In late October 1863, Ulysses Grant rode into Chattanooga, Tennessee, soaked through and nearly thrown twice when his horse slipped on a road torn apart by rain and wagon wheels. He was not arriving to a victory. He was arriving to a starving army. Six weeks earlier, at Chickamauga Creek, twenty miles south, Confederate General Braxton Bragg had shattered the Union Army of the Cumberland in two days of brutal fighting.
The remnants fled north through the mountain passes and collapsed inside Chattanooga. They arrived without shoes, without packs, without the appearance of an army at all. Bragg followed them to the heights overlooking the city and then did something that confused his own officers. He stopped.
He planted his men on Missionary Ridge to the east and Lookout Mountain to the southwest, terrain that gave him a view of everything inside Chattanooga. And he laid siege. His artillery could reach nearly any point in the city. His cavalry controlled the roads south and west.
The single Union supply line ran sixty miles north over a mountain road so poor that mules died pulling wagons across it. The army began eating its horses, then its mules. Rations dropped to a quarter of 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 with knives before the animal had stopped moving. The men of the Army of the Cumberland were not an army anymore. They were a crowd carrying rifles, sitting in the mud, waiting without knowing what they were waiting for. Grant looked at the dying army and saw a solution.
The Tennessee River hooked west of Chattanooga, and on the south bank of that hook sat a small crossing called Brown’s Ferry. If Union forces seized it, they could open a water route to a road that bypassed the Confederate-controlled routes entirely. The supply distance would shrink from sixty 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, without bureaucratic delay. Two days later, in the darkness before dawn on October 27th, 1,800 Union troops floated silently downstream in flatboats, drifted past Confederate pickets who heard nothing, and seized Brown’s Ferry before any alarm could be raised. Within a week, supply boats were moving up the river and wagons were rolling across a pontoon bridge. The men called the new route the cracker line, after the hardtack crackers that began arriving in quantities that felt, to men who had been starving for six weeks, almost obscene in their abundance.
The army began to reconstitute itself. New regiments arrived from the north. William Tecumseh Sherman marched his Army of the Tennessee four hundred miles from Mississippi, arriving in late November with four divisions. Joseph Hooker came down from the Army of the Potomac with two more.
Grant now had roughly 70,000 men around a Confederate army that had already been weakened when Bragg detached Longstreet’s corps northward toward Knoxville, a decision he would spend the rest of his life trying to explain. Bragg still held the high ground. Missionary Ridge ran for several miles east of the city, rising steeply to a crest that in places stood five hundred feet above the valley floor. Confederate artillery sat along the top in numbers that should have made any assault from the valley suicidal.
The rifle pits at the base were manned by veterans who had beaten this same Union army not two months before. On paper, the position was formidable. In practice, it was riddled with errors nobody had corrected. The artillery had been positioned for panoramic effect rather than tactical advantage.
Many guns could not depress their barrels far enough to hit men climbing directly beneath them. The rifle pits at the base sat forward of the military crest, forcing defenders inside them to expose themselves up the slope. The middle of the ridge, the long open stretch between the base pits and the summit, had been essentially ignored, as though no designer could imagine anyone reckless enough to cross it under fire. Grant’s plan for November 25th had a logical elegance.
Sherman would attack the north end of the ridge, threatening the Confederate right and drawing Bragg’s attention and reserves. 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 the newspapers would call the Battle Above the Clouds. Once both flanks were engaged and Bragg was stretched thin, Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland would advance to the base of the ridge, seize the rifle pits, and hold the center in place. That was the plan.
What happened bore only partial resemblance to it. Sherman’s attack ran into trouble 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, where Patrick Cleburne’s division waited. Cleburne, an Irishman who had learned to fight in the British Army before emigrating to Arkansas, repelled every assault with something approaching contemptuous efficiency. By early afternoon, Sherman 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 to the day’s main action. Grant was watching from Orchard Knob, a small rise in the valley seized two days earlier. He could see Sherman stalled and Hooker absent. He needed something to relieve the pressure on Sherman before Cleburne began counterattacking.
At half past three in the afternoon, he ordered Thomas to advance 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. Twenty-three thousand 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, flags snapping in the cold November air. Confederate artillery on the crest opened fire and men began falling, but the lines did not waver.
They came on at the double quick, crossed the open ground, and crashed into the rifle pits at the base. The defenders there were caught between Union troops pouring over their works from the front and Confederate artillery above 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 in the captured pits looked up at the crest five hundred 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 were up there on that ridge. They found themselves climbing 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 with what one Southern officer later described as disbelief.
They had built their position on the assumption that the slope itself was the defense. But the men coming up were not moving in the slow, rigid formation that made volleys decisive. They were climbing in broken groups, using every fold in the ground, every stump and outcrop for cover, advancing in rushes. The artillery on the crest was nearly useless against men thirty yards below the muzzles.
The Confederate line was not continuous. It had gaps between regiments, places where the defenders had never been fully positioned because Bragg had assumed the slope made density unnecessary. When the first Union troops reached the crest, men from Phil Sheridan’s division on the right, men from Thomas Wood’s 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, calling to regiments that were already running. The men did not stop for him. Some kept discipline and retreated in order.
Others threw down their rifles and ran without any order at all. Bragg himself barely escaped capture, departing the field in a state of agitation his staff found difficult to witness. 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 Bragg had been fortifying for six weeks on terrain every military engineer had called impregnable.
Grant, watching from Orchard Knob as the Confederate line disintegrated, turned to Thomas and asked who had ordered those men up the ridge. Thomas said it was not him. Gordon Granger said it was not 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. Sheridan’s division, which had reached the crest first on the southern portion of the ridge, pursued the fleeing Confederates well past darkness, capturing guns and prisoners for miles into the night. Sheridan was a compact, ferocious man of thirty-two who had spent much of the war in subordinate roles and was about to become one of the most famous generals in American history. On the night of November 25th, he was simply happy, which manifested as an urge to keep attacking, even in victory, in the dark.
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, which tended to punish attackers far more severely than defenders, 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 beyond following orders. Chickamauga had been a wound to their identity as soldiers. They had fought well there, in many places extraordinarily well, and had still been driven from the field.
The weeks in Chattanooga, hungry and besieged, had not improved their sense of themselves. When those men went up the slope 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. The Army of Tennessee passed to William Hardee on an interim basis and eventually to Joseph Johnston, a general Davis distrusted but whose competence he could no longer ignore. Bragg spent the rest of the war as Davis’s personal military advisor in Richmond, a position that sounds important and accomplished very little. The fall of Missionary Ridge opened the deep South to Union invasion in a way that had seemed impossible two months earlier.
Chattanooga was the railway hub of the Western Confederacy. Every significant line connecting the Eastern and Western Confederate theaters ran through or near it. With the city secured and Bragg’s army shattered, Grant had a platform for the next year’s campaigning. He was promoted to Lieutenant General and given command of all Union armies in March 1864.
Sherman inherited command in the West. The campaign that destroyed Atlanta and with it the Confederacy’s industrial and political heart began from the base that the Army of the Cumberland had held through starvation and secured through an uphill charge nobody had ordered.