The Chickamauga Campaign

7. Negley at Horseshoe Ridge: September 20, 1863

140  negley at horseshoe ridge september 20, 1863 David Powell Union Major General James S. Negley was uneasy. The time was 11:00 a.m. on September 20, 1863, the second day of the battle of Chickamauga . Due to tactical emergencies elsewhere, his command, the 2nd Division, 14th Army Corps, Army of the Cumberland, had largely been taken from him and dispatched to other points of the line. Now he was assigned a position on a high, open ridge, left with only one of his three infantry brigades, and ordered to assemble and protect an artillery reserve. He did not know the status of his other two brigades, or indeed, most of the army. So far, his role had been limited to a brief but hurried attack the evening before and a morning of impatient waiting. His corps commander, Major General George H. Thomas, had been sending repeated and urgent requests for Negley’s command to be replaced by other troops in the Brotherton field so it could join the rest of the corps in the Kelly field. Then, when his men were finally replaced, he was given this new mission far from the fight. On top of everything else, he was sick: Very sick. He had no business being on a horse, let alone trying to command a division. In the opinion of Surgeon R. G. Bogue, the 2nd divisional medical director, Negley was “really unable to be on duty, being a fitter case for a bed patient.”1 Shortly, however, General Negley would be called upon to make the most fateful decision of his military career and with no guidance or help from his superiors. The battle was about to come to him. James Scott Negley was one of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s, leading sons, with strong military credentials, at least for the citizen soldiers of the era. After graduating from the Western University of Pennsylvania, he joined the local militia and served through the length of the Mexican War.2 He remained in the militia after returning home and by the time the Civil War erupted he was a brigadier general in the state forces. In October 1861 he was commissioned as a brigadier general of U.S. volunteers and served in :RRGZRUWK&KLQGG $0 negley at horseshoe ridge 141 Kentucky and Tennessee for the next two years. When Confederate General Braxton Bragg invaded Kentucky in the fall of 1862, Negley successfully defended Nashville from various Rebel probes. He and his division next won noted acclaim for their gallant stand at Stones River. That fight also won him his promotion to major general, recommended by the army commander himself, William S. Rosecrans.3 Negley had begun the Chickamauga campaign as the senior divisional commander in Thomas’s 14th Corps. The first week or so had been strenuous , crossing the Tennessee River near Stevenson, Alabama, on September 1, and climbing both Sand and Lookout Mountains over the next several days. On September 9, as his division descended Lookout Mountain into McLemore’s Cove, Negley encountered Rebel cavalry. He was now leading the advance of Thomas’s entire corps. Their objective was La Fayette, on the east side of Pigeon Mountain, a spur of the larger Lookout Mountain. Taking La Fayette would help reunite all three of Rosecrans’s scattered infantry corps and signal the success of the first stage of the campaign to flank Bragg out of Chattanooga and bring him to battle. The town itself was only supposed to be lightly defended, with Bragg’s main body in full retreat to Dalton, Georgia, much farther east. Enemy resistance further stiffened the next day, and the reports filtering into Negley’s headquarters suggested that, far from retreating, Bragg’s whole army was instead concentrating at La Fayette. If so, Negley, with only one division, was marching into a trap. Fearing the worst, Negley halted at Davis’s Crossroads and appealed to Thomas for reinforcements. A couple of miles ahead of him, Dug Gap provided access through Pigeon Mountain to La Fayette. The enemy had a cavalry division to screen their movements while Negley had only his escort, one company of mounted troops. Thomas, alert to the potential danger, hurried another infantry division forward under Brigadier General Absalom Baird, raising Negley’s total force to about 11,000 men. Negley’s fears were well-founded. Bragg was assembling a force to crush the Federals, including no less than five Rebel divisions, numbering in all about 26,000 infantry. Confederates...