At dawn near a creek in northern Georgia called the Chickamauga, Union forces desperately prepared for an attack that was imminent. Confederate General Braxton Bragg imagined the second day of the Battle of Chickamauga would bring destruction to the Union Army. But once again, a breakdown in communication plagued the Confederates. The southern assault would not begin until 9:30 a.
m. One Union General who commanded one of the divisions on that perimeter said, “If the Confederate attack had happened at 6:00 a. m. , it wouldn’t have lasted an hour.
” After the war, a bitter Bragg would write, “If not for that 3-hour delay, our independence might have been won. ”
The previous day at Chickamauga had been as savage as any battle in more than two years of civil war. The invading Union Army of the Cumberland, led by General William Starke Rosecrans, was determined to gain control of the critical rail center of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Chattanooga was a gateway to the deep South, the heartland where factories, farmlands, and railroads were critical to the Confederate war effort.
Bragg’s Army of Tennessee hoped to not just stop Rosecrans, but to destroy his army of 58,000. The two armies collided just 8 miles south of Chattanooga on September 19th, 1863. After the first day of fighting, the Battle of Chickamauga was a draw. It was an drag-out fight in the woods, almost like Shiloh multiplied by two.
Now, less than 3 months after the devastating Confederate loss at Gettysburg, the Army of Tennessee resumed the battle they believed could reverse the fortunes of the Confederacy. Among the first to challenge the Union defenses at Chickamauga was the Kentucky Orphan Brigade commanded by Brigadier General Benjamin Helm. When the war began, Helm was offered a position with the Union Army by his brother-in-law, a high-ranking official with the US government. Helm instead chose to fight for the Confederacy.
Fighting under Helm’s command was 22-year-old Johnny Green. A perfect shower of grape tore through their ranks. They fired a volley and rushed upon them. Then Helm fell, mortally wounded, leading his brigade which he knew would never falter.
Surgeons realized Helm’s wound was fatal. The Confederate General clung to life for several more hours but died the next morning. Since the battle began, the two forces had been slugging it out along a 4-mile front astride the Lafayette Road. The Confederate attack on September 20th targeted the Union left.
But what would determine the outcome of Chickamauga was a hole in the Union center. Miscommunication, confusion, and fatigue with Rosecrans and his generals had left a gap more than a quarter mile wide. Rosecrans had not gotten any sleep on the night of the 19th, and by the time the action began the next day, he was on the verge of physical and mental collapse. The approaching Confederates were commanded by none other than James Longstreet, Robert E.
Lee’s trusted lieutenant. Longstreet and 11,000 soldiers from the Army of Northern Virginia had arrived just the night before. It was the only time in the war that significant numbers of troops were pulled away from Lee’s army and transferred to the Western theater to fight there. It showed that this was the Confederacy’s big effort to reverse the tide of the war in the West.
Now Longstreet’s Corps, eight brigades, rolled straight through that gap and directly into the rear of the Union Army. For the Confederate troops, it was thrilling. General Bushrod Johnson called it a scene of unsurpassed grandeur, as they realized that for the first time in the Western theater, the Confederacy was on the verge of a magnificent victory. The stunning breakthrough split the Union Army at Chickamauga.
Rosecrans and a third of his force left the battlefield. The Union right soon crumbled. But not all the Union soldiers left the field. Troops under the command of General George Thomas quickly formed a defense on Snodgrass Hill and Horseshoe Ridge, standing firm.
Ready to charge up the steep wooded slope and end the battle were nearly 3,000 Confederates. Among them was Lieutenant Joshua Callaway of the 28th Alabama. Seventeen months earlier, Callaway had left his wife, Dulcinea, and two small children at their home near Selma. Unlike almost a third of all white households in the Confederacy, Callaway did not own slaves.
Like so many others on both sides, the Callaways communicated through a series of letters. “My dear love, I have just passed through the terrible ordeal of a hard battle. Our brigade formed at the foot of a long hill, at the top of which was the enemy’s line. The battle was raging all along our line as if heaven and earth were coming together.
