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53 3 “the very ground Seemed alive”: sherMan’s assauLT on The norTh end oF Missionary ridge Steven E. Woodworth Grant planned to strike his main blow at the Confederate right and entrusted the job to William T. Sherman and his contingent of the Army of the Tennessee. Though Grant and Sherman both had high hopes for the attack, it failed to produce the results they expected. A careful study of the operation reveals why. There were several reasons why Grant planned his main effort against the Confederate right on the northern end of Missionary Ridge. The primary Confederate line of supply and retreat lay closer to the northern end of the ridge, so that a Union success there would at least have made Bragg’s retreat more difficult than would have been the case had Grant broken the Rebel lines farther south on the ridge. Another reason was that an attack on the northern end of Missionary Ridge offered the opportunity of striking the Confederate right flank. Finally, all previous experience in the Civil War indicated that a ridge would lose most of its strength as a defensive position if attacked end-on rather than frontally. Grant also had several reasons for selecting William T. Sherman’s corpssized detachment of the Army of the Tennessee to make the assault on the northern end of Missionary Ridge. Since before the Battle of Shiloh, nineteenth months earlier, Sherman had been his most trusted subordinate, and Sherman’s troops were from Grant’s own Army of the Tennessee. Grant and the Army of the Tennessee had grown up together in this war. At its head he had won every one of his successes thus far in the conflict—Fort Donelson, Shiloh, and the long campaign to take Vicksburg. Along the way, Grant had shaped and forged the Army of the Tennessee, building on his own personality and the regional character of its men, most of whom came from what was then called the Northwest but is now called the Steven e. WoodWorth 54 Midwest. The region had been frontier little more than a generation earlier, and the men who served in the ranks of Grant’s army had either helped farm land that their fathers had carved out of the wilderness or else had done the carving themselves only a few years before enlisting. They were capable and resourceful and tended to assume that they could handle anything the war brought their way. Grant knew them and knew their senior officers, whose promotions he had approved. Like him, the Army of the Tennessee was little inclined to stand on ceremony but was prepared to get at the enemy as quickly as possible, hit him as hard as possible, and keep moving on. This was just the force Grant wanted for his attack against Bragg’s right flank on Missionary Ridge. Sherman and his troops had arrived in the Chattanooga area scarcely ten days before the battle. On October 27 they had been in the vicinity of Tuscumbia, Alabama, working on repairing the Memphis and Charleston Railroad there and trying to protect it from guerrillas on orders from general-in-chief Henry W. Halleck in Washington. On that day, Sherman received new orders from Grant. Sherman’s old boss was the newly appointed commander of the newly created Military Division of the Mississippi, encompassing all Union forces between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. Ordered to Chattanooga after a personal conference with Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton in Louisville, Kentucky, Grant had arrived on October 23 to find the Army of the Cumberland virtually besieged there by Bragg’s forces, which controlled the Tennessee River Gorge downstream from the city. With the troops in Chattanooga in a state of semi-starvation, Grant had taken immediate steps to open the route through the gorge, what the soldier’s dubbed the “Cracker Line.” He had also lost no time in sending orders to Sherman directing him to drop work on the railroads and march at once to Chattanooga with four divisions.1 Among the reasons Sherman was Grant’s favorite subordinate was the fact that Grant could count on him to respond loyally and to march quickly when quick marching was needed. After receiving Grant’s order, Sherman immediately got his army in motion, and over the next seventeen days his men covered well over one hundred fifty miles of bad road, mostly in bad weather. To crown their accomplishment, they dragged their wagons and...

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