In the first place, I would have liked to have said then that the battle of Chickamauga was useless; that there was not the slightest necessity for fighting it, and, despite all that has been said, and written, and misrepresented to the contrary, to have shown that the troops could have been easily concentrated in Chattanooga without fighting a battle of any dimensions. The campaign was well managed until the occupation of Chattanooga, and the crossing of Lookout Mountain excited Rosecrans so that he lost his self-possession, when he made the gross mistake of sending his three corps in pursuit, by widely divergent lines, of a foe concentrated immediately in front of his centre. General Thomas made the discovery of this position of the enemy, and without consulting Rosecrans, who was some distance away, ordered McCook, already fifty miles distant on his way to Rome, to return immediately. For this Rosecrans blamed Thomas at first, but allowed himself to be argued into confirming the orders, which order really saved McCook, for another twenty-four hours' delay would have prevented him from reaching the main army. Nevertheless, having retreated west of Lookout Mountain, McCook was safe and could have pursued his way to Chattanooga, whither Thomas, and Crittenden too, could have fallen back had they not waited for McCook to recross the mountain and concentrate upon the west bank of the Chickamauga. Forty-eight valuable hours were lost by this movement, and made the battle of Chickamauga not only a necessity, but a failure. Had the proper plan been pursued, the campaign of Rosecrans would have ended with the successful siege and battles of Chattanooga, without their terrible precursor, Chickamauga.
The engagement itself was the worst managed battle of the war. The public blamed Rosecrans, and the President relieved him for leaving the field and retiring to Chattanooga, but it is not generally known that Rosecrans never saw the battle-field of Chickamauga; yet such is the fact; and he has to this day no knowledge of the roads or configuration of that field from personal examination. He did not actually see a gun fired on that field except when Longstreet broke McCook's corps and pushed through Rosecrans's quarters, which were in the rear of that part of the field. On the first day his quarters were a mile to the right and rear of the line of battle, and two miles from the main fight, which Thomas conducted. During this day's battle Rosecrans paced up and down his quarters, while his engineer sat near by with a map, a pencil, and a compass, endeavoring to locate on the map the line of the battle by its sounds! Never was any thing so ridiculous as this scene. A countrywoman named Glenn, who resided at the house, was called into requisition as an aide, and, standing by the engineer's side, would, in reply to his questions, "guess" the locality of the firing as "about a mile fornenst John Kelly's house," or "nigh out about Reid's bridge somewhar." The firing could be distinctly heard, and as on one or two occasions the cannonading and musketry grew more rapid, I heard Rosecrans, rubbing his hands and fairly quivering with excitement, exclaim, "Ah! there goes Brannin!" or "That's Negley going in!" and really understanding no more about the actual situation than the poor woman who aided Garfield and St. Clair Morton to locate the line on the map. Meantime, on the field, each corps commander fought "on his own hook," and thus Crittenden, who never, on the battle-field, had an opinion of his own, or ever assumed any responsibility that he could possibly avoid, failed to advance his corps when that of Thomas charged and drove the enemy. Had he done so, all the force which Bragg, on that first day of the engagement, had on our side of the Chickamauga River must have inevitably been driven into that stream. As it was, the right flank of Thomas's advancing corps became exposed and turned, and he was forced to retire from the field he had won, the fruits of his victory frittered away by Crittenden's negativeness. All this was undoubtedly owing to Rosecrans's absence from the field. The whole story of this terrible mistake was told that night by General John M. Palmer in an incident which illustrated it very handsomely. I had met him during the day when his troops were somewhat scattered. During the night ensuing, I was sitting at the table of the telegraph operators at Rosecrans's quarters, writing a dispatch, when General Palmer came in.
"Since I saw you this morning," he said, addressing me, "I have got my troops together again. They are in good spirits, and ready for another fight. I have no hesitation in saying to you"—at this moment he saw Assistant Secretary of War Dana at the other end of the table, and would have liked to stop, but had gone too far, and so he added, "and I have no hesitation in saying to you, Mr. Dana, that this battle has been lost because we had no supreme head to the army on the field to direct it."
