MILITARY REMINISCENCES
OF THE CIVIL WAR
BY
JACOB DOLSON COX, A.M., LL.D.
Formerly Major-General commanding Twenty-Third Army Corps
VOLUME II.
NOVEMBER 1863-JUNE 1865
CONTENTS
GRANT IN COMMAND--ROSECRANS RELIEVED
Importance of unity in command--Inevitable difficulties in a double organization--Burnside's problem different from that of Rosecrans--Co-operation necessarily imperfect--Growth of Grant's reputation--Solid grounds of it--Special orders sent him--Voyage to Cairo--Meets Stanton at Louisville--Division of the Mississippi created--It included Burnside's and Rosecrans's departments--Alternate forms in regard to Rosecrans--He is relieved--Thomas succeeds him--Grant's relations to the change--His intellectual methods--Taciturnity--Patience--Discussions in his presence--Clear judgments--His "good anecdote"--Rosecrans sends Garfield to Washington--Congressman or General--Duplication of offices--Interview between Garfield and Stanton--Dana's dispatches--Garfield's visit to me--Description of the rout of Rosecrans's right wing--Effect on the general--Retreat to Chattanooga--Lookout Mountain abandoned--The President's problem--Dana's light upon it--Stanton's use of it--Grant's acquiescence--Subsequent relations of Garfield and Rosecrans--Improving the "cracker line"--Opening the Tennessee--Combat at Wauhatchie.
SIEGE OF KNOXVILLE--END OF BURNSIDE'S CAMPAIGN
Departments not changed by Grant--Sherman assigned to that of the Tennessee--Burnside's situation and supplies--His communications--Building a railroad--Threatened from Virginia--His plans--Bragg sends Longstreet into East Tennessee--Their cross-purposes--Correspondence of Grant and Burnside--Dana and Wilson sent to consult--Grant approves Burnside's course--Latter slowly retires on Knoxville--The place prepared for a siege--Combat at Campbell's station--Within the lines at Knoxville--Topography of the place--Defences--Assignment of positions--The forts--General Sanders killed--His self-sacrifice--Longstreet's lines of investment--His assault of Fort Sanders--The combat--The repulse--The victory at Missionary Ridge and results--Division of Confederate forces a mistake--Grant sends Sherman to raise the siege of Knoxville--East Tennessee a "horror"--Longstreet retreats toward Virginia--Sherman rejoins Grant--Granger's unwillingness to remain--General Foster sent to relieve Burnside--Criticism of this act--Halleck's misunderstanding of the real situation--Grant's easy comprehension of it--His conduct in enlarged responsibility--General Hunter's inspection report.
AFFAIRS IN DISTRICT OF OHIO--PLOT TO LIBERATE PRISONERS AT JOHNSON'S ISLAND
Administrative duties--Major McLean adjutant-general--His loyalty questioned--Ordered away--Succeeded by Captain Anderson--Robert Anderson's family--Vallandigham canvass--Bounty-jumping--Action of U. S. Courts--of the local Probate Court--Efforts to provoke collision--Interview with the sheriff--Letter to Governor Tod--Shooting soldiers in Dayton--The October election--Great majority against Vallandigham--The soldier vote--Wish for field service--Kinglake's Crimean War--Its lessons--Confederate plots in Canada--Attempt on military prison at Johnson's Island--Assembling militia there--Fortifying Sandusky Bay--Inspection of the prison--Condition and treatment of the prisoners.
A WINTER RIDE ON THE CUMBERLAND MOUNTAINS
Ordered to East Tennessee--Preparation for a long ride--A small party of officers--Rendezvous at Lexington, Ky.--Changes in my staff--The escort--A small train--A gay cavalcade--The blue-grass country--War-time roads--Valley of the Rockcastle--Quarters for the night--London--Choice of routes-Longstreet in the way--A turn southward--Williamsburg--Meeting Burnside--Fording the Cumberland--Pine Mountain--A hard pull--Teamsters' chorus--Big Creek Gap--First view of East Tennessee--Jacksboro--A forty-mile trot--Escape from unwelcome duty--In command of Twenty-third Corps--The army-supply problem--Siege bread--Starved beef--Burnside's dinner to Sherman.
WINTER BIVOUACS IN EAST TENNESSEE
Blain's Cross-roads--Hanson's headquarters--A hearty welcome--Establishing field quarters--Tents and houses--A good quartermaster--Headquarters' business--Soldiers' camps--Want of clothing and shoes--The rations--Running the country mills--Condition of horses and mules--Visit to Opdycke's camp--A Christmas dinner--Veteran enlistments--Patriotic spirit--Detachment at Strawberry Plains--Concentration of corps there--Camp on a knoll--A night scene--Climate of the valley--Affair at Mossy Creek--New Year's blizzard--Pitiful condition of the troops--Patience and courage--Zero weather.
GRANT'S VISIT--THE DANDRIDGE AFFAIR
Grant at Knoxville--Comes to Strawberry Plains--A gathering at Parke's quarters--Grant's quiet manner--No conversational discussion--Contrast with Sherman--Talk of cadet days--Grant's riding-school story--No council of war--Qualities of his dispatches--Returns by Cumberland Gap--Longstreet's situation--Destitution of both armies--Railroad repairs and improved service--Light-draught steamboats--Bridges--Cattle herds on the way--Results of Grant's inspection tour--Foster's movement to Dandridge on the French Broad--Sheridan--His qualities--August Willich--Hazen--His disagreement with Sheridan--Its causes and consequences--Combat at Dandridge--A mutual surprise--Sheridan's bridge--An amusing blunder--A consultation in Dandridge--Sturgis's toddy--Retreat to Strawberry Plains--A hard night march--A rough day--An uncomfortable bivouac--Concentration toward Knoxville--Rumors of reinforcement of Longstreet--Expectation of another siege--The rumors untrue.
WINTER QUARTERS IN EAST TENNESSEE--PREPARATIONS FOR a NEW CAMPAIGN
Sending our animals to Kentucky--Consultations--Affair with enemy's cavalry--Roughing it--Distribution of troops--Cavalry engagement at Sevierville--Quarters in Knoxville--Leading Loyalists--Social and domestic conditions--Discussion of the spring campaign--Of Foster's successor--Organization of Grant's armies--Embarrassments in assignment of officers to duty--Discussion of the system-Cipher telegraphing--Control of the key--Grant's collision with Stanton--Absurdity of the War Department's method--General Stoneman assigned to Twenty-third Corps--His career and character--General Schofield succeeds to the command of the Department of the Ohio.
SCHOFIELD IN EAST TENNESSEE---DUTIES AS CHIEF OF STAFF--FINAL OPERATIONS IN THE VALLEY
Fresh reports of Longstreet's advance--They are unfounded--Grant's wish to rid the valley of the enemy--Conference with Foster--Necessity for further recuperation of the army--Continuance of the quiet policy--Longstreet's view of the situation--His suggestions to his government--He makes an advance again-Various demonstrations--Schofield moves against Longstreet--My appointment as chief of staff in the field--Organization of the active column--Schofield's purposes--March to Morristown--Going the Grand Rounds--Cavalry outpost--A sleepy sentinel--Return to New Market--Once more at Morristown--Ninth Corps sent East--Grant Lieutenant-General--Sherman commands in the West--Study of plans of campaign--My assignment to Third Division, Twenty-third Corps--Importance of staff duties--Colonel Wherry and Major Campbell--General Wood--Schofield and the politicians--Post at Bull's Gap--Grapevine telegraph--Families going through the lines--Local vendetta--The Sanitary Commission--Rendezvous assigned by Sherman--Preliminary movements--Marching to Georgia--A spring camp on the Hiwassee--The Atlanta campaign begun.
GRANT, HALLECK, AND SHERMAN--JOHNSTON AND MR. DAVIS
Grant's desire for activity in the winter--Scattering to live--Subordinate movements--The Meridian expedition--Use of the Mississippi--Sherman's estimate of it--Concentration to be made in the spring--Grant joins the Potomac Army--Motives in doing so--Meade as an army commander--Halleck on concentration--North Carolina expedition given up--Burnside to join Grant--Old relations of Sherman and Halleck--Present cordial friendship--Frank correspondence--The supply question--Railway administration--Bridge defences--Reduction of baggage--Tents--Sherman on spies and deserters--Changes in Confederate army--Bragg relieved--Hardee--Beauregard--Johnston--Davis's suggestion of plans--Correspondence with Johnston--Polk's mediation--Characteristics--Bragg's letters--Lee writes Longstreet--Johnston's dilatory discussion--No results--Longstreet joins Lee--Grant and Sherman have the initiative--Prices in the Confederacy.
ATLANTA CAMPAIGN: DALTON AND RESACA
The opposing forces--North Georgia triangle--Topography--Dalton--Army of the Ohio enters Georgia--Positions of the other armies--Turning Tunnel Hill--First meeting with Sherman--Thomas--Sherman's plan as to Dalton--McPherson's orders and movement--Those of Thomas and Schofield--Hopes of a decisive engagement--Thomas attacks north end of Rocky Face--Opdycke on the ridge--Developing Johnston's lines--Schofield's advance on 9th May--The flanking march through Snake Creek Gap--Retiring movement of my division--Passing lines--Johnston's view of the situation--Use of temporary intrenchments and barricades--Passing the Snake Creek defile-Camp Creek line--A wheel in line--Rough march of left flank--Battle of Resaca--Crossing Camp Creek--Storming Confederate line--My division relieved by Newton's--Incidents--Further advance of left flank--Progress of right flank--Johnston retreats.
ATLANTA CAMPAIGN: ADVANCE TO THE ETOWAH
Tactics modified by character of the country--Use of the spade--Johnston's cautious defensive--Methods of Grant and Sherman--Open country between Oostanaula and Etowah--Movement in several columns--Sherman's eagerness--Route of left wing--Of McPherson on the right--Necessity of exact system in such marches--Route of Twenty-third Corps--Hooker gets in the way--Delays occasioned--Closing in on Cassville--Our commanding position--Johnston's march to Cassville--His order to fight there--Protest of Hood and Polk--Retreat over the Etowah--Sherman crosses near Kingston--My reconnoissance to the Allatoona crossing--Destruction of iron works and mills--Marching without baggage--Barbarism of war--Desolation it causes--Changes in our corps organization--Hascall takes Judah's division--Our place of crossing the Etowah--Interference again--Kingston the new base--Rations--Camp coffee.
ATLANTA CAMPAIGN: NEW HOPE CHURCH AND THE KENNESAW LINES
Sherman's plan for June--Movements of 24th May-Johnston's position at Dallas and New Hope Church--We concentrate to attack--Pickett's Mill--Dallas--Flanking movements--Method developed by the character of the country--Closer personal relations to Sherman--Turning Johnston's right--Crossroads at Burnt Church-A tangled forest--Fighting in a thunderstorm--Sudden freshet--Bivouac in a thicket---Johnston retires to a new line--Formidable character of the old one--Sherman extends to the railroad on our left--Blair's corps joins the army--General Hovey's retirement--The principles involved--Politics and promotions.
ATLANTA CAMPAIGN: MARIETTA LINES--CROSSING THE CHATTAHOOCHEE
Continuous rains in June--Allatoona made a field depot on the railway and fortified--Johnston in the Marietta lines--That from Pine Mountain to Lost Mountain abandoned--Swinging our right flank--Affair at Kolb's farm--Preparing for a general attack--Battle of Kennesaw-The tactical problem--Work of my division--Topography about Cheney's--Our advance on the 27th--Nickajack valley reached--The army moves behind us--Johnston retreats to the Chattahoochee--Twenty-third Corps at Smyrna Camp-ground--Crossing the Chattahoochee at Soap Creek--At Roswell--Johnston again retreats--Correspondence with Davis--Mission of B. H. Hill--Visit of Bragg to Johnston--Johnston's unfortunate reticence--He is relieved and Hood placed in command--Significance of the change to the Confederacy and to us.
HOOD'S DEFENCE OF ATLANTA--RESULTS OF ITS CAPTURE
Lines of supply by field trains--Canvas pontoons--Why replaced by bridges--Wheeling toward Atlanta--Battle of Peachtree Creek--Battle of Atlanta--Battle of Ezra Church--Aggressive spirit of Confederates exhausted--Sherman turns Atlanta by the south--Pivot position of Twenty-third Corps--Hood's illusions--Rapidity of our troops in intrenching--Movements of 31st August--Affair at Jonesboro--Atlanta won--Morale of Hood's army--Exaggerating difference in numbers--Examination of returns--Efforts to bring back absentees--The sweeping conscription--Sherman's candid estimates--Unwise use of cavalry--Forrest's work--Confederate estimate of Sherman's campaign.
THE REST AT ATLANTA--STAFF ORGANIZATION AND CHANGES
Position of the Army of the Ohio at Decatur--Refitting for a new campaign--Depression of Hood's army--Sherman's reasons for a temporary halt--Fortifying Atlanta as a new base--Officers detailed for the political campaign-Schofield makes inspection tour of his department--My temporary command of the Army of the Ohio--Furloughs and leaves of absence--Promotions of several colonels--General Hascall resigns--Staff changes--My military family--Anecdote of Lieutenant Tracy--Discipline of the army--Sensitiveness to approval or blame--Illustration--Example of skirmishing advance--Sufferings of non-combatants within our lines--A case in point--Pillaging and its results--Citizens passing through the lines--"The rigors of the climate"--Visit of Messrs. Hill and Foster--McPherson's death--The loss to Sherman and to the army--His personal traits--Appointment of his successor.
CAMPAIGN OF OCTOBER--HOOD MOVES UPON OUR COMMUNICATIONS
Hood's plan to transfer the campaign to northern Georgia--Made partly subordinate to Beauregard--Forrest on a raid--Sherman makes large detachments--Sends Thomas to Tennessee--Hood across the Chattahoochee--Sherman follows--Affair at Allatoona--Planning the March to the Sea--Sherman at Rome--Reconnoissance down the Coosa--Hood at Resaca--Sherman in pursuit--Hood retreats down the Chattooga valley--We follow in two columns--Concentrate at Gaylesville--Beauregard and Hood at Gadsden--Studying the situation--Thomas's advice--Schofield rejoins--Conference regarding the Twenty-third Corps--Hood marches on Decatur--His explanation of change of plan--Sherman marches back to Rome--We are ordered to join Thomas--Hood repulsed at Decatur marches to Tuscumbia--Our own march begun--Parting with Sherman--Dalton--Chattanooga--Presidential election--Voting by steam--Retrospect of October camp-life--Camp sports--Soldiers' pets--Story of a lizard.
NASHVILLE CAMPAIGN--HOOD'S ADVANCE FROM THE TENNESSEE
Schofield to command the army assembled at Pulaski--Forrest's Tennessee River raid--Schofield at Johnsonville--My division at Thompson's--Hastening reinforcements to Thomas--Columbia--The barrens--Pulaski--Hood delays--Suggests Purdy as a base--He advances from Florence--Our march to Columbia--Thomas's distribution of the forces--Decatur evacuated--Pontoon bridge there--Withdrawing from Columbia--Posts between Nashville and Chattanooga--The cavalry on 29th November--Their loss of touch with the army.
NASHVILLE-HOOD'S ARMY ROUTED
Defensive works of Nashville--Hood's lines--The ice blockade--Halleck on remounts for cavalry--Pressing horses and its abuse--The cavalry problem--Changes in organization--Assignment of General Couch--Confederate cavalry at Nashville--Counter-movements of our own--Detailed movements of our right--Difference of recollection between Schofield and Wilson--The field dispatches--Carrying Hood's works--Confederate rout.
PURSUIT OF HOOD--END OF THE CAMPAIGN
Night after the battle--Unusual exposure--Hardships of company officers--Bad roads--Halt at Franklin--Visiting the battlefield--Continued pursuit--Decatur reoccupied--Hood at Tupelo, Miss.--Summary of captures--Thomas suggests winter-quarters--Grant orders continued activity--Schofield's proposal to move the corps to the East--Grant's correspondence with Sherman--Schofield's suggestion adopted--Illness--I ask for "sick-leave"--Do not use it--Promotion--Reinforcements--March from Columbia to Clifton--Columns on different roads--Western part of the barrens--Fording Buffalo River--An illumined camp--Dismay of the farmer--Clifton on the Tennessee--Admiral Lee--Methods of transport--Weary waiting--Private grumbling--Ordered East--Revulsion of spirits--On the transport fleet--Thomas's frame of mind at close of the campaign.
CAMPAIGN IN NORTH CAROLINA--CAPTURE OF WILMINGTON
Rendezvous at Washington--Capture of Fort Fisher--Schofield ordered to North Carolina--Grant and Schofield visit Terry--Department of North Carolina--Army of the Ohio in the field--Correspondence of Grant and Sherman--Sherman conscious of his risks but hopeful of great results--His plan of march from Savannah--Relation of Wilmington to New Berne--Our arrival at Washington--The Potomac frozen--Peace conference at Fort Monroe--Interview with Mr. Stanton--The thirteenth amendment of the Constitution--Political excitement at the capital--A little dinner-party--Garfield, H. W. Davis, and Schenck--Davis on Lincoln--Destination of our army--Embarkation--Steamship "Atlantic"--Visit to Fort Monroe--The sea-voyage--Cape Fear Inlet--General Terry's lines--Bragg the Confederate commander--Reconnoitring his lines--The colored troops--"Monitor" engaged with Fort Anderson--Alternate plans--Marching on Wilmington by the west bank of the river--My column opposite the town--Orders not applicable to the situation--Difficulty of communication--Use of discretion--Wilmington evacuated--A happy result.
THE CONFEDERACY IN STRAITS--JOHNSTON COMMANDS IN THE CAROLINAS--OUR OPERATIONS FROM NEW BERNE--BATTLE OF KINSTON
The Confederates lose Charleston and Columbia--Facing a crisis--Hopeless apathy of Southern people--Mr. Davis's perplexity--Beauregard startles him--Lee calls Johnston to command--Personal relations of leading officers--Dwindling armies--The cavalry--Assignments of generals--The Beaufort and New Berne line--Am ordered to New Berne--Provisional corps--Advance to cover railway building--Dover and Gum swamps--Bragg concentrates to oppose us--Position near Kinston--Bragg's plan of attack--Our own movements--Condition of railroad and river--Our advance to Wise's Forks and Southwest Creek--Precautions--Conference with Schofield--Battle of Kinston--Enemy attack our left front--Rout of Upham's brigade--Main line firm--Ruger's division reaches the field Enemy repulsed--End of first day's fight--Extending our trenches on the left--Sharp skirmishing of the 9th--Bragg's reinforcements--His attack of the 10th--Final repulse and retreat of the enemy.
JUNCTION WITH SHERMAN AT GOLDSBOROUGH--THE MARCH ON RALEIGH--CESSATION OF HOSTILITIES
Occupation of Kinston--Opening of Neuse River--Rebel ram destroyed--Listening to the distant battle at Bentonville--Entering Goldsborough--Meeting Sherman--Grant's congratulations--His own plans--Sketch of Sherman's march--Lee and Johnston's correspondence--Their gloomy outlook--Am made commandant of Twenty-third Corps--Terry assigned to Tenth--Schofield promoted in the Regular Army--Stanton's proviso--Ill effects of living on the country--Stopping it in North Carolina--Camp jubilee over the fall of Richmond--Changes in Sherman's plans--Our march on Smithfield--House-burning--News of Lee's surrender--Overtures from Governor Vance--Entering Raleigh--A mocking-bird's greeting--Further negotiations as to North Carolina--Johnston proposes an armistice--Broader scope of negotiations--The Southern people desire peace--Terrors of non-combatants assuaged--News of Lincoln's assassination--Precautions to preserve order--The dawn of peace.
THE SHERMAN-JOHNSTON CONVENTION
Sherman's earlier views of the slavery question--Opinions in 1864--War rights vs. statesmanship--Correspondence with Halleck--Conference with Stanton at Savannah--Letter to General Robert Anderson--Conference with Lincoln at City Point--First effect of the assassination of the President--Situation on the Confederate side--Davis at Danville--Cut off from Lee--Goes to Greensborough--Calls Johnston to conference--Lee's surrender--The Greensborough meeting--Approach of Stoneman's cavalry raid--Vance's deputation to Sherman--Davis orders their arrest--Vance asserts his loyalty--Attempts to concentrate Confederate forces on the Greensborough-Charlotte line--Cabinet meeting--Overthrow of the Confederacy acknowledged--Davis still hopeful--Yields to the cabinet--Dictates Johnston's letter to Sherman--Sherman's reply--Meeting arranged--Sherman sends preliminary correspondence to Washington--The Durham meeting--The negotiations--Two points of difficulty--Second day's session--Johnston's power to promise the disbanding of the civil government--The terms agreed upon--Transmittal letters--Assembling the Virginia legislature--Sherman's wish to make explicit declaration of the end of slavery--The assassination affecting public sentiment--Sherman's personal faith in Johnston--He sees the need of modifying the terms--Grant's arrival.
THE SECOND SHERMAN-JOHNSTON CONVENTION--SURRENDER
Davis's last cabinet meeting--Formal opinions approving the "Basis"--"The Confederacy is conquered"--Grant brings disapproval from the Johnston administration--Sherman gives notice of the termination of the truce--No military disadvantage from it--Sherman's vindication of himself--Grant's admirable conduct--Johnston advises Davis to yield--Capitulation assented to, but a volunteer cavalry force to accompany Davis's flight--A new conference at Durham--Davis's imaginary treasure--Grant's return to Washington--Terms of the parole given by Johnston's army--The capitulation complete--Schofield and his army to carry out the details--The rest of Sherman's army marches north--His farewell to Johnston--Order announcing the end of the war--Johnston's fine reply--Stanton's strange dispatch to the newspapers--Its tissue of errors--Its baseless objections--Sherman's exasperation--Interference with his military authority over his subordinates--Garbling Grant's dispatch--Sherman strikes back--Breach between Sherman and Halleck--It also grew out of the published matter--Analysis of the facts--My opinion as recorded at the time.
PAROLING AND DISBANDING JOHNSTON'S ARMY--CLOSING SCENES OF THE WAR IN NORTH CAROLINA
General Schofield's policy when left in command--Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in force--Davis's line of flight from Charlotte, N. C.--Wade Hampton's course of conduct--Fate of the cabinet officers--Bragg, Wheeler, and Cooper--Issuing paroles to Johnston and his army--Greensborough in my district--Going there with Schofield--Hardee meets and accompanies us--Comparing memories--We reach Johnston's headquarters--Condition of his army--Our personal interview with him--The numbers of his troops--His opinion of Sherman's army--Of the murder of Lincoln--Governor Morehead's home--The men in gray march homeward--Incident of a flag--The Salisbury prison site--Treatment of prisoners of war--Local government in the interim--Union men--Elements of new strife--The negroes--Household service--Wise dealing with the labor question--No money--Death of manufactures--Necessity the mother of invention--Uses of adversity--Peace welcomed--Visit to Greene's battle-field at Guilford-Old-Court-House.
MILITARY REMINISCENCES
OF THE CIVIL WAR
GRANT IN COMMAND--ROSECRANS RELIEVED
Importance of unity in command--Inevitable difficulties in a double organization--Burnside's problem different from that of Rosecrans--Cooperation necessarily imperfect--Growth of Grant's reputation--Solid grounds of it--Special orders sent him--Voyage to Cairo--Meets Stanton at Louisville--Division of the Mississippi created--It included Burnside's and Rosecrans's departments--Alternate forms in regard to Rosecrans--He is relieved--Thomas succeeds him--Grant's relations to the change--His intellectual methods--Taciturnity--Patience--Discussions in his presence--Clear judgments--His "good anecdote"--Rosecrans sends Garfield to Washington--Congressman or General--Duplication of offices--Interview between Garfield and Stanton--Dana's dispatches--Garfield's visit to me--Description of the rout of Rosecrans's right wing--Effect on the general--Retreat to Chattanooga--Lookout Mountain abandoned--The President's problem--Dana's light upon it--Stanton's use of it--Grant's acquiescence--Subsequent relations of Garfield and Rosecrans--Improving the "cracker line"--Opening the Tennessee--Combat at Wauhatchie.
It is very evident that, at the close of September, Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Stanton had become satisfied that a radical change must be made in the organization of the Western armies. The plan of sending separate armies to co-operate, as Rosecrans's and Burnside's had been expected to do, was in itself vicious. It is, after a fashion, an attempt of two to ride a horse without one of them riding behind. Each will form a plan for his own army, as indeed he ought to do, and when one of them thinks the time has come for help from the other, that other may be out of reach or committed to operations which cannot readily be dropped. It is almost axiomatic that in any one theatre of operations there must be one head to direct. [Footnote: Napoleon used to ridicule the vicious practice of subdividing armies in the same theatre of war. He called it putting them up in small parcels, "des petits paquets." Memoirs of Gouvion St.-Cyr, vol. iv.]
The official correspondence of the summer shows a constantly growing faith in Grant. His great success at Vicksburg gave him fame and prestige, but there was beside this a specific effect produced on the President and the War Department by his unceasing activity, his unflagging zeal, his undismayed courage. He was as little inclined to stop as they at Washington were inclined to have him. He was as ready to move as they were to ask it, and anticipated their wish. He took what was given him and did the best he could with it. The result was that the tone adopted toward him was very different from that used with any other commander. It was confidently assumed that he was doing all that was possible, and there was no disposition to worry him with suggestions or orders.
