The Battle of Chattanooga (November 23–25, 1863): “Another laurel leaf is added to Grant’s Crown”

Guest blog post by Brooks D. Simpson, Foundation Professor of History at Arizona State University and one of the co-editors of The Library of America's four-volume series, The Civil War: Told by Those Who Lived It. The third volume of the series was published earlier this year.

On the afternoon of November 25, 1863, Ulysses S. Grant stood on Orchard Knob east of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and pondered what to do next. It was just over a month since he had arrived at the town where the Army of the Cumberland, in the aftermath of its defeat at Chickamauga on September 20, found itself besieged by the victorious Army of Tennessee under the command of Braxton Bragg. Grant’s job was to break the siege and defeat the enemy.

It was a daunting task. The Confederates looked down upon their beaten foe from defensive positions along Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain. The Rebels had also moved westward along the Tennessee River to sever the Yankee supply line, leaving the Army of the Cumberland in a perilous situation. The Lincoln administration labored to relieve the beleaguered army, dispatching two corps from the Army of the Potomac in Virginia and one from Grant’s Army of the Tennessee in Mississippi to do what they could to pry open the Confederate grip on Chattanooga. Having lost faith in the ability of William S. Rosecrans, the Army of the Cumberland’s commander, to salvage the situation, President Lincoln turned to the victor of Vicksburg to save the day. Elevated in mid-October to a command that spanned the area from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River valley, Grant took advantage of an option provided in his orders to replace Rosecrans with George H. Thomas, who promised Grant that he would hold Chattanooga until his men starved.

By the time Grant arrived at Chattanooga on October 23, the Union forces were ready to take action. Rosecrans and his chief engineer William F. Smith had already framed a plan to reopen a supply line along the Tennessee River. Grant ordered that it be implemented. Meanwhile, he hurried forward William T. Sherman’s troops from the Army of the Tennessee, intending to entrust the key blow of the upcoming battle to Sherman instead of Thomas or Joseph Hooker, who had come westward with the Potomac soldiers. It was not until November 23 that Grant could set his plan in motion. That day Thomas undertook a reconnaissance in force that easily captured Orchard Knob. The result was more than Grant expected. Still, one observer noted that he was “well pleased at what had been accomplished. He seems perfectly cool, and one could be with him for hours, and not know that any great movements were going on. Its a mere matter of business with him.”¹

That night there was a near total eclipse of the moon. Major James A. Connelly of the 123rd Illinois Infantry noted that “it was ominous of defeat, but not for us; we concluded that it meant Bragg because he was perched on the mountain top, nearest the moon.”² As noon came on November 24 “the fiercest and most tremendeous roars of both cannon and musketry” broke out along Lookout Mountain. Hooker’s men scrambled up its slopes, driving the enemy away. That night Union observers could see “Camp fires and flashes of musketry” illuminate the mountain’s slopes: the following morning Grant’s headquarters discovered that Hooker’s men had planted a United States flag at the summit.³ Meanwhile, Sherman had moved into place opposite the Bragg’s right on Missionary Ridge, ready to smash the Confederate flank and drive the Rebels off the ridgeline.

On the morning of November 25 Sherman attacked, only to discover that he has misjudged the terrain in front of him. Patrick Cleburne’s division repelled several Union assaults, and by early afternoon it was clear that Sherman was getting nowhere. On the Union right Hooker’s men found it tough going to make progress against the Confederates, in part because they needed to replace destroyed bridges. At Orchard Knob, Grant, Thomas, and several officers stood in a cold wind and contemplated what to do next as Confederate shells “whizzed past” every few minutes.⁴

By mid-afternoon Grant knew he had to do something. He directed Thomas to order his four divisions to move forward and capture, the Confederate rifle pits at the base of Missionary Ridge, and then await further orders. When the moment was right, he would order them to resume their advance.

It didn’t quite work out that way. After Union artillery commenced shelling the ridge, Thomas’s men “moved forward at the rifle pits of the enemy as if they knew they were going to succeed,” as Smith described it. The Confederates “broke from behind their protection and up the hill, our men following with chear upon chear and the cannon and musketry on top of the hill pouring shot and shell upon them.”⁵

In truth, the advancing Yankees had no choice. Having taken the rifle pits with relative ease, they discovered that they were now vulnerable to deadly fire from the ridge above them. Withdrawal would only expose them to more fire. The only option was to advance without waiting for orders from headquarters. Some commanders thought that the crest of the ridge was the ultimate objective; others thought the advance was to stop at the rifle pits. That confusion no longer mattered. “The line ceased to be a line,” Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs recalled. “The men gathered towards the points of least difficult ascent” and streamed up toward the crest. Although Confederate artillery fired away, Major Connolly later explained that “they couldn’t even scare us, as they couldn’t depress their guns to reach us, but had to blaze away far over our heads.” As Smith described it, “Regiment after regiment gained the top and planted their colors—most of them gaining it by the many roads that passed from the valley to the top of the ridge.”⁶

