"General Beauregard asked me to relieve him, gentlemen—"
"Only on furlough for illness," interrupted the Chairman.
"And you have forced him into retirement!" added a member.
The President rose, walked to the window, gazed out on the crowded street for a moment and turned, suddenly confronting his tormentors. He spoke with quiet dignity, weighing each word with cold precision:
"If the whole world asked me to restore General Beauregard to the command which I have given to Braxton Bragg, I would refuse." He resumed his seat and the Committee retired to Senator Barton's house where they found a sympathetic ear.
Bragg was preparing to fight one of the greatest battles of the war. At Chickamauga, the "River of Death," he encountered Rosecrans. At the end of two days of carnage the Union army was totally routed, right, left, and center and hurled back from Georgia into Chattanooga. Polk's wing captured twenty-eight pieces of artillery and Longstreet's twenty-one. Eight thousand prisoners of war were taken, fifteen thousand stand of arms and forty regimental colors.
Rosecrans' army of eighty thousand men was literally cut to pieces by Bragg's fifty thousand Southerners. No more brilliant achievement of military genius illumines history. Chickamauga was in every way as desperate a battle as Arcola—and in all Napoleon's Italian campaigns nothing more daring and wonderful was accomplished by the Man of Destiny.
Bragg had justified the faith of Davis. Rosecrans was hemmed in in Chattanooga, his supplies cut off and his army facing starvation when he was relieved of his command, Thomas succeeding him. Grant was hurried to Chattanooga with two army corps to raise the siege.
With his reënforcements Grant raised the siege, surprised and defeated Bragg's army which had been weakened by the detachment of Longstreet's corps for a movement on Knoxville.
Bragg withdrew his army again into Georgia and resigned his command. The stern, irritable Confederate fighter was disgusted with the constant attacks on him by peanut politicians and refused to hear Davis' plea that he remain at the head of the Western army. The President called him to Richmond and made him his Chief of Staff.