When the operations in the Mississippi valley were reduced to secondary importance by the surrender of Vicksburg, it was certain that Grant would be called to conduct one of the great armies which must still make war upon the rebellion. In a visit to New Orleans to consult with Banks, he had been lamed by a fractious horse and was disabled for some days. As soon as he was able to ride in an ambulance he was on duty, and was assured by General Halleck that plenty of work would be cut out for him as soon as he was fully recovered. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxx. pt. iv. p. 274.] At the beginning of October he was ordered to take steamboat and go to Cairo, where he would find special instructions. This dispatch reached him on the 9th, and the same day he sailed for Cairo, arriving there on the 16th, when he learned that an officer of the War Department would meet him at Louisville. Hastening to Louisville by rail, he met Mr. Stanton himself, who had travelled incognito from Washington. The Secretary of War produced the formal orders which had been drawn at the War Department creating the Division of the Mississippi, which included Rosecrans's, Burnside's, and his own departments, and put him in supreme command of all. [Footnote: Id., p. 404.] The order was drawn in two forms, one relieving Rosecrans and putting Thomas in command of the Department of the Cumberland, and the other omitting this. After consultation with Mr. Stanton, the order relieving Rosecrans was issued and Grant published his own assumption of command. His staff had accompanied him, on a hint contained in an earlier dispatch, and after a day spent with the Secretary of War (October 18-19) he immediately proceeded to Chattanooga. He was hardly able to mount a horse, and when on foot had to get about on crutches.
It has been commonly assumed that the choice whether he would remove Rosecrans was submitted to Grant as a personal question affecting his relations with his subordinates, and that he decided it on the ground of his dislike of Rosecrans. The records of the official correspondence seem to me to show the fact rather to be that Rosecrans's removal was thought best by the Secretary, the doubt being whether Grant would prefer to retain him instead of meeting the embarrassments incident to so important a change in the organization of the beleaguered army. Grant was always disposed to work with the tools he had, and through his whole military career showed himself averse to meddling much with the organization of his army. He had strong likes and dislikes, but was very reticent of his expression of them. He would quietly take advantage of vacancies or of circumstances to put men where he wanted them, but very rarely made sweeping reorganization. If any one crossed him or became antagonistic without open insubordination, he would bear with it till an opportunity came to get rid of the offender. He hated verbal quarrelling, never used violent language, but formed his judgments and bided his time for acting on them. This sometimes looked like a lack of frankness, and there were times when a warm but honest altercation would have cleared the air and removed misunderstandings. It was really due to a sort of shyness which was curiously blended with remarkable faith in himself. From behind his wall of taciturnity he was on the alert to see what was within sight, and to form opinions of men and things that rooted fast and became part of his mental constitution. He sometimes unbent and would talk with apparent freedom and ease; but, so far as I observed, it was in the way of narrative or anecdote, and almost never in the form of discussion or comparison of views. It used to be said that during the Vicksburg campaign he liked to have Sherman and McPherson meet at his tent, and would manage to set them to discussing the military situation. Sherman would be brilliant and trenchant; McPherson would be politely critical and intellectual; Rawlins would break in occasionally with some blunt and vigorous opinion of his own: Grant sat impassable and dumb in his camp-chair, smoking; but the lively discussion stimulated his strong commonsense, and gave him more assured confidence in the judgments and conclusions he reached. He sometimes enjoyed with a spice of real humor the mistaken assumption of fluent men that reticent ones lack brains. I will venture to illustrate it by an anecdote of a date subsequent to the war. One day during his presidency, he came into the room where his cabinet was assembling, quietly laughing to himself. "I have just read," said he, "one of the best anecdotes I have ever met. It was that John Adams after he had been President was one day taking a party out to dinner, at his home in Quincy, when one of his guests noticed a portrait over the door and said, 'You have a fine portrait of Washington there, Mr. Adams!' 'Yes,' was the reply, 'and that old wooden head made his fortune by keeping his mouth shut;'" and Grant laughed again with uncommon enjoyment. The apocryphal story gained a permanent interest in Grant's mouth, for though he showed no consciousness that it could have any application to himself, he evidently thought that keeping the mouth shut was not enough in itself to ensure fortune, and at any rate was not displeased at finding such a ground of sympathy with the Father of his country. Grant's telling the story seemed to me, under the circumstances, infinitely more amusing than the original.
During the month which followed the battle of Chickamauga, Rosecrans had elaborated his report of the campaign. On the 15th of October he ordered General Garfield to proceed to Washington with it and to explain personally to the Secretary of the War and the General-in-Chief the details of the actual condition of the army, its lines of communication, the scarcity of supplies and especially of forage for horses and mules, with all other matters which would assist the War Department in fully appreciating the situation. Garfield's term as member of Congress began with the 4th of March preceding, but the active session would only commence on the first Monday of December. There was some doubt as to the status of army officers who were elected to Congress. General Frank P. Blair had been elected as well as Garfield, and it was in Blair's case that the issue was made by those who objected to the legality of what they called a duplication of offices. Later in the session of Congress it was settled that the two commissions were incompatible, and that one must choose between them. Blair resigned his seat at Washington and returned to Sherman's army. Garfield, who had found camp life a cause of oft-recurring and severe disease of his digestive system, resigned his army commission and retained his place in Congress. When he left Rosecrans, however, he was still hopeful that the two duties might be found consistent, and looked forward to further military employment.
On his way to Nashville, Garfield made a careful inspection of the road to Jasper and Bridgeport, and reported it with recommendations for the improvement of the transportation service. He arrived at Nashville on the 19th of October, and was met by the rumor that the Secretary of War and General Grant were at Louisville, and that Grant would come down the road by special train next day. He telegraphed the news to Rosecrans with the significant question, What does it mean? Rosecrans knew what it meant, for Grant's order assuming command and relieving him had been earlier telegraphed to him, and he had already penned his dignified and appropriate farewell order to the Army of the Cumberland.
Mr. Stanton awaited Garfield's coming at Louisville, and there was a full and frank interview between them. The order relieving Rosecrans ended Garfield's official connection with him, and, even if it had not been so, it would have been his duty to make no concealments in answering the earnest and eager cross-questioning of the Secretary. Mr. Stanton had not only had dispatches full of information from General Meigs, who now also met him at Louisville, but his assistant, Mr. Charles A. Dana, had gone early to Chattanooga, had been present at the battle of Chickamauga, and had there some perilous experiences of his own. Dana was still with Rosecrans, and had sent to the Secretary a series of cipher dispatches giving a vivid interior view of affairs and of men. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxx. pt. i. pp. 220, etc.; vol. xxxi. pt. i. pp. 69-74, 265; pt. ii. pp. 52-70.] The talented journalist had known how to give his communications the most lively effect, and they had great weight with the Secretary. They were not always quite just, for they were written at speed under the spell of first impressions, and necessarily under the influence of army acquaintances in whom he had confidence. There is, however, no evidence that he was predisposed to judge harshly of Rosecrans, and the unfavorable conclusions he reached were echoed in Mr. Stanton's words and acts. [Footnote: Since this was written Mr. Dana has published his Recollections, based on his dispatches, but the omissions make it still important to read the originals.] The Secretary of War was consequently prepared to show such knowledge of the battle of Chickamauga and the events which followed it, that it would be impossible for Garfield to avoid mention of incidents which bore unfavorably upon Rosecrans. He might have been silent if Mr. Stanton had not known so well how to question him, but when he found how full the information of the Secretary was, his duty as a military subordinate coincided with his duty as a responsible member of Congress, and he discussed without reserve the battle and its results. Mr. Stanton also questioned General Steedman, who was on his way home, and wrote to his assistant in Washington for the information of the President, that his interview with these officers more than confirmed the worst that had reached him from other sources as to the conduct of Rosecrans, and the strongest things he had heard of the credit due to Thomas. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. i. p. 684.]
Garfield came from Louisville to Cincinnati, where I was on duty at headquarters of my district, and found me, as may easily be believed, full of intense interest in the campaign. I had been kept informed of all that directly affected Burnside, my immediate chief, but my old acquaintance with Rosecrans and sincere personal regard for him made me desire much more complete information touching his campaign than was given the public. Garfield's own relations to it were hardly less interesting to me, and our intimacy was such that our thoughts at that time were common property. He spent a day with me, and we talked far into the night, going over the chief points of the campaign and his interview with Mr. Stanton. His friendship for Rosecrans amounted to warm affection and very strong personal liking. Yet I found he had reached the same judgment of his mental qualities and his capacity as a commander which I had formed at an earlier day. Rosecrans's perceptions were acute and often intuitively clear. His fertility was great. He lacked poise, however, and the steadiness of will necessary to handle great affairs successfully. Then there was the fatal defect of the liability to be swept away by excitement and to lose all efficient control of himself and of others in the very crisis when complete self-possession is the essential quality of a great general.
We sat alone in my room, face to face, at midnight, as Garfield described to me the scene on the 20th of September on the battlefield, when through the gap in the line made by the withdrawal of Wood's division the Confederates poured. He pictured the astonishment of all who witnessed it, the doubt as to the evidence of their own senses; the effort of Sheridan further to the right to change front and strike the enemy in flank; the hesitation of the men; the wavering and then the breaking of the right wing into a panic-stricken rout, each man running for life to the Dry Valley road, thinking only how he might reach Chattanooga before the enemy should overtake him, officers and men swept along in that most hopeless of mobs, a disorganized army. He described the effort of Rosecrans and the staff to rally the fugitives and to bring a battery into action, under a shower of flying bullets and crashing shells. It failed, for men were as deaf to reason in their mad panic as would be a drove of stampeded cattle. What was needed was a fresh and well-organized division to cover the rout, to hold back the enemy, and to give time for rallying the fugitives. But no such division was at hand, and the rush to the rear could not be stayed. The enemy was already between the headquarters group and Brannan's division which Wood had joined, and these, throwing back the right flank, were presenting a new front toward the west, where Longstreet, preventing his men from pursuing too far, turned his energies to the effort to break the curved line of which Thomas at the Snodgrass house was the centre.
The staff and orderlies gathered about Rosecrans and tried to make their way out of the press. With the conviction that nothing more could be done, mental and physical weakness seemed to overcome the general. He rode silently along, abstracted, as if he neither saw nor heard. Garfield went to him and suggested that he be allowed to try to make his way by Rossville to Thomas, the sound of whose battle seemed to indicate that he was not yet broken. Rosecrans assented listlessly and mechanically. As Garfield told it to me, he leaned forward, bringing his excited face close to mine, and his hand came heavily down upon my knee as in whispered tones he described the collapse of nerve and of will that had befallen his chief. The words burned themselves into my memory.
Garfield called for volunteers to accompany him, but only a single orderly with his personal aide-de-camp followed him; and he made his way to the right, passed through the gap at Rossville, saw Granger, who was preparing to move Steedman's division to the front, and rode on to join Thomas, running the gantlet of the enemy's fire as he passed near them on the Kelley farm. He never tired of telling of the calm and quiet heroism of Thomas, holding his position on the horse-shoe ridge till night put an end to the fighting, and then retiring in perfect order to the Rossville Gap, to which he was ordered. This part of the story has been made familiar to all. An eyewitness has told how, when Rosecrans reached Chattanooga, he had to be helped from his horse. His nerves were exhausted by the strain he had undergone, and only gradually recovered from the shock. [Footnote: Cist, The Army of the Cumberland, p. 226.] His first dispatch to Washington was the announcement that his army had met with a serious disaster, the extent of which he could not himself tell. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxx. pt. i. p. 142.] The most alarming feature of the news was that he was himself a dozen miles from the battlefield and had evidently lost all control of events. The truth turned out to be that two divisions would include all the troops that were broken,--namely, Sheridan's, two brigades of Davis's, and one of Van Cleve's,--whilst seven other divisions stood firm and Thomas assumed command of them. As these retired in order, and as the enemy had suffered more in killed and wounded than our army, Bragg was entitled to claim a victory only because the field was left in his hands with large numbers of wounded and numerous trophies of cannon. It was then claimed by some of our best officers, and is still an open question whether, if Rosecrans had been with Thomas and, calling to him Granger's troops, had resumed the offensive, the chances were not in our favor, and whether Bragg might not have been the one to retreat.
Unfortunately there was no doubt that the general was defeated, whether his army was or not. The most cursory study of the map showed that the only practicable road by which the army could be supplied was along the river from Bridgeport. Lookout Mountain commanded this; and not to hold Lookout was practically to announce a purpose to retreat into middle Tennessee. Dana informed the Secretary of War that Garfield and Granger had urged Rosecrans to hold the mountain, but that he would not listen to it. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxx. pt. i. p. 215.] He could much better afford to intrench a division there than Bragg could, for the Confederates were tied to Mission Ridge by the necessity of covering the Atlanta Railroad, which was their line of supply, and any troops put across the Chattanooga valley were in the air and likely to be cut off if the long and thin line which connected them were broken. Had Lookout Mountain been held, Hooker could have come at once into his place in line when he reached the Tennessee, and the reinforced army would have been ready, as soon as it was rested and supplied, to resume an offensive campaign. Instead of this, the country was for a month tortured with the apprehension that the Army of the Cumberland must retreat because it could not be fed by means of the mountain road over Walden's Ridge. After the fortifications at Chattanooga were strong enough to put the place beyond danger from direct assault, it would only be adding to the danger of starvation to send more men there before a better line of supply was opened.
The problem which the President and Secretary of War pondered most anxiously was the capacity and fitness of Rosecrans to conduct the new campaign. Would he rise energetically to the height of the great task, or would he sink into the paralysis of will which so long followed the battle of Stone's River? Dana's dispatches were studied for the light they threw on this question more than for all the other interesting details they contained. For the first three or four days, they teemed with impressions of the battle itself and the cause of the disaster to the right wing. Then came the assurance that Chattanooga was safe and could withstand a regular siege. Next, in logical order as in time, was the attempt to look into the future and to estimate the commander by the way he grappled with the difficulties of the situation. On the 27th of September Dana discussed at some length the army feeling toward the corps and division commanders who had been involved in the rout, and the embarrassment of Rosecrans in dealing with the subject. "The defects of his character," he wrote, "complicate the difficulty. He abounds in friendliness and approbativeness, and is greatly lacking in firmness and steadiness of will. He is a temporizing man, dreads so heavy an alternative as is now presented." [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxx. pt. i p. 202.] On the 12th of October he returned to the subject of Rosecrans's characteristics, mentioning his refusal to listen to the urgent reasons why he should hold Lookout Mountain to protect his supply line. "Rosecrans," he said, "who is sometimes as obstinate and inaccessible to reason as at others he is irresolute, vacillating, and inconclusive, rejected all their arguments, and the mountain was given up." [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxx. pt. i. p. 215.] Picturing the starvation of the horses and mules and the danger of it for the soldiers, he added: "In the midst of this the commanding general devotes that part of the time which is not employed in pleasant gossip, to the composition of a long report to prove that the government is to blame for his failure. It is my duty to declare that while few persons exhibit more estimable social qualities, I have never seen a public man possessing talent with less administrative power, less clearness and steadiness in difficulty, and greater practical incapacity than General Rosecrans. He has inventive fertility and knowledge, but he has no strength of will and no concentration of purpose. His mind scatters. There is no system in the use of his busy days and restless nights, no courage against individuals in his composition, and with great love of command he is a feeble commander." [Footnote:Ibid.]
It needs no proof that such a report would have great influence at Washington, and if it at all harmonized with the drift of impressions caused by the inaction and the wrangling of the summer, it would be decisive. It was with it in his pocket that Mr. Stanton had cross-questioned Garfield, and drew out answers which, as he said, corroborated it. The same correspondence had set forth the universal faith in Thomas's imperturbable steadiness and courage, and the admiring faith in him which had possessed the whole army. The natural and the almost necessary outcome of it all was that Thomas should be placed in command of the Department and Army of the Cumberland, and Grant in supreme control of the active operations in the whole valley of the Mississippi. As to Rosecrans's removal, Grant did not bring it about, he only acquiesced in it; willingly, no doubt, but without initiative or suggestion on his part. [Footnote: Grant's Personal Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 18.]
It may be well here to say a word upon the subsequent relations of Garfield and Rosecrans. In the next winter a joint resolution was offered in Congress thanking General Thomas and the officers and men under his command for their conduct in the battle of Chickamauga. The established etiquette in such matters is to name the general commanding the army, whose services are recognized, and not his subordinates; these are included in the phrase, "officers and men under his command." To omit Rosecrans's name and to substitute Thomas's was equivalent to a public condemnation of the former. Garfield had been promoted to be major-general for his conduct in the battle, and it was popularly understood that this meant his special act in volunteering to make his way to Thomas after Rosecrans and the staff were swept along the Dry Valley road in the rout. The promotion was recognized as a censure by implication on his chief. As Garfield was now chairman of the committee of the House of Representatives on military affairs, he was placed in a peculiarly embarrassing position. His sincere liking for Rosecrans made him wish to spare him the humiliation involved in the passage of such a resolution, and his generosity was the more stimulated by the knowledge that his own promotion had been used to emphasize the shortcoming of his friend. He could not argue that on the battlefield itself there had been no faults committed; but he was very earnest in insisting that the general strategy of the campaign had been admirable, and the result in securing Chattanooga as a fortified base for future operations had been glorious. He therefore moved to amend the resolution by inserting Rosecrans's name and modifying the rest so as to make it apply to the campaign and its results. He supported this in an eloquent speech which dwelt upon the admirable parts of Rosecrans's generalship and skilfully avoided the question of personal conduct on the field. He carried the House with him, but a joint resolution must pass the Senate also, and it never came to a vote in that body.
When in 1880 Garfield was elected President, and in the midst of a heated campaign had to run the gantlet of personal attacks infinitely worse than the picket fire under which he had galloped across the Kelley farm, a letter was produced which he had written to Mr. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, in June, 1863, when he was urging Rosecrans to terminate the inglorious delays at Murfreesboro by marching on Tullahoma. In his letter to Mr. Chase he had expressed in warmest terms his personal affection for Rosecrans, but had also condemned the summer's delays as unnecessary and contrary to military principles. In the violence of partisan discussion the letter was seized upon as evidence of a breach of faith toward his chief, who was now acting with the political party opposed to Garfield's election. The letter was a personal one, written in private friendship to Mr. Chase, with whom Garfield had kept up an occasional correspondence since the beginning of the war. I had done the like, for Mr. Chase had admitted us both to his intimacy when he was Governor of Ohio. It cannot for a moment be maintained that military subordination is inconsistent with temperate and respectful criticism (for such this was) of a superior, in private communications to a friend. But it was argued that the relation of chief of staff involved another kind of confidence. It unquestionably involved the duty of observing and maintaining perfectly every confidence actually reposed in him. But the public acts of the chief were anything but confidential. They were in the face of all the world, and these only were the subject of his private and friendly criticism. That criticism he had, moreover, expressed to Rosecrans himself as distinctly as he wrote it to Mr. Chase, and had declared it publicly in the written consultation or council of war to which the corps and division commanders were called. [Footnote:Ante, vol. i. p. 483.]
But Garfield was also at that time a member of Congress, having duties to the President, the Cabinet, and his colleagues and fellow members growing out of that relation. Rosecrans not only knew this, but was supposed by many to have invited Garfield to take the staff appointment partly by reason of this. Under all the circumstances, therefore, the ground of complaint becomes shadowy and disappears. Rosecrans, however, was made to think he had suffered a wrong. He forgot the generosity with which Garfield had saved him from humiliation in the session of 1863-64, and said bitter things which put an end to the friendly relations which had till then been maintained.
To return to Chattanooga in October, 1863: one thing remained to be done before a new campaign could begin. A better mode of supplying the army must be found. Thomas had answered Grant's injunction to hold Chattanooga at all hazards by saying, "I will hold the town till we starve." The memorable words have been interpreted as a dauntless assurance of stubborn defence; but they more truly meant that the actual peril was not from the enemy, but from hunger. Rosecrans had begun to feel the necessity of opening a new route to Bridgeport before he was relieved, and on the very day he laid down the command, he had directed Brigadier-General W. F. Smith, sent to him to be chief engineer of his army since the battle, to examine the river banks in the vicinity of Williams Island, six or seven miles below the town by the river, and to report upon the feasibility of laying a pontoon bridge there which could be protected. The expectation had been that Hooker would concentrate his two corps at Bridgeport, make his own crossing of the Tennessee, and push forward to the hills commanding Lookout Valley. By intrenching himself strongly in the vicinity of Wauhatchie, he would confine the Confederates to Lookout Mountain on the west, and cover the roads along the river so as to make them safe for supply trains. The only interruption in the connected communications would then be around the base of Lookout itself, where the road could not be used, of course, so long as Bragg should be able to hold the mountain. If, however, a bridge could be laid somewhere in rear of such a fortified position, the road on the north bank of the river could be used, for this road ran across the neck of Moccasin Point, out of range of a cannonade from the mountain, and after a short haul of a mile or two, the wagon trains could recross the river by the bridge at the town.
Hooker had showed no eagerness to take the laboring oar in this business, and excused his delay in concentrating at Bridgeport by the lack of wagons. General Smith's reconnoissance satisfied him that Brown's Ferry, a little above the island, would admirably serve the purpose. A roadway to the river on each side already existed. On the south side was a gorge and a brook, which sheltered the landing there, and would cover and hide troops moving toward the top of the ridge commanding Lookout Valley. Smith reported his discovery to Thomas and suggested that pontoons be built in Chattanooga, and used to convey a force by night to the ferry, where they might be met by Hooker coming from below. Thomas approved the plan, and as soon as Grant arrived, he inspected the ground in company with Thomas and Smith, and ordered it to be executed. The boats were completed by the end of a week, and on the night of the 26th of October the expedition started under the command of General Smith in person. Brigadier-Generals Hazen and Turchin and Colonel T. R. Stanley of the Eighteenth Ohio [Footnote: Colonel Stanley had been one of my associates in the Ohio Senate in the winter of 1860-61. On the origin and development of the plan and its complete execution, see Reports of General Smith and others, Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. i. pp. 77-137.] were assigned to command the three detachments of troops and boats assigned to the duty, and reported to Smith. Covered by the darkness and in absolute silence, they were to float down the stream which flowed around Moccasin Point in a great curve under the base of Lookout, on which batteries commanded long reaches of the river both above and below. Reaching the ferry on the enemy's side, they would land and carry the picket posts with a rush, Hazen to move to the left and seize the ridge facing the mountain, and Turchin to do the like toward the right, facing down stream. Colonel Stanley's detachment had the charge of the boats, which were fitted with row-locks and oars, and these were to do the ferrying when the proper place was reached. Each boat contained a corporal and four men as a crew, and twenty-five armed soldiers. They were fifty in number, besides two flatboats to be used as a ferry to cross the artillery. The whole force consisted of 5000 men and three batteries of artillery. The boats carried about a third of the whole, and the principal columns marched by the road on the north bank to the places assigned and were concealed in the forest. The plan worked beautifully. Starting at three o'clock in the morning of the 27th, the darkness of the night and a slight fog hid the boats from the Confederate pickets. The oars were only used to keep the boats in proper position in the current, and great care was taken to move silently. Colonel Stanley took the lead with General Hazen in one of the flatboats, having a good guide. The landing on the south bank was found, and the troops landed and drove off the enemy's picket, which was taken completely by surprise. The boats were swiftly pulled to the north bank, where the troops which marched by the road were already in position. The ferrying was hurried with a will, and before the Confederates had time to bring any considerable force to oppose, strong positions were taken covering the ferry, these were covered by an abatis of slashed forest trees and intrenched. The surprise had been complete, and the success had been perfect.
Hooker crossed the river on the bridge at Bridgeport, and on the morning of the 28th marched by way of Running Waters and Whitesides to Wauhatchie. Geary's division reached Wauhatchie about five in the afternoon, and about midnight was fiercely attacked by Jenkins' division of Longstreet's corps. The combat continued for some time, the enemy having some advantage at first as they attacked Geary's left flank in a direction from which he did not expect them. Other troops were urged forward to Geary's assistance, but the enemy retired as they approached the scene of action and only his division was seriously engaged. He reported a list of 216 casualties, whilst the Confederates admitted a loss of about 400. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. i. pp. 119, 233.] Hooker's position was made strongly defensible, so that Bragg did not again venture to disturb it, and the easy lines of supply for Chattanooga were opened. The subsistence problem was solved.
SIEGE OF KNOXVILLE--END OF BURNSIDE'S CAMPAIGN
Departments not changed by Grant--Sherman assigned to that of the Tennessee--Burnside's situation and supplies--His communications--Building a railroad--Threatened from Virginia--His plans--Bragg sends Longstreet into East Tennessee--Their cross-purposes--Correspondence of Grant and Burnside--Dana and Wilson sent to consult--Grant approves Burnside's course--Latter slowly retires on Knoxville--The place prepared for a siege--Combat at Campbell's station--Within the lines at Knoxville--Topography of the place--Defences--Assignment of positions-The forts--General Sanders killed--His self-sacrifice--Longstreet's lines of investment--His assault of Fort Sanders--The combat--The repulse--The victory at Missionary Ridge and results--Division of Confederate forces a mistake--Grant sends Sherman to raise the siege of Knoxville--East Tennessee a "horror"--Longstreet retreats toward Virginia--Sherman rejoins Grant--Granger's unwillingness to remain--General Foster sent to relieve Burnside--Criticism of this act--Halleck's misunderstanding of the real situation--Grant's easy comprehension of it--His conduct in enlarged responsibility--General Hunter's inspection report.
One of the first questions which General Grant had to decide was that of the continuance of the three separate departments of the Ohio, the Cumberland, and the Tennessee. It was very undesirable to concentrate the ordinary administrative work of these departments at his own headquarters. It would overburden him with business routine which need not go beyond a department commander. He needed to be free to give his strength to the conduct of military affairs in the field. It was also convenient to have the active army under a triple division of principal parts. All these reasons led him to a prompt determination to preserve the department organizations if the War Department would consent. The very day of his arrival at Chattanooga (October 23) he recommended Sherman for the Department of the Tennessee and the continuance of the others. His wish was approved at Washington, and acted upon, so that from this time to the end of the war the organization in the West remained what he now made it.
