River of Death: The Chickamauga Campaign, Volume One: The Fall of Chattanooga by William Glenn Robertson (review)

In a book on the Battle of Chickamauga preceding the one under review, This Terrible Sound (1992), Peter Cozzens quotes a staff officer to Army of the Cumberland commander, William Rosecrans. That man, Union Lieutenant Henry Cist, asserted decades after the sanguinary clash at Chickamauga and with the capture of Chattanooga in mind that "Brilliant campaigns without battles, do not accomplish the destruction of an army" (p. 21).

River of Death is an operational study of the midsummer campaign in 1863 that wrested from Confederate control the city that held the key to Georgia and that preceded the destructive two-day fight along Chickamauga Creek. In the first of two volumes, William Glenn Robertson has crafted a book worthy of the brilliant campaign. His account is one of maneuver in which neither the Confederate or Union army suffered destruction. The movements of the armies that Robertson narrates were covered, albeit more briefly, in the Cozzens book as well as in the extraordinary trilogy by David Powell, The Chickamauga Campaign (2015, 2017). After years of neglect in the last century, the campaign and battle are finally getting their full due.

Having read the volumes by Cozzens and Powell, I wondered if Robertson could add to what these other authors already provide. The answer is an unqualified, yes. In a masterful analysis, his well-ordered narrative is a clear explication of a complex and often confusing campaign. And when judgments are offered, readers will find themselves trusting Robertson's verdicts.

This is a long book. Not every reader will care for the level of detail as some will find the minutiae of campaigns and battles wearisome. But there will be an audience for this one. When I toured the surrounding area and battlefield with Powell's Chickamauga study group, avid readers among the fifty-member party snapped up every copy of Robertson's treatise in the park's bookstore.

Although it might seem elementary, Robertson, respecting contingency in war, insists that the performance of the respective commanders, both Rosecrans and the Confederate Army of Tennessee commander, Braxton Bragg, be evaluated on the basis of "what each commander knew at any given time" and "how they reacted" to what they knew (p. xiv). Many who write about the Western Theater recognized the resourceful generalship of Rosecrans, although Bragg is regularly dismissed as a benighted commander, blundering from one failure to the next. This study will help diminish such notions, for the challenges Bragg faced with the mountains that screened the Union advance, combined with the failure of his cavalry to keep headquarters advised of the movement of Rosecrans's army corps, will enable readers to comprehend why the loss of Chattanooga may have been unavoidable.

Robertson's book rises above the prosaic allowing readers to learn how the war looked and felt. In so doing, he has mastered the contours of the rugged terrain that made the campaign as difficult as any waged during the Civil War. He brings important insight to technology and logistics, which, at long last, are receiving the attention of scholars.

What exactly does Robertson show his readers? If professionals do, indeed, study logistics, Civil War bibliophiles discover how engineers bridged rivers and the ways in which cavalry crossed deep watery divides without pontoons. We learn how infantry did likewise with makeshift watercrafts and how reluctant cattle were made to traverse waterways on improvised flatboats. Those who have driven the modern roads over Walden Ridge or I–24 down the length of Battle Creek in Tennessee, discover in these pages how men moved matériel and artillery up and down the same, once seemingly impassable mountainous terrain and along narrow valleys. A Minnesota drummer boy described this country as "beautiful" but "far out of the world" (p. 347).

So, too, Robertson provides a sense of the gruelingly...