Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War (34 page)

BOOK: Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War

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A possible reason for Sherman’s belief that his attacks were encountering constantly replenished Confederate forces was that the fighting abilities of the one division opposing his four divisions may have led him to overestimate how many enemies his men faced. Its commander was Major General Patrick Ronayne Cleburne, an Irishman born in Cork on St. Patrick’s Day, who as a young man served in the British Army before coming to the United States and settling in Arkansas, where he became a pharmacist and then a lawyer. Cleburne had risen quickly within the Confederate Army, and the brigade he commanded at Shiloh fought valiantly in that defeat, losing nearly 40 percent of its men. In subsequent actions on battlefields ranging from Richmond and Perryville in Kentucky to the Confederate victory at Chickamauga, Cleburne was wounded three times and earned the confident loyalty of his soldiers. Promoted to lead the division that was repelling Sherman’s attacks on Missionary Ridge, his regiments, some of which he had led for two years, were filled with combat veterans from Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas. Cleburne’s men were fighting with everything they had, and more: in addition to firing their weapons, they hurled back one of Sherman’s attacks by rolling large rocks down the slope at the advancing Union troops and then threw stones at them.

At noon, still attacking, making no progress, and able to see that Thomas’s forces were not advancing up the center slope of Missionary Ridge, Sherman had a signalman wave his handheld flags, asking Grant, “Where is Thomas?” From Orchard Knob, Grant signaled back that Thomas was starting to move, but in fact Thomas was standing right there beside Grant, just where he was supposed to be and easily accessible for Grant to command, and that was not happening.

Now the officers of Grant’s staff began conferring among themselves, some yards away from Grant. Their understanding was that Grant had told Thomas to hold his attack until Sherman turned the enemy’s right flank and Hooker turned the left, but both Sherman and Hooker were stopped where they were. Wilson noted that Grant, still standing there silently, looked discouraged. Something had to be done. Grant’s chief of staff Rawlins walked up to him and said that surely it was time for Thomas’s division to go into action.

Grant turned, went the few steps to Thomas, who was studying the enemy trenches on Missionary Ridge through his binoculars, and said, “Don’t you think it’s about time to advance against the rifle pits?”

Thomas, who was to say that he was resentful of being held back while Grant gave Sherman the chance to win the day, gave no answer and kept studying the enemy positions through his glasses.

More time passed, with Sherman’s men trying to move forward and failing, while Grant and Thomas stood immobile within a few yards of each other. It is certain that both Grant and Thomas, like all the generals in the Union and Confederate armies, knew what had happened at Gettysburg, four months before, when Lee had finally sent Pickett’s division and other units up Cemetery Ridge—a slope far less formidable than the rocky, steeper, six-hundred-foot-high face of Missionary Ridge—only to see those able, willing, experienced men slaughtered in a doomed charge that sealed the fate of the battle.

At three in the afternoon, after his fourth major attack was bloodily repulsed, Sherman stopped to rest his men. On Orchard Knob, seeing and hearing the cessation of action, Grant sent Sherman a message by signal flag: “Attack again.” At this point, as Sherman remembered it, “I thought ‘the old man’ was daft, and sent a staff officer [Major L. B. Jenney] to inquire if there was a mistake.” Jenney said that Sherman did not send him, but told him, “Go signal Grant. The orders were that I should get as many as possible in front of me and God knows there are enough. They’ve been reinforcing all day.”

Whatever message Major Jenney sent, it stirred Grant into action. Rawlins received it, walked over to Grant, and started badgering him, telling him he must make Thomas attack. Colonel Wilson, also standing there, said that Grant strode over to Thomas and, “with unusual fire, ordered Thomas to command the attack.” Thomas promptly started issuing orders for his regiments to be ready for a signal: six quick cannon blasts in a row. When they heard the last boom, they were to advance and take the trenchlike enemy rifle pits at the base of Missionary Ridge. Grant was later to say that there had been difficulty in passing this order down to the forward commanders, and that the orders were to take the rifle pits at the bottom of the hill and then stop and reorganize “preparatory to carrying the ridge.”