That was not how Grant had planned it. Meigs recorded how Grant declared that “it was contrary to orders, it was not his plan—he meant to form the lines and then prepare and launch columns of assault, but, as the men[,] carried away by their enthusiasm had gone so far, he would not order them back.” What had seemed at first akin to suicide had turned into a smashing success.⁷

That evening no one could quite believe what they had seen, although it did not take long for the assault on Missionary Ridge to pass into legend. Bragg’s “beaten and discontented army” was “in full retreat”; Tennessee and Kentucky were now safe from invasion. It was, Meigs decided, “[t]he grandest stroke yet struck for our country.… It is unexampled—Another laurel leaf is added to Grant’s Crown.”⁸

Years later the editors of Century Magazine suggested to Grant that Bragg had detached some of his army to attack Knoxville in early November because he thought the Missionary Ridge position was impregnable. With “a shrewd look,” Grant replied: “Well, it was impregnable.”<sup>9

1</sup> William Wrenshall Smith: Journal, November 13–25, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It, 576.
² James A. Connolly to Mary Dunn Connolly, December 7, 1863, ibid., 593.
³ Smith, ibid., 577-78.
⁴ Montgomery C. Meigs: Journal, November 23–25, 1863, ibid., 585.
⁵ Smith, ibid., 580.
⁶ Meigs, ibid., 587; Connolly to Mary Dunn Connolly, November 26, 1863, ibid., 590; Smith, ibid., 580.
⁷ Meigs, ibid., 587.
⁸ Ibid., 589.
⁹ Ulysses S. Grant: Chattanooga, in Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence Clough Buel, eds., Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (1888), vol. III, 693n.

(This item is cross-posted at Civil War 150, cosponsored by The Library of America, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the National Endowment of the Humanities)

Recent Reader's Almanac posts on the Civil War

• Aaron Sheehan-Dean: Jefferson Davis tries to rally Confederate morale (Fall 1863)
• Brooks D. Simpson: The Battle of Chickamauga (September 19–20)
• Brooks D. Simpson: Grant lays siege to Vicksburg (May 22, 1863)

Grant lays siege to Vicksburg: “For nobody else believed in it!”

Guest blog post by Brooks D. Simpson, professor of history, Arizona State University and one of the co-editors of The Library of America's four-volume series, The Civil War: Told by Those Who Lived It. The third volume of the series was published earlier this month.

It had been a long and difficult winter for Ulysses S. Grant. For months his army had struggled in the bayous and swamps around Vicksburg, Mississippi, looking for some way to attack the Confederate citadel that blocked Union control of the Mississippi River. He had come under heavy criticism from many quarters, including some of his own subordinates. One of his corps commanders, the politically connected former congressman John A. McClernand, was busily intriguing to replace him by writing to President Lincoln about his shortcomings. Rumors circulated that Grant was drunk, stupid, or both. Newspaper reporters and editors freely abused him, and the authorities at Washington had dispatched several emissaries whose mission included finding out exactly what was going on in the Army of the Tennessee.

With the coming of spring, however, the roads and the levees began to dry, allowing Grant to make the move he had wanted to undertake since his arrival opposite Vicksburg at the end of January. Once Union gunboats and transports ran pass the batteries defending Vicksburg, Grant would move south, cross the Mississippi, and secure a foothold on dry land that would finally allow him to advance against the enemy citadel. He was aware that much depended upon the success of this maneuver. “I am doing my best and am full of hope for complete success,” he wrote to his father. Although he was aware of the criticism directed at him, “I have no idea of being driven to do a desperate or foolish act by the howlings of the press.” If he was to be removed from command, so be it; until then, he would continue to try “to put down the rebellion in the shortest possible time without expecting or desiring any other recognition than a quiet approval of my course.”¹

The course Grant took over the next month won him more than quiet approval: his campaign against Vicksburg is hailed today as a military masterpiece. Crossing the Mississippi on April 30, the lead elements of Grant’s command defeated a Confederate force at Port Gibson, Mississippi, the following day. As Iowa soldier Taylor Peirce recalled in a letter home, “when the victory was complete you ought to have heard the shout that rung out on the evening air. It was enough to pay us for all our fatigues and dangers.”² Two weeks later Grant entered the state capital at Jackson and drove off the Confederate forces gathering there before turning to face John C. Pemberton’s army east of Vicksburg. At Champion Hill on May 16 and Big Black River on May 17 Union forces scored decisive triumphs, driving Pemberton’s men back into the city. After two attempts to take Vicksburg by assault failed, Grant settled down on May 22 to lay siege to the city and its 30,000 defenders.