A thousand thunderstorms all turned loose could not equal the noise. ”
Dulcinea Callaway was hearing things she’d never heard before. She’d never read letters from a family member in war, so these letters were obviously going to make her fearfully concerned about her husband’s well-being. How this war was going to turn out was a big unknown, and that was a source of daily fear for a mother like her.
The carnage was awful. Men were shot down all around Joshua. He was indeed inthe very midst of death. On Snodgrass Hill, the Battle of Chickamauga reached its culmination.
The attacking Confederates tasted victory, but Thomas’s outnumbered defenders repulsed charge after charge. Thomas’s heroic defense allowed the remaining Union forces to escape, earning him the name Rock of Chickamauga. By day’s end, the last of Union troops withdrew. The carnage of the battle exceeded even the bloodbath at Shiloh.
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, exceeded only by Gettysburg. Though victorious, the staggering losses plagued the Confederacy. The Confederates realized the arithmetic, and they weren’t winning it.
If they expended more men, even equal to the loss in the Union armies, they would eventually cease to have the ability to put men in the field. Joshua Callaway somehow made it through the battle unscathed. They moved to the top of the hill and slept on the battlefield, Napoleon’s sign of victory. He wrote, “I have now seen and experienced the horrors of war, as well as the spoils and glories.
I’m very well, thank God. A thousand kisses for you and the children. Your loving, J. K.
Callaway. ”
Six hundred miles to the north in Washington, D. C. , President Abraham Lincoln received a telegram of the Union debacle.
With the report came devastating news about an enemy officer: his brother-in-law, Benjamin Hardin Helm, had been killed at Chickamauga. Lincoln’s trusted friend, Supreme Court Justice David Davis, later recalled, “I never saw Mr. Lincoln more moved than when he heard of the death of his young brother-in-law. He said, I feel as David of old when he heard of the death of Absalom.
I saw how grief-stricken he was, so I closed the door and left him. ”
Lincoln’s grief reflected the state of a nation beginning to crack under the pressure of a civil war. Two months earlier, in July of 1863, laborers in New York City reacted with violence to a law establishing the nation’s first military draft. Many of the protesters were impoverished immigrants from Ireland, enraged over a provision allowing draftees the option to buy their way out of service for $300.
Angry mobs roamed Manhattan, killing policemen and setting the city ablaze. But the protesters’ venom was particularly aimed at New York’s 12,000 African Americans. An orphanage for black children was torched; the 233 children inside escaped before the building burned to the ground. Northerners who dissented against this conflict felt aggrieved, misled, abandoned by a president who had turned a war for union into a war for union and emancipation.
It wasn’t until the arrival of Union soldiers who had just fought at Gettysburg that 5 days of rioting was finally quelled. Hundreds were killed. Some 2,000 were injured. Eleven black citizens were dragged from their homes and lynched by the angry mob.
Once Northerners thought that northern boys weren’t going to die for the freedom of African-Americans, that was something more than what they could stomach. That class of individuals was seen as responsible for bringing this war on and for taking northern boys from their homes, sending them to the front lines where they were dying in droves. By September 1863, northern casualties had eclipsed 400,000. At the Battle of Chickamauga alone, there were 16,000 Union casualties.
Chickamauga was undeniably a Confederate victory, but a hollow one. Bragg had allowed Rosecrans and his Union Army to escape to Chattanooga. He won a tactical victory, no doubt about it, but he didn’t have Chattanooga. The Confederates failed to exercise any strategic potential from that victory.
Bragg moved his army from the Chickamauga battlefield to the heights overlooking Union-occupied Chattanooga, planning to lay siege to the city. Lincoln and his cabinet feared it could become Vicksburg in reverse. As summer turned to autumn, the situation for the Union forces at Chattanooga grew desperate. Bragg had, in essence, cut off all supply lines into the city.
The trapped and now starving Army of the Cumberland was not just defeated, it was demoralized. Rosecrans was described by Lincoln as stunned like a duck hit in the head. On October 21st, Rosecrans was replaced, and the most familiar face in the Western Theater assumed overall command: Ulysses S. Grant.
