The Chattanooga Campaign

Introduction

1 introduction The Campaign for Chattanooga in the fall of 1863 was important in several respects. The city was a key strategic location, the gateway both to East Tennessee and to the Deep South. The campaign would determine whether the Confederacy would reap the fruits of its hard-fought victory at Chickamauga or the Union would wrest back the initiative in the heartland of the continent, setting the stage for an 1864 campaign that would drive even deeper into the vitals of the Confederacy. After the September 18–20 Battle of Chickamauga, Rosecrans ordered his army to withdraw into Chattanooga. Because of the way the battle had ended, Bragg would not have been able to pursue the Federals without launching a frontal assault against solid Union lines at Rossville Gap. Wisely, he chose not to do so, though some of his subordinates at the time and many historians since have not been able to understand the situation or give Bragg credit for the wisdom he showed. The Battle of Chickamauga had simply offered its nominal victor no opportunity for decisive results. Thus matters stood for several days until Rosecrans, still smarting from the sudden turn the battle had taken on the afternoon of the last day at Chickamauga, withdrew his troops from the high ground overlooking Chattanooga and controlling all of its practical routes of supply. This opened up the possibility of decisive victory for Bragg, and he moved promptly to take advantage of it, establishing a virtual siege of the Army of the Cumberland in Chattanooga. Only via a difficult and circuitous wagon track across Walden’s Ridge north of Chattanooga could the Federals in the town receive a scant minimum of food during the weeks that followed. In the face of this crisis, President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton acted decisively. They ordered two corps of the Army of the Potomac under the command of Joseph Hooker to travel rapidly by rail to reinforce their comrades at Chattanooga. More important, they created the Military Division of the Mississippi, encompassing all of the departments west of the Appalachians, and elevated Ulysses S. Grant, fresh from his conquest of Vicksburg, to command the new division with orders to remedy the introduction 2 situation around Chattanooga. Grant set out at once for the beleaguered city, and while he was still underway he availed himself of specific authority in his orders to relieve Rosecrans of command of the Army of the Cumberland and replace him with George H. Thomas. The most important task awaiting Grant on his arrival in Chattanooga was opening and securing a viable supply line for the troops there. He lost no time implementing a plan that Rosecrans’s staff had been working on, starting with a river-borne coup de main that seized Brown’s Ferry on the Tennessee River in the predawn hours of October 27 and opened the possibility of moving supplies through the Tennessee River Gorge below Chattanooga. For Bragg it was equally important to close that supply line. Forty-eight hours after the Brown’s Ferry operation, James Longstreet, acting half-heartedly on Bragg’s repeated and insistent orders, made a lame attempt to regain control of Lookout Valley and the Tennessee River Gorge, leading to the nighttime Battle of Wauhatchie. In an essay that examines the Confederate side of these operations, Alex Mendoza shows how a combination of factors made the First Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia an ineffective force for countering Grant’s bold move. Mendoza advances the thesis that, in losing Lookout Valley, First Corps commander James Longstreet had plenty of help from his subordinates. Meanwhile, the Union side of the Battle of Wauhatchie is the subject of Stewart Bennett’s carefully detailed study. Grant’s next task was to defeat the Confederate Army of Tennessee, which held the high ground ringing Chattanooga from Lookout Mountain on the southwest to Missionary Ridge on the south and southeast. By late November his plans were complete, and on November 24 he put them in motion. While Joseph Hooker led a force of three divisions, one from each of the three Union armies near Chattanooga, in driving the Rebels from the slopes of Lookout Mountain, William T. Sherman led three divisions of the Army of the Tennessee in crossing its namesake river above the town and before nightfall reaching a point that would allow it to strike the Confederate right flank on Missionary Ridge the following morning. Grant’s...