Within three weeks in May Grant had won five battles. Outnumbered at the outset of the campaign, he had beaten back two Confederate forces as they had attempted to converge on his army and annihilate it. His men lived off the land as they marched through the Mississippi countryside, while a flustered foe flailed away in an effort to sever non-existent supply lines (Grant had wagon convoys move his army’s medical supplies and munitions). Now he had Vicksburg and its defenders by the throat. William T. Sherman, who earlier had expressed his doubts about the operation, greeted his commander warmly as blue-clad soldiers crossed the Big Black River, declaring, “General Grant, I want to congratulate you on the success of your great plan. And it is ‘your plan,’ too, by heaven, and nobody else’s. For nobody else believed in it!”³

Back in Washington, Grant received an even more important seal of approval. “Whether Gen. Grant shall or shall not consummate the capture of Vicksburg, his campaign from the beginning of this month up to the twenty second day of it, is one of the most brilliant in the world,” Abraham Lincoln wrote to an Illinois congressman who had been critical of his military appointments.⁴ A few weeks later, the President declared that if Grant succeeded in opening the Mississippi, “why, Grant is my man and I am his the rest of the war!”

Little did Lincoln know when he thus spoke that Ulysses S. Grant had entered Vicksburg the previous day, July 4, 1863. Grant had bagged an entire Confederate army for the second time in the war. The President had found his general.

¹ Ulysses S. Grant to Jesse Root Grant, April 21, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It, 152.
² Taylor Peirce to Catharine Peirce, May 4, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year, 187.
³ James F. Rusling, Men and Things I Saw in Civil War Days (1899), 140.
⁴ Abraham Lincoln to Isaac N. Arnold, May 26, 1863, in Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1859–1865 (The Library of America, 1989), 449.
⁵ James F. Rusling, ibid., 17.

(This item is cross-posted at Civil War 150, cosponsored by The Library of America, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the National Endowment of the Humanities)

Recent Reader's Almanac posts on the Civil War

• Aaron Sheehan-Dean: The Battle of Chancellorsville, and the Death of Stonewall Jackson (April 30–May 6, 1863)
• Aaron Sheehan-Dean: General Henry Halleck writes to General Ulysses Grant: “The North must conquer the slave oligarchy or become slaves themselves” (March 31, 1863)
• Aaron Sheehan-Dean: Vallandigham Denounces the Draft (February 23, 1863)
• Brooks D. Simpson: The “Mud March” of the Army of the Potomac (January 1863)

The Battle of Shiloh, April 6–7, 1862: “The scenes on this field would have cured anybody of war.”

The Battle of Shiloh began the morning of April 6, 1862, when six divisions of the Confederate army commanded by General Albert Sidney Johnston and General Pierre G. T. Beauregard launched a surprise attack out of the woods near Shiloh Church in southwestern Tennessee against five divisions of General U. S. Grant’s Union forces. At the end of a day of the fiercest fighting of the war, the Rebels had pushed the Yankees two miles from the opening line of battle. But 25,000 Union reinforcements under General Don Carlos Buell and General Lew Wallace arrived during the night and at daylight on April 7 the Union army counterattacked and regained all the lost ground.

One member of the reinforcing brigades was nineteen-year-old Ambrose Bierce; his recollection of the battle, “What I Saw at Shiloh,” though written almost twenty years later, is often acclaimed as, in S. T. Joshi’s words, “the best piece he ever wrote.” Here he describes being part of the Union counterattack:

But now our commanding officer rode from behind us to the front, waved his hand with the courteous gesture that says après vous, and with a barely audible cheer we sprang into the fight. Again the smoking front of gray receded, and again, as the enemy’s third line emerged from its leafy covert, it pushed forward across the piles of dead and wounded with protruded steel. Never was seen so striking a proof of the paramount importance of numbers. Within an area of three hundred yards by fifty there struggled for front places no fewer than six regiments, and the accession of each, after the first collision, had it not been counterpoised, would have turned the scale.

The scale of Shiloh, even more than the outcome, proved a shock to both sides. As James McPherson notes in Battle Cry of Freedom:

Coming at the end of a year of war, Shiloh was the first battle on a scale that became commonplace during the next three years. The 20,000 killed or wounded at Shiloh (about equally distributed between the two sides) were nearly double the 12,000 battle casualties at Manassas, Wilson’s Creek, Fort Donelson, and Pea Ridge combined. Gone was the romantic innocence of Rebs and Yanks who had marched off to war in 1861.

