The Commission is also under obligations to the editorial staff of the Wisconsin Historical Society for having seen the volume through the press. The index was compiled by Dr. Louise Phelps Kellogg, a member of that staff; the proof-reading has been the work chiefly of Misses Annie A. Nunns and Daisy G. Beecroft.
R. G. T.
WISCONSIN HISTORICAL LIBRARY
MARCH, 1911
The Chattanooga Campaign
CHAPTER I
The Preliminary Campaign
The Union Army of the Cumberland, commanded by Major-General William S. Rosecrans, was, in June, 1863, encamped at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, thirty-two miles south of Nashville. It had been lying here since January 5, 1863, having marched from the adjacent field of Stone’s River. The Confederate Army of the Tennessee, was, at the same time, in camp near Tullahoma, forty miles south of Murfreesboro. The Confederates had been defeated at Stone’s River, and had fallen back to Tullahoma at the same time the Union forces had taken up their camp at Murfreesboro.
I will designate the campaign of the latter army, beginning on June 23, 1863, by marching from Murfreesboro, as the “Chattanooga Campaign of 1863.” The various engagements in that campaign, beginning with Hoover’s[1] and Liberty gaps[2] on June 24, down to that of Missionary Ridge, at Chattanooga, on November 25, are incidents of that campaign, and necessary parts of it. A description of the campaign immediately preceding, which started when General Rosecrans assumed command of the army of the Cumberland at Bowling Green, Kentucky, in October, 1862, and ended with the victory of the Union forces in the battle of Stone’s River, and the occupation of Murfreesboro—would give a preliminary historical setting.
In fact, a full history of the Chattanooga campaign may well include the entire movements of the army under General Buell, from October 1, 1862, when it marched out of Louisville, Kentucky, in pursuit of Bragg’s army. The latter was then supposed to be in the vicinity of Frankfort, the capital of that State, engaged in the inglorious occupation of coercing the legislature to pass an ordinance of secession. It was also trying to recruit its ranks from the young citizens of Kentucky, and was restocking its commissary from the rich farms of the blue-grass region. Buell found it, on October 8, at Perryville, seventy-five miles southeast of Louisville. He drove it out of Kentucky, and then marched to Bowling Green, on the railroad between Louisville and Nashville, where in the same month he was superseded, as commander, by Rosecrans.
The Atlanta campaign, immediately following that of Chattanooga—beginning on May 4, 1864, and ending in the capture of Atlanta on September 8 of that year—gives a subsequent historical setting: a connection in time as well as in space, to the operations of the Army of the Cumberland in 1863. By referring to these several important military campaigns of the war, the reader may obtain a synchronous perspective of the most important events in the Middle West, in the department occupied by that army.