MISSION RIDGE AND CHICKAMAUGA.
Accordingly, one cloudy December morning the chaplain, accompanied by
two ladies of his household, took me up at my hotel, and drove us out of
Chattanooga on the Rossville Road.
Leaving the open valley behind us we crossed a bushy plain, and passed
through a clump of oaken woods. Before us, on the east, rose Missionary
Ridge, forest-covered, its steep sides all russet-hued with fallen
leaves, visible through the naked brown trees.
The chaplain who witnessed the scene, described to us the storming of
those heights by the Army of the Cumberland, on the twenty-fifth of
November, a little more than two years before. It was the finishing
stroke to which the affair at Lookout Mountain was the brilliant
prelude. It was the revenge for Chickamauga. There was a Rebel line of
works along the base of the ridge; and the crests were defended by
infantry and heavy artillery. The charge was ordered; and forward across
the plain and up the slope swept a single glittering line of steel six
miles in length. The Rebels were driven from their lower works by the
bayonet. The army rushed forward without firing a shot, and pausing only
to take breath for a moment in the depressions of the hill; then onward
again, storming the heights, from which burst upon them a whistling and
howling storm of iron and lead. General Thomas says the Ridge was
carried simultaneously at six different points. The attack commenced at
three o’clock in the afternoon; at four the crests were taken, and
Bragg’s army in flight. The first captured gun was turned upon the enemy
by Corporal Kramer of the Forty-first Ohio regiment, belonging to
Hazen’s brigade of Wood’s division. He discharged it by firing his
musket over the vent. It took six men to carry the colors of the First
Ohio to the summit, five falling by the way in the attempt. Corporal
Angelbeck, finding a Rebel caisson on fire, cut it loose from the horses
and run it off down the hill before it exploded. These instances of
personal intrepidity (which I give on the authority of Major-General
Hazen, whom I saw afterwards at Murfreesboro’) are but illustrations of
the gallantry shown by our troops along the whole line.
The plain we were crossing was the same which General Hooker’s forces
swept over in their pursuit of the enemy. We passed the Georgia
State-line; and, amid hilly woods filled with a bushy undergrowth,
entered the mountain solitudes; crossing Missionary Ridge by the
Rossville Gap. Rossville, which consisted of a blacksmith-shop and
dwelling in the Gap, had been burned to the ground. Beyond this point
the road forked; the left-hand track leading to Ringold, the right to
Lafayette.
Driving southward along the Lafayette Road we soon reached the site of
Cloud Spring Hospital, in the rear of the battle-field. A desolate,
dreary scene: the day was cold and wet; dead leaves strewed the ground;
the wind whistled in the trees. There were indications that here the
work of disinterment was about to begin. Shovels and picks were ready on
the ground; and beside the long, low trenches of the dead waited piles
of yellow pine coffins spattered with rain.
A little further on we came to traces of the conflict,—boughs broken and
trees cut off by shells. We rode southward along the line of battle,
over an undulating plain, with sparse timber on one side, and on the
other a field of girdled trees, which had been a cotton-field at the
time of the battle. These ghostly groves, called “deadenings,” sometimes
seen in other parts of the country, are an especial feature of the
Southern landscape. When timbered land is to be put under cultivation,
the trees, instead of being cut away, are often merely deadened with the
axe, which encircles them with a line severing the bark, and there left
to stand and decay slowly through a series of years. First the sapless
bark flakes and falls piecemeal, and the wind breaks off the brittle
twigs and small boughs. Next the larger branches come down; and the
naked trunk, covered in the course of time by a dry-rot, and perforated
by worms and the bills of woodpeckers, stands with the stumps of two or
three of its largest topmost limbs upstretched in stern and sullen gloom
to heaven. There is something awful and sublime in the aspect of a whole
forest of such. The tempest roars among them, but not a limb sways.
