The Man Who Saved the Union (42 page)

Grant reassured the administration in Washington that Burnside would receive help. Lincoln and the War Department were growing frantic over the danger to eastern Tennessee. Stanton’s agent
Dana had gone to Knoxville, and he reported that Burnside was on the verge of withdrawing his force. Halleck wrote Burnside telling him to hold his ground. “
If you retreat now it will be disastrous to the campaign,” Halleck said. With the next stroke of his pen he wrote Grant regarding Burnside: “
I fear he will not fight, although strongly urged to do so. Unless you can give him immediate assistance he will surrender his position to the enemy.… Immediate aid from you is now of vital importance.”

Grant redoubled his efforts. “
I am pushing everything to give General Burnside early aid,” he told Halleck. “I have impressed on him in the strongest terms the necessity of holding on to his position. General Sherman’s troops are now at Bridgeport. They will march tomorrow and an effort will be made to get a column between Bragg and Longstreet as soon as possible.”

He sent a new message to Burnside, conveying more confidence than perhaps he felt and certainly more than Halleck and Lincoln did. “
So far you are doing exactly what appears to me right,” he told Burnside. He added a stiffener, though: “I want the enemy’s progress retarded at every foot, all it can be, only giving up each place when it becomes evident that it cannot longer be held without endangering your force to capture.” And he said that help was closer than ever. “Sherman moved this morning from Bridgeport with one division. The remainder of his command moves in the morning. There will be no halt until a severe battle is fought or the railroads cut supplying the enemy.”

Grant made a habit of exuding confidence.
Adam Badeau recalled of this period: “
Grant was always sanguine, amid the greatest difficulties and dangers.”
Charles Dana later observed, “
There was the greatest hopefulness everywhere.” Grant himself told Halleck that a bold stroke by Bragg against Burnside might lead to a setback but that it would be temporary. “
I think the rebel force making such a movement would be totally annihilated,” he said.

He was nervous all the same, as he later admitted to Halleck. “
I felt restless beyond anything I had before experienced in this war, at my inability to either move to reinforce Burnside or to attack the enemy in his position, to make him feel the necessity of retaining at Chattanooga all his troops. I was forced to leave Burnside to contend alone against vastly superior forces until Sherman could arrive with his men and means of transportation.”

When Sherman reached Chattanooga, he saw what Grant had to be nervous about. He, Grant and Thomas walked to the edge of the city to examine their position. “
We had a magnificent view of the panorama,” Sherman remembered. “
Lookout Mountain, with its rebel flags and batteries, stood out boldly, and an occasional shot fired toward Wauhatchee or Moccasin Point gave life to the scene.… All along
Missionary Ridge were the tents of the rebel beleaguering force; the lines of trench from Lookout up toward the Chickamauga were plainly visible; and rebel sentinels, in a continuous chain, were walking their posts in plain view.” Sherman turned to his commander. “Why, General Grant, you are besieged,” he said. Grant replied, “It is too true.” Sherman retrospectively added: “Up to that moment I had no idea that things were so bad.”

But Grant had been reckoning how to make things better. With his field glasses he could see that the Confederates were thinly placed on the north end of Missionary Ridge and near the mouth of Chickamauga Creek. This weakness afforded the opening he sought. “
Every arrangement is now made to throw Sherman’s force across the river just at and below the mouth of Chickamauga Creek, as soon as it arrives,” he told Burnside by way of explaining what must be done before reinforcements could be sent north. “Thomas will attack on his left at the same time and together it is expected to carry Missionary Ridge and from there push a force on the railroad between Cleveland and Dalton. Hooker will at the same time attack and, if he can, carry Lookout Mountain.”

Grant intended to attack on November 21, a Saturday, and promised Burnside he would do so. Burnside was more beset than ever; Longstreet’s
approach had driven him back and cut his telegraph lines. “
If you can communicate with General Burnside, say to him that our attack on Bragg will commence in the morning,” Grant wrote on that Friday to
Orlando Willcox, who had the command now closest to Burnside. “If successful, such a move will be made as, I think, will relieve East Tennessee, if he can hold out.”

