Hardcover(1st Edition)
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780809338016 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Southern Illinois University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/10/2020 |
| Series: | World of Ulysses S. Grant |
| Edition description: | 1st Edition |
| Pages: | 264 |
| Sales rank: | 1,163,976 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
1. “Some Western General of High Rank” Secretary of War Stanton was a frustrated man. Snappish and short-tempered at the best of times, by the beginning of October 1863, he seemed to be constantly fuming over the state of affairs in Tennessee. The army, apparently ensnarled in the usual red tape of bureaucracy, seemed to be moving as if in quicksand in response to the unfolding crisis at Chattanooga. From Washington, D.C., it appeared that Major General Rosecrans had two likely sources of succor. One was Grant’s army, sitting idle in Mississippi. The other was in East Tennessee, where Major General Burnside commanded close to 20,000 troops. With Burnside’s headquarters in Knoxville a mere 110 miles from Chattanooga, his force seemed the obvious choice to render immediate support. Orders to that effect were not long in going out. Back on September 9, when Rosecrans’s army first occupied Chattanooga, Burnside was in contact with the Army of the Cumberland and soon discovered via Maj. Gen. Thomas L. Crittenden (commanding the XXI Corps in Rosecrans’s army) that the Confederates were retreating deep into Georgia. Only a cavalry screen was needed to connect his force with Rosecrans at that time. Halleck then ordered Burnside to guard the mountain passes along the North Carolina border and to watch for a Confederate advance out of southwestern Virginia. The latter threat seemed increasingly likely; some reports placed as many as 15,000 Confederate troops under Maj. Gen. Samuel Jones at Jonesborough, Tennessee, one hundred miles northeast of Knoxville near the Virginia line. Accordingly, Burnside increasingly massed his available forces in that direction and away from Chattanooga. Much like the orders to Grant, by mid-September Halleck was sending multiple directives to Burnside, asking him to be prepared to support Rosecrans should the latter need help, especially once the extent of the Confederate reinforcements became apparent. Significantly, Halleck did not issue a direct order instructing Burnside to reinforce Chattanooga; he was waiting to see what would happen next. This was unfortunate, for like Grant, Burnside also suffered from the lack of a direct telegraphic link with Washington. His line of communications ran overland from Knoxville via the Cumberland Gap, then to Crab Orchard, Kentucky, where it finally reached a telegraphic connection with the North. This resulted in a time lag of forty-eight to seventy-two hours between sending and receiving messages, which left Burnside reacting to stale intelligence days out of date. Still, Burnside complied as best he could, positioning roughly 11,000 men near Loudon, Tennessee, perhaps a third of the distance between Chattanooga and Knoxville. He also continued his operations against Jonesborough, well to his north, where additional scouting reports placed the Rebel presence there at closer to 6,000 troops, fortunately a more manageable figure given Burnside’s stretched resources. The general also intended to shift the returning IX Corps troops toward Chattanooga as soon as they reached him. Then came Chickamauga. Unlike his fellow Federal commanders, Rosecrans did possess a nearly direct wire link with the North. He exchanged messages with Washington in as little as twelve to twenty-four hours, much faster than could either Burnside or Grant. Lincoln knew on September 18 that battle was about to be joined and that Bragg was heavily reinforced. Suddenly, affairs in North Georgia took a critical turn. When Burnside’s travel-lagged dispatches arrived in the capital, they reached the administration amid this unfolding crisis, triggering Lincoln’s frustration. Burnside’s September 17 wire, for example, responding to Halleck’s communiques of September 13 and 14, only reached the seat of government at 10:40 a.m. on September 19. By then, Rosecrans was fully engaged in a great battle, with Lincoln, Stanton, and Halleck all hanging on every click of the key. Thus, when Burnside promised that “orders to go below [to Chattanooga] will be obeyed as soon as possible,” the president erupted with a rare public profanity when the general then added, “I go to Greenville tonight. Dispositions for attacking the enemy at Jonesborough made.” Lincoln thundered in frustration, “Damn Jonesborough!” Worse was to come. By late evening on September 20, the first disastrous messages from both Charles A. Dana—the former newspaperman turned assistant secretary of war sent by Stanton to be his personal representative to Rosecrans—and the general himself reached Washington. Dana’s wire, sent at 4:00 p.m., delivered a bombshell: “Chickamauga,” he wrote, “is as fatal a name in our history as Bull Run.” At 5:00 p.m. Rosecrans’s own dispatch was hardly more promising: “We have met with a serious disaster; extent not yet ascertained. Enemy overwhelmed us, drove our right, pierced our center, and scattered troops.” Both dispatches were in Lincoln’s hands that same night. At 12:35 a.m. on September 21, just hours after the news of Chickamauga first reached Washington, the president wired reassurance to Rosecrans: “Be of good cheer,” he urged. “We have unabated confidence in you and in your soldiers and officers. . . . [S]ave your army by taking strong positions until Burnside joins you, when I hope you can turn the tide.” At 2:00 a.m. Lincoln ordered Burnside to “go to Rosecrans with your force without a moment’s delay.” At 11:00 a.m. the president amplified his intentions: “If you are to do any good to Rosecrans it will not do to waste time with Jonesborough.” By way of