The southern assault will not begin until 9:30 a. m. That delay, three hours born of confusion and miscommunication, would haunt the Confederacy long after the guns fell silent. After the war, a bitter Bragg would write, “If not for that 3-hour delay our independence might have been won.
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The previous day at Chickamauga had been as savage as any battle in more than two years of civil war. The two armies collided just eight miles south of Chattanooga on September 19th, 1863. After the first day of fighting, the battle was a draw. Soldiers described it as almost like Shiloh multiplied by two.
Among those who fought was a man named Helm, who chose instead to fight for the Confederacy, leading his brigade which he knew would never falter. But what would determine the outcome of Chickamauga was a hole in the Union center. On the night of the 19th, Rosecrans had not gotten any sleep. The approaching Confederates were commanded by none other than James Longstreet, the trusted lieutenant of Robert E.
Lee. Longstreet and 11,000 soldiers from the Army of Northern Virginia had arrived just the night before. But not all the Union soldiers left the field at Chickamauga. Troops under the command of General George Thomas quickly formed a defense.
Callaway was among those who did not. Like so many others on both sides of the battlefield, the Callaways communicated through a series of letters. Dulcinea Callaway was hearing things she’d never heard before. She’d never read letters from a family member in war.
One letter described the battle raging all along the line as if heaven and earth were coming together, a thousand thunderstorms all turned loose could not equal the noise. On Snodgrass Hill, the Battle of Chickamauga reached its culmination. At Chickamauga, more than 34,000 from both armies were dead, wounded, or missing. The combined casualties were the second most of any battle in the war.
Only Gettysburg exceeded the butchery of Chickamauga. She never saw Mr. Callaway again. Two months earlier, in July of 1863, laborers in New York City had reacted with violence to a law establishing the nation’s first military draft.
The 233 children inside a building escaped before it burned to the ground. Some 2,000 were injured. The Confederates won a tactical victory at Chickamauga, no doubt about it. But they failed to exercise any strategic potential from that victory.
Bragg had, in essence, cut off all supply lines into Chattanooga. Then Grant came. Grant had a natural ability. Within days of his arrival, supplies and reinforcements began to slip into Chattanooga through a supply route called the Cracker Line.
Grant came right in and immediately opened up the supply flow, and then began, as Grant was always thinking, “How can I take the fight to the enemy. ”
Most Confederates were dug in along the crest of Missionary Ridge, a seven-mile long spine of soil and stone extending from just east of Chattanooga to the Georgia state line. One soldier wrote, “My ambition cooled off and I began to think how I’d be perfectly content to be at home with my wife, never thought of after I die. You need not be at all surprised to hear some demonstration at any moment.
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The assault on the Confederate stronghold was about to begin. The same day, General Joseph Hooker and some 10,000 Union troops attacked 1,500 Confederates dug into Lookout Mountain. A Confederate defender remarked, “We feel we can kill all they send after us. ”
But Thomas’s veterans did not stop there.
When the Confederate line broke, Bragg watched in disbelief. He later wrote, “If only our men had held their ground, it would have been child’s play. But instead, they fled panic-stricken before the enemy. When I saw the men running, I could not believe that these were the heroes of Shiloh, Perryville, Oak Hills, and Chickamauga.
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Bragg ordered a retreat into Georgia. The battles of Chickamauga and Chattanooga resulted in 30,000 casualties for the Army of Tennessee. Two weeks after the battles for Chattanooga, Dulcinea Callaway received another correspondence. It now fell to someone else’s lot to write her a short letter letting her know what had become of her much beloved husband, Lieutenant Joshua K.
Callaway. She was just like so many other white women in the South, because 18% of Southern white men of military age died in this war. And these widows, though, what choice did they have? Now the armies were poised on the border of Georgia, and they could push down into not just Georgia, but Alabama.
That’s because Lincoln had promoted Ulysses S. Grant. Lincoln hoped, based on his horrible experience with generals in the East, that if he could bring Grant from the West to the East, Grant would do in the East what he did in the West. In Virginia, Grant would attempt to do what no Union General had been able to accomplish: accept the unconditional surrender of Robert E.
Lee. And then it all dried up. One New York Copperhead wrote, “The war is murder, nothing else. ” The Copperheads not only demanded Lincoln’s ouster, but also an immediate peace treaty with the Confederacy.
While Grant’s offensive stalled in Virginia, Sherman began to move his army of 100,000 from Chattanooga into Georgia. Its four railroad lines bound together what was left of the Confederacy. Rail lines ran through Atlanta. After the war, one general wrote, “The negro should be a free man, but not put on any equality with whites.
” Before the war, he had made a fortune in the slave trade. A federal investigation after the war concluded most prisoners were shot after the Union garrison had surrendered. In the South, the Congress of the Confederate States adopted a resolution expressing its appreciation for Forrest. Which made the story of Emma Stephenson all the more remarkable.
Often, the opposing earthworks lay within a few yards of each other. “Pick your target, keep your heads down. ”
Each time, Sherman’s moves had been checked by Johnston. The target was Atlanta, population 14,000.
Most of the residents were not wealthy plantation owners, but yeoman farmers who did not own slaves. In June 1864, more than 100,000 soldiers from both Confederate and Union armies ravaged Cobb County. The war had clearly become closer to the lives of civilians. No longer was the war something fought at a distance.
That kind of distance between home front and battlefield had collapsed. Only one last mountain remained between Sherman and Atlanta. Just 20 miles beyond Kennesaw Mountain was Atlanta. Instead of flanking, he ordered a frontal assault.
5,500 Federals surged up the steep slopes of Pigeon Hill, a knob just below Kennesaw Mountain. One nurse was in a hospital where there was probably not enough room for all of the patients there. And yet, she still chose this line of work. Simultaneous to the fight on Pigeon Hill, Sherman launched the other wave of his main attack.
In the woods below Cheatham Hill were 8,000 Union soldiers.