But the bad roads and two days’ downpour postponed the start. “
It will be impossible to attack Bragg before Monday,” Grant wrote Halleck on Saturday afternoon. The mud bogged down Sherman too; even on Monday his men weren’t quite in place. Yet Grant decided to go ahead.

“I
t was the beginning of the most spectacular military operations I ever saw,” Charles
Dana remembered. “Our army lay to the south and east of the town of
Chattanooga, the river being at our back. Facing us, in a great half circle, and high above us on Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, were the Confederates. Our problem was to drive them from these heights.” In most battles even the commanding general could see only a portion of the field, the rest being obscured by terrain, vegetation, distance or weather. The field at Chattanooga, by contrast, formed a natural amphitheater, permitting Grant and his staff to view almost every action. Dana stuck close to Grant and shared his view.

The battle opened with a ground-clearing action in Grant’s immediate front. Three of Thomas’s brigades moved rapidly forward against Confederates guarding two detached hills below Missionary Ridge. Their close order and precise discipline apparently lulled the enemy. “
Until we opened fire, prisoners assert that they thought the whole movement was a review and general drill,”
Montgomery Meigs, Grant’s quartermaster general, reported. “And then it was too late to send to their camps for reinforcements, and they were overwhelmed by force of numbers.” The Confederates inflicted serious damage on the Federals, killing or wounding more than a thousand, but were driven back with heavy losses of their own. By Monday evening the hills had been secured.

That night Sherman struggled to get his men across the river for the assault on Missionary Ridge. The first wave of boats reached the south bank in the blackness before dawn; Sherman’s men quickly overpowered the Confederate pickets and established a bridgehead. While some of the boats and a small steamer ferried more of the troops, other boats began to be formed into a bridge. Dana detached from Grant to watch
the crossing. “
It was marvelous with what vigor the work went on,” he wrote. “Sherman told me he had never seen anything done so quietly and so well.” The bridge spanned more than thirteen hundred feet of a river that flowed swiftly in the main channel, yet by early afternoon it was complete, and in a short space of time the rest of Sherman’s army was marching across.

Without so much as pausing for breath they assaulted the north end of Missionary Ridge. This was the lightly defended portion of the height, and Sherman captured it with little loss. He brought up additional troops and artillery—the guns being dragged by hand—under the cover of rain and low clouds, which prevented Bragg from appreciating what Sherman was doing. When Bragg did catch on, he ordered a counterattack, but Sherman beat it back.

Hooker’s actions on Grant’s right complemented those of Thomas in the center and Sherman on the left. Hooker’s troops captured a bridge over Lookout Creek and approached the base of Lookout Mountain. His orders were conditional—“
Hooker will attack Lookout and carry it if possible,” Grant explained to Halleck—but his men seemed not to give the condition a thought. They barely slowed at the base of the mountain and headed straight up. Confederate infantry manned rifle pits directly above them and Confederate guns commanded the mountaintop. But Hooker’s men fought their way to, through and over the Confederate positions and gained the upper slopes. As fighting continued into the afternoon they dug themselves in; at four o’clock Hooker sent word that his position was secure. Grant nonetheless sent a fresh brigade from the city to bolster him. Clouds had blocked the view from below for much of the day, but after nightfall the sky cleared. “
A full moon made the battlefield as plain to us in the valley as if it were day, the blaze of their camp fires and the flashes of their guns displaying brilliantly their position and the progress of their advance,” Charles Dana recalled.

Grant made time that evening to telegraph Washington. “
The fight today progressed favorably,” he said. “Sherman carried the end of Missionary Ridge, and his right is now at the Tunnel”—a railroad tunnel through the ridge—“and left at Chickamauga Creek. Troops from Lookout Valley carried the point of the Mountain and now hold the eastern slope and point high up. I cannot yet tell the amount of casualties but our loss is not heavy. Hooker reports 2000 prisoners taken, besides which a small number have fallen into our hands from Missionary Ridge.”

