The Man Who Saved the Union (41 page)

Lincoln saw the wisdom in Grant’s reasoning and let him stay in the West with greater responsibilities. In October Grant traveled to Indianapolis to meet with
Edwin Stanton, who explained that a new command was being created for him. The Military Division of the Mississippi would stretch from the Alleghenies to the Mississippi and comprise the Departments of the Ohio, the
Cumberland and the Tennessee.
Ambrose Burnside would head the Ohio department and William Rosecrans the Cumberland; Sherman would take over the Tennessee.

Grant’s first action in his new post was to fire William Rosecrans. He remembered the troubles Rosecrans had caused him during the summer of 1862, and he recounted them to Stanton, who related them to Halleck. “
He considers it indispensible that Rosecrans should be relieved
because he would not obey orders,” Stanton told Halleck of Grant. Halleck accepted Grant’s decision. The firing came easier since Rosecrans had just suffered a serious setback on Chickamauga Creek, near where southeastern Tennessee meets northwestern Georgia, at the hands of Confederate forces commanded by
Braxton Bragg and
James Longstreet. Rosecrans blundered in the battle while George Thomas, his subordinate, showed decisiveness and courage in covering the Union retreat to
Chattanooga. Grant knew and respected Thomas, and he gave him Rosecrans’s job.

T
homas could have wished for better timing. The Union hold on Chattanooga was uncertain at best. “
By the middle of October it began to look as if we were in a helpless and precarious position,” Charles
Dana wrote of the Union position in eastern Tennessee. Dana had left Grant after the capture of Vicksburg and gone to spy for Stanton on Rosecrans. He rode to the
battle of Chickamauga and joined the retreat to Chattanooga. “
No reinforcements had yet reached us,” he continued. “The enemy was growing stronger each day, and, worse still, we were threatened with starvation.” Supplies for Chattanooga traveled by rail from Nashville to Bridgeport, forty miles west of Chattanooga, where the railroad crossed to the south bank of the Tennessee River. But the Confederates controlled the south bank, depriving the Union of the railroad from Bridgeport. And their batteries prevented steam transports from getting through, while sharpshooters made the road on the north bank of the river nearly impassable. As a result the Chattanooga garrison was reduced to surviving on what trickled down inferior roads through the mountains north of the river. “These were not only disturbed by the enemy, but were so bad in places that the mud was up to the horses’ bellies,” Dana wrote. “On October 15 the troops were on half-rations, and officers as they went about where the men were working on the fortifications frequently heard the cry of ‘Crackers!’ ”—a plea for hardtack, even. The situation grew only worse. “On the 17th of October five hundred teams were halted between the mountain and the river without forage for the animals, and unable to move in any direction. The whole road was strewn with dead animals.” Dana nearly despaired for the garrison’s survival. “I never saw anything which seemed so lamentable and hopeless. Our animals were starving, the men had starvation before them, and the enemy was bound soon to make desperate efforts to dislodge us.”

Chattanooga became Grant’s responsibility at just this moment. He set off for the city to determine for himself its condition and prospects. He could have gone faster but for the effects of a second injury suffered when his horse again slipped and fell on him. For three weeks in September he was unable to move. “
Am still confined to my bed, lying flat on my back,” he wrote Halleck. “My injuries are severe but still not dangerous. My recovery is simply a matter of time. Although fatiguing I will still endeavor to perform my duties, and hope soon to recover, that I may be able to take the field.”

The threat to Chattanooga left him no choice. “
Hold Chattanooga at all hazards,” he telegraphed Thomas upon assuming command. “I will be there as soon as possible.” The journey wasn’t easy. “
I arrived here in the night of the 23rd, after a ride on horseback of fifty miles, from Bridgeport, over the worst roads it is possible to conceive of, and through a continuous drenching rain,” he wrote Halleck. The experience made him realize that his first task was to improve the route from Nashville. “It is barely possible to supply this
Army from its present base. But when winter rains set in it will be impossible.” Beyond that, he wasn’t sure how to proceed. “What force the enemy have to my front I have no means of judging accurately. Deserters come in every day, but their information is limited to their own brigades or divisions at furthest. The camps of the enemy are in sight, and for the last few days there seems to have been some moving of troops. But where to I cannot tell.”

