The Chickamauga Campaign

2. “In Their Dreams”: Braxton Bragg, Thomas C. Hindman, and the Abortive Attack in McLemore’s Cove

50  “in their dreams” braxton bragg, thomas c. hindman, and the abortive attack in mclemore’s cove Steven E. Woodworth During September 10 and 11, 1863, the Confederate Army of Tennessee had the opportunity to attack an isolated segment of William S. Rosecrans’s Union Army of the Cumberland, striking it in front and flank with overwhelming force and cutting off its retreat. The potential existed to cripple Rosecrans’s army, leaving its three sundered corps unable to support each other against the centrally positioned Confederate force. Yet the Confederate troops stood idle until it was too late, allowing the exposed Union detachment to withdraw to safety. To compound the incomprehensibility of their failure to act, the Confederate commander who was chiefly responsible had a reputation for extreme aggressiveness. All in all, the great military nonevent in McLemore’s Cove during the second week of September was one of the more remarkable incidents of the war. Rosecrans had launched his campaign on August 16, advancing from his army’s camps around Winchester, Tennessee, southwestward toward Chattanooga and Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee. Bragg had hoped to hold the line of the Tennessee River, but Rosecrans skillfully maneuvered so as to conceal his intended crossing points and had most of his army on the south bank before Bragg’s scouts detected the crossing. The Cumberland Plateau simply presented too many gaps for the Confederates to watch, and the Union Army of the Ohio, under the command of Ambrose Burnside, which was moving simultaneously from Kentucky against Knoxville, Tennessee, compounded the strategic problem for Bragg. Early on the morning of August 29, Union troops began crossing the Tennessee at Caperton’s Ferry, Alabama, about fifty miles west of Chattanooga. The first brigade crossed in boats to cover the construction of a pontoon bridge, and before the day was out all of Brigadier General Jefferson C. Davis’s :RRGZRUWK&KLQGG $0 “in their dreams” 51 division was across, with more troops to follow. Simultaneously, one brigade of the division of Brigadier General John M. Brannan crossed the river at the mouth of Battle Creek, fifteen miles upstream from Caperton’s Ferry and thus closer to Chattanooga, but they encountered no opposition as they swam the river, pushing their bundles of clothing and equipment on logs or other pieces of wood in front of them. Two days later the rest of the division followed. In the meantime, Major General Joseph J. Reynolds’s division crossed the river in flatboats at Shellmound, several miles upstream from Battle Creek. At almost the same time, Major General Philip H. Sheridan’s division began crossing the river by constructing a trestle bridge on the ruins of an earlier span at Bridgeport, Alabama, between Battle Creek and Caperton’s Ferry. Delayed by the collapse of their make-shift bridge, Sheridan’s men erected it yet again and were across the river by September 3. By the next day, Rosecrans’s entire army was on the south bank. Within the space of five days the Army of the Cumberland had spanned the Tennessee at four different points to the west and west-southwest of Chattanooga.1 On August 31, Confederate cavalry brought word to Bragg that Union troops were across the Tennessee in force at Caperton’s Ferry. Subsequent reports revealed that the Federals were crossing at several points in very great numbers and moving south but keeping to the west side of Lookout Mountain.2 That was a problem for Bragg. Lookout Mountain is actually a narrow and elongated plateau extending for nearly one hundred miles from near Gadsden , Alabama, to Chattanooga, Tennessee, cutting through the northwest corner of Georgia for thirty miles in between the two. At its highest point, overlooking Chattanooga at its northeastern tip, Lookout towers 2,392 feet above sea level and some 1,700 feet above the Tennessee River, which flows past its foot. Throughout its length, it posed a major barrier to the movement of wagons, cannons, and caissons, especially because its gently rolling summit is ringed with a more or less sheer, fifty-foot cliff called the Palisades. Horse-drawn vehicles could with difficulty negotiate the steep roads that clawed their way up the forested sides of the mountain, but they had no hope of getting up over the Palisades save at the few places where natural breaks in the cliff wall allowed a more gradual ascent to the summit plateau. The first such gap southwest of...