Grant remarked on the scale of the conflict in his April 8 letter home to his wife:

Again another terrible battle has occurred in which our arms have been victorious. For the number engaged and the tenacity with which both parties held on for two days, during an incessant fire of musketry and artillery, it has no equal on this continent.

But few eyewitnesses registered the impact of Shiloh more dramatically than Brigadier General William T. Sherman in his April 11 letter to his wife. Sherman had just taken command under Grant in March and during the first day of battle at Shiloh his forces took the brunt of the Confederate assault. Sherman himself was wounded in the hand and had three horses killed under him.

The scenes on this field would have cured anybody of war. Mangled bodies, dead, dying, in every conceivable shape, without heads, legs, and horses! I think we have buried 2000 since the fight our own & the Enemy, and the wounded fill horses, tents, steamboats and Every conceivable place. . . . I still feel the horrid nature of this war, and the piles of dead Gentlemen & wounded & maimed makes me more anxious than ever for some hope of an End but I know such a thing cannot be for a long long time. Indeed I never expect it or to survive it.

Also of interest:

• Brooks D. Simpson on what letters by Grant, Lee, Sherman, and McClellan reveal, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• Read the full LOA interview with S. T. Joshi about Ambrose Bierce
• “Attack on Fort Donelson” by General Lew Wallace, a previous Story of the Week
• National Park Service website for the Shiloh battlefield
• “Gone to Shiloh,” a montage of Civil War images arranged to the Elton John/Bernie Taupin song sung by Leon Russell, Neil Young and Elton John

Related LOA works: The Civil War: The Second Year Told by Those Who Lived It (includes letters about Shiloh by Generals Grant and Sherman); Ambrose Bierce: The Devil’s Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs (includes “What I Saw at Shiloh”); Grant and Sherman: Civil War Memoirs (boxed set)

The “death of the book” is greatly exaggerated

In spite of the barrage of reports proclaiming the imminent death of the book (not to mention the recent troubles at Borders), sales of The Library of America’s backlist catalog are booming. For the last six months, backlist sales are up 18% over the same period last year. In fact the holiday season was so robust (and the trend seems to be continuing) that we unexpectedly ran out of a couple of dozen titles and have been scrambling to keep the reprints coming fast enough.

Here’s a list of the titles with the most impressive increases in sales compared to last year:

1. James Thurber: Writings and Drawings
2. Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings
3. William James: Writings 1878–1899
4. Herman Melville: Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick
5. Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America
6. Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations
7. Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose
8. Saul Bellow: Novels 1956–1964
9. Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs and Selected Letters
10. Willa Cather: Later Novels
    (tie) James Fenimore Cooper: The Leatherstocking Tales: Volume One

A few of these are easily explained. Beginning last April, Keith Olbermann ended his Friday night broadcasts reading selections from Thurber, and the publication of Bellow’s letters almost certainly spurred renewed interest in his novels. Similarly, we’ve always seen an increase in sales of Grant’s memoirs whenever a new presidential memoir is published. But others on the list are, we confess, gratifyingly perplexing.

Related post: The Best-Selling Titles in The Library of America’s First Three Decades

Brooks D. Simpson on what letters by Grant, Lee, Sherman, and McClellan reveal

Much as we expected, the sesquicentennial celebration of the Civil War has already begun to revive debates about the character and capabilities of the generals who directed the conflict. Craig Silver on his blog at Forbes recently weighed in on whether Robert E. Lee should be considered a traitor. Finding Lee “extremely interesting” and “a compelling biographical subject,” Brooks D. Simpson, one of the editors of the new Library of America volume, The Civil War: The First Year Told by Those Who Lived It, recently engaged the question of Lee’s attitude toward slavery on his blog.

Letters penned by military leaders (and included in The Civil War: The First Year) often reveal more than the writer intended. In an exclusive interview (PDF) for The Library of America Simpson reflects on how the dispatches selected for the book reflect the quite disparate personalities of the war’s commanders:

LOA: The contributions from the generals display a range of writing styles. Would it be fair to characterize Robert E. Lee as having the more eloquent and elegant style, followed by Grant’s crisp and straightforward dispatches, to the choppier and more colloquial styles of McClellan and Sherman?