Spring comes, and all around the woods are green and glad, but not a
leaf or tender bud puts forth upon the spectral trunks. The sun rises,
and the field is ruled by the shadows of these pillars, which sweep
slowly around, shortening as noon approaches, and lengthening again at
the approach of night. Corn and cotton flourish well; the powdery rot
and half-decayed fragments which fall serving as a continual nourishment
to the soil. It takes from ten to twenty years for these corpses
standing over their graves to crumble and disappear beneath them.
Sometimes they rot to the roots; or, when all is ready, a hurricane
hurls his crashing balls, and the whole grove goes down in a night-time,
like ten-pins.
Dismal enough looked the “deadening,” in the cold and drizzling rain
that morning on the battle-field. Scarcely less so seemed the woods
beyond, all shattered and torn by shot and shell, as if a tornado had
swept them. On the northern side of these was Kelly’s house. The Dyer
Farm was beyond; upon which we found two hundred colored soldiers
encamped, in a muddy village of winter huts near the ruins of the burned
farm-house. The Dyer family were said to be excellent Rebels. Dyer
served as a guerilla; and it was his wife who burned her feather-bed in
order that it might not be used by our wounded soldiers. After that
patriotic act she wandered off in the woods and died. Her husband had
since returned, and was now living in a new log-hut within sight of the
camp.
The camp was a strange spectacle. The men were cooking their dinners or
drying their clothes around out-door fires of logs which filled the air
with smoke. Near by were piles of coffins,—some empty, some containing
the remains of soldiers that had just been disinterred. The camp was
surrounded by fields of stumps and piny undergrowth. Here and there were
scattered trees, hitched at some of which were mules munching their
dinners of wet hay.
There were two hundred and seventeen soldiers in camp. At first they had
a horror of the work for which they were detailed. All the superstition
of the African was roused within them at sight of the mouldering dead.
They declared that the skulls moved, and started back with shrieks. An
officer, to encourage them, unconcernedly took out the bones from a
grave and placed them carefully in a coffin. They were induced to
imitate his example. In a few hours they chatted or whistled and sang at
their work; and in a few days it was common to see them perform their
labor and eat their luncheons at the same time,—lay bones into the
coffin with one hand, and hold with the other the hard-tack they were
nibbling.
More than nine tenths of the bodies taken from Chickamauga were unknown.
Some had been buried in trenches; some singly; some laid side by side,
and covered with a little earth, perhaps not more than six inches deep,
leaving feet and skull exposed; and many had not been buried at all.
Throughout the woods were scattered these lonely graves. The method of
finding them was simple. A hundred men were deployed in a line, a yard
apart, each examining half a yard of ground on both sides of him, as
they proceeded. Thus was swept a space five hundred yards in breadth.
Trees were blazed or stakes set along the edge of this space, to guide
the company on its return. In this manner the entire battle-field had
been or was to be searched. When a grave was found, the entire line was
halted until the teams came up and the body was removed. Many graves
were marked with stakes, but some were to be discovered only by the
raised or disturbed appearance of the ground. Those bodies which had
been buried in trenches were but little decomposed; while of those
buried singly in boxes not much was left but the bones and a handful of
dust.
We had diverged from the Lafayette Road in order to ride along the line
of battle east of it,—passing the positions occupied on Sunday, the
second day, by Baird, Johnson, and Palmer’s divisions, respectively.
Next to Palmer was Reynolds; then came Brannan, then Wood, then Davis,
then Sheridan, on the extreme right. The line, which on Saturday ran due
north and south, east of the road,—the left resting at Kelly’s house and
the right at Gordon’s Mills,—was on Sunday curved, the right being drawn
in and lying diagonally across and behind the road. In front (on the
east) was Chickamauga Creek. Missionary Ridge was in the rear; on a spur
of which the right rested. I recapitulate these positions, because
newspaper accounts of the battle, and historical accounts based upon
them, are on two or three points confused and contradictory: and because
an understanding of them is important to what I am about to say.
