In the autumn of 1863, Chattanooga, Tennessee, sat inside a wide bend of the Tennessee River. By October, roughly 70,000 men on both sides were gathered around it. The Union Army of the Cumberland had stumbled into the city after one of the worst defeats in American military history at Chickamauga Creek.
Confederate General Braxton Bragg had broken that army in two days of brutal fighting. Its shattered remnants fled northward through mountain passes until they collapsed inside Chattanooga’s streets. The men who arrived were not an army anymore. They were a crowd carrying rifles. Thousands had no shoes. Many had thrown away their haversacks during the retreat.
Bragg followed them to the heights overlooking the city. He planted his army on Missionary Ridge to the east and Lookout Mountain to the southwest. His artillery could reach nearly any point in the city. His cavalry controlled the roads south and west. The single supply line feeding the Union Army ran 60 miles north through a mountain road so poor that mules died pulling wagons across it.
What followed was slow strangulation. The Army of the Cumberland began eating its horses, then its mules. Rations dropped to a quarter of the standard issue. Men foraged in the mud around slaughterhouses for scraps. A private in the 21st Ohio later recalled watching a horse die in the street and seeing a crowd gather around it with knives before the animal had fully stopped moving.
That was the army Ulysses Grant inherited when he arrived on October 23rd. He came in on horseback along a trail so torn up by rain that his horse nearly fell into a ravine twice. He was soaked through, his injured leg wrapped in a wet bandage. Thomas briefed him in a room lit by a single candle.
Grant looked at the supply problem and saw a solution. The Tennessee River made a long hook west of Chattanooga. On the south bank sat a small community called Brown’s Ferry. If Union forces could seize that crossing and hold it, they could open a water route to a secondary road that bypassed Confederate-controlled roads entirely. The distance from supply depots to the city would shrink from 60 miles to eight.
The plan was already half formed in the mind of General William Baldy Smith, Thomas’s chief engineer. Grant approved it within hours of his arrival. Two days later, it was done. In the darkness before dawn on October 27th, 1,800 Union troops floated silently downstream in flatboats, drifted past Confederate pickets, and seized Brown’s Ferry before any alarm could be raised.
Within a week, wagons were rolling across a pontoon bridge, and supply boats were moving up the river. The men called the new route the cracker line, after the hardtack crackers that began arriving in quantities that felt almost obscene in their abundance. The army that had been collapsing from hunger began to reconstitute itself.
New regiments arrived from the north. William Tecumseh Sherman marched his Army of the Tennessee 400 miles from Mississippi, arriving in late November with four divisions. Joseph Hooker came down from the Army of the Potomac with two more divisions. Grant now had something in the neighborhood of 70,000 men positioned around a Confederate army that had already been weakened by Bragg’s decision to detach Longstreet’s corps northward toward Knoxville.
Bragg still held the high ground. Missionary Ridge ran northeast to southwest for several miles east of the city, rising steeply to a crest that in some places was 500 feet above the plain below. Confederate artillery sat along the top in numbers that should have made any assault from the valley suicidal. On paper, Bragg’s position was formidable.
In practice, it was riddled with errors. The artillery on the crest had been positioned for panoramic effect rather than tactical advantage. Many of the guns could not depress their barrels far enough to hit men climbing the slope directly beneath them. The rifle pits at the base were positioned forward of the natural military crest. The middle of the ridge had been essentially ignored, as though no one could imagine anyone being reckless enough to cross it under fire.
Grant’s plan for the assault on November 25th had a certain logical elegance. Sherman would attack the north end of the ridge, threatening the Confederate right flank. Hooker would sweep in from the southwest after descending from Lookout Mountain, which his men had seized the previous day in a fog-shrouded engagement. Once both flanks were engaged, Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland would advance to the base of the ridge, seize the rifle pits, and demonstrate enough pressure to keep the center from reinforcing either flank.
That was the plan. What happened bore only partial resemblance to it. Sherman’s attack ran into trouble almost immediately. His maps were wrong. The ground his men seized turned out to be a detached hill separated from the main ridge by a deep ravine. Throughout the morning and into the afternoon, he hammered at the actual Confederate position with Patrick Cleburne’s division waiting for him. By early afternoon, Sherman’s four divisions had made no meaningful progress.
Hooker’s approach was delayed by a burned bridge over Chattanooga Creek. He would not arrive in time to contribute meaningfully to the day’s main action. Grant was watching from Orchard Knob, a small rise in the valley that Union forces had seized two days earlier. He could see that Sherman was stalled. He needed something to relieve the pressure.