What Grant had was nothing you could teach. He had a natural ability. Within days of Grant’s arrival, supplies and reinforcements began to slip into Chattanooga through a supply route called the Cracker Line. Grant came right in, immediately opened up the supply flow, and then began, as Grant was always thinking, “How can I take the fight to the enemy?
” Now it was Grant’s enemy that had become demoralized. By November 1863, even the weather seemed to be turning against Bragg and his men. For the men in the Confederate trenches, the Civil War was not just about states’ rights or the institution of slavery. In the war’s third year, it was also about defending your home and your family.
In the gloom of late autumn, Bragg’s men began to realize that the victory at Chickamauga had been wasted, and the opportunity to turn the tide of the Western campaign squandered. Even more disturbing was this sobering reality: the struggle for Chattanooga would mean yet another battle. A reinforced Grant was ready to go on the offensive against the Confederates encircling Chattanooga. Most were dug in along the crest of Missionary Ridge, a 7-mile long spine of soil and stone extending from just east of Chattanooga to the Georgia state line.
For Grant, the key to victory depended on destroying the Confederate stronghold. His plan was to cross the Tennessee River northeast of Chattanooga, get on the flank of Missionary Ridge, and then advance along it, rolling up the Confederate line. November 19th, 1863. On the very day Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address, Joshua Callaway climbed Lookout Mountain.
The 2,300-foot precipice towered over the Union forces in Chattanooga. He wrote to his wife, “Dear Lolly, yesterday I got some fellows to go up to the top of Lookout Mountain. I could not help but feel a spark of ambition, desire to make my name as immortal as that of Lookout Mountain. 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. As ever, your devoted, J. K. Callaway.
”
November 24th, 1863. On a foggy, misty day, Grant’s trusted lieutenant, William Tecumseh Sherman, led a Union force of 16,000 from Chattanooga to the northern tip of Missionary Ridge. 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.
The all-day fight became known as the Battle Above the Clouds. By nightfall, the overwhelmed Confederates evacuated. But the fate of Chattanooga would not be determined at Lookout Mountain, but rather Missionary Ridge. The next morning, Sherman’s assault on Missionary Ridge went nowhere.
A top the heights were 4,000 Confederates skillfully led by General Patrick Cleburne. A Confederate defender remarked, “We feel we can kill all they send after us. ” With Sherman’s attack paralyzed, Grant turned to George Thomas, the Rock of Chickamauga. He ordered Thomas to attack Confederate rifle pits at the base of Missionary Ridge.
But Thomas’s veterans did not stop there. They continued up the steep slope with one thing in mind: redemption. Once Thomas’s troops took the trenches at the base of the ridge, they were exposed to Confederate fire up the ridge. They just started moving up the defiles, not much different than the guys going ashore at Omaha Beach.
They knew they had to take the high ground eventually. The Union attack on Missionary Ridge was one of the most dramatic moments of the entire war. Among the Confederate defenders, the scene was pandemonium and confusion. With that, there was nothing left for the Confederates to do but get away as quick as they could, fleeing down the back slope of Missionary Ridge as fast as they could run.
Colonel C. Irvine Walker of the 10th South Carolina Infantry later said, “I don’t think any feat of the war can equal their attack on Missionary Ridge. 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. ” Bragg ordered a retreat into Georgia. With the Confederate defeat at Chattanooga, the gateway to the deep South had been pried open. A junior officer from Bragg’s army later called the defeat at Missionary Ridge the death knell of the Confederacy.
The battles of Chickamauga and Chattanooga resulted in 30,000 casualties for the Army of Tennessee, with some 2,500 giving their lives to the Confederate cause. Two weeks after the battles for Chattanooga, Dulcinea Callaway received another correspondence. It read:”It now falls to my own happy lot to write you a short letter letting you know what has become of your much beloved husband, Lieutenant Joshua K. Callaway, who fell in the Battle of Missionary Ridge, mortally wounded.
While rallying his company, he was shot through the bowels with a minie ball. We picked him up and started off the field when he asked us to lay him down and die. I have every reason to believe he’s gone to a better land where there’s no more war. The company and officers deeply sympathize with you in his loss.