When Thomas’s men heard that they were to enter the battle at last, they were eager to fight: a man of the Sixth Indiana said, “We were crazy to charge.” Thomas’s subordinate Brigadier General William B. Hazen found that every man in his brigade intended to line up and get into the attack: “All servants, cooks, clerks, found guns in some way.” When the signal of six successive cannon shots started at three-forty p.m., with the fifth shot everyone started running forward, cheering. A tremendous fusillade and barrage of enemy rifle and cannon fire poured down Missionary Ridge: a Union soldier said, “A crash like a thousand thunderclaps greeted us.” The fire came at them from everywhere: the rifle pits low on the slope, defensive positions halfway up, and the last line of trenches, six hundred feet up on the crest. Nothing stopped Thomas’s men. Encountering tree trunks that had either been knocked down by artillery or felled to slow their advance, the troops jumped, climbed, or vaulted over these obstacles, shouting and cursing as they rushed ahead. The enemy soldiers retreated from their rifle pits at the base of Missionary Ridge, firing as they backed up the slope.

As Thomas’s men leapt into the abandoned Confederate positions at the bottom of the slope, their officers began telling them to build up the back ends of the enemy holes, to protect themselves from the intense enemy fire still pouring down on them. They were to do that, and wait for further orders. The troops had other ideas; whatever Grant thought that they were supposed to do in terms of reorganizing “preparatory to carrying the ridge,” they were going up right then, and they began running upward into the enemy fire. For a minute their officers stood on the edge of the now-empty rifle pits, waving their swords at the backs of their advancing men and shouting orders that they should return; then they too started running up Missionary Ridge, trying to get in front of their troops. In a minute the first of the Union soldiers were overtaking the slowest of the retreating Confederates, and in another few minutes they were at the suddenly evacuated second line of enemy rifle pits, farther up the slope. Alternately shouting and gasping for air, no longer in any semblance of organized formations, Thomas’s men kept going.

Watching from Orchard Knob, Grant turned to Thomas, who was still standing in the appropriate place for a commander of one of Grant’s armies, and asked sternly, “Thomas, who ordered those men up the ridge?”

Thomas replied, “I don’t know. I did not.”

Grant turned to Thomas’s second in command. “Did you order them up, Granger?”

“No,” Granger answered. “They started up without orders. When those fellows get started all hell can’t stop them.”

Grant muttered that someone would face disciplinary action if the attack failed and went on watching. Regimental battle flags were advancing up Missionary Ridge, moving up through thickets, past boulders, fallen trees, and little suddenly appearing ravines. The enemy was firing, but few Union soldiers stopped to fire back. It had become a race to the top. The man carrying the banner of the Twenty-fourth Wisconsin, shouting the battle cry, “On, Wisconsin!” was Captain Arthur MacArthur, who would one day have a son named Douglas. On another part of the slope, Captain C. E. Briant of the Sixth Indiana had managed to get ahead of his entire company, but as he neared the crest a private named Tom Jackson started to sprint past him. The captain reached out and grabbed Jackson’s coattail, yanking him back as he forged ahead, but the private came on again and beat him to the top in the last yards. Looking down the reverse slope, Jackson called out to the winded men of his company who were coming over the top, “My God, come and see ’em run!”

A comrade who walked up beside Jackson recalled, “It was the sight of our lives. Gray clad men rushed wildly down the hill into the woods, tossing away knapsacks, muskets and blankets as they ran.” (In the rout, Bragg was nearly captured; four thousand of his scattered troops were eventually taken prisoner.)

Now the higher officers began catching up to the men who had been supposed to reorganize at the bottom of the slope and wait for orders. Brigadier General Thomas J. Wood came over the crest on his horse. After shouting “You’ll all be court-martialed!” at a crowd of his men, he laughed delightedly. As General O. O. Howard rode up the slope, he stopped near the top to try to comfort a dying soldier. In answer to his question of where he was hurt, the man replied, “Almost up, Sir.” When Howard explained that he meant what part of the man’s body had been hit, not where he had been on the slope, the soldier said again, “Oh, I was almost up and but for that”—he finally pointed to his mortal wound—“I’d have reached the top.”