He conducted a reconnaissance the next day. Riding out from Chattanooga with George Thomas and
William F. Smith, the chief engineer of the Cumberland army, as well as some members of his staff, Grant crossed the Tennessee to the north bank and ventured west to Brown’s Ferry, a few miles downstream from Lookout Mountain, the height that commanded Chattanooga’s valley. Confederate pickets occupied the south bank. “
We were within easy range,” Grant recalled. “They did not fire upon us nor seem to be disturbed by our presence. They must have seen that we were all commissioned officers. But, I suppose, they looked upon the garrison of Chattanooga as prisoners of war, feeding or starving themselves, and thought it would be inhuman to kill any of them except in self-defense.” (His surmise was correct. “
We held him at our mercy,” Braxton Bragg subsequently reported to
Jefferson Davis. “His destruction was only a question of time.”)

The complacency of the Confederates afforded Grant an opening. Weeks earlier Halleck had detached a force under
Joseph Hooker from
the Army of the Potomac and sent it west to reinforce Chattanooga. It had reached Bridgeport by the time Grant came through, but it waited there lest its advance to Chattanooga simply add to the strain on the supply line. Grant ordered Hooker to advance by a route south of the Tennessee, driving away such
Confederates as he encountered. Meanwhile William Smith would float a contingent down the Tennessee from Chattanooga with pontoon boats, which would glide in the dark past the Confederates on Lookout Mountain and form the basis for a bridge across the river at Brown’s Ferry. A column from Chattanooga would march across and connect via Lookout Valley, west of Lookout Mountain, with Hooker’s force.

The operation proceeded to Grant’s entire satisfaction. The Confederates caught north of the new Union line and south of the river realized their isolation and surrendered. Their removal opened the river and the road on its north bank to Union transports and mule teams, which shortly established the “
cracker line” the Chattanooga garrison had been crying for, and more. “
In a week the troops were receiving full rations,” Grant recalled. “It is hard for anyone not an eyewitness to realize the relief this brought. The men were soon reclothed and also well fed; an abundance of ammunition was brought up, and a cheerfulness prevailed not before enjoyed in many weeks.”

Yet Chattanooga remained besieged. The Confederate positions approached so near the Union defenses that the troops of the two sides were within speaking distance. They often did speak and otherwise observed a comity at striking odds with the larger conflict. One day Grant examined the Union troops along Chattanooga Creek, south of the city. “When I came to the camp of the picket guard of our side, I heard the call, ‘Turn out guard for the commanding general,’ ” he remembered. “I replied, ‘Never mind the guard,’ and they were dismissed and went back to their tents. Just back of these, and about equally distant from the creek, were the guards of the Confederate pickets. The sentinel on their post called out in like manner, ‘Turn out the guard for the commanding general,’ and, I believe, added, ‘General Grant.’ Their line in a moment front-faced to the north, facing me, and gave a salute, which I returned.”

The informal ceasefire grew even stranger. A tree had fallen across the creek at one point near which soldiers from both sides drew water. Some Confederates from
James Longstreet’s corps, in blue uniforms nearly the same shade as those of Grant’s troops, camped there. Grant, again inspecting the Union lines, saw a blue-coated soldier sitting on
the log. “I rode up to him, commenced conversing with him, and asked whose corps he belonged to. He was very polite, and, touching his hat to me, said he belonged to General Longstreet’s corps.” Grant, hiding his surprise and perhaps embarrassment, nonchalantly continued the conversation. “I asked him a few questions—but not with a view of gaining any particular information—all of which he answered, and I rode off.”

C
hattanooga was but half of Grant’s Tennessee challenge. Farther up the Tennessee River,
Ambrose
Burnside’s army anchored eastern Tennessee for the Union, but problematically. Burnside’s difficulties of provision were reported similar to those Thomas had experienced
at Chattanooga, and they rendered his prospects doubtful. Yet the government in Washington considered it imperative that he hang on. The mountaineers of eastern Tennessee favored the Union, and Lincoln was loath to let them down. The valley of eastern Tennessee formed a natural corridor between Georgia and Virginia; control of the valley would tighten the screws on the Confederacy still further. Conversely the loss of the valley would endanger Nashville and possibly Kentucky and western Virginia. “
If we can hold Chattanooga and East Tennessee, I think the rebellion must dwindle and die,” Lincoln wrote
William Rosecrans before the latter’s dismissal. “I think you and Burnside can do this; and hence doing so is your main object.”