Simpson: Lee always seemed to be writing as if someone was looking over his shoulder. He was always thinking about how he might appear to others. Sherman wrote as he thought, quickly, rarely pausing or reflecting on how his words sounded or even what he was saying. Sometimes his letters read as if he was blowing off immense amounts of steam lest he otherwise explode. Grant’s prose at its best is simple and direct, breaking things down to their essentials, a quality of mind that helps explain why he excelled at mathematics. He could explain a problem, consider what might happen, and offer a solution. Unfortunately for McClellan, he shared his emotions and his inner thoughts in letters to his wife, much like Sherman, and so the impression of him that we have is shaped by reading thoughts we might ourselves think but never share in any writing that we thought would be seen by others. See in particular the August 16, 1861, letter in which he observes “the Presdt is an idiot, the old General [Winfield Scott] in his dotage.”

Also of interest:

• The January issue of the Library of America's e-newsletter features additional information about The Civil War, along with other recent news and offers.
• On The New York Times's Disunion blog Harold Holzer, editor of The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now, describes the struggles of Thomas Dow Jones to create a bust of President-elect Abraham Lincoln
• The American Civil War blog posts the address Jefferson Davis delivered 150 years ago today when he resigned from the Senate

Related LOA works: The Civil War: The First Year Told by Those Who Lived It; Grant and Sherman: Civil War Memoirs (boxed set)

Presidents and the classics

The recent spate of articles over President Obama’s summer reading prompts an inquiry into how well acquainted our presidents have been with classic American literature.

In 2009 the McNally Jackson bookstore in New York organized a display of books Barack Obama read in his twenties. The Curious Autodidact offers the complete list of 54 books, in which we find three books by Philip Roth, two each by James Baldwin and Herman Melville, and works by W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, and Richard Wright, plus The Collected Writings of Thomas Jefferson and The Federalist Papers.

A recent post at Robin Bates's blog, On Better Living Through Beowulf, plumbs this list for meaning, wondering “what Obama would see in the ‘I’d prefer not to’ Bartleby” but thinking that in Benito Cereno he might see slaves “doing a complicated dance to present an acceptable face to the outside world.” Bates wonders, “Is Obama more a Jeffersonian or a Hamiltonian, a populist or a federalist? I see strains of both in his thinking.” And, during the 2008 presidential campaign, Jon Meacham apparently received the same list of Obama’s favorites via email. Meacham discerned the same “tragic sensibility” in both Obama and Republican presidential candidate John McCain because each listed For Whom the Bell Tolls among their favorite books: “They embrace hope but recognize the reality that life is unlikely to conform to our wishes.”

The most extensive citation of former president George W. Bush’s reading tastes appeared in Karl Rove’s famous column in The Wall Street Journal, “Bush Is a Book Lover,” in which Rove recounted the annual reading competition he had with the president. His much touted reading of Albert Camus’s The Stranger aside, Bush favored biographies and histories:

His reading [in 2008] included a heavy dose of history—including David Halberstam's The Coldest Winter, Rick Atkinson's Day of Battle, Hugh Thomas's Spanish Civil War, Stephen W. Sears's Gettysburg and David King's Vienna 1814. There's also plenty of biography—including U. S. Grant's Personal Memoirs; Jon Meacham's American Lion; James M. McPherson's Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief and Jacobo Timerman's Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number.

The Clinton Library has posted a list of some of former president William Clinton’s 21 favorite books. In addition to histories and biographies, there are several American classics: The Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, and The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron. It seems odd to find William Faulkner missing from this list since Gabriel Garcia Marquez posted a memorable account of a dinner he and Carlos Fuentes had with Clinton in 1995. When the conversation turned to favorite books:

Clinton said his was the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and Carlos Fuentes stuck loyally to Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner's stellar novel, no question, although others would choose Light in August for purely personal reasons. Clinton, in homage to Faulkner, got to his feet and, pacing around the table, recited from memory Benji's monologue, the most thrilling passage, and perhaps the most hermetic, from The Sound and the Fury.

Jennifer Schuessler recently asked, “Are You Reading What He’s Reading?” in The New York Times. Her assessment of President Obama’s reading tastes led her back to Theodore Roosevelt, who, if not our best-read president, was certainly the only one to confess that “now and then one’s soul thirsts for laughter,” as he does in A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open:

Now and then one’s soul thirsts for laughter.... Mark Twain at his best stands a little apart, almost as much so as Joel Chandler Harris. Oliver Wendell Holmes, of course, is the laughing philosopher, the humorist at his highest, even if we use the word “humor” only in its most modern and narrow sense.... If any man feels too gloomy about the degeneracy of our people from the standards of their forefathers, let him read Martin Chuzzlewit; it will be consoling.

Related LOA works: William Faulkner: Complete Novels; Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs and Selected Letters