Before reaching Chattanooga, Grant had telegraphed to Burnside and had received from him a detailed statement of the numbers and positions of his troops. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. i. pp. 680, 681.] Burnside also laid before him the dearth of supplies and short stock of ammunition, with the great need of clothing. Unless the railroad to Chattanooga could be fully reopened, he suggested making a depot at McMinnville, where was the end of one of the branches of the railway, from which the road to Knoxville would be considerably shorter than from Kentucky. He also informed Grant that he had taken steps to repair the wagon road from Clinton in East Tennessee to the mouth of South Fork of the Cumberland, the head of steamboat navigation when the stream should be swollen by the winter rains. [Footnote: Id., pt. iii. pp. 33, 34.] The problem of supplies for him was as difficult as for the Cumberland army, and was not so soon solved. It grew more serious still when the siege of Knoxville interrupted for a month all communication with a base in Kentucky, in middle Tennessee, or at Chattanooga.
In reply to an inquiry from General Grant, Burnside, on the 22d, [Footnote: Id., pt. i. p. 702.] gave his opinion as to the relative importance of points in East Tennessee, pointing out that unless communication with Kentucky were to be wholly abandoned, the valley must be held nearly or quite to the Virginia line; Knoxville would be the central position, and Loudon would be the intermediate one between him and Chattanooga. In a dispatch to the President of the same date, Burnside said that his command had been on half rations of everything but fresh beef ever since his arrival in the valley. [Footnote:Id., p. 701.] He also explained that he was improving the wagon road along the line of projected railroad down the South Fork of the Cumberland, so that sections of it could be laid with rails and the wagoning gradually shortened. He had been able to make an arrangement with the railroad company in Kentucky to assume the cost of the extension of the line from the northward, and by using his military power to call out negro laborers and to provide the engineering supervision, was making considerable progress without any money appropriations from Congress for this specific purpose. The quartermaster's department had taken issue with the general as to his authority to do this; but the President and Secretary of War sanctioned his acts and would not allow him to be interfered with. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxx. pt iii, p. 787.] The work stopped when he was relieved of command; but so long as he was in power, his clear apprehension of the vital necessity of a railway line to feed and clothe his army kept him persistent and indomitable in his purpose. The withdrawal of the enemy southward from Chattanooga, and the conversion of that place into a great military depot in the spring superseded Burnside's plan, but he had been right in concluding that East Tennessee could not be held if the troops depended upon supply by wagon trains.
Grant had hardly reached Chattanooga when Halleck informed him that it was pretty certain that Ewell's corps of 20,000 or 25,000 men had gone from Lee's army toward East Tennessee by way of southwestern Virginia. [Footnote: Id., vol. xxxi. pt. i. p. 712.] There thus seemed to be strong confirmation of rumors which Burnside had before reported. Before the end of the month there were also signs of a concentration south of Loudon, and the question became a pressing one, what line of action should be prescribed for Burnside if the Confederates should thus attack him from both ends of the valley. He did not credit the rumor as to Ewell's corps, but began to think that a large detachment from Bragg's army would attack him from the south. It is curious to find the report rife that Longstreet would march against Burnside, even before Bragg had issued orders to that effect. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. i. p. 718. Oct. 24.] Burnside himself proposed to take up the pontoon bridge at Loudon, and move it to Knoxville, for both the Holston and the Little Tennessee were now unfordable and would protect his flank against small expeditions of the enemy. [Footnote: 2 Id., p. 756.] His plan was to hold all the country he could and to concentrate at Knoxville and stand a siege whenever the enemy should prove too strong for him in the open field. Grant was not yet persuaded that this was best, and wanted the line of the Hiwassee held for the present, so that Burnside should draw nearer to Thomas rather than increase the distance before the Cumberland army should be prepared for active work in the field. [Footnote:Id., p. 770.]
Bragg's order to Longstreet to march against Burnside was issued on the 4th of November. [Footnote: Id. pt. iii. p. 634.] Railway transportation was provided for the first stages of the movement, but it was not efficiently used. Longstreet had no confidence in the result of the expedition, as his correspondence with Bragg very plainly shows. Stevenson's division of Hardee's corps was at Sweetwater, the end of the railway at that time, and about a day's march from the crossing of the Holston at Loudon. Ten days had been wasted in getting Longstreet's corps to Sweetwater, and Bragg and he each charged the other with the responsibility for it. Longstreet asserted that he had been given no control over the railway, and Bragg insisted that the control was ample. Then the former had urged that Stevenson's division should be attached to his command, saying this was his understanding at the start. Bragg replied that he never had any such intention and that Stevenson could not be spared. Longstreet retorted that with his present force it would be unreasonable to expect great results. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. iii. pp. 635-637, 644, 670, 671, 680, 681, 687: Longstreet's Report, Id., pt. i. pp. 455, etc.]
Meanwhile Sherman was hastening to Chattanooga, and the chances for making the diversion against Burnside profitable to the Confederate cause were rapidly diminishing. They soon vanished entirely, and Grant's great opportunity came instead. Longstreet's corps consisted of nine brigades of infantry in two strong divisions under Major-General McLaws and Brigadier-General Jenkins, two battalions of artillery aggregating nine batteries, and a cavalry corps of three divisions and three batteries of artillery under Major-General Wheeler. [Footnote: Id., pp. 451, 454.] Besides these troops a force was collected in the upper Holston valley to operate from the northeast in conjunction with Longstreet and under his command. At its head was Major-General Ransom, and it consisted of three brigades of infantry and three of cavalry, with six batteries of artillery. The column with Longstreet numbered 14,000 infantry and artillery, and about 6000 cavalry. It was strengthened when before Knoxville by Buckner's division about 3300 strong. Ransom's forces numbered 7500. [Footnote: These numbers are taken from the official returns for October 31st, except Wheeler's cavalry, which was not then reported and is estimated. Longstreet's corps is given in the tables, Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. ii. p. 656. Ransom's, Id., pt. iii. p. 644.] On November 22d Bragg wrote to Longstreet that nearly 11,000 reinforcements were moving to his assistance, but of what these were made up (except Buckner's division) does not clearly appear. [Footnote: Id., p. 736.]
The information Halleck collected at Washington indicated that Longstreet's column was a strong one, possibly numbering 40,000, but he urged that Burnside should not retreat. [Footnote: Id., p. 145.] The National forces in East Tennessee consisted, first, of the troops under General Willcox at Cumberland Gap and the vicinity, 4400; the Ninth Corps, Brigadier-General Potter commanding, 6350; and part of the Twenty-third Corps, 7800, with two bodies of cavalry numbering 7400. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. i. p. 811.] Willcox's troops and part of the cavalry were ordered to hold in check the Confederates under Ransom, one brigade of cavalry under Colonel Byrd was posted at Kingston to keep up communication with Chattanooga, and the rest was available to meet Longstreet, either in the field or behind intrenchments at Knoxville, as Grant should direct.
Longstreet's army was considerably overrated in the information received from Washington, but not unnaturally. [Footnote: Halleck to Grant, Id., pt. iii. p. 145.] It was assumed that he had with him all three divisions of his corps, and it was not known that Walker's division was detached. It had also been known that Stevenson's division was at Sweetwater two or three weeks before Longstreet assembled his forces there, and it seemed certain that it was the advance-guard of his whole command. Indeed Longstreet himself supposed so, and complained because it was not allowed to remain with him. [Footnote: Id., p. 635.] Concluding, therefore, that Burnside could not safely meet Longstreet in the field, Grant proposed that he should hold the Confederates in check, retreating slowly. He believed that in a week from the time Longstreet showed himself at the Holston River, he could assume the aggressive against Bragg so vigorously as to bring Longstreet back at speed and relieve Burnside of the pressure. [Footnote:Id., p. 143; to Halleck, p. 154.] Bragg also expected this, and had ordered that the railway connection should be maintained as far as possible, looking for a crushing blow at Burnside and a quick reassembling of his forces. The delays between the 4th and 14th of November had been fatal to this plan, and it would have been the part of wisdom to abandon it frankly.
Neither the authorities at Washington nor Grant gave Burnside credit, at first, for the cheerful courage with which he was ready to take the losing side of the game, if need be, and thus give a glorious opportunity to the co-operating army. His chivalrous self-forgetfulness in such matters was perfect, when it was likely to lead to the success of the larger cause he had at heart. To reach a more perfect understanding than could be had by correspondence Grant sent Colonel J. H. Wilson of his staff to Knoxville to consult personally with Burnside. This officer was accompanied by Mr. Dana, and their dispatches to Grant and to the Secretary of War give a clear and vivid picture of the situation. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. i. pp. 258, etc; pt. iii. pp. 146, 154.] Burnside clearly saw the importance of making his stand at Knoxville, and proposed to fortify that place so that he could stand a siege there. [Footnote: Burnside to Willcox, Id., p. 177. B.'s Report, Id., pt. i. p. 273.] He proposed to draw back slowly from the Holston at Loudon, tolling Longstreet on and getting him beyond supporting distance of Bragg. When Grant should have disposed of the weakened enemy in his front, he could easily drive Longstreet out of East Tennessee into Virginia. Grant approved without qualification the course taken by Burnside. [Footnote: Grant to Burnside, Id., pt. iii. p. 177.] During the siege which followed, there was a good deal of solicitude about Burnside, but it should be remembered in justice to him that his own confidence never faltered and was fully justified by the result.
Prior to the visit of Wilson and Dana he had sent his engineer, Captain O. M. Poe, to Loudon to remove the pontoon bridge before the occupation of the south bank of the Holston by the enemy should make it impossible to save it. The bridge had been made of unusually large and heavy boats, and it was a difficult task to haul them out of the water and drag them half a mile to the railway. The south end of the bridge was loosened and the whole swung with the current against the right bank, where the dismantling and removal of the boats was successfully accomplished under the eyes of a cavalry force of the enemy which watched the performance from the opposite bank. The bridge was carried to Knoxville and laid across the Holston there. Its size and weight proved to be great points in its favor for the special use there, and it was of inestimable value during the partial investment of the town. [Footnote: Poe's Report, Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. i. p. 294. Century War Book, vol. iii.]
On the 13th of November Longstreet brought up his own pontoons and laid a bridge near Loudon, and the next day began a vigorous advance upon Knoxville. Burnside had matured his plans, and opposed the advance of Longstreet with one division, Hartranft's of the Ninth Corps, and another, White's of the Twenty-third Corps. He was weak in cavalry, however, and could only meet Wheeler's corps with a single division under Brigadier-General Sanders. Burnside had secured Sanders's promotion from Mr. Stanton when the Secretary was at Louisville in October, in recognition of the ability and gallantry shown in the expedition to East Tennessee in June and his other services during the campaign. By giving Shackelford charge of the cavalry operating in the upper valley and putting Sanders in command of those resisting Wheeler, Burnside was sure of vigor and courage in the leadership of both divisions. Longstreet kept Wheeler on the left bank of the Holston, directing him to overwhelm Sanders and move directly opposite Knoxville, taking the city by a surprise if possible. But Sanders opposed a stubborn resistance, falling back deliberately, and held the hills south of Knoxville near the river. Wheeler was thus baffled, and returned to Longstreet on the 17th of November. The absence of his cavalry had been a mistake, as it turned out; for the Confederate infantry, after crossing at Loudon to the right bank, had not been able to push Burnside back as fast as Bragg's plans required, nor had they succeeded at all in getting in the rear of the National forces.
As soon as it was definitely known at Knoxville that Longstreet was over the Holston, Burnside went to the front at Lenoir's to take command in person. [Footnote: Burnside's Report, Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. i. p. 273.] He left General Parke as chief of staff in general charge of affairs at headquarters, with Captain Poe in charge of the engineer work of preparing lines of defence connecting the forts already planned and partly constructed. Wilson and Dana stayed in Knoxville till the 15th, and then rode rapidly to the westward, passing around Longstreet's columns and rejoining Grant at Chattanooga on the night of the 17th, with latest assurances from Burnside that he would hold Knoxville stubbornly. Longstreet's tactics were to move one of his infantry divisions directly at Burnside's position, while with the other he turned its flank and sought to get to the rear. Burnside met the plan by the analogous one of alternate withdrawals of a division, one holding the enemy at bay while the other took post in echelon in the rear and opposed the flanking column till a concentration could be made.
At Campbell's Station Longstreet attacked with vigor, determined to finish matters with the force before him. Ferrero's division of the Ninth Corps had now joined. Hartranft repulsed an attack by McLaws, whilst the trains and the division of Ferrero passed on, and Ferrero took a strong position half a mile in rear covering the junction of roads. White then retired and came into line on Ferrero's left. When these were solidly in place Hartranft took an opportune moment to withdraw and came into line on the left of White. The manoeuvres were perfectly performed, and the fighting of our troops had been everything that could be desired, meeting and matching Longstreet's veterans in a way to establish the soldierly reputation of all. The comparatively new organization of the Twenty-third Corps proved itself equal to the best, and Burnside declared that he could desire no better soldiers. The same tactics were continued through the day, and Burnside followed the hard labor and the fighting of the day with a night march which brought him to Knoxville on the morning of the 17th. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. i. pp. 274, 275, 296.] He had personally handled his little army through the day with coolness and success, and had raised to enthusiasm the confidence and devotion of his men. Each side had a casualty list of about 300.
Wheeler had marched back along the left bank of the Holston half-way to Lenoir's and crossed at Louisville, joining Longstreet again near Knoxville on the 17th, as has been already stated. He now took the advance and pressed sharply in upon the town. General Sanders had been recalled by Burnside from the south, and entering Knoxville by the pontoon bridge, passed out to the westward on the Loudon road, meeting the enemy as he advanced, and gradually falling back to a position a mile beyond the lines, where he made a stubborn stand and held Wheeler at bay till night closed the combat. From the fortified points about the city the cavalry engagement had been in full view, and the heroism of Sanders and his men was in the presence of a cloud of witnesses. They made little barricades of rail piles, and though these were frequently sent flying by the cannon balls and shells with which Alexander's artillery pounded them all day, they held at nightfall the line Sanders had been directed to hold in the morning, and had not given back an inch. [Footnote: Colonel O. M. Poe, in "Century War Book," vol. iii. p. 737.]
Knoxville was so situated that its outline was a sort of parallelogram of high ground, averaging a hundred and fifty feet or more above the river which ran along the town on the south. Two creeks ran through the town in little valleys, and in the northern suburbs where the land was much lower than the town it had been practicable, by damming these streams to make inundations which covered a considerable part of the northern front and added very materially to the defences. At the four corners of the parallelogram, enclosed works had been planned for use by a small garrison, and these had been partly constructed. Captain Poe, the chief engineer, had staked out infantry lines connecting these forts, with epaulements for artillery at intervals, and work had been hastened during the days from the 13th of November, as soon as Burnside's plan of holding the city had been approved. When the troops approached the city on the morning of the 17th, the position for every brigade and every battery had been assigned, and officers were in waiting to lead each to its place. All the infantry was put in line except Reilly's brigade of the Twenty-third Corps, which was placed in reserve in the streets of the town. [Footnote: Poe's Report, Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. i. p. 295.]
The most important of the forts was at the northwest angle of the works, upon a commanding hill. It was afterward called Fort Sanders in honor of the cavalry commander who lost his life in front of its western face. This work was planned as approximately a square with sides of about a hundred yards and bastions at the corners. The eastern front had not been completed, and was now left entirely open, as the northern face connected with the infantry trench. The ditch was twelve feet wide and about eight deep, and the parapet was about twelve feet high, making its crest about twenty feet above the bottom of the ditch. The berme usually left between the bottom of the parapet slope and the ditch was cut away so as to leave no level standing-place at the top of the scarp. This was the work which Longstreet afterward assaulted. Its chief defect was due to the situation and the contour of the ground around, which made its position so prominent a salient in the lines that the flanking fire was necessarily imperfect, leaving a considerable sector without fire beyond the angle of the northwest bastion. The point of the bastion was truncated, and a single gun put in the pan coupé. The three other forts were less elaborate but of similar profile.
As soon as the infantry took position, the men were set industriously to work to strengthen the defences. The first infantry trench between the forts had been a mere rifle-pit two and one half feet deep with the earth heaped in front as it was thrown out, to raise a parapet. Every hour made the line stronger, and work on it was continued till nearly every part of it was a good cover against artillery fire. The critical time was during the 18th of November, when as yet there was practically no cover between the forts. The cavalry was ordered to oppose the most determined resistance to the establishment of close investing lines by the enemy, and Sanders set his men a most inspiring example. He was a classmate of Captain Poe at West Point, and on the night of the 17th he shared Poe's blanket. Before dawn he went to the front, and passed from one to another of the little barricades held by his dismounted troopers. The Confederates increased the vigor of their attacks, and if any of our men were driven back by the hot fire, Sanders would walk deliberately up to the rail-pile and stand erect and exposed till his men rallied to him. For hours he did this, and his life seemed to be charmed, but about the middle of the afternoon he was mortally wounded, and the screen he had so resolutely interposed between the enemy and our infantry digging in the trenches was rolled aside. [Footnote: Paper by General Poe in "Century War Book," vol. iii. p. 737.] The time thus gained had been precious, though it was bought at so high a price. The lines were already safe against a coup de main. [Footnote: Poe's Report, Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. i. p. 296.]
Longstreet's principal lines were north of Knoxville beyond the railway and the station buildings. He also occupied a line of hills, but pushed forward strong skirmish lines and detachments to cover the making of intrenchments closer to the town. There were frequent bickering combats, but no general engagement. The enemy made efforts to destroy the pontoon bridge by sending down logs and rafts from above. These were met by an iron cable boom stretched across the river above the bridge, borne on wooden floats to keep it at the surface. [Footnote: Century War Book, vol. iii. p. 739.] Several efforts were made to drive Burnside's men from the hills covering the town on the south side of the river, but they were defeated, and communication was kept up with the valley of the French Broad River, and supplies enough were brought in to make it certain that Burnside could not be starved out, although the rations were reduced to the smallest quantity and the fewest elements which would support life.
A week passed thus, Burnside being shut off from all communication with the outer world. The 25th of November came with the almost miraculous storming of Missionary Ridge by the army under Grant at Chattanooga. Bragg retreated southward and Longstreet had no longer a possibility of rejoining him. Yet Burnside knew nothing of it, and did not dream of the more than complete justification his slow defensive campaign was having, in the tout and demoralization of the Confederate army in Georgia in Longstreet's absence. The latter was now forced to attack the fortifications or to raise the siege of Knoxville. He knew, at least by rumor, what Burnside was ignorant of,--not only the defeat of Bragg, but that a force was already moving from Grant's army to the relief of Knoxville. Bragg had also sent to him a staff officer with exhortations to prompt action. For a day or two Longstreet tried to attract Burnside's attention to the south of the river and to other parts of the lines, and then on the 28th prepared a desperate assault upon the great salient of Fort Sanders.
The artillery in the fort was under the command of Lieutenant Samuel N. Benjamin, Second U. S. Artillery, whose battery of twenty-pounder Parrotts had done good service at South Mountain and Antietam. The infantry was of Ferrero's division of the Ninth Corps. There was a slight abatis in front of the fort, and on the suggestion of Mr. Hoxie, an officer of the railway, some old telegraph wire left at the depot was used by Captain Poe to make an entanglement by fastening it between small stumps of a grove which had been felled along the slope northwest of the bastion at the salient. Longstreet's plan of assault was to attack the northwest angle of the fort with two columns of regiments, consisting of Wofford's and Humphrey's brigades of McLaws's division. Anderson's brigade was to attack the infantry trench a little east of the fort. Longstreet's instructions were to make the assault at break of day on the 29th. The columns were to move silently and swiftly without firing and endeavor to carry the parapet by the bayonet. [Footnote: Longstreet's Report, Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. i. p. 461.] The determined advance of the enemy's rifle pits by his skirmishers in the night of the 28th gave warning of what was to be expected. The morning of the 29th was damp and foggy, but the watchful pickets detected the formation of the enemy's columns. About six o'clock the Confederate batteries opened a heavy fire on the fort, which did not reply, ammunition being too precious to be wasted. In about twenty minutes the cannonade ceased and the columns moved to the assault. The fire of our lines was concentrated upon them, and they lost heavily; but they kept on, somewhat disordered by the entanglement as well as by their losses, and came to the ditch. No doubt its depth and the high face of the parapet surprised them, for they had no scaling ladders. They jumped into the ditch and tried to scramble up the slope of the earthwork. Some got to the top, only to be shot down or captured. The guns flanking the ditch raked it with double charges of canister. Shells were lighted and thrown as hand-grenades into the practically helpless crowd below. Those who had not entered the ditch soon wavered and fell back, at first sullenly and slowly, then in despair running for life to cover. Those who remained and could walk surrendered and were marched to the southwest angle of the fort, where they were brought within the lines.
The remnants of the broken columns were rallied behind their outer lines, but no effort was made to renew the assault. They had done all that was possible for flesh and blood. The casualties in the assault had been about 1000, whilst within the fortifications only 13 killed and wounded were reported. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. i. pp. 277, 278, 344, 461, 487, 490, 519, 520.] Buckner's division had joined Longstreet a day or two before the assault, but took no active part in it. Their absence from Missionary Ridge still further reduced Bragg's army, whilst it did not give to Longstreet any practical benefit. The division of the Confederate forces had thus proved to be a great military mistake. Its only chance had been in a swift attack upon Burnside and a prompt return, and this chance had vanished with the delays in the railroad transportation of Longstreet's men to Sweetwater. Prudence dictated that the expedition should be abandoned on the 13th of November; but the fear of seeming vacillating, a weakness of second-rate minds as great as vacillation itself, had made Bragg order the column forward. Burnside's well-conducted retreat, on the other hand, had lured Longstreet forward, and the patient endurance of a siege had kept the enemy in front of Knoxville, and even led to the further depletion of Bragg by the detachment of Buckner, giving to Grant the very opportunity he desired. The good fortune of the National commander culminated at Missionary Ridge. Soldiers believe in good luck quite as much as in genius, and follow a leader whose star is in the ascendant with a confidence which is the guaranty of victory. Great opportunities, however, come to all. The difference between a great soldier and an inferior one is that the great man uses his opportunities to the full, and so fortune seems to be in league with him. When Grant had driven Bragg back on Dalton, the latter could realize what he had lost by his errors. It was now impossible for Longstreet to rejoin him. It was even doubtful if Wheeler's cavalry could do so. The whole National army was between the widely separated Confederate wings, and nothing was left to Longstreet but a humiliating march back to Lee by way of the upper Holston and the headwaters of the James River. Pride delayed it, and the depth of winter favored the delay; but it was a foregone conclusion from the hour that Wood's and Sheridan's divisions crowned Missionary Ridge.
For two weeks there had been no communication between Burnside and the outer world. Lincoln had been full of anxiety, but had found some comfort in the reports from Cumberland Gap that cannonading was still heard in the direction of Knoxville. It proved that Burnside held out, and gave additional earnestness to the President's exhortation to hurry a column to his relief immediately after Grant's victory. Grant needed no urging. A report had reached him that Burnside still was confident on the 23d, and had supplies for ten or twelve days on the scale of short rations he was issuing. On the very evening of his success he wrote to Sherman, "The next thing now will be to relieve Burnside." He directed Thomas to detach Granger's Corps, and this with part of the Army of the Tennessee would make a column of 20,000 men to march at once for Knoxville under Granger's command. Three days passed, and Grant, being dissatisfied that the relieving column was not already far on its way, directed Sherman on the 29th to take command in person and push it energetically toward Burnside. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. ii. pp. 45, 49; Sherman's Memoirs, vol. i. pp. 366, 368.] Sherman immediately went forward, and on the 1st of December he was over the Hiwassee River, approaching Loudon. He telegraphed Grant that he would let Burnside hear his guns on the 3d or 4th at farthest; but he added what throws much light on the feeling of military men in regard to campaigning in East Tennessee. In his frank and familiar style he said, "Recollect that East Tennessee is my horror. That any military man should send a force into East Tennessee puzzles me. Burnside is there and must be relieved; but when relieved, I want to get out and he should come out too." [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. iii. p. 297.] From a strictly military point of view this was sound; but Burnside had been sent there more from political than from military reasons, and it was now too late to think of letting the loyal mountaineers return under Confederate rule.
Meanwhile at Knoxville Burnside was closely watching the evidences of Longstreet's purposes and eagerly listening for news from Chattanooga. On the 1st of December wagon trains began to move eastward from the besiegers' camp, and on the 3d and 4th more of them, so that it became probable that Longstreet was about to raise the siege. In the night of the 3d Captain Audenried, Sherman's aide-de-camp, came into Knoxville from the south, having made a long circuit with a small body of cavalry, from Sherman's camp, which on the night of the 2d was forty miles from the city by the direct road. Colonel Long, commanding Sherman's cavalry, had selected part of his best mounted men for the expedition, and Audenried had accompanied him. The good news of Sherman's approach was thus made certain, and it was evident that Longstreet's information was earlier than Burnside's. The Confederate camps were evacuated on the night of the 4th, and on the 5th Burnside, sending a detachment to follow up Longstreet's retreat toward the east, sent one of his staff with an escort in the other direction to meet Sherman. The messenger from Burnside met the head of the relieving column at Marysville, a day's march for infantry. Sherman halted his little army, and wrote Burnside that he felt disposed to stop, "for a stern chase is a long one," since Longstreet had retreated. He rode in to Knoxville the next day and consulted with Burnside. He was evidently dubious of any advantage from a pursuit of Longstreet, and Burnside's disposition was to avoid urging any comrade to undertake an unpleasant task for his sake. He therefore cordially assisted Sherman in solving his doubts in favor of taking back all his troops except Granger's Fourth Corps, and wrote a letter of warm thanks for the prompt march to his relief, adding his opinion that the Fourth Corps would make him strong enough to meet Longstreet, and that it was advisable for Sherman to rejoin Grant with the rest. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. ii. p. 36.] This was accordingly done, and Sherman was free to give his attention to a winter campaign toward the Gulf, from which he hoped important results.
Granger did not relish the prospect of a protracted absence from the Army of the Cumberland, and protested in vigorous and long dispatches to Thomas, to Grant, to Burnside, to Sherman, and later to Foster, [Footnote: Id., pt. iii. pp. 358, 365, 391-393; Sherman's Memoirs, vol. i. p. 368.] but with no effect, except that Grant was displeased with his original reluctance to march to Burnside's relief as well as with these protests. The result showed itself in the spring, when Granger was relieved from the command of the corps, which was conferred upon Howard.
