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

close and inquisitive eye on Grant ever since the capture of Forts Henry and Donelson in February 1862, and Lincoln defended Grant after the Shiloh debacle. When Alexander McClure accused Grant of drunkenness and incompetence at Shiloh and urged Lincoln to cashier him, Lincoln “gathered himself up in his chair and said in a tone of earnestness that I shall never forget, ‘I can’t spare this man; he fights.’” Francis Carpenter remembered one “self-constituted committee” that visited Lincoln in 1863 to warn the president against Grant’s reputed alcoholism. “By the way, gentlemen,” Lincoln remarked after hearing them out, “can either of you tell me where General Grant procures his whiskey? because, if I can find out, I will send every general in the field a barrel of it!”67

Behind the jokes, Lincoln remained unsure about Grant, and in 1863 Stanton sent Charles Dana to keep an eye on Grant during the Vicksburg campaign and report anything untoward. As it turned out, Dana gave Grant the highest possible praise: “the most modest, the most disinterested, and the most honest man I ever knew, with a temper that nothing could disturb, and a judgment that was judicial in its comprehensiveness and wisdom… whom no ill omens could deject and no triumph unduly exalt.” That clinched the matter for Lincoln and Stanton. In October, unwilling to face the prospect of the destruction of an entire Federal army at Chattanooga, Stanton wired Grant to come up the Mississippi to Cairo, and thence to Louisville, and meet with him personally. Their trains crossed instead in Indianapolis on October 17, with Stanton boarding Grant’s car, mistaking Grant’s medical attaché for Grant, and confidently informing the aide that he recognized him from his photographs. Once the proper identities had been sorted out, Stanton informed Grant that Lincoln had decided to consolidate all Federal military operations in the west (except for the occupation of Louisiana) and put Grant in command of them all. Next, Grant was to take himself and whatever troops he had at hand over to Chattanooga to rescue the Army of the Cumberland. Grant never hesitated. Three days later, he relieved Rosecrans of command of the Army of the Cumberland and turned it over to the hero of Chickamauga, George Thomas. Three days after that, Grant himself was in Chattanooga.68

What Grant did to lift the siege of Chattanooga looks almost ludicrously simple from a distance, but that only underscores the real genius of his accomplishment. First, Grant reopened the Tennessee River supply line to Chattanooga on October 28. Then Grant brought up substantial reinforcements, including two army corps shipped by railroad from the Army of the Potomac under Fighting Joe Hooker in October, and two more from the Mississippi under William Tecumseh Sherman by mid-November. With these forces in hand, and with Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland, Grant now turned on the complacent Bragg and prepared to drive him off his positions atop Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge. The inevitable confrontation came on November 24 and 25. After a preliminary skirmish the day before, Grant sent Hooker’s men up the steep sides of Lookout Mountain (on Bragg’s left flank) and threw Sherman’s men at a railroad grade and tunnel on Bragg’s other flank. Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland, angered and humiliated, was held in reserve in the center to await the results.

As it turned out, Hooker’s men easily cleared the Confederates off Lookout Mountain, but Sherman’s attack on the tunnel stalled. To relieve pressure on Sherman, Grant ordered Thomas’s men to seize the trenches the Confederates had dug along the base of Missionary Ridge. But when the Army of the Cumberland finally got moving, it scarcely bothered to stop at the trenches but kept right on going up the 200-foot-high face of Missionary Ridge and over the top. The Confederates up on the ridge were taken completely by surprise. The colonel of the 24th Mississippi watched in slow-motion disbelief as “under a galling and destructive fire the Federal army climbed up the steep sides of the mountain. I thought they could never reach the summit, but a short time before night set in I had the bitter mortification of seeing our line, about one hundred and fifty or two hundred yards to the left of our brigade, give way and run in confusion. I heard the triumphant shout of the Federals as they placed their colors on the ridge.” The center of Bragg’s line caved in, and the rest of the Army of Tennessee stumbled back along the roads down to Georgia, with Bragg berating his men for the disaster.69

This time, however, no amount of shifting and excuse could disguise Bragg’s incompetence. Instead of crushing Rosecrans in Chattanooga when he could have, Bragg had settled into a comfortable and indolent siege. He had quarreled with the best of his officers again, including a wrathy Nathan Bedford Forrest, who finally descended on Bragg and shook his fist in Bragg’s face:

I have stood your meanness as long as I intend to. You have played the part of a damn scoundrel, and are a coward. … You may as well not issue any more orders to me, for I will not obey them, and I will hold you personally responsible for any further indignities you endeavor to inflict upon me. You have threatened to arrest me for not obeying your orders promptly. I dare you to do it, and I say to you that if you ever again try to interfere with me or cross my path it will be at the peril of your life.70

Then, as though the presence of Grant in Chattanooga meant nothing, Bragg had sent Longstreet’s corps off on a wild-goose chase to recapture Knoxville. In short, Bragg had done almost everything necessary to destroy the morale and order of the Army of Tennessee, and Chattanooga just about finished it. Five days after the battle, Bragg was officially relieved by President Davis and recalled to Richmond, where he would finish out the war behind a