote:
“He was not over 15 years of age, and very slender in size. He was clothed in a cotton suit, and was barefooted — barefooted, on that cold and wet 24th of November. I examined his haversack. For a day’s ration there was a handful of black beans, a few pieces of sorghum and a half dozen roasted acorns. That was an infinitely poor outfit for marching and fighting, but that Tennessee Confederate had made it answer his purpose.”14
Chapter Eleven
AND KEEP MOVING ON
1. Year of Jubilo
EIGHTEEN hundred and sixty-four came in, and it would be the worst year of all — the year of victory made certain, the year of smoke and destruction and death, with an old dream going down in flames and an unfathomable new one taking form in the minds of men who hardly knew what they dreamed. Steadily and inescapably a new rhythm was being felt. The revolutionary times which old General Scott had detected away back in the early days, when hotheaded little Captain Lyon had to be equipped with irregular authority to meet a fantastic situation in Missouri, were enforcing their own hard rules. Visibly drawing nearer to its end, the war had paradoxically become a thing that could not be stopped.
Thoughtful Southerners saw the narrowing circle and the rising shadows and cried that the fight must continue to the final limits of endurance. The Confederate Congress, adopting a resolution addressed to constituents