This Great Struggle (29 page)

As the summer progressed, Bragg began to think this might be a good idea. The Union forces in front of him were spread out in garrisons holding West Tennessee and extreme northern Mississippi. They were obviously going nowhere, but he could get nowhere against them. He began to see that a rapid move to Chattanooga could do much more than just save the gateway to Georgia and East Tennessee. It could shift the whole momentum of the war in the region west of the Appalachians. Bragg decided to leave detachments in Mississippi to counter the two chief Union threats to the state. Sixteen thousand men under Major General Sterling Price would stay to watch the Federals in northern Mississippi, while about that many more Confederates would remain in the state under the command of Major General Earl Van Dorn, ready to counter Union efforts at taking the Mississippi River town of Vicksburg. After Farragut had taken New Orleans that April, he had taken his fleet up the river, captured Baton Rouge, and tried to take Vicksburg. There he had been joined by the Union river gunboat fleet—Pook’s Turtles and their timber-clad consorts—which had defeated a Confederate riverboat fleet and captured Memphis in June. Only Vicksburg remained as a Confederate outpost on the Mississippi, and Van Dorn was supposed to see that it held out.

With the rest of his force Bragg undertook the boldest strategic movement of the war to date. While his cavalry, artillery, and supply wagons proceeded across northern Alabama at a safe distance from Buell’s plodding army, his infantry would board trains and ride the railroad to Mobile, Alabama, where they would transfer to a different railroad for the ride up to Chattanooga. It was the most significant use of railroads in the history of warfare up to that time, and it put Bragg’s troops in Chattanooga in time to stop Buell, who was getting very close. As soon as the artillery and wagons arrived, the army would be ready to march northward into Middle Tennessee, turning Buell and threatening his supply lines.

Kirby Smith was delighted. While Bragg held Chattanooga and waited for his artillery and wagons, Smith took his own small army, reinforced with the largest division of Bragg’s army, and marched north to deal with the small Union division at Cumberland Gap. Arriving in front of the gap, Smith sent a dispatch back to Bragg informing him that the Union position was too strong to attack and that he preferred going around the Federals by one of the other nearby gaps and entering Kentucky. Like Maryland, Kentucky was seen by Confederates as a slave state held in bondage to the Union only by the presence of Federal troops. That concept served as a powerful lure to Kirby Smith and a temptation for him to set aside his promises of obedience to Bragg as well as his strategic common sense.

The view that Kentuckians were awaiting only the appearance of a Confederate army to rise en masse and throw off the yoke of northern oppression had recently been reinforced by the exploits of the colorful and romantic Colonel John Hunt Morgan. In July, the Kentuckian Morgan had led his nine hundred Confederate horsemen on a daring raid into the Bluegrass State, capturing small Union detachments, including one Union brigadier general; damaging Union installations; destroying supplies; and leading the pursuing Union cavalry on a frustrating and fruitless chase. The enthusiastic reaction of Kentucky crowds, especially women, when Morgan’s command rode through towns encouraged Confederate commanders like Kirby Smith to assume that tens of thousands of men in the state were only waiting for the opportunity to join the Rebel army.

Smith’s planned lunge into Kentucky made political sense within the context of such assumptions, but it was not good military strategy since it would put Bragg and Smith too far apart to support each other and would leave Buell in their rear. It would work only if Kentuckians would rise en masse to help the Confederates drive out the Yankees. Despite Bragg’s urging and Smith’s own previous promise to obey Bragg’s orders, Smith defied the higher-ranking officer and led his troops into the Bluegrass State.

Henceforth Smith’s irresponsibility would control Bragg’s movements during this campaign. When on August 28 Bragg finally had his wagons and artillery on hand and could begin his march northward from Chattanooga, he had to keep his army between Smith on the one hand and Buell’s Union army on the other. To do otherwise would invite Buell to crush the two separate Confederate forces one at a time. Without Smith and the troops he had lent him, Bragg did not have men enough to fight Buell in Middle Tennessee, where he had hoped to stage the showdown battle of the campaign, and instead was forced by Kirby Smith’s maneuver to advance his army into Kentucky as well, swinging north and west on the inside track of Smith’s movement. Whether Bragg liked it or not, his whole campaign was now staked on the response of the Kentuckians. Hoping for the best, he brought along in his army’s wagons twenty thousand extra rifles to equip the hordes of Kentucky recruits for whom he and other Confederates earnestly hoped.

As Smith advanced into Kentucky, he first passed through the hilly southeastern part of the state, an area where slave ownership was relatively rare and the people were generally hostile to the Confederate cause. As the march continued, his small army was happy to leave behind the rugged hill country and descend to what Smith called “the long, rolling landscape” that characterized the wealthy Bluegrass section of the state. Waiting for them there, near the town of Richmond, Kentucky, was an even smaller blue-clad force that Union authorities had hastily scraped together from inexperienced recruits who had responded to Lincoln’s call for “three hundred thousand more.” Smith’s tough veterans defeated them easily, rounding up hundreds of prisoners and sending the rest fleeing in disorder from the battlefield. Then the Rebels advanced unopposed the remaining twenty-five miles and occupied Lexington, chief city of the Bluegrass region. Crowds of Kentuckians turned out to see and occasionally cheer them, especially women, who fluttered their handkerchiefs in greeting, but Smith thought that men were distinctly underrepresented among the spectators. Recruits were rare, but Smith’s Confederates settled down to occupy the Bluegrass and requisition its abundant supplies.

