Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

my observation, that you do not possess the confidence of the Army, in other respects, in that degree necessary to secure success.”56

At this point, even President Davis was ready to relieve him of command, and in March 1863 Davis tried to persuade Joseph E. Johnston to take over Bragg’s command. Johnston declined Davis’s suggestion, however, and Davis took that as a sign that Bragg had been severely misjudged by his subordinates. Accordingly, Davis decided to grant Bragg one more reprieve, and in March he even allowed Bragg to court-martial one of his critics, Major General John Porter McCown, who had loudly threatened to leave the Army of the Tennessee and go back to farming potatoes until Bragg was relieved.57

The situation for the western Confederacy might have looked even bleaker had not Bragg’s failures been partly compensated for by the spectacular achievements of one of Bragg’s cavalry brigadiers, Nathan Bedford Forrest. By the end of 1862, Forrest had emerged as the single most daring and successful light cavalry officer of the Civil War: in July 1862, leading only 1,400 cavalry troopers, Forrest raided Buell’s supply lines, “captured two brigadier-generals, staff and field officers, and 1,200 men; burnt $200,000 worth of stores; captured sufficient stores with those burned to amount to $500,000, and brigade of 60 wagons, 300 mules, 150 or 200 horses, and field battery of four pieces.” In December 1862, he led a new brigade of 2,100 cavalrymen on a destructive joyride through middle Tennessee that, in two weeks, destroyed fifty bridges along the Mobile & Ohio Railroad, killed or captured 2,500 Federal pursuers, captured ten pieces of artillery and enough Enfield rifles to reequip his own men (with 500 rifles to spare), and generally made a shambles of the Federal occupation of middle Tennessee. “Forrest’s cavalry seemed to be ubiquitous,” rejoiced one Tennessee rebel. “The Federals never knew when he would appear upon their flanks or in their rear.”58

Nevertheless, Forrest was an embarrassment to Braxton Bragg. A self-made man, Forrest smacked of the slave market (where before the war he had made a fortune in slave dealing), and his grammar invariably left something to chance. He had no formal military schooling (or any other schooling, for that matter), and made up his own earthy maxims of war as he went. Always strike first, he counseled his artillery commander, the twenty-two-year-old John Watson Morton; “in any fight, it’s the first blow that counts; and if you keep it up hot enough, you can whip ’em as fast as they can come up.” Then, never let the enemy regain his balance, or, as Forrest put it, “Get ’em skeered and then keep the skeer on ’em.” His final piece of advice was never to be intimidated by professional soldiers, since, as Forrest had discovered, “Whenever I met one of them fellers that fit by note, I generally whipped hell out of him before he got his tune pitched.”59

Forrest was utterly indifferent to drill and urged his men to attack the enemy directly and without regard for the niceties of the tactics books. “General Forrest, as a commander, was, in many respects, the negative of a West Pointer,” wrote Morton. “He regarded evolution, maneuvers, and exhaustive cavalry drill an unnecessary tax upon men and horses.” Forrest’s untutored lust for combat might have merely resulted in more casualty-laden melees had it not been for his natural, baffling gift—a gift possessed by only a few generals in the Civil War, including Ulysses Grant—for sizing up a given tactical situation and instinctively knowing what to do in response. According to Morton:

[Forrest] had absolutely no knowledge or experience of war gleaned from the study of what others had wrought. General Forrest grasped intuitively and instantaneously the strategic possibilities of every situation which confronted him. … His knowledge of men was in most cases unerring; and his ability to inspire and bring out the greatest power and endurance of his men was unsurpassed. … His eye for position was almost infallible, and his knowledge of the effect of a given movement on the enemy was intuitive and seemed to come rather from an inner than an outer source of information.60

Forrest was a fairly good inkling of what could be done by pressing relentlessly for decisive combat conclusions on the battlefield. Unfortunately, he was also everything that a tightly buttoned regular (such as Bragg) ought not to be, and Forrest never ceased to suspect that Bragg had authorized his raids chiefly as a means of getting him out of the way.

Forrest’s raids were almost the only activity Bragg, or anyone else, would indulge in after Murfreesboro. For six months, the Confederate and Union armies, exhausted and bloodied by the battle at Stone’s River, were content to rest and refit. Rosecrans’s self-confidence had been badly shaken by the carnage at Murfreesboro (his closest friend and adjutant, Colonel Julius Garesché, had been decapitated by a shell while riding beside Rosecrans, spattering the general with a mess of blood and brains), and instead of pushing on toward Chattanooga, he carefully fortified himself in Murfreesboro and began demanding reinforcements and supplies. Stanton and Halleck refused. “You have already more than your share of the best arms,” Halleck replied, “Everything has been done, and is now being done, for you that is possible by the Government. Your complaints are without reason.” When Stanton instead began prodding Rosecrans to get the Army of the Cumberland moving southward, Rosecrans went over Stanton’s head and began whining to Lincoln in March 1863 about enemies in the War Department who were denying him the promotion he deserved, the staff members he wanted, and so forth.61

Then, on June 23, 1863, Rosecrans’s old aggressiveness resurfaced, and the Army of the Cumberland suddenly lurched into action. Bragg’s Army of Tennessee was entrenched around Tullahoma, Tennessee, almost halfway between Rosecrans and Chattanooga, inviting an attack as a sure way of revenging itself for Murfreesboro. But Rosecrans deftly feinted to Bragg’s left, smartly zigzagged to Bragg’s right, and then slipped around behind