But what is your loss and our loss is his eternal gain. W. F. A.
Lieutenant, Company K, 28th Alabama Regiment. ”
With the death of her husband, Dulcinea Callaway had to begin envisioning a future she would create for her children on her own. 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. That was a significant loss, and it left many widows behind.
And these widows, though, what choice did they have? They had to move on. By the end of 1863, the war in the East remained a stalemate. But the Western Theater was thus far a stunning success for Union forces.
Since the war began, the North had been victorious at Fort Henry and Donelson, Shiloh, Corinth, Stones River, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga. The Union Navy had captured the major port of New Orleans and now controlled the entire Mississippi River. Equally important was the naval blockade along the Gulf Coast that was squeezing the life out of the Confederate economy. And now the armies were poised on the border of Georgia, able to push down into not just Georgia but Alabama, striking that final dagger into the heart of the Western Confederacy.
That dagger was now in the hands of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman. Lincoln had promoted Ulysses S. Grant to Lieutenant General, making him General-in-Chief of all Union armies. Grant chose to make his field headquarters with the Army of the Potomac in its fight in Virginia.
Lincoln hoped that if he could bring Grant from the West to the East, Grant would do in the East what he did in the West. Grant understood, as Lincoln had for several years, that to win this war, the Union had to attack the Confederacy simultaneously everywhere. In Virginia, Grant would attempt to do what no Union General had been able to accomplish: accept the unconditional surrender of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.
People in the North might have sat back and said, “Well, the war is almost over now. Victory is within reach. Grant is ready to move on Richmond. Sherman is ready to move on Atlanta.
We’ll just start counting the weeks now until the war ends. ” And then it all dried up. May 1864. A succession of battles in the confused terrain northwest of Richmond resulted in a bloodbath for the Union Army of the Potomac.
At the battles of Wilderness, Spotsylvania Courthouse, and Cold Harbor, Grant’s forces suffered a staggering 50,000 casualties. The catastrophic loss of life fueled a growing anti-war movement in the North. A vocal faction of the Democratic Party, dubbed Copperheads by their Republican rivals, vehemently denounced Lincoln’s war policies. One New York Copperhead wrote, “The war is murder, nothing else.
”
If you looked at how politics was being done on the ground in 1864, a pattern emerged. In Ohio, Clement Laird Vallandigham, an Ohio Democratic Congressman who had actually been arrested for anti-war activities and expelled into the ranks of the Confederacy, was running for governor of Ohio from his vantage point across the border in Canada. He had thousands upon thousands of people turning out in rallies to support him. The governor of New York was now a Democrat.
The governor of New Jersey was now a Democrat. All of them very public, very vehement in their denunciation of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Lincoln administration. The Copperheads not only demanded Lincoln’s ouster, but also an immediate peace treaty with the Confederacy. They would become a political force in a year when Lincoln faced re-election.
While Grant’s offensive stalled in Virginia, Sherman began to move his army of 100,000 from Chattanooga into Georgia. His mission: to capture Atlanta, a major manufacturing center and industrial hub of the Confederate war machine. Its four railroad lines bound together what was left of the Confederacy. Taking Atlanta would bring havoc and destruction to the Confederacy’s ability to field troops, to supply them, to keep their economy going.
Rail lines ran through Atlanta. Munitions were being produced there. Clothing was being produced there. You had to strike that last important place.
Marching towards Atlanta with the 111th Illinois Infantry was Austin Gilmore, a former slave from Tennessee who had volunteered to fight. Austin, however, would not serve as a soldier, but rather as a cook. Like many in the North, Sherman did not trust the fighting abilities of African-Americans. After the war, he wrote, “The negro should be a free man, but not put on any equality with whites.
” But hundreds of miles west, at places like Port Gibson, Mississippi, and Milliken’s Bend, Louisiana, African-Americans had already proven Sherman wrong. In June 1863, along the Mississippi River at Milliken’s Bend, black soldiers put up fierce resistance to a Confederate attack. They were untrained soldiers from Mississippi who did not really know how to fire their weapons. They ended up in hand-to-hand combat, using their bayonets and their muskets as clubs.