The raising of the siege brought Burnside into communication with Cumberland Gap, and he learned that Major-General John G. Foster was at Tazewell, under orders to relieve him of the command of the department. This was in apparent accord with the wish which Burnside had expressed, [Footnote: Ante, vol. i. pp. 527, 528.] but as action had been postponed it was reasonable to expect that further consultation would be had before he should be relieved, and that Grant's judgment would be asked in regard to it. After the controversies which followed the battle of Fredericksburg, Halleck was habitually unfriendly to Burnside, and we have seen how uniformly a wrong interpretation was given to the events of the current campaign. Foster's appointment to succeed Burnside was dated the 16th of November, [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. iii. p. 166.] and he had been in Kentucky or near Cumberland Gap during the siege of Knoxville. The day the order was made relieving Burnside was that on which he was battling with Longstreet at Campbell's Station, holding him at bay in the slow retreat upon Knoxville, where he arrived on the 17th. On this morning Grant was writing him, "So far you are doing exactly what appears to me right," [Footnote: Id., p. 177.] and this was written after the receipt of Dana and Wilson's full dispatches of the 13th and 14th, as well as Burnside's of the 13th. [Footnote: Id., p. 138.] Yet so strangely was the same information misread by Halleck, that on the 16th he was telegraphing Grant that Burnside was hesitating whether to fight or retreat out of East Tennessee. "I fear he will not fight," he added, "although strongly urged to do so. Unless you can give him immediate assistance, he will surrender his position to the enemy." [Footnote: Id., p. 163. This dispatch of Halleck seems to have been called out by one of Dana to Stanton on the 14th in which he said, "Burnside has determined to retreat toward the Gaps." (Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. i. p. 259.) Halleck failed to interpret this in connection with one of the 13th in which Dana had stated alternate lines of retreat, "if finally compelled," and Burnside's judgment in favor of the line of Cumberland Gap in such last resort rather than toward Kingston. (Ibid.) Dana had fully conveyed, however, Burnside's determination to hold Knoxville "as long as possible," and his reasons for making a stubborn fight there. By failing to keep this in mind, the Secretary and General-in-Chief became unnecessarily agitated, and forgot in their conduct what was due to Grant almost as much as what was due to Burnside.] On the next day Burnside entered Knoxville, where fortifications had been hurriedly built, and the siege began. The heroic defence of Knoxville lasted three weeks, and when Longstreet withdrew toward Virginia, the successful general learned that he had been removed from command at the very moment he was completing, with Grant's unqualified approval, the preparation for that stubborn resistance which saved East Tennessee and averted the "terrible misfortune" which Halleck feared. [Footnote: Id., pt. iii. p. 145.] The importance of holding East Tennessee, now that it had been liberated, was urged upon the War Department by Burnside from the beginning. He had pointed it out when ordered to abandon it and march to Rosecrans's assistance. [Footnote: Id., vol. xxx. pt. iii. p. 904.] So far from hesitating to fight Longstreet, Dana found him determined to "expose his whole force to capture rather than withdraw from the country." [Footnote:Id., vol. xxxi. pt. i. p. 260.] It was not till Mr. Dana's later dispatches were received that the misapprehensions were corrected at Washington. Then the story of the occupation and defence of East Tennessee was explained, and justice was done the wisdom of the general's course as well as his patriotic and unselfish spirit. A part of the trouble had been due to the fact that after Grant reached Nashville Burnside's correspondence was with him, and, in accord with military usage, he dropped direct correspondence with Washington, except when addressed from there.
It was too late, however, to undo what had been done. Foster was in Kentucky, carrying forward into East Tennessee such detachments as could be picked up. He reached Knoxville on the 10th of December, and the next day Burnside turned over the command to him, and started for Cincinnati by way of Jacksboro and Williamsburg. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. iii. pp. 372, 384.] The President was most hearty in his approval of Burnside's conduct when once he understood it, and insisted that after a brief rest he should again enter into active service. Congress passed strong resolutions of thanks to him and to his troops, [Footnote: Id., pt. i. p. 281.] and it began to be understood that the campaign had been a creditable one.
It was in such a command that Burnside appeared at his best. The independence of his campaign gave full play to his active energy, whilst the bodies of troops were not so large as to prevent his personal leadership in their combats. In a great army he was at a disadvantage from lack of true system in handling great and complicated affairs when he was in chief command; and if his position was a subordinate one he lacked the sort of responsibility which called out his best qualities, and he was therefore liable to become the formal intermediary for the transmission of orders. In such cases, too, he was in danger of suffering from faults of subordinates whom his kind heart had permitted to retain important positions for which they were not fit. When acting immediately under his eye, he could give them energy and courage which they would lack when left to themselves. The sore spot in his experience in 1864 was the failure to make full use of the explosion of the mine at Petersburg, and the Court of Inquiry made it clear that the fault lay with inefficient subordinates. One of the most prominent of these was said to have stayed in a bomb-proof instead of leading his command. But the same officer had done the same thing in Fort Sanders at Knoxville, as had been officially reported by Captain Benjamin, the Chief of Artillery; [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. i. p. 344.] and Benjamin was an officer of such military and personal standing that a court-martial should certainly have investigated the case. A mistaken leniency brought bitter fruit.
The campaign had been a new test for General Grant also, and it is instructive to follow him in grasping the details of his enlarged responsibility. When communication with Burnside became difficult and infrequent, he gave orders to Willcox at Cumberland Gap and to subordinates of Burnside in Kentucky and Ohio. He provided for starting supplies to Knoxville by all practicable routes as soon as the siege should be raised. He cut trenchantly through pretences where he thought a lack of vigorous performance was covered up by verbosity of reports. [Footnote: Id., pt. iii. p. 233.] He was quietly but easily master, and showed no symptom of being overweighted by his task or flurried by the excitements of a critical juncture in affairs. He does not impress one as brilliant in genius, but as eminently sound and sensible. His quality of greatness was that he handled great affairs as he would little ones, without betraying any consciousness that this was a great thing to do. He reminds one of Wellington in the combination of lucid and practical common-sense with aggressive bull-dog courage. Some telling lines, developing his traits as he appeared to a critical observer, are found in a dispatch of General David Hunter to the Secretary of War, giving a report of his visit to Chattanooga where he was sent to inspect the army. Hunter was one of the oldest of the regular officers in service, knew thoroughly Grant's history and early army reputation, and his words have peculiar significance. Grant had received him with a sort of filial kindness, making him at home in his quarters, and opening his mind and his purposes to him with his characteristic modesty and simplicity of manner. Hunter says: "I saw him almost every moment, except when sleeping, of the three weeks I spent in Chattanooga.... He is a hard worker, writes his own dispatches and orders, and does his own thinking. He is modest, quiet, never swears, and seldom drinks, as he took only two drinks during the three weeks I was with him. He listens quietly to the opinions of others and then judges promptly for himself; and he is very prompt to avail himself in the field of all the errors of his enemy. He is certainly a good judge of men, and has called around him valuable counsellors." He naively adds: "Prominent as General Grant is before the country, these remarks of mine may appear trite and uncalled for, but having been ordered to inspect his command, I thought it not improper for me to add my testimony with regard to the commander." [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. iii. p. 402.]
AFFAIRS IN DISTRICT OF OHIO--PLOT TO LIBERATE PRISONERS AT JOHNSON'S ISLAND.
Administrative duties--Major McLean adjutant-general--His loyalty questioned--Ordered away--Succeeded by Captain Anderson--Robert Anderson's family--Vallandigham canvass--Bounty-jumping--Action of U. S. Courts--of the local Probate Court--Efforts to provoke collision--Interview with the sheriff--Letter to Governor Tod--Shooting soldiers in Dayton--The October election--Great majority against Vallandigham--The soldier vote--Wish for field service--Kinglake's Crimean War--Its lessons--Confederate plots in Canada--Attempt on military prison at Johnson's Island--Assembling militia there--Fortifying Sandusky Bay--Inspection of the prison--Condition and treatment of the prisoners.
In the sketch I have given of the campaign in East Tennessee, I have reached the time when I joined the Twenty-third Corps in front of Knoxville, and became part of the organization with which my fortunes were to be united till the end of the war. It is necessary, however, to go back and pick up the threads of personal experience during this autumn of 1863.
The arrangement of the business of the department which I have mentioned [Footnote: Ante, vol. i. p. 492.] gave me some work in addition to that which properly belonged to the District of Ohio and Michigan. I did not appear officially in it, but under Burnside's instructions to his adjutant-general on leaving Cincinnati, the questions arising in daily administration were submitted to me, and on my advice current orders were issued in Burnside's name. This kept me in close communication with the general personally as well as officially, and made me aware of the progress of events more perfectly than I could otherwise have been. The adjutant-general in charge of the Cincinnati headquarters was Major N. H. McLean, an experienced officer of the regular army, and most systematic and able in his administrative duties. He was punctilious in his performance of duty, and was especially averse to having his military conduct seem in any way influenced by political motives. Like many other officers of the army, he made his devotion to his government as a soldier the basis of all his action, and disclaimed any interest in politics. But in the summer of 1863 politics in Ohio became too heated to allow any neutrality or even any hesitation in open declarations of principle. Vallandigham was a candidate for governor, although an exile under the judgment of the military court. Local politicians were not always discreet, and some of them demanded avowals of Major McLean, which he refused to make, not because of any sympathy with Vallandigham's partisans, but because he thought it unbecoming his military character to submit to catechising. This was enough to condemn him in the eyes of those who literally enforced the proverb that "he that is not for us is against us," and they sent to the War Department a highly colored statement of McLean's conduct, accusing him of disloyalty. Mr. Stanton, in his characteristic way, condemned him first and tried him afterward. The first we knew of it, an order came sending McLean off to the Pacific coast,--to Oregon, I believe. General Burnside protested, and warmly sustained the major as a loyal man and able officer; but the mischief was done, and it was months before it could be undone. Indeed it was years before the injury done him in his professional career was fully recognized and a serious attempt was made to recompense him.
When Major McLean was thus removed, the business of his office fell into the hands of Captain William P. Anderson of the adjutant-general's department, who issued the orders and conducted the correspondence in General Burnside's name. The captain was a nephew of General Robert Anderson, and though the general had no sons himself, his near kinsmen gave striking evidence of the earnest and militant patriotism of a loyal Kentucky stock closely allied to a well-known Ohio family. The roster of the members of the family who saw military service is an exceptional one. [Footnote: Colonel Charles Anderson, brother of the general, was in Texas when the Civil War began, but abandoned his interests there, and coming back to Ohio was made colonel of the Ninety-third Ohio Infantry, which he led in the battle of Stone's River, where he was wounded. He was in 1863 made the Union candidate for lieutenant-governor on the ticket with John Brough, whom he succeeded as governor when Brough died in 1865.
Colonel Latham Anderson, son of Charles, graduated at West Point in 1859 and became a captain in the Fifth U. S. Infantry and colonel of the Eighth California Volunteers. His war service was mostly in New Mexico and on the frontier.
Larz Anderson, another brother of the general, was represented in the War of the Rebellion by five sons who had honorable records: (1) Nicholas Longworth Anderson was adjutant, lieutenant-colonel, and colonel of the Sixth Ohio Infantry. He was severely wounded at Stone's River and Chickamauga. He left the service at the close of the war as brevet-major-general.
(2) William Pope Anderson enlisted as a private in the Sixth Ohio Infantry, became sergeant-major and second lieutenant. He was then appointed assistant-adjutant-general with rank of captain. He was slightly wounded in the battle of Shiloh.
(3) Edward Lowell Anderson was first lieutenant and captain in the Fifty-second Ohio Infantry. He was wounded at Jonesboro, but continued in service to the end of the war.
(4) Frederick Pope Anderson was first lieutenant in the One Hundred and Eighty-first Ohio Infantry.
(5) Larz Anderson, Jr., was a mere lad, but served without commission as volunteer aide-de-camp on the staff of Brigadier-General N. C. McLean.
William Marshall Anderson, of Chillicothe, Ohio, another brother of the general, had two sons in the war service: (1) Thomas McArthur Anderson was captain in the Fourteenth U.S. Infantry, and after the war became its colonel, and later a general officer in the Philippines.]
Including the general himself, his brother Charles, and the nephews, ten kinsmen supported the flag of the country in the field. Such a family record is so remarkable as to be worthy of preservation.
To return to the affairs of our military administration of the department and district, the situation was complicated by the fact that Vallandigham had openly declared a purpose to return to Ohio during his candidacy. I did not hesitate to let it be known that upon his doing so, the alternative in his sentence would be enforced, and that he would be sent to Fort Warren for imprisonment. Mr. Pugh, who had been induced to accept the nomination for lieutenant-governor with him, made a visit to Windsor, in Canada (opposite Detroit), where Vallandigham met him. The result of the conference was that Vallandigham remained quietly in Canada till the election was over, leaving it to his friends to make as much political capital out of his exile as they could.
As evidence of the fierceness of the passions roused among his partisans, a few significant facts may be mentioned. The conscription law had led, as we have seen, [Footnote: Henry Reuben Anderson was second lieutenant in the Forty-third Ohio Infantry, captain in the Sixth U.S. Volunteer Infantry, and after the war was transferred to the Fourth U.S. Artillery as first lieutenant.] to wholesale frauds in the form of "bounty-jumping." It was of course the duty of the military authorities to prevent this by arresting deserters and holding them to military service and discipline under their enlistment. A common form of fraud was for a well-grown young man to offer himself as a recruit, take the oath that he was of lawful age, receive the hundreds of dollars of bounty, and then bring forward his parents to claim him as a minor enlisting without their permission. We always recognized promptly the authority of a writ of habeas corpus from the Federal courts in such cases, and the judges examined the recruit and his friends carefully, to detect a fraudulent conspiracy if there was one. If the case appeared to be free from collusion and the evidence of minority sufficient, an order of release was made, conditioned on the repayment to the government of the bounty received and the expenses of the proceeding.
The depot of recruits for the army was on the south side of the river in Kentucky; but in any case that was not palpably fraudulent I directed the officers in charge to bring the recruit to Cincinnati, where Judge Leavitt's writ could reach him, and to submit the case to the United States District Court. The following letter will illustrate this, being one addressed by me to General Tillson, who commanded in Covington, which, with the region within a radius of some fifteen miles, was part of my district:--
"HEADQUARTERS, DISTRICT OF OHIO, CINCINNATI,
9th September, 1863.
GENERAL,--Judge Leavitt of the United States District Court called this morning with a Mr. Eckmann, who wishes to get his son, a minor, out of the First Heavy Artillery. The boy is named Summerfield Eckmann, and is in Company C. As you have stated to me that it is practicable to fill up the place of minors and invalids as fast as they can be got rid of, I would like to have the case looked into at once, and unless some reason unknown to me exists, have him sent to report to Colonel Boone at Kemper Barracks, where the writ from the Federal Court may be served. By agreement with the father, if the judge should discharge him, the bounty will be paid back, and you will please send a statement of what amount was paid and how his account with the government stands.
Very respectfully, your obed't serv't,
(Signed) J. D. Cox,
B. G. Commanding.
Brig. Gen. Davis Tillson,
Com'g, etc., Covington, Ky."
All honest and deserving cases could be satisfactorily disposed of in this way. But the fraudulent "bounty-jumpers" wanted nothing so little as a full investigation before the United States Courts. These cases, therefore, if they appeared in court at all, would be brought before local judges supposed to be prejudiced against the government and who would not require restitution. To prevent this, the War Department issued instructions based on the decision of the United States Supreme Court in Ableman v. Booth, in which Chief Justice Taney had delivered the opinion. These instructions directed that in cases arising under the conscription and recruiting laws, the writ of habeas corpus should be obeyed only when issued by United States courts. With full knowledge of these instructions and of the Supreme Court decision which had been a party shibboleth in the fugitive-slave cases before the war, the Probate judge of the county seemed bent on provoking a collision with the National authorities. His court was, among courts of record, that of inferior jurisdiction in the county, and the higher courts gave us no trouble. A letter which I wrote to Governor Tod at the close of August so fully gives the details of the matter and of the view I then took of it, that I prefer to let it stand as my statement of it, rather than any paraphrase I could now make. I said:--
"I have the honour to call your attention to a persistent effort on the part of the Probate Judge of the county to produce a collision between the sheriff and posse of the vicinity and the United States government.
"You have probably noticed the newspaper accounts of a habeas corpus case before Judge ------ some time since, in which the writ was issued to Lieutenant-Colonel Boone, One Hundred and Fifteenth Ohio Volunteer Infantry, commanding at Kemper barracks in this city, directing him to bring before the court one Hicks, held as a deserter from the army.
"In accordance with instructions from the War Department, based upon the decision of Chief Justice Taney in the case of Ableman v. Booth, Lieutenant-Colonel Boone answered in writing, stating that the man was held by the authority of the United States as a deserter, and that, without intending any disrespect to the court, it was impossible for him to deliver the prisoner to the officers of a State court. Lieutenant-Colonel Boone further attached to his answer and made part of it the instructions from Washington and the order of Major-General Burnside promulgating the same, and it was thus made matter of record in the court that the case was one directly affecting the government of the United States. The judge was also notified by counsel that it was the purpose of the Federal officers to take the case to the courts of last resort should his decision be in accordance with that which he had rendered in other cases, and that the matter would thus, without doubt, be ultimately determined by the judicial decision of the highest courts having cognizance, and that there could be no occasion for collision between himself and the military authorities.
"The judge issued an attachment against Lieutenant-Colonel Boone for contempt, and directed Major-General Burnside to be made party to the record. General Burnside answered in a similar manner to Colonel Boone. The court made no personal order in General B.'s case, but directed the sheriff of the county to arrest Lieutenant-Colonel Boone and bring him before the court. The sheriff went to Colonel Boone's quarters and was there informed that the writ could not be executed, as, under orders received, the military authorities would not permit it. The sheriff so made return to the court, and has, as he informs me this morning, been again directed peremptorily by the judge to execute the writ at every hazard.
"The sheriff came to me to know what would be our course if he should raise the posse comitatus in obedience to the writ. My answer was that the United States forces would use no aggression, but that I wished him and the judge to understand distinctly that the writ could only be executed by overpowering the United States troops in open fight, and that it became all concerned to consider well before they became overt traitors by levying war against the Federal government; that I should regard them as public enemies at the first overt act and use the utmost vigor against them; and that after suppressing any disturbance they might create, my first duty would be to arrest the judge and himself and hand them over to the United States courts to be tried for treason. I likewise expressed my surprise that in a matter which was avowedly an undisguised attempt to bring the State authorities into open conflict with the National government, he had not appealed to the governor of the State, its chief executive (he being himself but a subordinate), for instructions. As he professed embarrassment as to his duty, I told him I would state what in my opinion a loyal sheriff should do in such a case; and that was to make a written return upon the writ saying that it could not be obeyed without levying open war against the United States, and was therefore returned unexecuted.... In view of the circumstances, I have thought best to lay the matter before you, that you may, if you see proper, direct the sheriff to take no steps calculated to bring the State and National authorities into collision, without full communication with and instruction from yourself as chief executive. I have no concern as to the success of any forcible attempt upon Colonel Boone, but regard it as very desirable that no such attempt should be made, and especially that it should not be precipitated, without your knowledge, by the action of the Probate Court of this county in overruling a decision of the Supreme Court of the United States.
"I shall forward a copy of this letter to the Secretary of War for his information, and have the honor to remain," etc.
There were some amusing incidents connected with the sheriff's embarrassment which could not properly appear in my letter to the governor. Both he and the Probate judge were candidates for re-election, and it seemed certain that the aggressive Vallandigham faction in the party would control the nominations in the party convention. In such excited times extreme men are almost sure to take the lead. The sheriff saw very clearly that there was nothing profitable to him in a forcible attack upon the United States troops in barracks, and knew that a call upon the posse would be responded to by nobody but ruffians of the criminal class who might like an opportunity to gather as a mob with a pretext of lawful authority. He complained to me with a comical distress that the judge had taken advantage of him to gain with the extremists of his party the credit for bold defiance of the government, whilst he, the sheriff, was left to bear the brunt of the real danger. I had told him in an earlier interview that if he called out the posse it would be his duty to lead it in person, and had intimated that I should direct the soldiers to save bloodshed by carefully marking the leaders in an attack. I now suggested that if he should inform the judge that he should summon him first as one of the posse and require him to march beside him, he would probably find the zeal for a collision diminished.
Whatever were the reasons which controlled, there was no posse summoned, and I heard no more of the arrest of Colonel Boone. Both judge and sheriff lived to look back upon the episode in their lives with other feelings than those which excited them nearly to desperation in that singular political campaign. It was not always easy to draw a satisfactory line in dealing practically with such powdery elements and social conditions as those of 1863, but the best results seemed to come from carefulness not to provoke unnecessary collision with political prejudices and not to interfere with personal liberty more than was necessary, whilst showing inexorable firmness in carrying out such measures as we had to adopt. Two cases which arose in Dayton made it necessary to distinguish between two possible courses, and though there was a good deal of difference in judgment among loyal men I thought the event fully justified us in that which we pursued.
The arrest of Vallandigham had left a certain class of people in Dayton on the verge of violent outbreak. A mob had wrecked the publishing office of the Union party paper, and we had kept a small garrison at the city to preserve the peace, The "roughs" of the place were insolent to the soldiers and their officers, and it required firm discipline to keep our men as patient as we wished them to be. One day a wrangle began, and one of the city "rowdies" pulled a pistol and fired upon a soldier. We arrested the criminal, but whilst we held him, an indictment was found against him in the local court, and he was demanded by the civil authorities for trial. We knew very well that in any jury of that county enough partisans of Vallandigham would be found to prevent a conviction, but I ordered the man to be delivered up. This was pretty sharply criticised by the more ardent Union men, but I answered that it was necessary to find out whether justice could be administered by the civil authorities before applying military rule.
The delivery of the man was no doubt looked upon as an act of timidity, and it was not long before we had a repetition of the offence. I had taken pains to have the garrison at Dayton carefully instructed that they must be patient and cool, avoiding every provocation, but if attacked, the aggressor must be punished on the spot. In the second case, the man who drew his weapon was instantly shot down. There was now a demand for the soldier to be tried by the local civil court; but I said that the boot was on the other foot. The charge against the soldier was for an act performed in the line of his military duty, and of this our military courts had cognizance. The case was investigated by a military tribunal and the man justified. The result was every way satisfactory. Assaulting soldiers lost its attractiveness to town bullies, and the case in which the civilian had been left to the action of the civil courts was a standing proof of the inefficiency of those tribunals in matters where partisan passions entered, and where the unanimity of a jury was consequently impossible.
The State election occurred in October, and although there had been great fears of rioting and bloodshed, these fears were happily disappointed. There had been enough of the preliminary education as to the relations of the military authorities to the preservation of the peace, to make it generally understood that disturbances would be dangerous. The soldiers were, however, kept carefully out of sight except as they exercised their personal right to vote. They were under arms at their barracks, and no leaves of absence were given. These precautions were all that was needed. In Cincinnati the election was said to be one of the quietest and most orderly ever known. The people seemed to appreciate the gravity of the situation and to realize that it must be soberly and thoughtfully met. Hosts of men who would willingly have been in opposition to the administration party on questions of economy or of details in the conduct of the war declined to vote for Vallandigham, whose utterances had been the great matter of debate during the canvass, and whose disloyalty being thus brought home to the voters in every neighborhood, had repelled all but the most passionate of his party friends. John Brough, the Union party candidate, himself a "war democrat," was elected governor by an unprecedented majority of over a hundred thousand. The soldiers' vote had helped to swell this majority, and as returns had to be made from polling-places opened for each Ohio regiment in the field, there was considerable delay before the extent of the political victory was fully known. The home vote was enough for every practical purpose, and it, of course, was known at once. The returns from the army vote kept adding to the majority, and gave, day by day, a new stimulus to political interest, one party rejoicing over the unanimity of the country's defenders, and the other affecting to see dangers of military despotism. For this reason it was fortunate that the soldiers' vote was not necessary to decide the election, and that without it Brough's triumph went beyond any ordinary measure of party success.
The remarkable result of the election was felt throughout the country as an indication of renewed determination of the people that the war must be fought out to the complete crushing of the Rebellion and the restoration of the Union. There was a noticeable crystallization of public opinion after it. Reasonable men in the defeated party found it easy to accept conclusions which were backed up by so great majorities. Agitation was quieted, and there was an evident disposition to acquiesce in what was so evidently the popular current.
My aversion for the anomalous position of a military commandant out of the actual field of war had not been lessened by my experiences of the summer, and both directly and indirectly I renewed my requests for a field command. I had been told that the Secretary of War awaited only an opening which would permit him to assign me to duty with the advanced grade which had been given me after Antietam, and I had been advised, in a way that seemed authoritative, to wait patiently for this. It became evident in the autumn that such waiting was likely to be profitless as well as wearisome. A regular army officer had a backing in the esprit de corps at the departments, and Halleck was watchful to give the full weight of his official influence in favor of such a one. It was, perhaps naturally, assumed that a volunteer would be assisted by political friends, and if he did not make use of such influence he would fall between two stools. After my first appointment I was never aware of receiving any help from these personal influences, and had gotten whatever recognition I had from my immediate commanders in the field. Burnside had intimated that if Hartsuff's ill health should make that officer retire from the command of the Twenty-third Corps, he would assign me to it in the expectation that the corresponding rank would then be conferred by the President. If I have any regret respecting my own action in seeking active duty, it is that I did not ask for the command of one of the divisions in the corps on the movement into East Tennessee. It was Burnside's wish that I should remain in Cincinnati and I acquiesced; but I have had a lingering belief that my influence with him would have helped decide him to remain in the West had I been with him in Knoxville in October and November. Be that as it may, I was fully determined after the Ohio election was over to cease looking for anything more than a field command, according to my present rank, and to be urgent till I obtained it.