further rebuke, he added: “It is already too late to do the most good that might have been done, but I hope it will still do some good. Please do not lose a moment.” To his secretary John Hay, the president fumed that Burnside, “instead of obeying orders . . . and going to R[osecrans] has gone up on a foolish affair to Jonesboro to capture a party of guerrillas.” But how quickly could Burnside comply? As it turned out, not very. Burnside received Lincoln’s peremptory order only on September 24, when he returned to his Knoxville headquarters to discover a mountain of unwelcome news. It also left the general in a quandary: Was he to abandon all the gains in East Tennessee and march at once with all his forces to Chattanooga, or should he leave troops sufficient to hold East Tennessee and move only with those he could spare? Halleck’s orders suggested the former, but Lincoln’s stinging reproof seemed to suggest the latter. Over the next week there followed a series of exchanges that highlighted both the emotional nature and the ambiguity of the government’s response to the crisis. On September 30 Burnside finally resorted to outlining three different plans to try and help Rosecrans, seeking guidance on which the administration preferred. “The first,” as summarized by historian William Marvel, “required the complete abandonment of East Tennessee and a complete junction of Burnside’s twenty thousand men with Rosecrans. . . . The second option entailed slinking south . . . from Loudon and attacking Bragg’s right wing with about fifteen thousand [men], leaving the other five thousand to face Jones. The final alternative called for a combined force of cavalry and infantry, twelve thousand strong, which would . . .circle south of Bragg’s right flank, cutting [his] railroad connection from Dalton to Atlanta . . . , [and eventually] living off the land in a march to the sea.” Interestingly, Burnside favored the third alternative, which was by far the most ambitious. By the time Burnside made his proposals, communications with both Rosecrans in Chattanooga and Halleck in Washington were greatly improved; his newest dispatch was received a mere nine hours after being transmitted. Things were also much calmer in Chattanooga, from where Rosecrans wired that, while he was besieged, he was in no immediate danger of losing the city. On the morning of October 1, Halleck informed Burnside that since “Rosecrans has now telegraphed . . . that it is not necessary to join him at Chattanooga, . . . only move down to such a position that you can go to his assistance, if he should require it” at some later time. For the moment at least, East Tennessee would not be abandoned. The Washington authorities were certainly frustrated by Burnside’s apparent balkiness, but several members of Lincoln’s cabinet also thought that the crisis brought out the worst in Halleck. Writing in his diary on September 26, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles scoffed: “General Halleck has earnestly and constantly smoked cigars and rubbed his elbows, while the Rebels have been vigorously concentrating their forces to overwhelm Rosecrans. We all, except General Halleck, know that Longstreet with 20,000 men has gone from Lee’s army somewhere. The information does not seem to have reached Halleck. . . . H[alleck] has never seemed to realize the importance of that position [Chattanooga]—nor, I am sorry to say, of any other.” On the twenty-ninth Welles recorded similar sentiments from Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, who “expressed great disgust towards Halleck: says Halleck has done nothing while the Rebels were concentrating. . . . Halleck, he said, was good for nothing, and everybody knew it but the President.”7 But no cabinet officer was angrier than Stanton. Nor was the secretary of war one to wait patiently while the generals sorted things out. He thought that if Gen. Robert E. Lee could send troops from his Army of Northern Virginia to Bragg, then Maj. Gen. George G. Meade, commander of the Army of the Potomac, could do the same for Rosecrans. On September 23, once it became clear that neither Grant nor Burnside were going to be able to respond quickly, Stanton took the highly unusual step of summoning a cabinet meeting. Lincoln was “considerably disturbed” by the request, since never before had Stanton “ever sent for him.” Was this a harbinger of some new crisis? Despite the president’s gloomy expectations, when he reached the War Department offices, he found reassurance. First, Stanton produced a “dispatch from Rosecrans [probably Dana’s of that morning] stating that he could hold Chattanooga against double his number: [the city] could not be taken until after a great battle: his stampede evidently over.” The second order of business was reinforcements. Burnside, thought Halleck, could get 20,000 men to Chattanooga within ten days, “if uninterrupted,” and 12,000 in just over a week. Grant’s forces might take ten days to arrive as well, further estimated “Old Brains,” assuming the orders sent to Mississippi arrived in a timely fashion; Halleck was still awaiting confirmation on that detail. As these reports were being digested, Stanton flummoxed everyone by presenting a scheme to send 30,000 men—two corps—from the Army of the Potomac to reinforce Rosecrans immediately, suggesting they could arrive at Bridgeport with five days. Stanton’s pronouncement was greeted skeptically, not the least by Lincoln. Halleck glumly opined that it would take closer to forty days than five to transfer the troops from the East. Much discussion ensued. Most doubted the feat could be done. Stanton, however, had an ace in the hole, with the superintendent of military railroads, Col. Daniel C. McCallum. Just prior to calling the meeting, Stanton asked McCallum and his staff to put together an estimate of how long such a project would take to complete. Now the secretary summoned McCallum, who asserted to the gathered officials that “the transfer can be begun and fully completed within seven days.” Stanton was ebullient, the others astounded. “‘Good! I told you so,’ shouted Stanton. Then, scowling at Halleck, he added: ‘Forty days! Forty days indeed, when the life of the nation is at stake!’ The triumphant secretary turned to McCallum and said, ‘go ahead, begin now.’” The man tapped to lead this force was Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker, who had commanded the Army of the Potomac until June 28, 1863. On that date he resigned, nominally over the use of troops at Harpers Ferry, and was replaced by Meade three days before the Battle of Gettysburg. While Hooker likely only offered up his resignation in a miscalculated game of brinksmanship with the administration in quest of a freer operational hand, it was immediately accepted by Lincoln and Stanton, who lacked confidence in the general after his defeat at Chancellorsville. That resignation idled him at a critical moment in the contest, and he was eager to get back into the war.11 The decision to send Hooker to lead this new expedition, however, was part and parcel of another troubling issue: who would command all thesen assembled forces once they arrived in Rosecrans’s department? Burnside ranked the Army of the Cumberland commander, but should the two men join forces, he would be operating outside his own department and within the geographic confines of Rosecrans’s authority. Hooker was the man who replaced Burnside at the helm of the Army of the Potomac after the Fredericksburg debacle the previous winter. And while Sherman was junior to all three generals, he belonged to Grant’s Army of the Tennessee and brought with him a major portion of that force. Then there was the matter of Rosecrans’s competence. The general could be a difficult subordinate, and Stanton was an exceedingly difficult superior. Their relationship took a bad turn early in the war, while Rosecrans headed up the Department of West Virginia. Though Rosecrans was in many ways an excellent soldier, a solid strategist, and perhaps the army’s most effective organizer and logistician, he was tone deaf to politics, internal or otherwise. He tended to lecture his superiors on things that seemed obvious, overstepping his bounds on a regular basis. In 1862, while in West Virginia, Rosecrans watched from afar as Maj. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson demolished one Federal force after another in the Shenandoah Valley. “Rosecrans urged the administration to put the fragmented Federal forces in the region under a single command: His.” That suggestion proved counterproductive. “Within a few days,” as historian Frank Varney has noted, Rosecrans “received a letter from Gen. George Hartsuff, informing him that ‘Secretary Stanton has taken a dislike to you, due to your suggestions.’”12 Shortly thereafter, Rosecrans was sent west to serve under Grant. Rosecrans commanded the district encompassing Corinth, Mississippi, in the fall of 1862, fighting two battles during that time, Iuka in September and Corinth in October. At Iuka he commanded one element of a two-pronged advance under Grant’s overall authority, which through delay and miscommunication turned into an engagement where Rosecrans’s column did all the fighting while the other force, under Maj. Gen. E. O. C. Ord (and accompanied by Grant), missed the engagement entirely. Mutual recriminations followed, cut short first by the battle at Corinth two weeks later, then by Rosecrans’s transfer to Kentucky to replace Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell in command of what would become the Army of the Cumberland. Grant became further incensed when articles highly critical of him appeared in northern newspapers, apparently originating from Rosecrans’s headquarters. The upshot of Rosecrans’s time in Mississippi was that he and Grant did not part harmoniously. Should the two men serve together again, friction seemed inevitable.13 For Stanton, the final straw proved to be Rosecrans’s controversial actions at Chickamauga. On September 20, in the wake of a Confederate breakthrough, Rosecrans, along with Major Generals Crittenden and Alexander McCook, ended his day in Chattanooga, a dozen miles from the battlefield. Only Major Generals Thomas and Gordon Granger remained on the field, fighting until the close of day. Their stand saved the Army of the Cumberland from a larger disaster but only further highlighted the absence of the army commander. Assistant Secretary Dana’s September 23 telegram itemized the reasons for the disaster and highlighted McCook’s failures in particular, but Stanton would hear none of it: “I know the reasons well enough,” he snapped. “Rosecrans ran away from his fighting men and did not stop for thirteen miles. . . . No, they need not shuffle it off on McCook, he is not much of a soldier . . . but he is not accountable for this business. He and Crittenden made pretty good time away from the fight to Chattanooga, but Rosecrans beat them both.” If Stanton feared that his assistant was trying to absolve Rosecrans, however, those fears were groundless. As September waned and gave way to October, Dana maintained a daily telegraphic correspondence with Washington, painting an increasingly alarming portrait of the man in charge of the Army of the Cumberland. A former New York newspaperman, Dana took up a job offer from Stanton in the summer of 1862. Initially appointed to investigate unresolved claims on behalf of the Quartermaster’s Department, Dana performed well, and Stanton kept him in mind for other things. In March 1863 he asked Dana to accept a position as assistant secretary of war and undertake a mission to the western armies. His “ostensible function,” explained Stanton, “will be that of special commissioner . . . to investigate the pay service of the Western armies, but your real duty will be to report to me every day what you see.” The former journalist agreed.