Once you heard the stories of those who served in combat, how they fought, you realized they were making a statement with their blood. Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana wrote of the battle, “The bravery of the blacks completely revolutionized the sentiment of the army with regard to the employment of negro troops. ”
But with their service came tragedy and controversy.
As Sherman prepared for the Atlanta Campaign, a detachment of Confederate cavalry attacked Fort Pillow, a Union post along the Mississippi River, 40 miles north of Memphis. The cavalry was under command of Nathan Bedford Forrest. Before the war, Forrest had made a fortune in the slave trade. Enlisting as a private, his daring battlefield exploits had seen him rise to the rank of major general.
Among the 500-plus defenders of Fort Pillow were 262 men of the US Colored Artillery. As they attempted to surrender, many were killed. Confederate Sergeant Achilles V. Clark wrote, “The poor deluded Negroes would run up to our men, fall upon their knees, and with uplifted hands scream for mercy.
But they were ordered to their feet and shot down. ” 200 of the 262 black soldiers at Fort Pillow were killed. A federal investigation after the war concluded most were shot after the Union garrison had surrendered. The slaughter at Fort Pillow enraged people throughout the North.
In the South, the Congress of the Confederate States adopted a resolution expressing its appreciation for Forrest. With thousands of African Americans now fighting for the Union, Confederate President Jefferson Davis made it clear that captured black soldiers would not be treated as prisoners of war, but rather as slaves to be returned to bondage. Which made the story of Emma Stephenson all the more remarkable. Like Austin Gilmore, Emma was emancipated.
Now, marching towards Atlanta with Sherman’s army, Emma was a nurse with the 17th Army Corps. Performing that kind of work meant you wanted to have a stake in liberating your people and in essentially liberating yourself. That was a powerful message. It was very important for Americans to know that there were Emma Stevensons in the midst of the war.
In Sherman’s way, 30 miles south of Chattanooga, was a Confederate army of 65,000 men. Braxton Bragg had been replaced with General Joseph Johnston. Johnston knew that the very future of the Confederacy depended on protecting Atlanta. At every opportunity, his men built miles of makeshift fortifications.
Outnumbered almost two to one, Confederates found trench warfare an effective defensive strategy. One officer wrote, “One good man behind earthworks should prevail over four or five opponents advancing in the open without cover. ” The Federals responded with trenches of their own, often lying within a few yards of each other. Sergeant Johnny Green was a Confederate with the 9th Kentucky Infantry.
Anyone who showed his head above the trenches was sure to have two or three minnie balls come singing around his ears. But they soon got so accustomed to it that the boys grew very careless. For the past month in northern Georgia, Sherman and Johnston had been waging a deadly game of chess. Time and again, Sherman tried to outflank the Confederate Army.
Each time, his moves were checked by Johnston. But in the process, the Confederate General was forced to yield precious ground. By mid-June 1864, Johnston’s army was backed up to within 20 miles of Atlanta. Caught in the crossfire in the campaign for Atlanta were the people of Cobb County, Georgia.
Population 14,000, about a third of them slaves. Most of the residents were not wealthy plantation owners, but yeoman farmers who did not own slaves. Lucinda Casey was a widow, struggling to keep the family farm while raising three children: daughters Louisa, Nancy, and Hazelteen. As Sherman’s army approached, Lucinda and her daughters quickly packed their belongings and fled to the safety of Atlanta.
In June 1864, more than 100,000 soldiers from both Confederate and Union armies ravaged Cobb County. At Lucinda Casey’s home, nothing was spared. As Sherman’s troops made their way through Georgia, it showed that this war had changed. It had become closer to the lives of civilians.
No longer was the war something fought at a distance, something on some remote battlefield. That kind of distance between home front and battlefield had collapsed. There really wasn’t much of a distinction anymore. The war was now literally on people’s doorsteps.
Sherman had begun to craft this new style of warfare. One of the ways that you dominate, one of the ways that you completely control, was that everything had a military objective. Everything: every gin, every barn, every horse, every cow, and every civilian. Everything became a military objective.
