[ORCHARD KNOB AND THE NATIONAL CEMETERY.]
The street cars that run through the open valley country from Chattanooga to Missionary Ridge, pass between two places of peculiar interest to Northern visitors,—Orchard Knob on the left, and the national cemetery on the right. Of these, the Knob remains in all the desolation of war-time; unfenced, and without so much as a tablet to inform the stranger where he is and what was done here; a low, round-topped hill, dry, stony, thin-soiled, with out-cropping ledges and a sprinkling of stunted cedars and pines. Some remains of rifle-pits are its only monument, unless we reckon as such a cedar rather larger than its fellows, which must have been of some size thirty years ago, and now bears the marks of abundant hard usage.
The hill was taken by the Federal troops on the 23d of November, 1863, by way of "overture to the battle of Chattanooga," Grant, Thomas, Hooker, Granger, Howard, and others overlooking the engagement from the ramparts of Fort Wood. The next day, as all the world knows, Hooker's men carried Lookout Mountain, while the multitude below, hearing the commotion, wondered what could be going on above them, till suddenly the clouds lifted, and behold, the Confederates were in full flight. Then, says an eye-witness, there "went up a mighty cheer from the thirty thousand in the valley, that was heard above the battle by their comrades on the mountain." On the day following, for events followed each other fast in that spectacular campaign, Grant and Thomas had established themselves on Orchard Knob, and late in the afternoon the Union army, exceeding its orders, stormed Missionary Ridge, put the army of Bragg to sudden rout, and completed one of the really decisive victories of the war.
For a man who wishes to feel the memory of that stirring time there is no better place than Orchard Knob, where Grant stood and anxiously watched the course of the battle, a battle of which he declared that it was won "under the most trying circumstances presented during the war." For my own part, I can see the man himself as I read the words of one who was there with him. The stormers of Missionary Ridge, as I have said, after making the demonstration they had been ordered to make, kept on up the slope, thinking "the time had come to finish the battle of Chickamauga." "As soon as this movement was seen from Orchard Knob," writes General Fullerton, "Grant turned quickly to Thomas, who stood by his side, and I heard him say angrily, 'Thomas, who ordered those men up the ridge?' Thomas replied in his usual slow, quiet manner, 'I don't know; I did not.' Then, addressing General Gordon Granger, he said, 'Did you order them up, Granger?' 'No,' said Granger; 'they started up without orders. When those fellows get started all hell can't stop them.'" In the heat of battle a soldier may be pardoned, I suppose, if his speech smells of sulphur; and after the event an army is hardly to be censured for beating the enemy a day ahead of time. I speak as a civilian. Military men, no doubt, find insubordination, even on the right side, a less pardonable offense; a fact which may explain why General Grant, in his history of the battle, written many years afterward, makes no mention of this its most dramatic incident, so that the reader of his narrative would never divine but that everything had been done according to the plans and orders of the general in command.
Orders or no orders, the fight was won. That was more than thirty years ago. It was now a pleasant May afternoon, the afternoon of May-day itself. The date, indeed, was the immediate occasion of my presence. I had started from Chattanooga with the intention of going once more to Missionary Ridge, which just now offered peculiar attractions to a stranger of ornithological proclivities. But the car was full of laughing, smartly dressed colored people; they were bound for the same place, it appeared, on their annual picnic; and, being in a quiet mood, I took the hint and dropped out by the way.
There was much to feel but little to see at Orchard Knob; and yet I recall two plants that I found there for the first time; a low gromwell (Lithospermum canescens), with clustered bright yellow flowers, and an odd and homely greenish milkweed (Asclepias obovata). The yarrow-leaved ragwort was there also, and the tall blue baptisia; but as well as I can recollect, not one dainty and modest nosegay-blossom; not even the houstonia, which seemed to grow everywhere, though after a strangely sparse and depauperate fashion. As I said to begin with, the Knob is a desolate place. It made me think of the Scriptural phrase about "the besom of destruction." I can imagine that mourners of the "Lost Cause," if such there still be, might see upon it the signs of a place accursed.
Far otherwise is it with the national cemetery. That is a spot of which the nation takes care. Here are shaven lawns, which, nevertheless, you are permitted to walk over; and shrubbery and trees, both in grateful profusion, but not planted so thickly as to make the inclosure either a wood or a garden; and where the ledge crops out, it is pleasingly and naturally draped with vines of the Virginia creeper. One thing I noticed upon the instant; there were no English sparrows inside the wall. The city is overrun with them beyond anything I have seen elsewhere; within two hundred feet of the cemetery gate, as I passed out, there were at least two hundred sparrows; but inside, on three visits, I saw not one! How this exemption had been brought about, I did not learn; but it makes of the cemetery a sort of heavenly place. I felt the silence as the sweetest of music (it was a Sunday afternoon), and thought instantly of Comus and his "prisoned soul" lapped in Elysium. If I knew whom to thank, I would name him.
A mocking-bird, aloft upon the topmost twig of a tall willow near the entrance, was pouring forth a characteristic medley, in the midst of which he suddenly called wick-a-wick, wick-a-wick, in the flicker's very happiest style. "So flickers must now and then come to Chattanooga," I said to myself, for up to that time I had seen none. It was a pleasure to hear this great songster of the South singing above these thousands of Northern graves. It seemed right; for time and the event will prove, if, indeed, they have not proved already, that the South, even more than the North, has reason to be glad of the victory which these deaths went far to win.
A tablet on one of the cannons which stand upright on the highest knoll informs visitors that the cemetery was "established" in 1863. The number of burials is given as 12,876, of which nearly five thousand are of bodies unidentified. A great proportion of the stones bear nothing but a number. On others is a name, or part of a name, with the name of the State underneath. One I noticed that was inscribed:—