After Grant secured Chattanooga from starvation and surrender, the attention of the government centered on Burnside. So did the attention of the Confederates.
Bragg sent Longstreet and twenty thousand troops up the river to threaten Burnside. Grant was tempted to reinforce Burnside but realized that, until the supply problem was solved, reinforcements would only weaken Burnside’s garrison. “
There was no relief possible for him except by expelling the enemy from Missionary Ridge and about Chattanooga,” Grant explained afterward. In the meantime he ordered Burnside to stand fast. “
I do not know how to impress on you the necessity of holding on to East Tennessee, in strong enough terms,” he wrote.

T
o drive off
Bragg, Grant summoned Sherman. “
Drop everything east of Bear Creek and move with your entire force towards Stevenson,” Grant wrote Sherman in late October, referring to a railroad town in northeastern Alabama. Sherman had marched his army from Vicksburg
up the Mississippi to Memphis and from there had been working his way east along the
Memphis & Charleston Railroad, rebuilding and defending the line as he went. Grant determined that the danger to eastern Tennessee required risking the railroad and other recent gains in the western part of his theater. “The enemy are evidently moving a large force towards Cleveland”—a rail town northeast of Chattanooga—“and may break through our lines and move on Nashville,” he told Sherman. “With your forces here before the enemy cross the Tennessee, we could turn their position so as to force them back and save the probability of a move northward this winter.”

Sherman later recollected the circumstances of his receiving Grant’s message, which traveled circuitously on account of disrupted telegraph traffic. “
As I sat on the porch of a house I was approached by a dirty, black-haired individual with mixed dress and strange demeanor, who inquired for me,” Sherman said. “The bearer of this message was
Corporal Pike, who described to me, in his peculiar way, that General
Crook”—the commander at Huntsville, Alabama, the relay point for Grant’s telegrams—“had sent him in a canoe; that he had pulled down the Tennessee River, over Muscle Shoals, was fired at all the way by guerrillas, but on reaching Tuscumbia he had providentially found it in possession of our troops. He had reported to General Blair, who sent him on to me.” Corporal Pike apparently thrived on danger; he subsequently asked the impressed Sherman for a hazardous assignment that would make him a hero. Sherman told him about a railroad bridge behind Confederate lines that ought to be burned. “I explained to Pike that the chances were three to one that he would be caught and hanged,” Sherman recalled. “But the greater the danger, the greater seemed to be his desire to attempt it.” Pike disappeared into enemy territory and Sherman lost touch with him. As the bridge wasn’t burned, Sherman assumed Pike had been captured and executed. But he turned up two years later in South Carolina while Sherman was marching through. “Pike gave me a graphic narrative of his adventures, which would have filled a volume; told me how he had made two attempts to burn the bridge and failed, and said that at the time of our entering Columbia he was a prisoner in the hands of the rebels, under trial for his life, but in the confusion of their retreat he made his escape and got into our lines, where he was again made a prisoner because of his looks.” Sherman cleaned him up and put him back into service as a courier.

Sherman responded to Grant’s call with his usual energy. He suspended
rail work, gathered his available troops and hastened east. He personally reached Bridgeport on November 13, with his troops trailing by various roads. A fresh message from Grant awaited him. “
Leave directions for your command and come up here yourself,” Grant said. “Telegraph when you start and I will send a horse to Kelly’s Ferry for you.”

Grant meanwhile informed
Burnside that aid was coming. “
Sherman’s advance has reached Bridgeport,” Grant wrote. “His whole force will be ready to move from there by Tuesday”—November 17. “If you can hold Longstreet in check until he gets up, or by skirmishing and falling back can avoid serious loss to yourself and gain time, I will be able to force the enemy back from here and place a force between Longstreet and
Bragg that must inevitably make the former take to the mountain passes by every available road to get back to supplies.”