Abandoned by Smith, Bragg was not strong enough to seek battle with Buell in Middle Tennessee, but he did outmarch Buell, beating the Federals to Kentucky and capturing a Union brigade that had been guarding the bridge over the Green River at Munfordville. Bragg’s position at Munfordville put him squarely athwart Buell’s supply line running back to Louisville. Buell could, if he chose, try to march around Bragg on one side or the other, but that would make his army vulnerable to Bragg’s attack. If he chose to attack Bragg head-on at Munfordville, the Rebels, defending a strong position, would have even more advantages. It appeared that Bragg’s skill and his troops’ hard marching might win this campaign in spite of Kirby Smith.

One reason Buell moved so slowly was that he insisted on bringing with his army an unusually large number of wagons laden with supplies. Conversely, Bragg moved more quickly because his army traveled light and lived off the land. Encamped at Munfordville waiting for Buell to move, the Rebels soon exhausted local supplies. Kirby Smith was deaf to Bragg’s pleas that he either join him at Munfordville or at least send some of the supplies his men were gathering in the rich agricultural district around Lexington. Buell, who still had adequate supplies, was in no hurry to move, and finally Bragg had to give up and march east to join Smith near Lexington. That cleared the way for Buell to advance to Louisville, where he received abundant reinforcements and supplies and could reorganize and refit his army.

While Buell was busy in Louisville, Bragg tried one last gambit to salvage the campaign. Little chance remained of defeating Buell in battle with the Confederate forces then in Kentucky, and pitifully few Kentuckians had enlisted during the campaign. Perhaps if Bragg could install a pro-Confederate state government at Frankfort, Kentuckians would feel more motivated to volunteer, and if they did not, a pro-Confederate state government was just the thing Bragg needed to help him implement the Confederacy’s conscription law within the state. Richard Hawes, the Confederacy’s shadow governor for Kentucky, had accompanied Bragg on the campaign, and in a formal ceremony at Frankfort on October 4, 1862, Bragg had him inaugurated.

No sooner had Hawes finished his inaugural address than the sound of artillery fire to the northwest alerted the small assembly of Confederate officers and pro-Confederate Kentuckians that a strong Union column was approaching the state capital from the direction of Louisville. Apprised by scouts that the Federals were too numerous to be turned back by the detachment of his own army at Frankfort, Bragg had to beat a hasty and ignominious retreat, together with the would-be governor, now returned to exile status after only a few hours in the capital city he claimed.

With Kentucky men of military age still avoiding Confederate ranks in droves, almost no hope remained for the success of the campaign, the central guiding concept of which—Kirby Smith’s confidence that Kentuckians were eager to join the Confederacy—had been shown to be a delusion. Still Bragg was determined to try every possible alternative before giving it up. Buell was advancing from Louisville in several different columns on separate roads. Bragg saw an opportunity to attack and possibly destroy the Union column approaching Lexington. He ordered Kirby Smith to attack it head-on while Leonidas Polk, commanding Bragg’s own army while Bragg exercised overall command of both forces, was to swing northwest and strike the Federals in the flank. The plan failed before it could begin as Polk became frightened and refused to obey Bragg’s orders, forcing Bragg to call off Smith’s attack. With that there was nothing left to do but abandon Lexington and begin retreating in a southeasterly direction.

As Bragg’s forces pulled out of the Bluegrass region and fell back toward the southeast and Buell’s separate columns continued advancing toward them from Louisville, Buell’s main column collided with Confederate forces near the town of Perryville on October 8, about forty miles southwest of Lexington. Not realizing the size of the force in front of him, Bragg attacked. Buell, whose headquarters were a couple of miles behind the front, somehow did not hear the firing because of a rare phenomenon called an acoustic shadow, an atmospheric phenomenon in which very loud sounds that can be heard at long distances are nevertheless inaudible at medium distances. Unaware that a battle was in progress, Buell sent no aid to his frontline troops.

Buell had cultivated a climate of command in his army such that none of his subordinates who did know about the battle felt authorized to send help either. For that reason and because many of the Union troops were green, the Confederates experienced initial success, driving the Federals back as much as a mile in some places before more experienced Union troops arrived and made a stand. The Confederate success had been not quite sufficient to start a chain reaction that might have led to the collapse of Buell’s larger army, and once the front was stabilized, the opportunity was past.

When Bragg that night learned the size of the Union force he was confronting, he resumed his retreat toward Tennessee. Buell made little effort to pursue and instead turned away and marched his army slowly to Nashville. The campaign was over, and neither side was satisfied. Kentuckians within the ranks of the Confederate army did not want to face the fact that their state had chosen not to fight for the Confederacy, so they blamed Bragg. Polk and Kirby Smith had performed poorly in the campaign, and they knew that Bragg knew it. So they blamed him too. Bragg was not adept at winning friends and influencing people, but even a skillful politician might have struggled to overcome the persistent campaign of undermining that would now be waged against him within the officer corps of his own army.

On the Union side, Buell’s slowness and lack of aggressiveness was the object of contempt both among many of his subordinates and among his superiors in Washington. During the midst of the campaign, Lincoln had decided to replace Buell with Army of the Ohio corps commander George H. Thomas (West Point, 1840). That would have been a disappointment, since Thomas, though steadier and more competent than Buell, was nearly as slow. As it turned out, Thomas refused the proffered promotion, perhaps because he supported Buell’s policies and perhaps because he did not want the responsibility of getting the army out of the mess Buell had gotten it into. Now with the campaign over and the Confederates having escaped back into Tennessee more or less unscathed, Buell’s continued tenure in command of the Army of the Ohio was precarious.