General Rosecrans had had these general points of danger in mind, and made them known to the Government nearly a month before he crossed the Tennessee. But his request for more men and flanking supports was refused at the War Department with much warmth and most inconsiderate emphasis. This Commercial editorial, therefore, startled him, and his records show that he sent Mr. Halstead a sharp letter intimating that such an editorial was little better than a call to the Jeff Davis government to fall on him. It was, however, the clear common sense of the situation; and if the Washington authorities had heeded it, instead as was their custom, sneering at "newspaper generals" and newspaper ways of carrying on the war, many lives would have been saved at Chickamauga which were lost because of the unequal contest, and there would never have been any questioning of that costly, but no less decided victory.
It is further true that General Peck, stationed in North Carolina, sent word to General Rosecrans, under date of September 6, that Longstreet's corps was passing southward over the railroads. Colonel Jacques, of the Seventy-third Illinois, who had come up from the South, tried in vain for ten days to gain admittance in Washington, to communicate this fact of Longstreet's movement to Halleck and Stanton, and then, without accomplishing it, started West, and reached his command in time to fight with the regiment at Chickamauga. There had been time enough, after General Rosecrans's explanations of his proposed plan, to force Burnside, with twenty thousand men, down from East Tennessee, and to have brought all needed strength for the other flank from the Army of the Tennessee on the Mississippi. Even when ordered up, after the battle, this latter loitered to a degree that its commander will never be able to satisfactorily explain.
To return from this digression, Bragg on the 13th had ordered an attack by three corps on Crittenden. The latter, by his great activity and by the bold operations of Van Cleve, Wood, Palmer, and the brigades of Hazen, Minty, and Wilder, had created the impression of much greater strength than they really had, and Polk moved cautiously. Finally, just as he was ready to attack, his column on the Lafayette road encountered Van Cleve moving on him with a single brigade of infantry. So vigorously did this officer attack that he forced Polk's advance back for three miles, and created the impression of a general Union advance. This disconcerted Polk, and instead of ordering his forces forward, he halted, took up a defensive position, and sent to Bragg for re-enforcements. Thus Negley and Baird, by their pluck and skill in front of overwhelming forces, and Palmer and Crittenden's active divisions and attached brigades on the left, by their unhesitating attacks wherever they developed the enemy, and by this last one delivered in the face of an advance of three full corps on one, had made the concentration of the army possible, and had saved it. The next day Steedman, that lion of battle, had reached Rossville, in immediate support of Crittenden, with two brigades of his own command and two regiments and two batteries temporarily attached, having marched from Bridgeport, a distance of forty miles, in twenty-eight hours.
The appearance and wonderful activity of Hazen, Wilder, and Minty's brigades on the left of Crittenden's, and Steedman's forces of the reserve corps at Rossville, with the fact that McCook was nearing Thomas, and that the latter had extended his left to within near supporting distance of Crittenden, seem to have restrained Bragg from attack in any direction after the failure of his orders to Polk to attack on the 13th until his orders of the night of the 17th for an attack the next day upon Crittenden's left and rear.
During this period of comparative inaction against the Union front, Rosecrans insured the concentration of his army in time for battle. McCook, not understanding the roads along the top of the mountain, and not deeming it prudent to consume the time necessary to explore them, had crossed Lookout twice, at the cost of more than a full day, and appeared with his head of column at General Thomas's camps during the 16th. On the 17th the latter closed the heads of his columns toward Crittenden.
The days of concentration had been a period of the most intense anxiety, of unceasing watchfulness, of unbending determination, of brilliant minor affairs, of unflinching courage, and, withal, of cool calculation and precise execution for every part of the army.
While, on the morning of the 18th, the three corps of the Union army and its reserve were in position where each could support the other if attacked, its supreme effort for position was to come. Bragg's order for battle contemplated crossing the Chickamauga some miles below Lee and Gordon's and driving the Union left under Crittenden back on the center and right under Thomas and McCook, and thus, by thrusting his columns between Rosecrans and Chattanooga, recover that place and force the Union army back into the mountains, from which position it is doubtful if it could have extricated itself.
Bragg's order for attack on the 18th could not be executed. His army was concentrated between Lee and Gordon's and Lafayette. He moved with five infantry and two cavalry corps. Narrow roads, small bridges, difficult fords, and dense forests delayed operations, so that at nightfall of the 18th his troops were not in position to attack. In fact, he was scarcely ready to deliver battle under his plan on the morning of the 19th, when Thomas's unexpected attack, far on the rebel right, deranged Bragg's plan, and forced him to battle several miles from the point where he was about to open it on Crittenden, who he supposed still constituted the Union left.
It was nothing less than the inversion of the Union army under cover of a night that had thus disconcerted Bragg and enabled Rosecrans to array himself for battle between Bragg and Chattanooga, and across the roads and in front of the passes which led to that city. It was this night march of two corps which constituted the supreme movement of the concentration, and which at the same time defeated Bragg's purpose to fight with the back of his own army to Chattanooga with a view to its recovery.
The map given below will make this inversion and final concentration clear, and show the position of the two armies at daylight on the 19th, when the battle began.