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Chapter 4 The Chattanooga Campaign Wh e n Osterhaus returned from leave on August 21, Grant sent him to the Big Black River to report to Fifteenth Corps commander William T. Sherman. However, the general’s next assignment was by no means assured: Sherman at that point had more generals than he had divisions, and two other generals outranked Osterhaus. Despite this, when Osterhaus asked for the command of his old Missouri compatriots, who had fought with distinction at Vicksburg in Frederick Steele’s First Division, his request was granted (Steele recently having been transferred). Sherman’s decision was an indication of his esteem for Osterhaus as well as the fact that the German had been recommended for promotion by both McClernand and Ord. Osterhaus would continue to command the First Division throughout both the Chattanooga and the Atlanta campaigns, but at present he had just a few weeks to whip his new division into his idea of shape before the next assignment materialized.1 His large First Brigade, under Brig. Gen. Charles A. Woods, included the three mostly German American regiments that Osterhaus had led in the Arkansas campaign: the Third Missouri, his own original Twelfth Missouri from St. Louis and Belleville, and the Seventeenth Missouri from St. Louis. The other regiments were new to Osterhaus: the Twenty-seventh, Twenty-ninth, Thirtieth, Thirty-first, and Thirty-second Missouri as well as the Thirteenth Illinois and the Seventy-sixth Ohio. The laconic Woods was new to him as well, an Iowan and West Point graduate with a good reputation. Woods turned out to be extremely capable, inheriting the division after Osterhaus moved on in 1864. The Iowan was a favorite of Sherman’s as well as of his own men, who admired his informality (“more common than a Potomac Lieut. in both dress and deportment ”) and coolness under fire.2 Osterhaus’s much smaller Second Brigade, under Col. James A. Williamson, were Iowans to a man: the Fourth, Ninth, Twenty-fifth, Twenty-sixth, Thirtieth , and the Thirty-first Iowa; the Fourth and Ninth Iowa were veterans of Pea Ridge. Williamson, before the war a lawyer from Kentucky, had served with 120 121 The Chattanooga Campaign bravery as Grenville Dodge’s adjutant at Pea Ridge and was much later awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his performance at Chickasaw Bayou. But, although unquestionably courageous, he was somewhat of a complainer. Williamson and Osterhaus were destined to butt heads as time went on. By contrast , Osterhaus was delighted with his artillery, more of a known quantity: the First Battery of the Iowa Light under Lt. James Williams, Battery F of the Second Missouri Light under the redoubtable “Flying Dutchman,” Capt. Clemens Landgraeber (a former Prussian artillery officer with quite a fighting reputation whom Osterhaus had met at Pea Ridge), and the Fourth Battery of the Ohio Light under Capt. George Froehlich, all commanded by Capt. Henry Griffiths. Osterhaus had commanded the Fourth Ohio battery at Pea Ridge.3 Osterhaus spent the next month at the Big Black camp, running the usual patrols and destroying Mississippi infrastructure in addition to drilling his troops daily. In late August, he heard that Grant had been severely injured in a fall from a horse and confined to bed for several weeks. When Grant’s wife and son hurried to his side in Vicksburg, Osterhaus kindly agreed to help occupy young Frederick Dent Grant, thirteen, allowing him to tag along on his black horse whenever possible as the general made rounds and went for short trips outside the lines. Osterhaus was happy to help Grant, whom he greatly admired and respected, much later calling him “one of the strongest military figures of the nineteenth century, a man who would have been great in any of the European wars of the last hundred years.”4 On September 22 Grant was still flat on his back when he received a dispatch from General-in-Chief Henry Halleck. After a disastrous defeat at nearby Chickamauga, Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland was trapped in Chattanooga by Gen. Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee, “closely beleaguered with no communications and the scantiest sustenance,” as Osterhaus put it. Grant tapped Osterhaus, and again his most ethnic of generals did not disappoint his commander. Grant was able to report to Halleck that Osterhaus was on the road that same day to relieve Rosecrans. Sherman’s other divisions would follow. As Osterhaus recounted: “On September 22nd 1863, General Grant...

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