Quitting the camp, we approached the scene of the great blunder which
lost us the battle of Chickamauga. At half-past nine in the morning the
attack commenced, the Rebels hurling masses of troops with their
accustomed vigor against Rosecrans’s left and centre. Not a division
gave way: the whole line stood firm and unmoved: all was going well;
when Rosecrans sent the following imperative order to General Wood:—
“_Close up as fast as possible on General Reynolds, and support him._”
General Brannan’s division, as you have noticed, was between Wood and
Reynolds. How then could Wood close up on Reynolds without taking out
his division and marching by the left flank in Brannan’s rear? In
military parlance, to _close up_ may mean two quite different things. It
may mean to move by the flank in order to close a gap which occurs
between one body of troops and another body. Or it may mean to make a
similar movement to that by which a rank of soldiers is said to _close
up_ on the rank in front of it. To _close to the right or left_, is one
thing; to _close up on_, another. To General Wood, situated as he was,
the order could have no other meaning than the latter. He could not
_close up_ on General Reynolds and support him without taking a position
in his rear. Yet the order seemed to him very extraordinary. To General
McCook, who was present when it was received, he remarked,—
“This is very singular! What am I to do?” For to take out his division
was to make a gap in the army which might prove fatal to it.
“The order is so positive,” replied McCook, “that you must obey it at
once. Move your division out, and I will move Davis’s in to fill the
gap. Move quick, or you won’t be out of the way before I bring in his
division.”
General Wood saw no alternative but to obey the order. He would have
been justified in disobeying it, only on the supposition that the
commanding general was ignorant of the position of his forces. Had
Rosecrans been absent from the field, such a supposition would have been
reasonable, and such disobedience duty. But Rosecrans was on the field;
and he was supposed to know infinitely more than could be known to any
division commander concerning the exigencies of the battle. Had Wood
kept his place, and Reynolds been overwhelmed and the field lost in
consequence of that act of insubordination, he would have deserved to be
court-martialled and shot. On the contrary, he moved his division out,
and in consequence of his strict _obedience_ to orders the field was
lost. He had scarcely opened the gap between Brannan and Davis, when the
Rebels rushed in and cut the army to pieces.
General Rosecrans, in his official report, sought to shift the
responsibility of this fatal movement from his own shoulders to those of
General Wood. This was manifestly unjust. It appears to me that the true
explanation of it lies in the fact that Rosecrans, although a man of
brilliant parts, had not the steady balance of mind necessary to a great
general. He could organize an army, or plan a campaign in his tent; but
he had no self-possession on the field of battle. In great emergencies
he became confused and forgetful. It was probably this nervousness and
paralysis of memory which caused the disaster at Chickamauga. He had
forgotten the position of his forces. He intended to order General Wood
to close to the left on Brannan; or on Reynolds, forgetting that Brannan
was between them. But the order was to close up on and _support_
Reynolds; whereas Reynolds, like Brannan, was doing very well, and did
not particularly need support.
The routed divisions of the army fled to Chattanooga,—the commanding
general among the foremost; where he hastened to telegraph to the War
Department and the dismayed nation that all was lost; while General
Garfield, his chief of staff, extricating himself from the rabble, rode
back to the part of the field where firing was still heard,—running the
gauntlet of the enemy’s lines,—and joined General Thomas, who, rallying
fragments of corps on a spur of Missionary Ridge, was stemming the tide
of the foe, and saving the army from destruction.
Through woods dotted all over with the graves of soldiers buried where
they fell, we drove to the scene of that final fight.
Bones of dead horses strewed the ground. At the foot of the wooded hill
were trenches full of Longstreet’s slaughtered men. That was to them a
most tragical termination to what had seemed a victory. Inspired by
their recent success, they charged again and again up those fatal
slopes, only to be cut down like ripe grain by the deadly volleys which
poured from a crescent of flame and smoke, where the heroic remnant of
the army had taken up its position, and was not to be dislodged.