In this year the first volume of Kinglake's "History of the Crimean War" was published, and reading it in the intervals of other duty in Cincinnati, I found in it lessons of hope and confidence in our armies that were to me both stimulating and encouraging. It would not be strange if an English soldier should feel that Kinglake was quite too frank in his revelation of the mistakes and discouragements which attended England's first military operations after the "forty years' peace." But it was precisely this photographic realism and unreserve which gave the book its peculiar value. I found Lord Raglan and his subordinates intelligent men, feeling their way through doubts and mistakes to a new experimental knowledge of their task. I compared them and their work with what I had seen in our own service when a great army had to be organized and put in the field and everything had to be created anew. I saw that we had been no worse off than our neighbors, and that our tuition in the school of experience had gone on quite as rapidly as theirs. I thanked Kinglake in my heart for telling us that Raglan tested what he was doing by asking himself how "the Duke" would have done had he been there. It was only another way of applying the lessons of past experience to the present duty; but it seemed peculiarly human that the English general in the perplexities of his troublesome problem in the Crimea should summon up the shade of Wellington and ask how the practical soldier of the Spanish Peninsular War would act were he deciding for his old staff officer what he must do at the Alma or in front of Sebastopol.
The student of military history sees that the weak points in the British army on the peace establishment had been that systematic and continuous preparation for active war had not been insisted on. It needed the organizing genius of Roon and Moltke in the Prussian army to make such a mobilization as that of 1866 and that of 1870, and to show what is possible in preparing an armed host to take the field. Preparation for war has had a totally different meaning since those campaigns, and the start of a day or two in reaching the field was shown to involve the winning and losing a great campaign. As matters stood in 1854, however, the great military powers of Europe should be considered as having only the raw material of armies as they had depots of military stores, and true organization in every department had to be effected after a declaration of war. Studying it in 1863, it seemed to me that the only advantage England or France would have had over us at the outbreak of the Rebellion would have been in the greater number of men partly drilled and the greater quantities of arms and ammunition in store. Kinglake taught us that others would have had to go through most of the discouragements we had experienced, and that our aptitude in learning had been perhaps greater than theirs would have been. His unreserved disclosure of the errors and the miseries of the siege of Sebastopol was infinitely more instructive than any history which hid the humiliating facts and covered all with the glamour and glory of the final success. His faithful dealing was in the line of true discipline, though the reading of his story must have been a sore chastisement of spirit for many an English soldier and statesman. It was more effective than the comments of any "war correspondent," however capable; for it was free from every suspicion of unfriendliness, and was written with the fullest access to official evidence. I cannot help believing that the book was no small factor in the general movement in Europe toward a much more scientific comprehension and a much better practical mastery of the elements of army organization and administration in times of peace.
But what I am quite sure of is that its perusal was a source of great comfort and encouragement to me in the midst of our own struggle; because it assured me, as I compared Raglan's experience with ours, that we had not gone so far astray in learning our lesson, and were not so completely on the dunces' bench, as I had been disposed to fear. We had plenty of blunders to confess, and there was no room for over-confidence; but the book prompted every earnest soldier among us to believe that we could make still better use of our experience, and to feel bolder in relying on his own judgment and courage in drawing new expedients from our peculiar circumstances and in developing new adaptations of military science to our own campaigns. Staff schools cannot turn out great generals to order, and the man who leads will continue to be more important than any other element of an army; but no leader can work well with dull and antiquated tools, and the present generation can hardly see a great war begun with so little adequate preparation for it as was common before our great civil strife.
On the 9th of November the humdrum routine at my district headquarters was interrupted by a dispatch from the officer commanding at Detroit, Michigan, giving warning of what was more explicitly reported in one of the 10th, saying that he was positively informed that within forty-eight hours two armed steamers would attack Johnson's Island and release the prisoners held there. [Footnote: Official Records, series ii. vol. vi. pp. 491, 495, 635.]
The military prison at Johnson's Island was built for the confinement of Confederate officers who had been captured in battle, and their number was so large that to release them would be an enterprise of no little importance, if successful. The island lay in Sandusky Bay, within a few hours' sail of several Canadian ports. Its garrison consisted of a single regiment which had all the employment it needed to furnish the ordinary prison guards, and would be entirely too weak to oppose any considerable force attacking from without, especially as it would be prudent to assume that such an attack would be accompanied by an outbreak of the prisoners within.
I immediately communicated with Governor Tod and with the Commissary of Prisoners at Washington, Colonel Hoffman, and on the same day sent a battery of three-inch rifled cannon and 500 newly raised recruits to Sandusky. I telegraphed the Hon. Joshua R. Giddings, our consul-general at Montreal, asking what he could learn in Canada as to the threatened expedition. He thought it was the mere "bombast" of Confederate emissaries and refugees in the Canadian provinces, and made light of it. On the 12th, however, the Secretary of War telegraphed me that Lord Lyons, the British ambassador, confirmed the report, and directed me to take energetic action to defeat the expected raid. The dispatch reached me at nine o'clock in the morning, and as it would be necessary to consult with the governor and get him to call out a force of State militia, I telegraphed him that I would go to Columbus on the half-past-ten train from Cincinnati, and asked him to be ready to call out the militia as soon as I could see him. I then sent messages to the commandants of militia regiments near the railway line, requesting them to call out their men at once in anticipation of an order from the governor to proceed to Sandusky. I also communicated with my subordinates in command at Detroit, Sandusky, and Columbus, giving a hint of my purposes. Finding I was likely to be late at the railway station, I sent a message to Mr. Woodward, the superintendent of the Little Miami Railroad, asking him to hold the train for me. The train had gone when the message reached him, but he ordered out an extra locomotive, and when I reached the station it was under orders to overtake the regular train. With an aide-de-camp I mounted the locomotive, and we were off at speed. The train was overtaken at Xenia, half-way to Columbus, and I was able to keep my appointment with the governor.
It happened that there was at this time a plot also to take the camp of military prisoners at Columbus, indicating a wide-spread scheme among the Confederate prisoners in Ohio, and General Mason, who commanded there, did not think it would be safe to reduce his garrison. The governor acted at once upon my suggestion, and ordered out the militia regiments which I had warned before leaving Cincinnati. My regular train had gone on, but Mr. Woodward had provided for a special one from Columbus, and we were soon speeding on in the hope of making the connection with a train going West on the Lake Shore Railway. The connection was made, though it became necessary to make what was then regarded as extraordinary speed to do it. Over one stretch of the road we ran twenty miles in eighteen minutes by the watch, and our average rate was high enough to make it a noteworthy journey. I reached Sandusky at midnight, and found reports of the militia regiments already on the way, and that the hostile expedition had not yet left Canada.
There is always a considerable amount of business labor connected with the sudden assembly of new troops in a city like Sandusky. Provision must be made for quarters and for their subsistence. The militia were not like troops accustomed to take the field, and were not provided with tents. The autumn was well advanced, and severe winter weather was likely to come at any time. Competent officers had to be selected to take responsible charge of each of the supply departments, including arms and ammunition. A battery of Parrott-rifled cannon was ordered to report to me as well as some heavy coast artillery. The first organization of means to look after the coming troops and the artillery being made, the next duty was a personal reconnoissance of my field of operations. A gentleman put at my disposal a small sailing yacht of light draught, and with a good crew and a fresh breeze the principal points of the lower bay were visited, including Johnson's Island.
Sandusky Bay is the largest land-locked body of water connected with Lake Erie. It is some twenty miles long by three or four wide, its length running east and west, and narrow tongues of land separating it from the lake. The mouth of the bay is about a mile wide, but the water is quite shallow except in the narrow channel, which is sinuous and runs very close to Cedar Point, the extremity of the long, low sandy cape which separates the eastern part of the bay from the open water. A lighthouse on the point and range lights near it give direction to vessels approaching, which run from the northwest, head on, till they seem almost ashore at the foot of the lighthouse tower, when they turn sharply to the southwest, the channel being zigzag up to the city, which lies on the southeast shore. It did not need a second glance to determine that Cedar Point was the place to fortify, and that batteries there would rake any vessel approaching the harbor, as well as on its way in, if it should succeed in passing the point.
Johnson's Island lies a mile or two inside the entrance to the bay on the western side. A narrow channel separates it from the land on that side, which is a high rocky peninsula called Marblehead. The island had been cultivated as a farm, containing a hundred acres or more, with some pleasant groves amid the fields, and with a gently undulating surface which gave it an agreeable variety and a picturesque appearance. The landing at the island was on the bay side, three or four miles from the city wharves. If a hostile force should land on the peninsula at Marblehead, it could not reach the island by reason of the channel which separates it from the land on the west. The only chance of success for such a raid was to make a surprise of it before Cedar Point could be fortified, to enter the bay and land a force sufficient to overpower the prison garrison before it should be reinforced.
Under the terms of the treaty with Great Britain, our navy was represented by a single vessel of war on Lake Erie, the steamer "Michigan," which carried a battery of eight or ten guns. She was ordered to Sandusky to co-operate with me at the same time that I was directed to go there. She was commanded by Captain John Carter, a bluff and hearty seaman of the old school, whom I found cordially ready to work with me in the most perfect harmony and mutual understanding. I lost no time in transporting my two rifled batteries to Cedar Point, and throwing up hasty earthworks to cover them. From the moment they were in position it was certain that no unarmed steamboat could enter the harbor. A part of my infantry was encamped in rear of the batteries, covered by a grove of evergreen trees, near enough to support the guns if an effort were made to land there. The rest of the infantry was assigned to increase the garrison on Johnson's Island itself. The news had spread that there was a concentration of our forces at Sandusky, and by the time we were ready for an attack the raiders were well aware that their plans had failed.
Their project had not been a hopeless one if they could have kept it secret, but that was almost impossible. The leaders in it were commonly reported to have been some of Morgan's men who had made their way to Canada when he was captured. By the aid of Confederate agents they had procured the means to organize a considerable band of adventurers, and had chartered two steamboats which were to meet them at the mouth of the Detroit River. The assembly of such a body of men attracted the attention of the Canadian authorities, and information was sent to Lord Lyons at Washington. Our officers at Detroit also got wind of it, and employed the police and detectives to ferret out the facts. The raiders had assembled, and the boats were ready, when, on the 14th of November, they learned that their plans were exposed and the chance to succeed was lost. The less eager ones were quick to abandon the enterprise, and the bolder spirits found themselves reduced to a handful. So they scattered, threatening to try it again at some more convenient time.
As soon as the work of preparation at Cedar Point was well under way, I accepted the invitation of Captain Carter to make a reconnoissance in the "Michigan." We sailed out of the harbor and made the tour of the beautiful group of islands known as the Bass Islands, in the midst of which is the little harbor of Put-in-Bay. We were on the classic ground where Perry had won his naval victory in the War of 1812, and although we found no trace of the threatened raid, the circumstances which took us there added to the interest with which we examined the scene of Perry's glory. On my return I reported to the Secretary of War that all present danger had passed, and asked to be allowed to send the militia home. The weather had become stormy, and the State troops naturally became impatient when the need of their continued exposure seemed to be at an end. They were soon allowed to go, but it was wisely determined to put the heavy guns in a fortification on the island, where they could command the entrance to the bay and yet be so connected with the permanent garrison as to avoid the establishment of two camps with the necessary increase of expense as well as numbers.
This delayed me a fortnight at Sandusky, and the delay was quite as unwelcome to me as to the militia. I had been away from Cincinnati but a few days when I received a dispatch from General Burnside, saying that if I was still minded to accept a field command he thought he could give me one of his corps. As this was exactly what I had been wishing for, it will be easily believed that I chafed at the circumstances which seemed to tie me to the shore of Lake Erie when I longed to be on my way to East Tennessee. I laid the matter before the War Department by telegraph, and begged to be allowed to go. Mr. Stanton answered on the 22d that I could not yet leave Sandusky. I hurried the work to be done there with all possible energy, so as to remove the cause of delay, and on the 3d of December was gratified to learn that the order had been issued directing me to report in person to the general in command at Knoxville. I was not informed that I should not find Burnside there when I should arrive, and assumed that my work at Sandusky was the only cause of delay in my orders to go; but I was soon to learn of other changes which I did not anticipate.
My stay at Sandusky gave me the opportunity to make an inspection of the military prison at Johnson's Island, and I availed myself of it. As only officers were confined there, the high average intelligence and character of these would of course show itself in their personal habits and in their methods of employing the time, which hung heavy on their hands. In all such situations the energy and hopefulness of the individual are the best guaranty for continued good health, whilst ennui, listlessness, and idleness are the pretty sure forerunners of melancholy and homesickness, which lead to serious maladies. It would be hard to find a more salubrious site for a camp than Johnson's Island. Naturally well drained, diversified with grove and meadow, open to the breeze from every quarter, washed by the pure waters of Lake Erie, it is to-day, as it was then, a beautiful and attractive spot. The winter there is not usually severe. The vast body of water comprising the Great Lakes modifies the climate and tempers it so that the autumn is generally prolonged and pleasant. Winter begins late, but is apt to be changeable and disagreeable, and a raw and backward spring, with chilling winds off the frozen waters, is the part of the year most to be dreaded. Native Ohioans insist that there is no climate more wholesome and pleasant than this lake-shore belt, which is now the land of continuous vineyards and peach orchards. A native of the Gulf States would, however, find its winter and spring severe and trying, more from sudden changes than from any extremely low temperature. Taking it all in all, it is probable that no place for a prison camp could be found in the Northern States which would be liable to fewer objections.
The prison itself was constructed in the manner which seemed simplest and cheapest. A large square on the sloping hillsides was surrounded with a high wooden fence. On the outside of this, near the top, was a gallery or balcony supported on brackets.
This was the walk for the sentinels, and from it they had a commanding view of the interior of the enclosure. Sentry-boxes, looking like turrets, were at the corners and at intervals on the sides. Within, the barracks for the prisoners were on the west or northwest side, leaving the larger space open in front for exercise. The buildings were of pine boards, roughly but well constructed, so that they were dry and tight. Rows of bunks ran along the sides, filled with beds of straw. The shelter and accommodation was decidedly better than that which we made for our own troops at Camp Dennison, our first camp of instruction. Through most of the year there was no ground for complaint. In winter, and especially on winter nights, it would be impossible to keep up anything like a steady temperature, and the thin shell of the building would soon chill through in a nipping and frosty air. We had to meet this difficulty in all winter quarters for troops, and there seemed to be no way to remove it. If one could be heavily clad, it was generally more healthful to endure a steady low temperature, than to meet the alternations of heat and cold which came of the replenishing and dying out of the fires in stoves during the long winter night. As many men have many minds, it was almost impossible to secure anything like system in a long shed-like building occupied by a little democracy of hundreds of persons.
The food was plain but good in quality, similar to the army ration, and at the time of my visit was abundant. I took occasion to go through the barracks unattended by the officers of the garrison, and encouraged the prisoners to make known any complaints. There were practically none that were not necessarily incident to the position of a prisoner of war in actual confinement. The loss of liberty, the weary pacing of the enclosure in front of their barracks, the lack of interesting occupation, home-sickness, and general discomfort,--these were the ills of which they spoke. Among the prisoners was General Jeff. Thompson, of Missouri,--the ranking officer among them, as I recollect,--and I sought an introduction to him and talked with him in regard to the prison life. He was depressed and ailing, though not consenting to go into hospital, and spoke feelingly of the discouraging monotony and ennui of their existence, but made no complaint of the administration of the prison in any way. To be exchanged was the burden of their wishes and prayers, and in this every one with ordinary human sympathies must feel with them. Games of chess, draughts, dominoes, and cards were their indoor amusements, and some of the more energetic kept up an attempt at regular out-door exercise.
It happened that the chief surgeon of the camp was an old neighbor of mine, Dr. M. C. Woodworth, and I questioned him closely as to the medical and sanitary condition. He was a man of the highest character in his profession and as a citizen. I had absolute confidence in his uprightness as well as his ability. His statements fully corroborated the conclusions I drew from my own observation. I was fully satisfied that the garrison administration was honest and humane, and that the prisoners suffered only such evils as were necessarily incident to confinement in a narrow space, and to life in temporary barracks of the kind used in all military camps.
I learned that those prisoners who had means of their own were permitted to open private accounts with merchants and bankers in the city of Sandusky, and had little difficulty in increasing their physical comforts in many ways. Since the war I have conversed with business men of that town who personally knew of these arrangements, and who have given me details of remittances and credits furnished to prisoners, and of some considerable investments made for them. A certain surveillance was necessary in such cases to give assurance that no unlawful advantage was taken of such opportunities, but there was very little if any reason to believe such leniency was abused.
A WINTER RIDE ON THE CUMBERLAND MOUNTAINS
Ordered to East Tennessee--Preparation for a long ride--A small party of officers--Rendezvous at Lexington, Ky.--Changes in my staff--The escort-A small train--A gay cavalcade--The blue-grass country--War-time roads--Valley of the Rockcastle--Quarters for the night--London--Choice of routes--Longstreet in the way--A turn southward--Williamsburg--Meeting Burnside--Fording the Cumberland--Pine Mountain--A hard pull--Teamsters' chorus--Big Creek Gap--First view of East Tennessee--Jacksboro--A forty-mile trot--Escape from unwelcome duty--In command of Twenty-third Corps--The army-supply problem--Siege bread--Starved beef--Burnside's dinner to Sherman.
The order of the War Department directing me to report in person to the general commanding in East Tennessee was issued on the 2nd of December. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. iii. p. 314.] It was to take effect when I should have completed my duties at Sandusky, but as I had pressed all my work forward to completion some days before, in the expectation of the order, I was prepared to leave at once. A copy of the order was telegraphed to me on the 3rd, and I left for Cincinnati the same evening. On reaching the district and department headquarters, I learned that Burnside was relieved, and that General Foster had passed through the city, going on toward East Tennessee to assume command of the department. Longstreet raised the siege of Knoxville the very day I reached Cincinnati, but this was not yet known, and several days passed before we had authentic information that the way to Knoxville was open. There was work to do in closing up the business of the district, packing papers and books pertaining to my headquarters, and providing for their safe-keeping. A number of officers belonging to Burnside's command were waiting an opportunity to rejoin the army, and I arranged a rendezvous for these at Lexington, Ky., where I would join them. A small troop of cavalry was detailed to act as our escort, and the quartermaster's department promised wagons for our baggage and supplies. On the 8th the news of Longstreet's retreat indicated that the road through Cumberland Gap to Knoxville was probably open, and sending our horses and baggage to Lexington by railroad, I left Cincinnati with my staff on Wednesday, the 9th, for the same place. Reaching there at evening, the next day was spent in packing our wagons and organizing our little party, and the cavalcade marched out of the pretty town of Lexington early on the 11th.
My staff was not altogether the same as it was in my Virginia campaigns. I had lost my friend, Surgeon Holmes, by death. He had been assigned to duty with me in Cincinnati, but his lungs had become diseased through exposure in the field, and he had died of consumption a few weeks before. My aide Captain Christie was similarly affected, and resigned to prolong his life. He ultimately died of the illness thus contracted. My aide Lieutenant Conine was appointed colonel of one of the new colored regiments, and went with it to Virginia. Major Bascom, my adjutant-general, Major Treat, my commissary, and Lieutenant Theodore Cox, my aide-de-camp, were ordered to accompany me, and were all that remained of my old staff. In the place of Conine I secured the detail of Captain E. D. Saunders, assistant-adjutant-general, who had served temporarily on my staff during the preceding season. He was the son of an old resident of Cincinnati, an excellent officer in his department as well as a gallant soldier, and he remained with me in closest relations till he fell by my side in the Atlanta campaign in the following year. His assignment as aide-de-camp was out of the usual course, but it was allowed in view of the contingency that Major Bascom could not remain with me if I should not continue in command of an army corps. In this case Saunders would become my adjutant-general, and this was what in fact occurred a little later.
At Lexington I found a group of ten or a dozen officers who were eager to join my party in the ride over the mountains. The one of highest rank was Lieutenant-Colonel J. H. Strong of General Foster's staff, who had been allowed a short leave of absence when his chief started for the West, and was now hastening back to duty. I found a ground for pleasant acquaintance with him in his relationship to Bishop Bedell of Ohio, a venerated friend of mine as long as he lived. Colonel Strong was a brother of Mrs. Bedell, and was a refined and cultivated gentleman. Lieutenant-Colonel James T. Sterling of the One Hundred and Third Ohio Infantry was also on his way to join his regiment at Knoxville. He had been a captain in the Seventh Ohio Volunteer Infantry, and served with me in my first campaign in West Virginia, where I had become attached to him for his military as well as his personal character. He became my inspector-general in the field. Captain D. W. H. Day, assistant quartermaster, was also en route to the Twenty-third Corps in the field, and was directed to take charge of our little train. His unbounded energy and his power to surmount obstacles so impressed me that on our reaching Knoxville I had him also assigned to permanent duty with me in his department. The others passed out of the circle of permanent acquaintances when the journey was over, but they were all pleasant travelling companions, and one or two of them would have been remarkable anywhere for their wit and cheerfulness. It was as happy and jolly a party as one need wish for in a rough ride of a couple of hundred miles over the mountains.
Our escort turned out to be only twenty horsemen instead of a full troop, but these were enough for protection against mere marauders, and we had to take the chance of meeting organized bodies of the enemy. Four army wagons were furnished us. One of these was loaded with oats for our horses, and carried the personal baggage of the cavalry troop. Another was loaded with ordinary army rations. A third was devoted to mess supplies of the officers of the party, and as we were going into a country wasted by war and almost famine-stricken, we each tried to carry with us a small stock of choice provisions which might eke out a little comfort to the mess. The fourth wagon carried our personal baggage. Captain Day had carefully selected strong and serviceable horses for the teams, and the wagons were minutely inspected to see that they were fit for the mountain work in a wilderness where wheelwrights could not be found. It was our purpose to get both forage and provisions on the road if we could buy them, and to save the stock in our wagons for a time of necessity or to carry as much as possible into Knoxville.
I had telegraphed to Burnside as soon as I reached Cincinnati, formally reporting myself as under his orders for duty in the field by permission of the Secretary of War. I expressed my regret to hear of his leaving the command, and urged my assignment to duty before he laid down his authority. No answer to my dispatch was received, and the fact was that full communication with Burnside by the Cumberland Gap route was not opened till the 9th of December, so that my letter was among the correspondence received by Burnside the day he turned over the command to Foster. Another cause of uneasiness to me was the change of department boundaries made in the order assigning General Foster to command. The States north of the Ohio were separated from the department, and I was apprehensive that other changes might occur which would make me fall between two stools. That there was danger of just such disappointments turned out to be very true. My anxious determination to get forward to Knoxville with the least possible delay was justified, and I had reason to congratulate myself on acting promptly upon it.
Our cavalcade presented a gay appearance as we marched out of Lexington on Friday morning. There were twelve or fifteen officers, all well mounted and followed by a group of servants riding and leading our extra horses. Part of the cavalry troop led the way, the guidons fluttering in the van. Behind us came an ambulance and the army wagons with clean white canvas covers and well-groomed teams of four horses each, driven in army fashion by a driver astride of the near wheel-horse, a mounted wagon-master superintending the whole. The little column was closed by a squad of the cavalry acting as rear-guard. There had not been any severe winter weather as yet, and though the road was sloppy, the sun was bright overhead, and its beams flashed from our side-arms and equipments. Our first day's ride was to take us to Richmond, a thriving town twenty-five miles away, the county-seat of Madison County, and a good turnpike road made this an easy day's journey. We were in the rich blue-grass region, and though all of central Kentucky showed the marks of war's ravages, this region was comparatively unscathed, and the beautiful rolling country was neither abandoned nor untilled. Horses and cattle were noticeably few, for raids like Morgan's had been frequent enough to teach the peril of having flocks and herds to tempt the enemy. Farmers gave more attention than before to agriculture proper and the raising of crops which would directly support the family. There was nothing dispiriting in the view of the country on this first day's ride, and though a winter landscape can hardly be exhilarating when it is leafless and bare, gray, and a little sombre in color, we found ourselves under no stress of sympathy with misfortune or want, as is so often the case with the soldier.
On leaving Richmond our really rough work began. The roads would have been bad enough at any time, but the hard use by army trains in bad weather and the entire lack of repair had made them execrable. All the ordinary methods of keeping highways in order by local administration were suspended by the war, and the only work done upon them was what each wagon-master could do with his drivers to mend the worst places so that his train could get through. As we could not be sure of finding food for man or beast on the road, it was necessary to gauge our speed by the distance our wagons could make, so that we should not be separated from them. About twenty miles a day was the maximum, and though we sometimes got a little further, there were days when our journey was much less. South of Richmond and on the border between Madison and Rockcastle counties, we crossed Big Hill, the first of the outlying ranges of the Cumberland Mountains. These great ridges are nearly parallel to each other, and even the "gaps" in them are so high that there is always a long and hard pull for wagon teams in surmounting them. Over the summit we came down into the valleys tributary to the Rockcastle River. Twenty or twenty-five miles away another summit marks the boundary between this valley and the principal depression in which the Cumberland River finds its devious course to the south and west. The rocks are sandstone through which the Rockcastle River has cut deep gorges and chasms, and the weathering of the cliffs has left the strata and crevices exposed with so much of the regularity of layers of masonry as to tell at once the story of the impression made on the early explorers of the region, and the suggestion by Nature herself of a name for the beautiful stream that dashes along to join the Cumberland many miles below.
