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5 1 a perfect Storm of ineffectiveneSS: The FirsT Corps and The Loss oF LookouT MounTain Alex Mendoza At dawn on October 28, 1863, General Braxton Bragg, the commander of the Army of Tennessee, left his headquarters on Missionary Ridge to converse with one of his lieutenants, Lieutenant General James Longstreet, on the crest of Lookout Mountain. Longstreet’s force, which had arrived from Virginia the previous month, was responsible for the left of the Confederate lines that laid siege to the Union army in city of Chattanooga. Just a day earlier, an early morning assault on Brown’s Ferry, on the south bank of the Tennessee River, had allowed the Federals to gain a foothold on the landing that could open up a supply line toward the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad and points north. As the two generals conferred about plans to regain Brown’s Ferry and continue to harass the Federals, one of Longstreet’s signal officers reported that the Yankees were advancing from the south and up Lookout Valley between Raccoon and Lookout Mountains. Longstreet’s First Corps and his cavalry detachment from Bragg’s army had failed to account for a seven-thousand-man force which had marched undetected toward Brown’s Ferry. Clearly, this astonished both Bragg and Longstreet who stood helpless on the crest of Lookout Mountain, watching the Federal column under Major General Joseph E. Hooker advance with beating drums and flags waving.1 The mere fact that the First Corps, Army of Northern Virginia, was in the vicinity of the key sector that would ultimately lead to a break in Bragg’s siege line was curious. After all, the corps’ two divisions had come to Bragg’s army on the eve of the Battle of Chickamauga, heralded upon their arrival. Longstreet’s men, their success at Chickamauga now a distant memory, were stationed on the far left of Bragg’s army. The events of the previous four weeks had diminished their battlefield accomplishments and extended rumors that their commander had conspired to oust the commanding general. alex mendoza 6 Longstreet, a renowned veteran of the war in the eastern theater and a trusted subordinate of General Robert E. Lee, weeks earlier had plotted with several generals in the Army of Tennessee to remove Bragg by signing their names to a petition urging the authorities in Richmond to consider changing commanders in the Confederacy’s foremost western army. In addition, one of Longstreet’s divisions served as the platform for two up-and-coming generals who aspired to gain the command of Hood’s division. These two First Corps brigadiers, Micah Jenkins and Evander Law, were working at cross-purposes in Tennessee due to a bitter rivalry that stretched all the way back to antebellum South Carolina. The other division commander, Major General Lafayette McLaws, had his own argument with Longstreet and his transfer to the West. Accordingly, the First Corps, which had arrived to provide Bragg with the support needed to defeat the Federals, would later leave the Army of Tennessee under ignominious circumstances, a victim of its inner turmoil and infighting within the senior officers’ ranks. The First Corps was so dysfunctional in the fall of 1863 that it became entangled in a perfect storm of recrimination and internal strife that contributed directly to the loss of Lookout Mountain, and by extension, Chattanooga. Following the Rebel victory at Chickamauga, Bragg’s army approached the retreating Federals at Chattanooga on September 23. Though the town’s population was only about 2,500 in 1860, it remained a strategically important link to the Confederate heartland. The Union army had rallied to establish a semicircular three-mile line around the town. In fact, the Federals occupied many of the same fortifications built by Bragg’s troops a month earlier when Chattanooga was still in Confederate hands. In their desperate state, the Yankees confiscated every major building and burned outlying homes as they prepared for the expected Rebel assault. Yet that attack never came. In the wake of victory, Bragg paused. Instead, the commanding general decided on a different course of action, laying siege to Chattanooga with hopes of starving the Federals into submission. By the end of September, the Army of Tennessee, along with Longstreet’s First Corps, had established a siege line around the town.2 The Confederate siege line extended from the Tennessee River on the east to the base of Missionary Ridge, along the Western and Atlantic Railroad, on the west...

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