Lincoln was most pleased. “
Well done,” he replied. “Many thanks to
all.” Yet the president immediately added, “Remember
Burnside.” Halleck seconded both sentiments. “
I congratulate you on the success thus far of your plans,” he wrote Grant. “I fear that General Burnside is hard pressed and that any further delay may prove fatal. I know that you will do all in your power to relieve him.”

Grant thought he
was
doing all in his power to help Burnside, by defeating Bragg. The successes of Monday and Tuesday positioned him for what he believed would prove the decisive action of Wednesday. On one part of the battlefield, however, the decision came sooner than he expected. Bragg, reckoning that he couldn’t defend Lookout Mountain any longer, withdrew his troops between Tuesday nightfall and Wednesday dawn. “
At daylight on the 25th, the Stars and Stripes were discerned on the peak of Lookout,”
Montgomery Meigs recalled. “The rebels had evacuated the mountain.”

The weight of the fighting shifted to Missionary Ridge. Grant ordered Sherman to attack at dawn, driving against Bragg’s right on the ridgetop. Hooker would cross over from Lookout Mountain to hit the Confederates in the left or rear. Thomas, awaiting Hooker’s arrival, would move against Bragg’s center. Grant and Thomas prepared to watch from Orchard Knob, one of the promontories captured on Monday.

The day broke clear and sunny. “
The whole field was in full view from the top of Orchard Knob,” Grant remembered. “It remained so all day. Bragg’s headquarters were in full view, and officers—presumably staff officers—could be seen coming and going constantly.”

Bragg, likewise, could see Grant. “
The enemy kept firing shells at us,” Charles Dana, with Grant on Orchard Knob, recounted. “They had got the range so well that the shells burst pretty near the top of the elevation where we were, and when we saw them coming we would duck—that is, everybody did except Generals Grant and Thomas and
Gordon Granger.” Granger was one of Thomas’s corps commanders, and he took the Confederate shelling personally. “Granger got a cannon,” Dana related. “How he got it I do not know. And he would load it with the help of one soldier and would fire it himself over at the ridge.” Grant’s adjutant
John Rawlins didn’t like this at all. “Rawlins was very much disgusted at the guerrilla operations of Granger, and induced Grant to order him to join his troops elsewhere.”

The fighting in Sherman’s sector was heavy all morning. Grant expected Hooker to ease the pressure on Sherman, but the Confederates, in their retreat from Lookout Mountain, had burned the one bridge over
Chattanooga Creek. Hooker spent most of the morning trying to get his troops across. Grant had intended to wait on Hooker before throwing Thomas against the Confederate center, but Sherman’s condition appeared critical and so he issued the order. Nothing happened. Somehow the chain of command had broken. Grant gave the order again, this time directly to one of the division commanders who would carry it out. The embarrassed officer dashed away, and in what seemed mere moments Thomas’s men charged forward shouting. His skirmishers fired at Confederates in front of rifle pits at the base of Missionary Ridge. “
The rebel pickets discharged their muskets and ran into their rifle pits,” Montgomery Meigs, observing with Grant from Orchard Knob, recalled. “Our skirmishers followed on their heels. The line of battle was not far behind, and we saw the gray rebels swarm out of the long line of rifle pits in numbers which surprised us, and spread over the base of the hill. A few turned and fired their pieces, but the greater number collected into the various roads which creep obliquely up its steep face, and went on to the top.”

The troops’ orders were to pause and regroup after taking the first line of the enemy’s defense, but the passion of the moment impelled many of them forward. “Some regiments pressed on and began to swarm up the steep sides of the ridge,” Meigs recounted. “Here and there a color was advanced beyond the line. The attempt appeared most dangerous, but the advance was supported, and the whole line ordered to storm the heights, upon which not less than forty pieces of artillery, and no one knew how many muskets, stood ready to slaughter the assailants. With cheers answering to cheers, the men swarmed upward. They gathered to the lines of least difficult ascent, and the line was broken. Color after color was planted on the summit, while musketry and cannon vomited their thunder upon them.”

Charles Dana by this time was willing to credit Grant with gifts of military genius. But the attack on Missionary Ridge required explanation of a different sort, he said. “
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. It seemed as awful”—that is, awe-full—“as a visible interposition of God.”