Our second day's journey ended far from any village or tavern, in this romantic valley. A pouring rain had begun about noon, and we plodded and splashed along till we reached a large log house which seemed a convenient halting-place as far advanced as our wagons could be brought. The house belonged to a thrifty widow. Half of it was simply furnished, and in this part she and her children lived. The other half was a large unfurnished room with the walls of hewn logs and a great fireplace of stone in the middle of the long side of the room. Out of this opened a little bedroom, a mere closet, in which the spare bed for guests was placed. The widow put these two rooms at our disposal. A roaring fire was soon burning on the hearth, our saddles and horse trappings were arranged on the sides of the room to serve as pillows, and blankets were brought in from the ambulance. Supper was got, partly from our own stores, cooked with the help of the family, and we were early ready for bed. The guest chamber was assigned to me, but it was so small that for the sake of ventilation the door was kept open, and the ruddy firelight flashed upon as picturesque and as merry a group as one could wish to see. A weary day in the saddle made all of us ready for sleep, and quips and jokes soon died out as one after another seemed to drop off into forgetfulness. The physical fatigue of the day made one of the party develop a phenomenal capacity for snoring in his heavy sleep, and in the quiet his nasal trumpeting grew more pronounced. It proceeded by phrases, as it were, each effort stronger than the preceding, till a fortissimo passage came and ended with a snort which echoed through the room and was followed by perfect silence. From the corner of the room came a drawling voice with a sigh as of deep relief, "Thank God he's dead." The shout of laughter which followed showed that nearly all had roused themselves for the finale, and the badgered performer of the music lost much of the real comfort of his night's rest by his fear of committing himself to a complete oblivion which might subject him to another chaffing bout from his companions.
Another wet and uncomfortable day's ride brought us to London, an unattractive village at the parting of the ways, the principal road leading on to Cumberland Gap, and another on the right going to a ford of the Cumberland River at Williamsburg, where there would be again a choice of routes up the Elk Fork of the Cumberland between the ridges known as Jellico Mountain and Pine Mountain. The left wing of Burnside's column had taken this route in October, and after crossing the Cumberland had climbed Jellico Mountain on their right hand, and reached the headwaters of Emory River, a tributary of the Tennessee which breaks through the mountains at Emory Gap, the easiest route into East Tennessee. Another road kept in the valley of Elk Fork till a place was reached where Pine Mountain, on the left, could be scaled, and once over its summit a hard road led to Big Creek Gap in the Cumberland Mountains, and thence by way of Jacksboro to Knoxville.
At London we were met with news from East Tennessee which made me reconsider the question of our route. We heard from Cumberland Gap that after General Foster had joined Burnside at Knoxville, Longstreet had moved in force to Rutledge, where he intercepted this line of communication, and that Knoxville could not be reached by that road for some time to come. This seemed to make it necessary to turn off to the south. As between the road to Emory Gap over Jellico Mountain and that to Big Creek Gap over Pine Mountain, the best evidence seemed to indicate the latter as the easier, but with the qualification which travellers in so wild a region have often to face, that whichever way you go you will wish you had gone the other. The name of Williamsburg on the Cumberland sounded as if it might be a considerable town, but the man who gave us the route warned us that we should find "it's not much of a 'burg neither when you git thar." Our ride into London had been on Sunday, and was surely a work of necessity if not of mercy. Captain B. had found his horse a little shaky in coming down the steep hills, and at one little stream the jaded beast came down on his knees in the water. The captain with affected seriousness argued that it was a punishment for travelling on the day of rest, but was effectually silenced by the wag of the party, who humorously remarked, "Ah! if your horse is so weak on Sunday what would have become of him and you on a week day?" London did not afford us any lodgings that tempted us indoors, and we wrapped ourselves in our blankets and slept on the open veranda of a dilapidated house, building a camp-fire in the yard in front. The rain had ceased, and we preferred the frosty air to the narrow and stuffy quarters we should otherwise have had to take.
The evening of the 14th of December brought us to the Cumberland River, and as it was rising from the heavy rain of the preceding week, we should have been glad to get over at once, but the wagons could not overtake us till night, and we stopped at a country-house on the north side where we were made quite comfortable. About one o'clock in the morning, however, I was awakened by voices in the room below me, and recognized that of Captain French of Burnside's staff, who was asking the farmer to light a fire and prepare to receive the general and his party, who were a little behind, wet and nearly frozen. I got up and dressed myself, went downstairs to greet the captain, who was soon joined by the rest of the party. The general had come by the route I was taking, but his wagons had broken down on the mountain-side, and he had been obliged to abandon them. The party had picked up somewhere an old-fashioned stage-coach on thorough braces, and this was drawn by ten mules. They had packed on the backs of other mules such of their personal effects and stores as they could, and had left the rest by the roadside. They had halted for the night on the south side of the river, but at midnight had been roused by the news that the river was rising, and that they must pass the ford at once if they expected to get over. In the darkness of the night it had been both difficult and perilous, for the ford was diagonal to the course of the stream, and there was great danger of getting into deep water. They were all soaking wet and chilled, covered with mud, and as forlorn and unkempt a set of men as was ever seen. They warmed and partly dried themselves by the fire, and pushed on as soon as day began to break, for the general was impatient to get forward. Colonel Goodrich, Colonel Richmond, Major Van Buren, and the personal staff were with him, and as my own staff had been well acquainted with them, it was an interesting rencounter with all the events of the Knoxville campaign to discuss. The general had sent his proposal to me to join him, the very day Longstreet reached the Holston River at Loudon, and when it had become evident that the Confederates were committed to an active campaign in East Tennessee. General Hartsuff had found that he could not endure the work, and had decided to leave before Knoxville should be invested. My regret that I could not start at once was diminished by the fact that the investment was complete before I could possibly have reached Knoxville, so that no time had been lost. But all the circumstances showed that Burnside had regarded his request to be relieved as indefinitely postponed, and the appointment of General Foster to succeed him was unexpected. He had not heard that I was on my way, but after meeting me sent a dispatch to Foster as soon as he reached the telegraph line. He had informed Foster at Knoxville of his purpose in having me join him, and sent this message in a friendly wish to promote my interests.
As soon as the general and his party were off, we began our preparation to cross the river. Their experience had shown that the increase of difficulty in keeping the ford at night was more than would probably come from the rise of the water. I therefore ordered everything to be ready as soon as it was broad daylight. We had eaten our breakfast and were in the saddle as soon as we could see clearly. Captain Day carefully examined the ford with a few of the cavalrymen, and fixed the landmarks which would guide us to the shallowest places. With these precautions and by carefully following directions we got over without mishap. The water did not quite reach the bodies of the wagons, and by lifting our feet out of our stirrups we got over dryshod. The stream was swift, and the only way to keep one's direction safely was to look ahead and not downward. Had we tried it in the night, we should no doubt have fared as badly as our friends who had preceded us.
A day's hard journey for the wagon teams brought us to the foot of Pine Mountain at the point where the road leaves the bed of Elk Fork to climb the steep ascent. We were now only nineteen miles from Jacksboro, in the valley of the Clinch, but the distance was multiplied by the cumulating difficulties of the way. We were not far from Cross Mountain, a ridge which, as its name indicates, connects the long parallel ranges of Jellico, Pine, and Cumberland mountains. We must climb Pine Mountain to its crest, descend along the shoulders of Cross Mountain near the head of the valley, then scale the side of Cumberland Mountain to reach Big Creek Gap, from which the valley of East Tennessee would open before us. We camped for the night and prepared for an early start in the morning. The teams were well fed and groomed, and the whole equipment was carefully inspected to see that everything was ready for the strain of the rough work of the morrow.
The morning of the 16th was fair and frosty, and we were astir early. Pine Mountain loomed before us like the steep roof of some vast gothic cathedral. The ridge seemed as straight as a house ridge, and we could not see that any natural depression made the ascent much easier in one place than another. Our road ran up a spur of the mountain till the regular slope was reached, then turning to the right it gradually mounted the steep incline by a diagonal course on a long shelf cut in the hillside, with here and there a level spot on which the teams could breathe. From where we stood in the valley the mountain face looked precipitous, and the road a mere line gradually rising along its front. It would have been bad enough if it had been a metalled road in good order; but it was only a rough track alternating in mud and rock, that had never been good even in mid-summer, and it was now next to impassable. Under the direction of Captain Day and the wagonmaster the teams were doubled, two of the wagons being left in the valley till the others should reach the summit, when the teams were to be brought back. When they came to the long and hard pull, the drivers gave us a good sample of army wagoning, their yelling and cracking of whips keeping up a continual chorus, and at specially hard points the quartermaster and wagon-master joined in the music like the baying of a pack of hounds, while the horses seemed to be stimulated to almost frantic action. This could not be kept up long, and when one of the level breathing-places was reached all subsided into quiet, while the steaming and puffing horses regained their wind for another effort.
Five miles of advance was the utmost we could make on that day, but this was fifteen for the teams, as they had to be brought down the mountain over the same road and drag up the wagons which had been left at the foot. Our party of cavaliers waited lazily in the valley till the first of the wagons were near the summit, and then rode on to overtake them on the other side of the ridge. It was an easy and picturesque ride for us who were well mounted, but a wearing labor and strain for the teamsters and their animals. We congratulated ourselves on the care with which the "outfit" had been selected at Lexington, for we came through without accident on a road where wrecks were plentier than milestones.
We had sweet slumber that night in the keen air of the mountain top, and were ready for the last day of mountain work. We were fourteen miles from Jacksboro, and were resolved to reach the little town before night. The road was unlike the long inclined plane cut in the side of Pine Mountain. We were in the midst of a mass of irregular stony hills, all of them part of the highlands between the summits of the two ranges. It was hard and rough work, but we were not obliged to double the teams again. The last ascent of the Cumberland Mountains toward Big Creek Gap was over bare rock much of the way, the sandstone strata lying horizontal, and the road being a gigantic staircase in which the steps were sometimes a foot each, but oftener more, with an occasional rise of fully four feet in the edge of the rocky outcrop. In the road the sharp edges of these stairs had been rounded off, partly by wear and a little by mechanical means, but they distinctly retained the stair-like character and looked absolutely impracticable. At the worst places the teamsters would halt and throw together stones or branches of trees to fill the angle in the rock, then mounting, a whoop and a crack of the whip was the signal for the team to dash at the obstacle. The horses' shoes would strike fire from the level rock of the long "treader" above, the wagon would be bounced up the step, when a little bit of level would bring them to another rise in the staircase. We zigzagged along as the road sought the easiest places among the rocks, and perseverance at last had its reward when we crowned the summit and looked down into the broad and beautiful valleys of the Clinch and the Holston, the lovely tributaries which form the Tennessee River.
Our first look into Big Creek Gap was a startling and pleasurable surprise which has remained indelibly fixed in memory. Clouds had been hanging about the top of the mountain, and as we ascended the last slope and reached the crest, they hung so low over us that we could almost touch them. It was not like going into a fog, as is usually the case in climbing mountains, but these seemed smooth as silk on the under surface and hung over us as well defined as the covering of a tent. This gave to the prospect an accidental and very peculiar effect that one might not see again in crossing the pass a hundred times. As we looked eastward from the depression in the crest in which our roadway ran, a great circling amphitheatre lay before us, almost perfect in the symmetry of its curves. The ridge on right and left which formed its outer margin was higher than the spot on which we stood, and the silky clouds over our heads rested on it as on the walls of a natural coliseum, like the velum of canvas of the ancient gigantic structure in Rome, except that here, nature outdoing all art, spread the lovely awning over the whole vast and cavernous auditorium a mile or more across. The gloom of the interior threw the retreating slopes into a mysterious shadow in which it were easy to imagine them peopled with ranks of ghostly auditors gazing upon the stage. It was there, full in our faces, that the most startling and almost incredible effect was visible. The circle of the mountains was there broken by an opening flanked on either side by stupendous perpendicular cliffs, and we looked through it upon a charming landscape bathed in glorious sunshine. A blue stream dashed foaming through the great gap and wandered off to join the river beyond. The broad and undulating valley fifty miles across was backed by another mountain wall which towered opposite to that from whose battlements we were gazing, not a long and level ridge like so many of those in the Alleghanies, but a picturesque Alpine mountain scene, with peaks snow-clad and dazzling in the sunlight,--the Great Smokies, the noblest of all the mountain groups of the Appalachian chain. The gloom and shadow of our vast amphitheatre held us in awe, while the brilliancy of the scene beyond the great stage opening seemed to draw us to it as to a promised land. We sat upon our horses, spellbound, gazing upon what seemed at once too grand and too beautiful to be real. Had we been superstitious like soldiers of an ancient time, we might have seen a miraculous portent in it; and even as it was, such sentiment as may be permitted in the sceptical spirit of our own day could find a happy omen in the scene. We were entering upon a new chapter in our military lives, and it was cheering to us, in entering East Tennessee, through the great gate that opened before us, to have so charming a picture to lure us on. We wound down the mountain side, happy but quiet. There was no one among us so lacking in earnest character as to be unmoved. We had left the wagons far behind, and the clinking of our horses' shoes upon the rocks was the only sound which broke the silence till the roaring and laughing brook that gives a name to the pass met us and rollicked beside us, as we went out between the giant cliffs into the broad and cheerful valley.
At Jacksboro we entered the theatre of active warlike operations, and found ourselves in the usual atmosphere of rumors. It was of course known that Longstreet had retreated to the northeast after raising the siege, but some insisted that he was moving down the valley again, and that Foster was to be shut up in Knoxville as Burnside had been. It was evident that there was no definite information on which any of these local opinions were based, and I was satisfied that our road was open and safe. The only risk was from some raiding column of cavalry, and we must take our chances as to that. After a good night's rest, I decided on the morning of the 18th to take with me Colonel Strong of General Foster's staff and Colonel Sterling, and leaving the wagons behind, to make the forty miles to Knoxville in a single day's ride. What we had heard of the destitution in the city made it seem best that most of the party should remain with the wagons and the supplies, and so avoid the risk of throwing too many guests upon the hospitality of headquarters. We took a few of the cavalry as an escort, and both horses and men were in such good condition and so hardened to the road that we scarcely broke from a trot in the whole distance, except to stop for resting and feeding our nags at noon.
We reached Knoxville in the afternoon, and Colonel Strong was warmly welcomed by those of the staff who were present, but the general was absent at the front. He was expected back the next night, however, and comfortable quarters were provided for us meanwhile. My instinctive fears of complications in regard to my own assignment to duty proved to be true. The very day I left Lexington General Foster had issued an order assigning me to command the District of Kentucky, and it had passed me on the road. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. iii. pp. 383, 394.] My determination to obey literally the order from the War Department to report in person, and the haste with which I had started, proved my salvation from the kind of duty at the rear which I was bent on escaping. The District of Kentucky would have been even worse than that of Ohio, for the strife between political factions embroiled every one who commanded there, and the order to me had been issued because the officer in command was obnoxious to one of these factions.
General Foster returned on the 19th, and on my reporting to him I found at once the benefit of General Burnside's representations in regard to me. Colonel Strong was also well aware of my earnest wish for field service, and the friendship which had grown up on the road, no doubt, made him an influential advocate with his chief. The general received me very kindly, and said that his action had been based on the supposition that I would prefer duty in Kentucky during the winter rather than make the rough journey over the mountains at that season. On my assuring him that my coming without waiting to communicate with him was because of my earnest request to the War Department for service in the field, he was evidently pleased and immediately revoked the orders already made, and assigned me to the Twenty-third Corps, to command it as the senior general officer present. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. iii, p. 457.]
I had been eight days on the road from Lexington, and the rest of the party who remained with the wagons were a day longer in reaching Knoxville. It had given me a vivid appreciation of the impossibility of supplying an army in East Tennessee by wagon trains over the mountains. The roads by Cumberland Gap or by Emory Gap were less precipitous, but they were more muddy. The forage was exhausted along all the routes, and till grass should grow large trains of supplies were not to be thought of. The effort to force trains through in the autumn had been most destructive to the teams. Noticing how the way was lined by the carcasses of dead horses and mules, we kept an accurate count one day of the number of these. In the twenty miles of that day's journey we counted a hundred and fifty dead draught animals. The movement of wagon-trains had, of course, been suspended when Longstreet advanced upon Knoxville, and bad weather had hardly begun then. Beef cattle could be driven in herds, but the country was so stripped of forage that the danger of starvation by the way made this mode of supply nearly as hopeless as the other.
The only permanent solution of the subsistence problem was to be found in enlarging the facilities for railway communication at Chattanooga so that that town might become a great depot from which the East Tennessee troops could draw as soon as the railroad to Knoxville should be repaired, or light steamboats be brought to the upper Tennessee and Holston rivers. They showed us at Knoxville samples of the bread issued to the garrison during the siege. It was made of a mixture of all the breadstuffs which were in store or could be procured, but the chief ingredient was Indian corn ground up cob and all. It was not an attractive loaf, but it would support life, though the bulk was out of proportion to the nutriment. The cattle had been kept in corral till they were too thin and weak to be fit for food, but there was no other, and the commissaries killed the weakest and issued them as rations because these would otherwise die a natural death. Sherman and his staff had expressed their astonishment that an appetizing dinner had been spread for them at Burnside's headquarters; [Footnote: Sherman's Memoirs, vol. i. p. 368.] but they would have wondered more if they had known of the way in which the town and vicinity had been ransacked to do honor to the welcome guests who had relieved the beleaguered army. General Poe vividly describes the straits they were in, and the heroic sort of hospitality which had hunted far and wide for something fit to set before the leader of the column which had raised the siege. [Footnote: Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, vol. iii. p. 745.] There had been no danger of actual starvation, but only the coarsest of bread and the poorest of beef could be distributed. Eating, in such circumstances, was not a pleasure, and the pangs of real hunger were necessary to make the ration at all palatable. The withdrawal of the enemy relieved the situation somewhat, for it opened the country to foraging parties, and every kind of produce which money could tempt the people to part with was bought and brought into the camps. It was little enough at best, and three months of pinching want were to be endured before anything like regular supplies could be furnished to the army. It was to such a house of destitution we had come, but we had come voluntarily to share the labors and the triumphs of our comrades in the field and we had no regrets.
WINTER BIVOUACS IN EAST TENNESSEE
Blain's Cross-roads--Hanson's headquarters--A hearty welcome--Establishing field quarters--Tents and houses--A good quartermaster--Headquarters' business--Soldiers' camps--Want of clothing and shoes--The rations--Running the country mills--Condition of horses and mules--Visit to Opdycke's camp--A Christmas dinner--Veteran enlistments--Patriotic spirit--Detachment at Strawberry Plains--Concentration of corps there--Camp on a knoll-A night scene-Climate of the valley--Affair at Mossy Creek--New Year's blizzard--Pitiful condition of the troops--Patience and courage--Zero weather.
The Twenty-third Corps was encamped at Blain's Cross-roads, seventeen miles northeast of Knoxville, on the road to Rutledge, where Longstreet was supposed to be. The Fourth Corps, under General Granger, and the Ninth, under General Parke, were in the same neighborhood. The cavalry corps covered the front and flanks on both sides of Holston River. A concentration of the Army of the Ohio and its reinforcements had been made there to meet a rumored return of the Confederates toward Knoxville after an affair at Rutledge in which Longstreet had captured a wagon-train loaded with supplies for us. I left Knoxville on the morning of the 21st of December, accompanied by my staff officers, and rode to Blain's Cross-roads. I found the corps under temporary command of Brigadier-General Mahlon D. Manson, of Indiana, who had commanded one of the divisions in the preceding campaign. Manson occupied an old log house too small for himself and staff. There was but one bed in it, and at night the general occupied this, whilst his staff slept in their blankets on the floor. We had travelled leisurely, as I wished to study the country between Knoxville and the camp, and we reached the corps too late to make any arrangement for the night, and had to cast ourselves on our comrades' hospitality. I was most heartily welcomed by General Manson, who did the best he could for me by offering me the half of his own bed, whilst the staff took similar lodgings with his officers in a shed veranda at the back of the house lying snugly together, wrapped in their blankets. Manson was a burly, whole-souled man, brave and loyally unselfish, and turned over the command to me with a sincerity of subordination which won my confidence at once. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. iii. pp. 462, 463.] It was not a comfortable night in the overcrowded log house for either hosts or guests, but it was made cheery by the hearty soldiers' welcome we received, and we sat late around the crackling fire in the stone chimney after we had eaten with a relish, known only in camp, the best supper which the meagre rations of the army could furnish.
Our first occupation next day was to establish my own headquarters, for a military man does not feel at home until his little camp is set in some decent nook with the regularity and order which shows good system, and with the sentinel pacing before the entrance. I have always found it most comfortable and most healthful to live under canvas, even in winter, in the sparsely settled parts of the country. It might be different in Europe or in the more densely peopled States at the East, but in the West and South a house cannot always be found in proper proximity to the line, and changing from house to tent and back again is much more dangerous to health than adherence to what seems the more exposed kind of life. There is also a question of discipline and morale involved, and the effect of example at headquarters is felt through the whole command. With no little difficulty we found four old tents without flies, but these were carefully pitched in a clean place accessible to all parts of the corps, and when we were installed in them we had a real satisfaction in being at home and ready for business. Our difficulty in procuring four poor tents was simply an index of the scarcity of all supplies and equipments. The depots at Cincinnati and Nashville were packed with everything we wanted, but there had been no time to get them forward when the siege began, and now the impassable mountain roads cut us off as completely as a circle of hostile camps. We especially felt the lack of the flies for the tents in roughing it. This extra roof makes as great a difference in keeping a tent habitable in wet weather, as an extra cape or a poncho does in keeping the rain off one's person, or in civil life the omnipresent umbrella. Our overcoats and ponchos kept out the wet in the longest march, but without a fly the tent roof and walls would drip with moisture. In Captain Day, however, I had a quartermaster whose indomitable energy would not be long baffled, and in his journeys to and fro in charge of the supply trains of the corps he kept a sharp eye out for whatever would make our headquarters outfit more efficient. The warehouses at Knoxville were searched, and a better tent found in one place and a fly in another gradually brought our little camp into what soldiers regard as a home-like condition. The clerical work and the official correspondence of the command could then go on; for the headquarters of an army corps in the field is as busy a place as a bank or counting-house in a city. It is the business centre for a military population of 12,000 or 15,000 men, where local government is carried on, and where their feeding, clothing, arming, and equipping are organized and directed, to say nothing of the military conduct in regard to the enemy, or of the administration of affairs relating to the neighboring inhabitants.
The troops were in bivouac, generally in the woods about us, where shelter could be made in ways well known to lumbermen and hunters. The most common form was a lean-to, made by setting a couple of crotched posts in the ground with a long pole for a ridge. Against this were laid other poles and branches of trees sloping to the ground on the windward side. The roof was roughly thatched with evergreen branches laid so that rain would be shed outward. A bed of small evergreen twigs within made a comfortable couch, and unlimited firewood from the forest made a camp fire in front that kept everybody toasting warm in ordinary weather. The regimental and company officers had similar quarters, improved sometimes by a roof of canvas or tarpaulin beneath the evergreen thatch. There were but few days in the East Tennessee winters when such shelter was not a sufficient protection for men young and accustomed to hardship. It was in fact more comfortable than life in tents at division and corps headquarters, but with us tents were a necessity on account of the clerical business which I have mentioned.
The want most felt was that of clothing and shoes. The supply of these had run very low by the time Burnside had marched through Kentucky and Tennessee to Knoxville, and almost none had been received since. Many of the soldiers were literally in rags, and none were prepared for winter when Longstreet interrupted all communication with the base of supplies. Their shoes were worn out, and this, even more than their raggedness, made winter marching out of the question. The barefooted men had to be left behind, and of those who started the more poorly shod would straggle, no matter how good their own will was or how carefully the officers tried to enforce discipline and keep their men together.
The food question was in a very unsatisfactory way, but had improved a good deal after the siege of Knoxville was raised. Some herds had been brought part of the way, and had been kept together, so that they were driven in as soon as the road was open. Some were captured and some were lost, but enough arrived so that the meat ration was pretty regularly issued in full weight. A large amount of pork had been salted and packed at Knoxville, and was issued as an occasional change from the ordinary ration of fresh beef. The "small rations" of coffee, sugar, salt, etc., were almost wholly wanting, and our soldiers had been so accustomed to a regular issue of these that the deprivation was a very serious matter. As to breadstuffs, none could be got from our depots and we were wholly dependent upon the country. We put all the mills within our lines under military supervision, and systematized the grinding so that the supply of meal and flour should be equitably distributed to the army and to the inhabitants. As the people were loyal, there was no wish on the part of the military authorities to take corn or other grain without payment, and the people brought in freely or sold to us on their farms all that they could spare. Still the supply was short, and was soon exhausted in the vicinity of the army, so that we had to send forage trains to great distances and with very unsatisfactory results. During the whole winter we rarely succeeded in obtaining half rations of bread, and oftentimes the fraction was so small as to be hardly worth estimating. In such a situation corn could not be taken for horse-feed, and as the long forage in our vicinity was exhausted, the animals were in pitiful condition. In many instances artillery horses dropped dead of starvation at the picket rope.
The Fourth Corps was no better off than ourselves. Granger had left the Army of the Cumberland immediately after the battle of Missionary Ridge, and although the situation at Chattanooga had been a good deal mitigated, no considerable supplies of clothing had then arrived. The distress was therefore universal in our East Tennessee army. Learning that Sheridan's division was encamped not far from us at Blain's Cross-roads, I rode over to find Colonel Emerson Opdycke of the One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Ohio, who was in that division. He was a townsman of mine, and our families were intimate, and other neighbors and friends were with him. I could give them later news from home than any of them had, for until the end of the year the newspapers I brought from Cincinnati were the latest in camp. I found Opdycke's camp like our own. He was in the woods, under a lean-to shelter such as I have described, with a camp-fire of great logs in front of it. He was just opening the first letters he had got from home since the battle of Chickamauga in September, and these had been a long time on the way, for they had gone to Chattanooga and had come by casual conveyance from there. His statements fully agreed with the reports I had got from the Twenty-third Corps officers in regard to the condition of the troops. It was the same with all. They would not suffer greatly if they could remain in the forest encampments till shoes and clothing could come to us, but any active campaigning must produce intolerable suffering.