At half past 3:00 in the afternoon, he ordered Thomas to advance on the rifle pits at the base of Missionary Ridge. What happened next is one of the stranger moments in a war full of strange moments. 23,000 men of the Army of the Cumberland stepped off from Orchard Knob and began moving across the valley floor in parade ground order, six divisions abreast, their flags snapping in the cold November air.
Confederate artillery opened fire, and men began falling, but the lines did not waver. They crossed the open ground and crashed into the rifle pits at the base of the ridge. The Confederate defenders in those forward pits were caught between Union troops pouring over their works from the front and artillery above them that could not depress its fire low enough to help. Hundreds surrendered immediately. Others scrambled up the slope.
The rifle pits were taken in minutes. And then the Army of the Cumberland did something nobody had ordered. They kept going. The men looked up at the crest 500 feet above them and made, collectively and spontaneously, a decision that defied every rational calculation. They had been cooped up in Chattanooga for six weeks, half starved and humiliated, carrying the memory of Chickamauga like a stone in the chest.
The men who had broken them at Chickamauga were up there on that ridge. They found themselves climbing a 500-foot ridgeline into direct fire because the men beside them were climbing, and that seemed, in the logic of that specific moment, like reason enough. The Confederate defenders watched this with disbelief.
The men coming up the slope were not moving in the slow, rigid formation that made volleys decisive. They were climbing in broken groups using every fold in the ground for cover, advancing in rushes. The artillery on the crest was nearly useless against men 30 yards below the muzzles. The Confederate line on the crest was not continuous. It had gaps between regiments.
When the first Union troops reached the crest, men from Phil Sheridan’s division on the right, men from Thomas Woods’ division in the center, they came up at those gaps and poured over the top before the defenders on either side could respond. The moment the crest was breached in multiple places simultaneously, the entire Confederate position unraveled with a speed that shocked both armies.
Bragg tried to rally his men. He rode along the back of the crest on his horse, calling to regiments that were already running. The men did not stop for him. Some kept their discipline and retreated in reasonable order. Others threw down their rifles and ran without any order at all. Bragg himself barely escaped capture.
The whole thing, the crossing of the valley floor, the seizure of the rifle pits, the unsanctioned climb, the breach of the crest, had taken roughly two hours. Two hours to destroy a position that Bragg had been fortifying for six weeks on terrain that every military engineer had called impregnable.
Grant, watching from Orchard Knob, was not pleased in the way a man who had planned something and seen it work might be pleased. He had not planned this. He turned to Thomas and asked who had ordered those men up the ridge. Thomas said it wasn’t him. Gordon Granger said it wasn’t him either. Grant reportedly said somebody would have been in serious trouble if it had gone the other way.
It had not gone the other way. Philip Sheridan’s division pursued the fleeing Confederates well past darkness, capturing guns and prisoners for miles into the night. On the night of November 25th, he was simply happy, and happiness in Sheridan manifested as an urge to keep attacking.
The losses tell part of the story. The Army of the Cumberland lost around 5,800 men killed, wounded, or missing across the three-day operation. Bragg’s Army of Tennessee lost roughly 6,700 along with 40 artillery pieces and thousands of small arms abandoned in the route. By the arithmetic of Civil War battles, these numbers were nearly inexplicable. An attacking army had crossed an open valley and climbed an entrenched ridgeline and lost fewer men than the defenders.
The men of the Army of the Cumberland had something to prove that day that went beyond following orders. Chickamauga had been a wound to their identity as soldiers. When those men went up the slope of Missionary Ridge without being told to, they were not following a tactical doctrine. They were answering a question that had been sitting in their chests since September.
Bragg submitted his resignation the day after the battle. Jefferson Davis accepted it. Bragg spent the rest of the war as Davis’s personal military advisor in Richmond. The fall of Missionary Ridge opened the deep South to Union invasion in a way that had seemed impossible just two months earlier.
Chattanooga was the railway hub of the Western Confederacy. With the city secured and Bragg’s army shattered, Grant had a platform from which the next year’s campaigning could proceed. He would be promoted to Lieutenant General and given command of all Union armies in March 1864. Sherman would inherit command in the West. The campaign that destroyed Atlanta began from the base that the Army of the Cumberland had held through starvation and secured through an uphill charge nobody had ordered.