By mid-June, Sherman’s army had moved within striking distance of his objective. Only one last mountain remained between Sherman and Atlanta: Kennesaw Mountain, over 1,800 feet high and 2 miles long. Some called it the Gibraltar of Georgia. For Johnston, Kennesaw’s rocky ridges were the ideal place to halt Sherman.
The summit was a 700-foot precipice called Big Kennesaw. To the south was a spur named Pigeon Hill. Further south was a ridge soon to be known as Cheatham Hill. With an imposing 7-mile line of defense, the Confederates dared Sherman to attack.
Just 20 miles beyond Kennesaw Mountain was Atlanta. By the time you got to Kennesaw, Sherman didn’t want to flank around to the west anymore. It was getting too far from his rail line. And flanking from the east didn’t seem to be much of a discussed option.
And so, his third option was to attack. In the pre-dawn hours of June 27th, Union officers received special field orders number 28. Major General Thomas would assault the enemy at any point near his center to be selected by himself. Upon hearing the order, an officer with the 86th Illinois responded, “The stupidity of this order is enough to paralyze me.
” A little after 8:00 a. m. , the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain began. 5,500 Federals surged up the steep slopes of Pigeon Hill, a knob just below Kennesaw Mountain.
The attack was doomed from the start. The Battle of Kennesaw Mountain went against everything Sherman had been talking about and trying to do. Why did he make this direct assault against dug-in troops on a high mountain, when it was clear that this was just not going to work? Sherman ordered all cooks and musicians to the Kennesaw battlefield to aid the wounded.
Unarmed, Austin Gilmore attempted to save a Union soldier wounded on Pigeon Hill. The former slave was struck in the hip by a minie ball. Yet, Gilmore managed to drag the soldier to safety. The Union wounded were taken to a field hospital at the base of Kennesaw Mountain.
It was a crude, open-air facility with little regard to sanitation. Antibiotics had not yet been discovered. Medical instruments went unsterilized. The overwhelmed surgeons worked courageously, as did battlefield nurses like Emma Stevenson.
She was in a hospital where there was probably not enough room for all of the patients. It was crowded. It was loud. It was horrifying.
And yet, she still chose this line of work. It said something about her determination to become free, her determination to do what she could to ensure that the Union Army had the labor and resources it needed to win this war. Sherman’s frontal assault on Pigeon Hill was a disaster. An officer with the 53rd Ohio summed up the fight by saying, “The rebels fought with a desperation worthy of a better cause.
”
Simultaneous to the fight on Pigeon Hill, Sherman launched the other wave of his main attack. It occurred not at Big Kennesaw, but 2 miles south at Cheatham Hill. In the woods below Cheatham Hill were 8,000 Union soldiers. To embolden his 52nd Ohio, Colonel Dan McCook recited a poem about warriors of ancient Rome:”Out spake brave Horatius, the captain of the gate: ‘To every man upon this earth, death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better than facing fearful odds for the ashes of your fathers and the temples of your gods? ‘” To reach the Confederate earthworks on Cheatham Hill, the Federals had to advance across an open field and up a steep incline. It was a 400-yard march into certain death. “Come on, lads, close up, to the works!
” They charged into a storm of lead. The assault on Cheatham Hill failed. The Federals were repulsed with heavy losses. By day’s end, Sherman had suffered over 3,000 casualties at Kennesaw Mountain.
Johnston’s Confederates had held their ground. But despite the tactical defeat, Sherman’s strategy remained intact. He had learned that a frontal assault against entrenched Confederates was suicide. He would never attempt another.
Instead, he resumed his flanking movements, forcing Johnston to fall back again and again, ever closer to Atlanta. The Confederate victories at Kennesaw Mountain proved hollow. Johnston had won the battle, but he was losing the campaign. Each retreat brought Sherman closer to his objective, and Johnston closer to the point where he could retreat no further without abandoning Atlanta itself.
The war in the West was reaching its climax, and the fate of the Confederacy hung in the balance.