Gasping from their efforts, the victors compared notes. The color-bearer of the Thirty-eighth Indiana told his comrades who were still coming over the crest, “A fellow of the Twenty-second Indiana was up here first, but he wouldn’t have been if I hadn’t had on my overcoat.” A captain of the Nineteenth Illinois had come up unscathed but was now examining his overcoat and discovered fourteen bullet holes in it.

Sherman’s report of what his men were doing while all this was going on described his own force as having “drawn vast masses of the enemy to our flank” and said that “it was not until night closed in that I knew that the troops in Chattanooga [Thomas’s men] had swept across Missionary Ridge and broken the enemy’s centre. Of course the victory was won, and pursuit was the next step.”

Sherman added that he ordered his reserve “to march at once” and “push forward,” but the only officer who successfully exploited the situation was Brigadier General Philip Sheridan, a short, fiery West Pointer who was the son of Irish immigrants. Sheridan had been one of the Union generals brought south with his men to face the emergency at Chattanooga. Now, while Union soldiers of all ranks acted in the spirit of “My God, come and see ’em run!,” Sheridan quickly organized a combination of moves to follow the fleeing Confederates; in an effort that did not stop until two in the morning, men of his division captured seventeen hundred prisoners and seventeen artillery pieces. Praised by Grant for his “prompt pursuit,” Sheridan had redeemed an earlier indifferent performance at Chickamauga and soon would return to the Northern theater of war, from which he would emerge as the Union’s great cavalry leader.

The Battle of Chattanooga, a most important strategic victory for the North, was finally over. The most brilliant part of it had been the impromptu assault on Missionary Ridge, which took the troops exactly fifty minutes to execute. Charles Dana had witnessed this final attack. At four-thirty that afternoon, his first report to Washington began, “Glory to God! The day is decisively ours. Missionary Ridge has just been carried by a magnificent charge of Thomas’s troops, and rebels routed.” The following day he added, “The storming of the ridge by our troops was one of the greatest miracles in military history. No man who climbs the ascent by any of the roads that wind along its front can believe that eighteen thousand men were moved in tolerably good order up its broken and crumbling face unless it was his fortune to witness the deed … Neither Grant nor Thomas intended it.”

That was the reality; as soon as the battle finished, the interpretations of what had happened during the great victory began. Hooker recalled that, soon after Missionary Ridge was taken, he heard Grant say, “Damn the battle! I had nothing to do with it.” Grant almost immediately sent Sherman a letter that started with, “No doubt you witnessed the handsome manner in which Thomas’s troops carried Missionary Ridge this afternoon, and can feel a just pride too in the part taken by the forces under your command in taking first so much of the same range of hills, and then in attracting the attention of so many of the enemy as to make Thomas’ part certain of success.”

There it was: the beginning of the debate as to whether Sherman’s attacks on the flank did in fact draw off large Confederate reinforcements whose absence weakened the enemy center. Sherman wanted to believe not only that this had happened but also that the entire strategy had been to do just that. In a letter to his brother John, he wrote, “The whole philosophy of the Battle was that I should get by a dash the extremity of Missionary Ridge from which the enemy would be forced to drive me,” and later commented that “the whole plan succeeded admirably.” The overall victory was indeed a military success, but the evidence is that Grant had intended Sherman’s effort to be the winning attack that broke through on the northeast flank of Missionary Ridge and went right along its crest, with Thomas playing a secondary role in the center, and that Sherman failed in that assignment.

Like Sherman, Grant believed what he wanted to believe. In an official report of the action, he said, “Discovering that the enemy in his desperation to defeat or resist the progress of Sherman was weakening his center on Missionary Ridge, determined me to order the advance at once. Thomas was accordingly directed to move forward his troops, constituting our center.” The “at once” is difficult to comprehend. Grant, a man of proven military intuition who said that at Chattanooga the commanders could see every part of the battlefield perfectly, had been watching Sherman unsuccessfully attack the enemy’s right flank all day. Why it took Grant until after three in the afternoon to discover that the enemy was sending reinforcements to face Sherman that were “weakening his center on Missionary Ridge”—something that Colonel Wilson of Grant’s own staff said was not the case—is either a mystery, or his statement was simply a convenient way of covering for Sherman and of putting the best face on a day when it was other men who won a crucial Union victory.

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