Our mess wished to celebrate Christmas by a dinner at which a few of our comrades might share the luxury of some canned vegetables and other stores we had brought from Ohio, and we sent a man with a foraging party that was going twenty miles away for hay and corn. After a diligent search he succeeded in getting a turkey and a pair of fowls, and we kept the festival in what seemed luxurious style to our friends who had been through the campaign. The spirit of officers and men was all that could be wished, for they thoroughly understood the causes of their privation, and knew that it was unavoidable. Their patriotism and their moral tone were magnificently shown in the re-enlistments which were at this time going on. The troops of the original enlistment of 1861 were now near the end of their term of three years, and it was the wise policy of the government to let the question of a new term be settled now while the winter was interrupting active operations. Regiments whose term of service would expire in the spring or summer of 1864 were offered a month's furlough at home and the title of "veterans" if they would re-enlist. The furlough was to be enjoyed before the opening of the next campaign, and the regiments were to be sent off as fast as circumstances would permit. We knew that the home visit would be a strong inducement to many, but we were astonished and awed at the noble unanimity of the popular spirit of the men. Almost to a man they were determined to "see it out," as they said. The re-enlistment was accepted by companies, but there was great pride in preserving the regimental organization as well. The closing week of the year was devoted to this business, other duty being suspended as far as circumstances would permit. When a company had "veteranized" by the re-enlistment of a majority, they announced it by parading on the company street and giving three rousing cheers. These cheers were the news of the day, and the company letter and the number of the regiment passed eagerly from mouth to mouth as the signal of a new veteran company was heard. Some companies re-enlisted without an exception. In one regiment there were only 15 men in the ten companies who did not sign the new rolls. In fact only the physically disabled with here and there a discontented man were omitted in the veteran enlistment. It was a remarkable incident in the history of the war and a speaking one. It illustrates better than anything, except the original outburst of patriotism in 1861, the character of the men who formed our rank and file. Could we only have had then an efficient system of filling up these veteran regiments by new recruits, the whole would have made an incomparable army; but, alas, we were to see them reduced to a handful while new regiments were organized, only (as it looked to us in the field) to give the "patronage" of the appointments to politicians, or to reward successful recruiting instead of soldierly ability tested in action.
Soon after General Foster was assigned to the department he reissued an order which Burnside had made earlier but had revoked, by which Brigadier-General Samuel D. Sturgis was appointed to the command of the cavalry corps. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. iii, p. 394.] Sturgis had commanded a division of the Ninth Corps in Maryland and Virginia, and was one of those whose dismissal Burnside had demanded for the insubordination which followed the battle of Fredericksburg. Good policy would have dictated that he should be sent to some other command; but he was ordered to report to Burnside, and had no active employment until Foster arrived. The cavalry corps had had several lively engagements with the Confederate horse, and was now concentrated near Mossy Creek, where it was supported by a brigade of infantry from the second division of the Twenty-third Corps, in command of Colonel Mott of the One Hundred and Eighteenth Ohio. [Footnote:Id., pp. 488, 489, 562.] Our information showed that Longstreet's forces were now concentrated about Morristown, and that nothing larger than scouting parties came across to the west side of the Holston. It became prudent, therefore, to transfer part of our forces from the Rutledge road over to that which runs from Knoxville along the line of the railroad to Morristown. Both the railroad and the wagon-road cross the Holston at Strawberry Plains and go up the valley on the east side of the river by way of New Market and Mossy Creek. On the 24th and 25th I was directed to send two more brigades to Strawberry Plains, [Footnote: Id., p. 490.]one of which was put over the river to cover the reconstruction of the railway bridge which was going on. This was the long trestle which had been burned by Sanders in the preceding summer, and had since been repaired and destroyed by the opposing armies alternately. On the 27th I was ordered to move the other division of the corps to Strawberry Plains, thus concentrating my command in that vicinity. Our distance from Knoxville would be about the same as at Blain's Cross-roads, but the divergence of the roads made our march some six or eight miles across the country.
It was a great hardship to the men to abandon the huts they had made with a good deal of labor, and which were the more necessary for them by reason of the destitution which I have described. Nor was it pleasant for us at headquarters, for we had got our own establishment into a condition of tolerable comfort. Some brick had been got from a ruined and abandoned house, and with them a chimney with an open fireplace had been built at the back of one of our tents, which thus made a cheerful sitting-room for our mess. It is a soldier's proverb that comfortable quarters are sure to bring marching orders, and we were only illustrating the rule. The march was made in the afternoon through rain and mud, and we reached Strawberry Plains just before nightfall in the short midwinter day. The Plains were a nearly level space in a curve of the river, though the village of the name was on some rough hills on the other bank at the end of the long trestle bridge. The level lands had been for some time occupied by the cavalry, and were so cut into mud-holes and defiled in every way as to be unfit for an infantry camp. A little on one side, however, was an isolated gently rounded hill covered with a mixed forest of oak and pine. With a little crowding this would make a clean and well-drained camp for the division I had brought with me. The brigades were placed so that they encircled the hill on the lower slopes with openings between leading to the top, on which I placed my headquarters. The little quadrangle of tents on the top, the forest-covered slopes, the busy soldiery below making new camps for themselves, made a romantic picture despite the discomforts. I cannot better show the impression made at the moment than by quoting from a letter written home the next day: "When we arrived, the rain was pouring in torrents, the dead leaves, wet and deep, soaked our boots and made it slow work to kindle a fire, and as we stood about in our overcoats heavy with water, we were not especially impressed with the romance of the scene; but when we had found a few old pine-knots to start the fire with, and the heavy smoke of the damp leaves changed to a bright flame,--when the tents were pitched, a cup of hot coffee made, and we sat about the fire watching the flashing light on the deep green of the pines and the beautiful russet of the oak leaves with the white of the tents beneath, the few square yards about us were made as lovely as a fairy scene shut in by the impenetrable gloom beyond. The old witchery of camp life now came over us, we forgot rain and cold, singing and chatting as merrily as if care were dead, till finally rolling in our blankets under our tents, we went to sleep as sweetly and soundly as children."
A day or two of bright mild weather followed, and the troops got themselves fairly well sheltered again. The cutting of trees for huts and for firewood thinned out the forest, and the elevation of the camp above the surrounding country exposed us to the wind, as we soon learned to our cost. Whilst the fair days lasted, we had a favorable example of an East Tennessee winter, as is shown by the further quotation from the home letter just cited. "I am sitting in the open air," I said, "before the camp-fire of great logs, writing upon my atlas on my knee, which is more comfortable than doing it in the chilly shade of the tent. I wish you could have seen our camp last night. We were grouped around the fire, some sitting and lolling on the logs drawn up for fuel, some in camp chairs. The smoke from the camps about us made the whole air hazy. Over the tents through a vista of pine-trees the moon was rising red through the thickened air, while overhead the stars were shining. The wonderful perspective the firelight makes in the forest, here brought out and deepened the mass of color of the evergreens, there made the bare trunk and limbs of a leafless oak stand like a chalk drawing against the black background, and again it gave rich velvety warmth to the brown of the dead leaves which hung thick on some trees, while the gloom beyond and the snug enclosure of our little quadrangle of tents shut us in with a sense of shelter, and completed a picture that would have made Rembrandt die of envy." We were hardened by our continuous exposure so that we felt no discomfort in sitting thus in the open air till late in the evening, though we woke in the morning to find the dead leaves which made our carpet stiff and crisp with the frost. Still, it was much milder than the Christmas weather of northern Ohio, or we could not have taken it so easily.
On the 29th the cavalry had a lively affair with the enemy at Mossy Creek, some twenty miles above us. General Sturgis was making a reconnoissance of the country between the French Broad and the Holston rivers, sending the cavalry partly toward Dandridge on the former stream, under command of Colonel Foster, and partly toward Morristown, under Brigadier-General W. L. Elliott of the Cumberland army. Elliott was supported by Mott's brigade of infantry, part of which acted under his orders. Foster found no enemy, but Elliott had advanced about three miles beyond Mossy Creek when he encountered the cavalry corps of the Confederates, advancing, apparently, with a purpose similar to ours. The infantry were posted by Sturgis upon a ridge half a mile beyond the railway bridge at Mossy Creek, and the cavalry with the artillery were ordered to retire slowly to the same position. The enemy under Major-General William T. Martin consisted of two divisions of horsemen and two batteries of artillery. They closely followed our retiring troops, who made cool resistance and drew back slowly and in order. When the position of the infantry was reached, the whole force was halted to receive the Confederate attack. Sturgis had two batteries of artillery with his corps, but had sent a section of each with Colonel Foster, and Elliott now placed the remaining sections on right and left of the road, each supported by infantry. Martin boldly attacked till he found himself confronted by Mott's infantry, which opened upon him with a withering fire. The artillery also fired canister upon the advancing enemy, and our horsemen, dismounting, extended the line and did good execution with their carbines. The first assault being repulsed, Martin was unwilling to give it up so, and bringing his artillery into better position renewed the fight. A sharp skirmishing combat was kept up for several hours, when the enemy retreated. Darkness came on soon after, and the pursuit was not pushed far. Our losses had been 17 killed and 87 wounded. That of the enemy was reported to be much more severe. The result of the engagement was to repress the enterprise of the Confederates, so that Mossy Creek remained for some time our undisturbed outpost in the valley. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. i. pp. 625-641.]
On New Year's eve we had a change of weather which rudely broke in upon our dream of a steady and mild winter. It had been raining nearly all day, and we had just turned in about ten o'clock in the evening when a sudden gale sprung up from the northward. The water-soaked ground did not hold the tent pins very well, and the rattling of canvas warned us to look after the fastenings. The staff were all quickly at work, the servants being, as usual, slow in answering a call in the night. The front of our mess tent blew in, and the roof and sides were bellying out and flapping like a ship's sail half clewed up. I caught the door-flaps and held them down to the pole with all my strength, shouting to the black boys to turn out before the whole should fly away. Then we had a lively time for an hour, going from tent to tent to drive the pins tighter and make things secure. We had just got them snug, as we thought, and began to listen to the roaring of the wind with something like defiance, when a "stick-and-clay" chimney, which Colonel Sterling and my brother had at the back of their tent, took fire and was near setting the whole encampment in a blaze. This made another shout and rush, till the chimney was torn away from the canvas and the fire extinguished. The gale was so fierce that the sparks from the camp-fires rolled along the ground instead of rising, and we should have burned up had not the rain kept the tents soaking wet. It grew cold so fast that by the time we had made the encampment safe, the wet canvas froze stiff. It must be confessed that we did not sleep well that night, and we got up in the morning aching with cold. It still blew a gale, though the sky was clear and the thermometer had fallen to zero. It was a typical cyclone coming as a cold wave from the North, and, as we afterward learned, was exceptional in its suddenness and bitterness along the whole line from Minnesota to northern Georgia.
The soldiers in the camps had slept but little, for they were obliged to keep awake and near the fires to escape freezing. No one who has not lived in tents or in bivouac in such a time can understand what real suffering from cold is. Exposure by day is easy to bear compared with the chill by night when camp-fires burn low and men lie shivering, their teeth chattering, while extreme drowsiness makes exertion painful and there is danger of going off into the sleep that knows no waking. On New Year's day morning the ground was frozen solid. All huddled about the fires, but the gale was so fierce that on the windward side there seemed to be no radiation of heat, so completely was the fire blown away from that side of the logs. On the leeward side the smoke suffocated and the sparks burned one, and men passed from one side to the other doubting which was the more tolerable.
I spent a good part of the morning going through the regimental camps and giving such encouragement and cheer as I could. The patience and courage of the troops were marvellous, though many of the men were in a pitiable condition as to clothing. They were tatterdemalions in appearance, but heroes at heart. Some had nothing but drawers upon their legs, their trousers being utterly worn to rags. Some had no coats and drew their tattered blankets about them, sitting upon their haunches, like Indians, about the camp-fires. I do not recall a single querulous or ill-natured complaint. It was heart-breaking work to see their misery, but they were so intelligent that they knew as well as I did that it had grown out of the inevitable fortunes of war, in spite of the utmost efforts of their commanders to get supplies forward as soon as the siege of Knoxville had been raised. I estimated that fully one-third of the command had lost and worn out some material portion of their clothing, so as to be suffering for lack of it. A little thing which added greatly to the discomfort of the men was that in some whole brigades they had been without soap for two months. This made cleanliness impossible, and clustering about the fires as they were forced to do, they became so begrimed that a liberal supply of soap would have been necessary to restore their color and show to what race they belonged. Yet, hungry, cold, ragged, and dirty, they responded cheerily to my New-Year's greetings, and at this very time the "veteranizing" was going on without a check until nearly every one of the old regiments re-enlisted for another term.
At our headquarters on the hill-top we realized that our picturesque situation had its disadvantages, for we were doubly exposed to the force of the wind. We were on a high dome, as it were, with nothing whatever to make a lee or break the power of the icy gale. In one or two of the tents, furnaces or stoves of stone had been made, on the pattern of those we had used in West Virginia in 1861. The trench in the ground with flat stone covering level with the tent floor and connected with an opening on the outside, proved the most successful device. We collected in these, and used every manner of pastime to kill the tedious hours till the subsidence of the wind made our usual outdoor life and activity possible again. Our efforts at meals were a woeful sort of failure. Cooking under such difficulties was more a name than a fact, and we left the mess tent shivering and hardly less hungry than we entered it. But all things have an end, however tedious they seem in passing, and the 2d of January seemed pleasant in the comparison, for the "blizzard" was over, and the weather was calm though cold.
GRANT'S VISIT--THE DANDRIDGE AFFAIR
Grant at Knoxville--Comes to Strawberry Plains--A gathering at Parke's quarters--Grant's quiet manner--No conversational discussion--Contrast with Sherman--Talk of cadet days--Grant's riding-school story--No council of war--Qualities of his dispatches--Returns by Cumberland Gap--Longstreet's situation--Destitution of both armies--Railroad repairs and improved service--Light-draught steamboats--Bridges--Cattle herds on the way--Results of Grant's inspection tour--Foster's movement to Dandridge on the French Broad--Sheridan--His qualities--August Willich--Hazen--His disagreement with Sheridan--Its causes and consequences--Combat at Dandridge--A mutual surprise--Sheridan's bridge--An amusing blunder--A consultation in Dandridge--Sturgis's toddy--Retreat to Strawberry Plains--A hard night march--A rough day--An uncomfortable bivouac--Concentration toward Knoxville--Rumors of reinforcement of Longstreet--Expectation of another siege--The rumors untrue.
In the midst of the severest suffering of the army from cold and want, General Grant came in person to inspect the condition of affairs in East Tennessee. He reached Knoxville on the 30th of December, and after spending two or three days with General Foster, came up to Strawberry Plains. The first intensity of the cold wave had passed by, but it was still "zero weather" when he came: indeed he had waited in Knoxville for a little moderating of the temperature, but finding that it continued very cold, his desire to complete the inspection hurried him on. The corps and division commanders accompanied him in a ride through the camps that he might see the destitution of the army, and the necessity for sparing the troops all unnecessary exposure. The great trestle bridge across the Holston was examined, and the features of the topography which made Strawberry Plains an important point in military operations covering Knoxville and the line of communication with Cumberland Gap.
At the end of the ride we gathered in General Parke's quarters for what I supposed would be a discussion of the situation and a comparison of views as to our future work. It was my first meeting with Grant, and I was full of interest in observing him. On the ride he had been quietly attentive, making no show of curiosity, asking few questions, carrying himself in an unpretentious business-like way. In the social meeting at General Parke's I was disappointed that the conversation did not take the direction of a military discussion. Grant did not seem to desire further information, but was satisfied with what he had seen. He took no lead in conversation, and it was evident that he almost wholly lacked facility in that way. What he said was kindly; there was nothing like surliness in his manner; but he seemed to be without the faculty of drawing other people out and putting himself in easy accord with them. No doubt his interviews with General Foster had contained all that was necessary for making up his mind as to our situation except the personal inspection he was now engaged in; but had he been Sherman, he would have gone over the phases of the matter which could properly be made the subject of general discussion, would have emphasized whatever could be made encouraging, and exhorted to patience and courage in doing the present duty. Grant did nothing of the kind. He smoked and listened, and did not accept any of the openings which others made for conversation upon the campaign.
A majority of the officers in the group were West Point men, and college life is always a resource for small-talk when other subjects fail. The experiences of the military school, the characteristics of friends and classmates there, the qualities of the officers and professors, escapades and larks at Benny Havens' were found to have perennial freshness and interest. Grant evidently enjoyed this, and began to talk more freely. One could see that he did not lack the sense of humor, and he told an anecdote simply but without failing to make its points tell. His voice lacked volume, and seemed thin and rather high-keyed. It was half-deprecatory in tone, with an air of shyness, and he had a way of glancing quickly from one to another, as if looking for signs of response to his venture into talk. As he went on, this wore off to some extent, and he laughed quietly over the reminiscences he was telling. He told very well a story of his experience in the riding-school, where the riding-master in his time was an amusing sort of tyrant. Grant's strong point was horsemanship, and the riding-master, whether seriously or as a joke, determined to "take down" the young cadet. At the exercise Grant was mounted on a powerful but vicious brute that the cadets fought shy of, and was put at leaping the bar. The bar was raised higher and higher as he came round the ring, till it passed the "record." The stubborn rider would not say enough, but the stubborn horse was disposed to shy and refuse to leap. Grant gritted his teeth and spurred at it, but just as the horse gathered for the spring, his swelling body burst the girth and rider and saddle tumbled into the ring. Half stunned, he gathered himself up from the dust only to hear the strident, cynical voice of the riding-master calling out, "Cadet Grant, six demerits for dismounting without leave!"
I believe Grant's story is the only memory I brought away from what I had imagined would be a council of war presided over by the most prominent figure in our armies, soon to command them all. As a council of war it certainly did not fill the ideal of an eager and earnest young officer; but if we supplement it by a reading of the daily and hourly dispatches in which the clear practical judgment, the unswerving faith in final success, the unbending will, the restless energy and industry, the power to master numberless details, and a consciousness of capacity to command, all plainly stand forth as traits of Grant's character, we can see that a judgment based only on the incidents of the meeting around the fireplace in the shabby house at Strawberry Plains after our ride on that bitter winter's day would be very misleading.
Grant's visit had plainly shown him that the great problem with us was the clothing and subsistence of the troops, and that our very existence depended on it. He therefore determined to ride over the mountains by way of Cumberland Gap, and form his own judgment as to the truth of the reports of the impassable condition of the roads. The weather had hardly moderated at all when he left us on the 4th of January, and this long and severe journey was proof of his forgetfulness of personal comfort in his devotion to duty. Before following him further in his investigation, it may be profitable to go back and note some of the circumstances which brought him to Knoxville.
When Longstreet raised the siege of Knoxville, he took position near Rogersville, where he would be in reach of the unbroken part of the railway connecting him with Virginia, which now became his base. His force continued unchanged, and was not materially increased or diminished until the winter was nearly over, when the cavalry which belonged to the Army of Tennessee was ordered back into Georgia. Like Foster, he was reduced to inaction for lack of clothing and supplies. Forage had become very scarce in every part of Tennessee, and it was with great difficulty that the horses were kept alive in either army. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. iii. pp. 817, 819.] To go into cantonments, sheltering the men as well as possible, to send all extra horses to the rear and wait for the springing of the grass and the settling of the roads when winter should be over, was the dictate of common-sense, as was clearly seen by everybody on the ground. It was not pleasant to leave the loyal men of the upper counties of the valley to suffer under the Confederate occupation; but nothing short of a continuous and reliable line of supplies would enable Foster to occupy the country up to the Virginia line. There was no gate to be shut behind Longstreet if he were driven out. He could come back as soon as our troops withdrew. Marching and countermarching would destroy the nearly naked and barefoot troops without accomplishing any permanent good.
The authorities at Washington were beset by the well-grounded complaints of the loyal representatives of the upper valley, and had become blind by habit to the difficulties of supplying and moving troops among the mountains in winter. From the first week after Foster relieved Burnside, Halleck complained that Longstreet was not driven beyond the Virginia line and kept there. These complaints were repeated to Grant, and the latter promised, in dispatches of the 23d and 24th of December, to go to Knoxville in person. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. iii. pp. 472, 479.] In the last of these he said, "If Longstreet is not driven from Tennessee, it shall not be my fault." He came, and saw that it was not Foster's fault, and that no more than Foster could he make a winter campaign with men in such a state of destitution. As I have already said, droves of beef, cattle, and hogs could be brought "on the hoof," in poor condition it is true, but fit to be eaten. Yet soldiers could not campaign on fresh beef and pork only, and bread stuffs and all vegetable food were practically not to be had; so of coffee, sugar, salt, and the small rations generally. This, however, was the least part of the trouble, for the condition of the army as to clothing and shoes was simply appalling. When many had not even rags to cover their nakedness, and none were clad as civilized men should be to face the winter's snows and rains, it was nonsense to talk of campaigning. Grant saw this at a glance when he reached our camps. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxii. pt. ii. pp. 19, 43.] We have not the whole situation when even this is told. Wagons and teams, artillery with their horses, cavalry with theirs, are as necessary as infantry; and when foraging trains could hardly collect forage enough to feed the animals seeking it, those that were left at the picket rope had to die there. To talk, then, of hauling supplies for man and beast in a marching column was preposterous.
It was quite proper to ask whether the impracticability of bringing wagon trains over the mountains was as complete as we reported, and Grant's horseback journey back into Kentucky when the thermometer was at zero is sufficient proof that he found it imperatively necessary to settle that question also with his own eyes and without delay. We shall see presently what he reported. He knew before he left Chattanooga that the railroad from Nashville was hardly supplying Thomas's army. To Foster's appeals for at least some clothing and shoes by that route, General Meigs, who was there, replied that it could only be done "at the cost of starvation to our animals or short rations to our men" in the Army of the Cumberland. [Footnote: Id., vol. xxxi. pt. iii. p. 476.] He said that the railroad must be "not only repaired, but rebuilt," before it could do more than supply the troops already dependent on it. General McCallum, the superintendent of military railroads, had gone west, and was inspecting the Nashville and Chattanooga Road, and carefully studying the problem of its possible capacity. [Footnote:Id., pp. 422, 444.] In consequence of this a change was made in the local superintendence, and Mr. Adna Anderson was put in charge of operating the line, while Mr. W. W. Wright was made constructing engineer. [Footnote: Id., vol. xxxii. pt. ii. pp. 371, 372.] Under their energy and ability it was repaired and operated so that East Tennessee as well as Sherman's army in Georgia were abundantly supplied during the Atlanta campaign; but this is part of the history of the next spring and summer. To reduce the number of mouths to feed at Chattanooga, Grant sent portions of the Army of the Tennessee into northern Alabama, where they could be supplied by boats coming up the Tennessee River. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. iii. pp. 429, 496, 502.] The same considerations influenced him in assenting to Sherman's plan of the Meridian Expedition, where the troops engaged in it could live partly at least on a country not yet ravaged by armies, whilst they would make a diversion in favor of the weakened army left with Thomas. It is safe to say that no such division of efforts would have occurred if the railroad had been ready to supply the concentrated army on an advance into Georgia. Sherman understood it to be an interlude, and expected to be back and join the main army by the time the railroad should be repaired and supplies accumulated. [Footnote: Id., p. 498.] As auxiliary to the line of supplies, the railroad from Bridgeport to Decatur was also to be repaired, so as to connect with steamboats at the latter place.
In Foster's department the same energy was directed toward improving the communication with Chattanooga. The hull of the light-draught steamboat which Colonel Byrd had found under construction at Kingston was taken as a model, and two more were put on the stocks. [Footnote: Ante, vol. i. p.523. Official Records vol. xxxi. pt. iii. p. 483.] Pontoon bridges were prepared for use at different points on the river. Lumber was cut to rebuild the great railway bridge at Loudon and the long trestle at Strawberry Plains. The little train of "twenty-odd cars" which Burnside had captured was carefully guarded and kept running on the only bit of railroad in East Tennessee that was now open, viz., that from Loudon through Knoxville to Strawberry Plains. Herds of cattle were threading mountain paths to avoid the deep mud of the wagon roads from Kentucky, and on those roads desperate but too often fruitless efforts were making to push forward some wagon-loads of shoes and clothing.
In the consultations at Knoxville Foster had plainly stated his own conviction that the only wise course was to abandon the thought of aggressive warfare until spring; to station the troops so as to cover Knoxville, but to select their positions chiefly with reference to collecting forage and breadstuffs; to send all unnecessary animals to the rear and in every way to simplify to the utmost the problem of carrying the army through the winter, preserving it for active use when the change of season and the improvement of the railway line should make regular supplies possible. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. i. pp. 281 et seq.] Grant listened and suspended his judgment till he had examined the situation for himself. An accident to General Foster had increased the complication of affairs. He was occasionally suffering from lameness resulting from an old wound in the leg, and had found on his first journey over the mountains that he was in danger of being disabled by it. Within a fortnight after he reached Knoxville, his horse fell with him in passing over some slippery rocks, and caught the wounded leg under him. [Footnote: Id., pt. iii. p. 502.] This completely disabled the general for active field service, and on the advice of his surgeon he asked to be relieved. This request was forwarded on the 26th of December, and Grant had been notified of it on the same day. It could not be acted on at once, and during the few weeks that Foster remained at the head of the department, he was obliged to remain in Knoxville, entrusting to General Parke, as senior officer, the active command of combined movements in the field.
When General Grant reached Nashville, he reported to the War Department the results of his visit to us. [Footnote: Id., vol. xxxii. pt. ii. p. 99.] He said that he found the troops so destitute of clothing and shoes that not more than two-thirds of them could march; that the difficulty of supplying them even with food was so great that it was not advisable to send reinforcements; consequently that the policy advised by Foster must be followed and active operations suspended. Of his own journey he said, "From the personal inspection made, I am satisfied that no portion of our supplies can be hauled by teams from Camp Nelson [Ky.]." He proposed, on the first rise of the Cumberland River, to send supplies by steamboat up the Cumberland to the mouth of the Big South Fork, in the hope that as this was a new route some forage for the teams could be got along it, and that wagoning would be possible by that line into East Tennessee. It did not turn out to be so, and the only relief we got was by way of Chattanooga, where light-draught steamboats added something to the facilities for supply. As his own most pressing needs were relieved, General Thomas sent the steamboat "Lookout" with a small cargo of shoes and clothing to Loudon. There our little railway train met the boat and brought the goods to Knoxville, so that in my own command we began to receive a little about the 10th of January. It was very little, but it was greatly encouraging as a foretaste of better things to come.