Nothing was ever truer than this. All that was at one time needed to have secured us a great victory was to have had some one to tell Crittenden that it was his manifest duty to charge with Thomas. The next day was too late; Longstreet was then across the river; McCook was routed; he, Crittenden, and Rosecrans were in Chattanooga (the latter had already telegraphed to Washington that his army was totally defeated and routed); and all that Thomas could hope to do with his remnant of the army was to cover the retreat. This he was enabled to do by the timely appearance of the reserve corps and its two very able leaders, Granger and Steedman.
Granger was the character, Steedman the remarkable man of these two, and both such men as Thomas needed in his emergency. They brought with them the reserve corps of twenty-five thousand men—fifteen thousand of them enlisted men, the other ten thousand were Steedman and Granger themselves. They were each men in whom their troops had implicit confidence, and this doubled their strength, or rather was their strength, for no army can be said to have any strength if it has not confidence in its leaders.
GORDON GRANGER.
Gordon Granger is a rude, rough, and tough soldier, and the confidence of his men was inspired not so much by their knowledge of his ability as of admiration of his bravery. His ability as a director is not great, but he is a good leader of men. Granger is a man without any sense of fear—is more thoroughly indifferent to the dangers of battle than any man I ever remember to have met. He was not the coolest man I have seen on a battle-field; on the contrary, he was what might be called fidgety, in order to avoid saying that he was excitable, which would not be true; but so totally and absolutely fearless that it was not merely apparent, but remarkable, and called forth frequent allusion from his fellow-officers, and the constant admiration of his men. This quality of his nature constituted him a leader, as inspiring the confidence of his men, and this confidence formed the discipline and the morale of his command. Granger ought to have been an artillerist rather than an infantry-man, for he was devoted to the artillery, and the greatest fault of his character as a leader was this predilection for artillery. Not unfrequently Granger would abandon the direction of a corps to command a battery. At Chickamauga he left Steedman to lead his corps while he mounted a battery on General Woods's front, and opened on the enemy a fire which had the effect of calling forth a reply which made Thomas's quarters too hot to be comfortable even for that old salamander. During the first day of the battles of Chattanooga, in November, 1863, Granger devoted himself in the same way to the big guns in Fort Wood, Grant's head-quarters, and so disturbed Grant by his repeated firing of the monsters that the latter had to order him to the front, where his troops had carried a position. The ruling passion was too strong in Granger to be exorcised by a hint, and he had hardly been on the front line five minutes when he had a battery mounted, and was firing away at the rebels at a shorter range.
Granger was a man equally courageous morally as physically, and pursued an object, or criticised a subject or person without the slightest regard to others' opinions. He never shirked a responsibility—in fact, would rather act without authority than not, as giving zest to the undertaking. He was free in his criticisms as Hooker, but ruder. He had as little policy in such things as "Fighting Joe," but nothing of the sarcastic bitterness of that officer. Granger was almost gruff, not only in his criticisms, but in his language, and never disliked a man without showing it. When the army occupied East Tennessee, after the expulsion of Longstreet from the vicinity of Knoxville, Sherman left Granger in command at Loudon with but little food for his troops, and almost no provender for his animals. Granger complained of his wants to Grant, who referred the matter to Sherman. The latter declared that there was plenty of all kinds of supplies in East Tennessee, and in indorsing the papers, advised Granger to live off the country. "Living off the country" was a favorite idea with Sherman, but Granger saw greater difficulty in it, and nearly starved in trying to do so. Shortly after this Grant went to the Potomac, and Sherman succeeded him in command of the Military Division of the Mississippi. While making an inspection of his command in the ensuing spring, Sherman one day arrived at Loudon, Granger's head-quarters. On jumping off the cars at that place, Sherman saw Granger in front of his quarters, and, going up to him, began, in that quick, nervous manner in which Sherman always speaks,