On the 12th General Foster was obliged to telegraph Grant that things had grown worse rather than better since his visit. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxii. pt. ii. pp. 71, 72.] Many animals were dying daily. The weather was still intensely cold, and floating ice combined with high water, in the Holston had twice broken the pontoon bridge at Knoxville. Food for man and beast was all eaten out on the north side of the Holston River, and he proposed to move most of the troops to the south and east of the French Broad, in the hope of finding a region in which some corn and forage might still remain. The great trestle bridge at Strawberry Plains was completed, and a strong post would be left there to protect it. A regiment was at work upon the bridge at Loudon. To diminish the number of mouths to be fed, Foster gave the "veteran furlough" at this time to several more of the regiments which had re-enlisted. Trustworthy evidence showed that Longstreet was quite as badly off as we were, and that he was not likely to move unless, like us, he was forced to do so to find forage. Cavalry parties had reported to us that there were considerable quantities of corn in the neighborhood of Sevierville, and this was the inducement to send most of our troops to that side of the French Broad River. To avoid any appearance of retreat, it was ordered that we march from Strawberry Plains to Dandridge, which was a flank movement to our right, one day's march. There we should extemporize some sort of ferry to cross the French Broad and seek camps in regions which promised some supplies, but within supporting distance of our several detachments. The men whose clothing was most lacking and who were without shoes would remain in our present camp and be temporarily attached to the post established to protect the bridge. The cavalry, which had been near Mossy Creek (fourteen miles up the Holston), was directed to move straight across the angle between the two rivers, and cover the flank march of the infantry to Dandridge. It was thought probable that the cavalry might subsist for a short time in the neighborhood of Dandridge and in the valley of the Nolachucky, the principal tributary of the French Broad from the north; indeed, the time of crossing the larger river by the infantry was not fixed, but would be determined by our good or bad fortune in finding forage and bread-stuffs near Dandridge. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxii. pt. ii. pp. 82, 87, 99, 101.]
The 15th of January was the day fixed for the march. The weather was not so cold as it had been, but was very raw and uncomfortable. At the last moment General Foster found it necessary to have a consultation with Parke and Granger; and Sheridan, whose division of the Fourth Corps led off on the road, was directed to select positions for the infantry of that corps and mine as we reached Dandridge. He was also authorized to assign mills to the use of the different commands so as to systematize our means of supply and prevent disorder. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxii. pt. ii. p. 102.] The march was nineteen miles to Dandridge, and our positions were about a mile in front of the village, on the hills covering it. Both the Fourth and the Ninth Corps had remained in their camps at Blain's Crossroads up to this time, and the Ninth now took my place at Strawberry Plains, covering Knoxville from that direction. It had less than 4000 men present for duty. [Footnote: Id., p. 292.] Our moving column consisted of Sheridan's and Wood's divisions of the Fourth Corps and parts of three brigades from the Twenty-third; less than 10,000 men in all. The ground was frozen, and as we were moving over roads which had not been much travelled, the way was comparatively smooth for our artillery and wagons. It was not so much so for the infantry, and the little unevenness being sharpened by frost, quickly cut through the men's old shoes. Those who were barefoot were ordered to stay behind, but the shoes of others were in so bad a state that there were places where I saw the road marked with bloody tracks from the wounded feet of the soldiers.
Reaching Dandridge a little in advance of my command, I reported to Sheridan, and he showed me the line he had selected, on which we were to occupy the left. Colonel Sterling, my inspector-general, was assigned the duty of placing the brigades in position as they arrived. The cavalry had preceded us, and we found them occupying the town and picketing the roads toward Morristown and the elbow of the Nolachucky River northeast of us, locally called the Bend o' Chucky. A range of hills known as Bay's Mountain was the water-shed between the valleys of the Holston and the French Broad, and we expected the cavalry to cover the front on a line from Kimbrough's Cross-roads near the mountain to the Bend o' Chucky. This line would be nine or ten miles from Dandridge, and would communicate also with Mott's brigade of my command, which had been left in its post at Mossy Creek, on the Holston, under orders to fall back deliberately to Strawberry Plains if attacked by superior forces. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxii. pt. ii. p. 99.] If these positions could be held, the cavalry could not only collect the forage in the Nolachucky valley as far up as their detachments could reach, but would also threaten the left flank of Longstreet's position at Morristown.
Those who only knew Sheridan after the war would hardly recognize him in the thin and wiry little man I met at Dandridge. His hollow cheeks made his cheekbones noticeably prominent, and his features had a decided Milesian cast. His reputation at that time was that of an impetuous and vehement fighter when engaged, rousing himself to a belligerent wrath and fury that made his spirit contagious and stimulated his troops to a like vigor. At other times he was unpretentious and genial, and whilst regarded as a good division commander was not thought of as specially fitted for large and independent responsibilities. He was not considered cool enough for the broader duties of a commander, and indeed had had rather bad luck in the great battles of Stone's River and Chickamauga, where the qualities called for were those which enable a perfectly self-possessed officer to extricate his command from a perilous position. He has told me himself that he was slow in learning to have confidence in his own power to direct in such cases, and that it was only after he had tested himself, step by step, that he came to rely on his own judgment and will, as he did in the Shenandoah valley and at Five Forks. It was his blazing impetuosity in action that made Grant think of him as specially fitted for a cavalry leader, and his growth into the able commander of an army was a later development of his talents. He received me very cordially, and in our trying wintry experience at Dandridge began a friendly acquaintance which continued unbroken till his death.
General Thomas J. Wood was not with his division, and it was under the command of General August Willich, whom I had seen drilling Robert McCook's German regiment, the Ninth Ohio, as its adjutant, at Camp Dennison in the spring of 1861. I had expected to find Brigadier-General William B. Hazen in temporary command during Wood's leave of absence, but when I went to his quarters was surprised to find him in arrest. Hazen had been one of the first of the officers of the regular army with whom I became acquainted at the beginning of the war, and he had offered to accept a staff position with me. I had a real regard for him, and naturally offered my friendly services in his present predicament. It seemed that Sheridan had called on him for a report as to the condition of things in his front, and Hazen had taken advantage of some peculiarity of the situation which he thought Sheridan did not sufficiently understand, to make a report which was ironical and so irritating that Sheridan's answer was to order him to keep his quarters in arrest. Their quarrel, however, dated from the battle of Missionary Ridge, where Sheridan accused Wood's division, and Hazen in particular, with usurping the honors of being first on the crest and capturing part of Bragg's artillery. Sheridan honestly thought his division entitled to the honor, but the official evidence seems to me to be against him. At any rate, it began a very pretty quarrel which never was wholly made up, and which had many queer little episodes, in war and in peace, on the Indian frontier and at Washington, for many years thereafter. Hazen was an officer of real ability, of brilliant courage and splendid personal presence. His fault was that he was too keen in seeing flaws in other people's performance of duty, and apt to dilate upon them in his official reports when such officers were wholly independent of him. This made him a good many enemies notwithstanding his noble qualities and his genial kindliness to his friends. A military officer usually finds it hard enough to submit gracefully to the criticisms of his superiors, and naturally takes it ill if this prerogative is exercised by those of equal grade without authority. Such a practice puts into the official records matter which does not belong there, and which, however honestly stated, may be very unjust, because all the explanatory circumstances are not likely to be known to the critic. At any rate, the person criticised is not amenable to that tribunal, and this is enough in itself to cause a sense of injury. [Footnote: See Review of General Hazen's Narrative of Military Service, "The Nation," Nov. 5, 1885.] Sheridan took very kindly my mediation in Hazen's behalf, and probably had never intended more than a temporary arrest. After Granger came to the front and resumed command of the corps, I heard no more of the trouble.
We had escorted a small train in which were some wagon-loads of clothing and shoes for the cavalry, and the mounted corps remained at Dandridge during the 15th of January, issuing these supplies. The rear of our infantry column came up on the next day, so that we were assembled and in position before evening. The cavalry moved out in the afternoon of the 16th, part on the right toward the Nolachucky River, and the left toward Kimbrough's Cross-roads on the Morristown road. The right wing found the enemy's cavalry in their front about five miles from town, but the left wing found Kimbrough's occupied by Longstreet's infantry. His whole force, except Ransom's division, had advanced upon information of the movement of our cavalry on the 14th. In doing this Longstreet had turned the position of the brigade of infantry left at Mossy Creek, and Colonel Mott retired on the 16th to Strawberry Plains in accordance with his orders. Toward evening the cavalry on our right were driven back in a lively skirmish, and those on the left were recalled to give them support. The whole were united and repulsed the enemy's horsemen, taking position for the night about a mile in front of our infantry camps. On the 17th the enemy's infantry advanced, and reached the posts of our cavalry in the afternoon. Longstreet now made a vigorous attack with his troops of both arms, and gradually drove back our horsemen, who resisted him with their carbines, fighting dismounted. Sheridan supported the cavalry with some infantry and a lively skirmishing combat continued for an hour or two till darkness came on. The affair was something of a surprise to both parties. Longstreet had evidently made his movement in the hope of giving our cavalry a lesson which might check their enterprise and make them keep their distance, and was astonished to come upon our infantry at Dandridge. We were in motion to put our infantry on the south side of the French Broad, and were equally surprised to find the enemy in force on the same route.
General Parke and General Granger had ridden over from Strawberry Plains and reached Dandridge in the afternoon. Hearing of the presence of what was reported to be the whole of Longstreet's army, and not liking to accept battle with superior forces with the river at his back, Parke had caused an examination of the river to be made, and learned that just below the town was a shallow, fordable at an ordinary stage of water, and now about waist-deep for the men. In the low physical condition of our troops and their lack of clothing he very wisely thought it would not do to make them march through the river, but devised a foot-bridge by putting army wagons end to end and making a path over the boxes of the wagons. Sheridan was ordered to detach a brigade immediately to make this bridge, and it set to work at once. The plan was to march the infantry to the south side of the river and afterward remove the wagons, covering the operation by the cavalry who could then ford the stream, which though very cold and running with ice was not impracticable for horsemen.
About dusk, as the skirmishing in front ceased, Sheridan and myself, with Sturgis, the commandant of the cavalry, were called to meet Generals Parke and Granger at a house in the town to report the condition of affairs in our front and to receive orders for marching. The bridge had been completed, as was supposed, and the brigade which had made it had been ordered across, when, on reaching the land on the left bank, they found, to their amazement, that they were upon an island with an equally deep and wide channel beyond! This news had just been received when we assembled at headquarters. Sheridan was greatly mortified at the blunder, but there was then no help for it. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxii. pt. i. p. 79.] It was impracticable to complete the bridge before morning, and it was doubtful if wagons enough could be got together. My own command was on the extreme left of the line, partly covering the road back to Strawberry Plains, and we had not been engaged. The fighting had been in front of the centre and right. I could therefore throw no light on the question of the enemy's force. The information from other parts of the line and from prisoners left no doubt that infantry had engaged in the attack late in the afternoon and that Longstreet was present in force. There was therefore no dissent from the conclusion that it would be unwise to accept a battle with the river behind us, and orders were given to leave the position in the night and retire to Strawberry Plains. The wagons and most of the artillery were to follow the advance-guard, which was Sheridan's division, my command to march next, and Willich's (Wood's) division of the Fourth Corps to be the rear-guard. The cavalry were to march on a road a little to the right, leading to New Market, and would thus cover our flank. [Footnote: For the Dandridge expedition, see Official Records, vol. xxxii. pt. i. pp. 79 et seq.]
Granger had been ailing for a day or two and had not been with the troops. He was lying on a bed in the room where we met, and the rest of us sat about the fireplace, a tallow candle being on a rude table in the middle of the floor. Sturgis came in later than the others, having had a longer ride. He was a handsome fellow, with full, round features, sharp black eyes, and curly black hair and mustache. He had been seated but a few minutes when he noticed a bottle of whiskey on the table and a glass which had been placed there as camp hospitality for any one that wanted it, but had apparently been neglected. Glancing that way, Sturgis said, "If I had a little bit of sugar, I believe I'd take a toddy." A colored boy produced a sugar-bowl and the toddy was taken. The conversation ran on a few moments, when, as if it were a wholly new suggestion, the same voice repeated, "If I had a little bit of sugar, I believe I'd take a toddy;" and again the attendant did the honors. Our orders were received and we were about ready to go to our commands, when again, with polite intonation and a most amusing unconsciousness of any repetition, came the words, "If I had a little bit of sugar, I believe I'd take a toddy." The incident was certainly a funny one in itself, but I should not have cared to repeat it had not the official records of Sturgis's defeat by Forrest in the Tishimingo affair later in the year emphasized the mischief of lax habits as to temperance. The judgment of his superiors and of those who knew him well was made severer by the knowledge of his weakness in this respect. Railway officers insist upon absolute sobriety in locomotive engineers; but if there be one employment in which such coolness of head is more absolutely essential than in another, I believe it is in commanding troops in the field. [Footnote: See Marbot's Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 242, for results of Wittgenstein's reliance on an intemperate officer, Kulnieff, in the Russian campaign of 1812.] Sturgis's military downfall was a severe lesson, but he gave every evidence afterward of having learned it, and "lived cleanly" through many years of service after the Civil War was over.
The march back to Strawberry Plains began by starting the wagon train to the rear as soon as it was dark. Sheridan's division was drawn out soon afterward. My command was ordered to leave the line at eight o'clock, and Willich's to follow when the road should be clear as far as the first defensible ridge beyond the village where a rear-guard could make a successful stand. The cavalry were to maintain their position till morning and cover the movement. It was about half-past eight when my column closed up upon the wagons ahead of me, but as they had not yet climbed the first hill, we found ourselves necessarily halted in the main street of the village. General Willich had prudently placed a tent a little to the right of the road where it leaves the town, and there he made his quarters until the column should completely pass that point. He could thus keep his division in their bivouac in support of the cavalry till he knew the rest of the little army had cleared the place and could secure some rest, whilst he was still in easy communication with both the marching column and his own men. He reaped the advantage of his forethought. As my command had to assist the wagons and the artillery, no such means of bettering the situation was possible for us. I had notified Willich that I would be in person at the extreme rear of my command so that he could communicate with me most promptly and obtain my support if he were seriously attacked. The brigade in the lead was directed to give the wagons and cannon every help in getting forward, and the column was ordered to keep well closed up.
The day had been a mild one in comparison with the fortnight preceding, and rain set in early in the evening. The surface of the clayey roads soon became very slippery, then cut into deep ruts, and the moisture was just enough to give the mud the consistency of tenacious putty. The teams, half starved, were very weak, and it seemed as if they would never mount the hills before them, which were the southern end of the ridge of Bay's Mountain, separating the Holston valley from the Nolachucky. Three or four teams had to be united to drag up a single cannon or caisson, and the time as well as the distance was thus trebled or quadrupled. In some instances more than twenty horses were thus hitched to a single piece, besides having infantrymen at the wheels as thick as they could cluster, pushing and lifting. The column which was halted thus waiting for the wagon trains and artillery to climb a hill, grew weary of standing. The men would break ranks and sit down in the fence corners, where they built little camp-fires, and, rainy as it was, they fell asleep leaning against each other in these little bivouacs. Then would come word from the front to close up, and the regimental officers would give the command to fall in. The men would rouse themselves, the column would march, perhaps less than a hundred yards, when the road would be blocked again, the men would again seek the fence corners and stir up the fires that had been left by those who were now in advance. Thus in cold and wet and weariness the night wore on, till when day broke about six o'clock next morning we had put a distance of less than two miles between us and the village, and Willich's division had barely reached the first wooded ridge beyond the town.
During all the last hours of the night we were anxious lest we should be attacked by the enemy, who by crowning the hills above the road would have had us at great disadvantage. I had concerted with General Willich a plan of action if we were assailed, but the enemy took no advantage of our situation, and I have always believed that as the meeting at Dandridge was a mutual surprise, by a similar coincidence both parties were retiring at the same time. Our cavalry moved off toward New Market at daybreak, but it was not till late in the forenoon, when we had toiled on several miles further, that the Confederate cavalry approached our infantry rear-guard and accompanied its march for a time with some light skirmishing.
The weather grew colder during the day, and in the afternoon the rain changed to moist driving snow. The sleepy, weary troops toiled doggedly on; the wagons and the cannon were helped over the bad places in the way, for we were determined not to abandon any, and the enemy was not hurrying us. When night fell, on the 18th, my own command and Willich's division were still three miles from Strawberry Plains, though Sheridan's division and part of the wagon train had reached that place and crossed the Holston. We halted the men here and went into bivouac for the night. It had been a wretchedly cheerless and uncomfortable march, but the increasing cold and flying snow made the camp scarcely less inclement. The officers were, as was frequently the case, worse off than the men, for they could not carry their rations in haversacks, and the separation from the wagons in such a desolate country meant a prolonged fast. The delay caused by the rain and mud had been unexpected, and the march we had hoped to make in the night had taken more than twenty-four hours. During that time myself and staff had not eaten a mouthful, and we had no expectation of seeing food till we should get across the Holston next day and reach our headquarters wagons. Better luck happened us, however. We found a deserted and unfinished log cabin which had a roof and a stick-and-clay chimney, though it had no floor or chinking. The snow drove through between the logs, but the roof was over our heads and we soon had a lively fire roaring in the chimney. Some bundles of corn-stalks were found in a field near by, and of these we made a bed on the ground in front of the fire, and began to think we might forget our hunger in thankfulness for fire and shelter such as it was. But still better was in store for us. One of our tired forage trains had gone into park near us, and the teamsters offered to share their supper with us. They had corn "pone," some salt pork, and for a rarity some newly arrived coffee. We sat on the corn-stalks around the fire with an iron camp-kettle in the midst containing the black coffee which we dipped out with battered tin cups, and we held in our hands pieces of the corn-pone and slices of fried pork, congratulating each other on the unexpected luxury of our supper. Hunger and fatigue were so good a sauce that it seemed really a luxury, and we banished care with an ease which now seems hardly credible. The supper ended, sleep was not long a-wooing, though my rest was more broken than that of the others, for frequent dispatches came from headquarters which I had to answer, and orders had to be sent to the troops to continue the march on the morrow in accordance with the directions which I had received. I had provided myself in Cincinnati with a field dispatch book in form of a manifold letter-writer which I myself carried in a sabretasch during all the rest of the war. In this, by means of the carbon sheets and agate-pointed stylus, a dispatch and its copy were written at once, and a valuable record kept of every day's business. I could sit by the bivouac fire and write upon my knee without troubling a weary aide-de-camp to make a copy. I had in my saddle portmanteau also a little pair of brass candlesticks screwing together in form of a large watch-case, so that I could be provided with a light at the root of a tree in the darkness, if it was necessary to send or receive dispatches where there was neither shelter nor fire. These were necessaries; for food we could take our chances.
We halted the troops in wooded slopes where they were sheltered from the storm and where the evergreen boughs were speedily converted into tents of a sort, as well as soft and fragrant beds. Their ration was still scant, but nearly all of them picked up some addition to it on a day's march, so that the camps were more cheerful than they had been in the intensely severe weather of the first half of the month. On the next day we continued the movement, passing through Strawberry Plains and three miles further on the road to Knoxville. The Fourth Corps troops were ordered to go to the last-named city, there to cross the Holston and move out toward Sevierville into the country we had expected to reach by way of Dandridge. The Ninth Corps remained a little longer at Strawberry Plains.
On the 18th of January General Foster's plans were unsettled by a dispatch received from General Grant, dated at Nashville on the 16th, but in some manner delayed in transmittal. This conveyed the rather startling information that Longstreet had been reinforced by a division of Ewell's Corps with expectation of another also, and that the Confederate commander was in fact moving in force on Knoxville. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxii. pt. ii. pp. 109, 127.] The source of the information is not disclosed, but the news was stated with a positiveness uncommon with Grant. It reached Foster just as he had Parke's report of our having most unexpectedly met Longstreet's infantry at Dandridge and of our retreat on Strawberry Plains. The news was without foundation, for Longstreet had not been reinforced and his movement had no other significance than that which I have given it; but, coming on the heels of the accidental collision at Dandridge, there was a curious coincidence in the events which gave strong apparent confirmation to the report, and it was a matter of course that Foster should accept it as true and act upon it.
He directed the sick and all extra baggage to be sent at once to Knoxville. Part of the Fourth Corps troops were ordered to the same place. The cavalry, except two regiments left with General Parke for picket duty, was ordered to pass through Knoxville toward Sevierville to obstruct any further movement of the enemy on the Dandridge line. Parke was ordered to hold the rest of the army together, resisting Longstreet's advance, and retiring deliberately on Knoxville. Preparations were made to destroy the long trestle bridge at Strawberry Plains, and this important structure was devoted to ruin for the third or fourth time since Sanders entered the valley in the preceding summer. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxii. pt. ii. pp. 129, 162.] Grant had said to Foster that the impossibility of supplying more troops in East Tennessee made it useless to send reinforcements, and that he must keep between Longstreet and Thomas, retiring toward Chattanooga if necessary. Halleck complicated the situation by telegraphing direct to Thomas that he must aid Foster to any extent needed, and that the line from Knoxville to Cumberland Gap must be maintained at all hazards. [Footnote: Id., p. 130.] Foster reported to Grant that he had so greatly improved the defences and armament of Knoxville that it could not be taken, and that he would not retire further than this place unless it were explicitly ordered. [Footnote: Id., p. 138.] This was in accordance with General Grant's wish, and his confidence in the information as to Longstreet's reinforcement was such that he telegraphed Halleck on the 20th that the siege of Knoxville was about to be renewed. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxii. pt. ii. p. 149.] The chronic inability of Halleck to understand East Tennessee affairs is shown in his insistence on still maintaining the Cumberland Gap line, which was necessarily uncovered whenever the enemy approached Strawberry Plains. Chattanooga had now become our base, and remained so for all troops in East Tennessee till the end of the war. We at the front got the first authentic information which disproved the report of Longstreet's reinforcement and showed that he had retired to Morristown. Foster was thus enabled to telegraph Grant on the 20th that the evidence did not sustain the report, and that he doubted whether the Confederate commander would again attempt Knoxville. [Footnote: Id., p. 151.]
WINTER QUARTERS IN EAST TENNESSEE--PREPARATIONS FOR A NEW CAMPAIGN
Sending our animals to Kentucky--Consultations--Affair with enemy's cavalry--Roughing it--Distribution of troops--Cavalry engagement at Sevierville--Quarters in Knoxville--Leading Loyalists--Social and domestic conditions--Discussion of the spring campaign--Of Foster's successor--Organization of Grant's armies--Embarrassments in assignment of officers to duty--Discussion of the system--Cipher telegraphing--Control of the key--Grant's collision with Stanton--Absurdity of the War Department's method--General Stoneman assigned to Twenty-third Corps--His career and character--General Schofield succeeds to the command of the Department of the Ohio.
In connection with the movements of concentration about Knoxville, General Foster carried out his scheme of sending back to pasture in Kentucky and Tennessee all the horses and mules, except a very few teams needed to distribute supplies and two or three horses at each division headquarters for the commanding officer and an aide or two. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxii. pt. ii. pp. 203-204.] The animals were herded and driven together, an escort of cavalry accompanying them, and the whole put in charge of Captain Day of my staff, as quartermaster, the same whose energy in our journey over the mountains I have already noted. This measure definitely committed us, of course, to a quiet and defensive line of conduct for the next three months. On the 21st of January we were deliberately closing in around Knoxville, where the Fourth Corps was already concentrated, and General Foster had called upon the three corps commanders to meet him at his headquarters in the city for the purpose of putting in official form our opinion upon the necessity of suspending active operations in view of the condition of the troops and animals. We met there on the next day, and submitted our reports in response to interrogatories on several points. My own statement summarized the facts in regard to the supplies of food, forage, clothing, and the impossibility of drawing anything more from the country except some very limited quantities of bread-stuffs. My conclusion was that economy of life, animals, property, and (taking the next six months together) of time also, required that the troops should go into permanent quarters for a short period to be devoted to recuperation, drill, and instruction, organization of means of supply, and general preparation for an active campaign in the spring. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxii. pt. ii. p. 176.] I, however, added that this was on the hypothesis that no imperative military reasons existed for continued active campaigning; for in presence of such a necessity every officer and man of the corps would most cheerfully continue to undergo every hardship and endure every privation. There was complete unanimity among us in regard to the subject, and General Foster's orders were issued accordingly.
Whilst we were in conference, reports came in from General Willcox, who had been left in command of the Ninth Corps at Strawberry Plains, that the enemy were pressing him rather vigorously. Word came also from General Spears that hostile infantry and cavalry had appeared in large force at Blain's Cross-roads. Sturgis also reported from the direction of Sevierville that the whole rebel army had gone to Strawberry Plains. [Footnote: Id., pp. 163, 174.] Toward evening of the 22d our troops had come within some five or six miles of Knoxville, but the enemy showed so strong a disposition to attack that Foster ordered me to return to the front, take command of both corps (Ninth and Twenty-third) and of the cavalry with them, and check the Confederates, as there was some danger that our troops would change the concerted movement into a precipitate retreat. General Parke was suffering in health from recent exposure and remained in Knoxville. Galloping out from the town, I reached the troops a little before dark, halted them, and by a personal reconnoissance satisfied myself that only cavalry were before us. Our men had passed some wooded hills which were important to cover our position and give a starting-point for an aggressive movement on our part. Reversing their movement, I reoccupied these hills, brusquely driving back the enemy's advance-guard and checking their main body. It was now dark, and putting our forces in line of battle ready for an advance at daybreak, they were allowed to bivouac for the night, whilst I rode rapidly back to Knoxville, in accordance with my arrangement with General Foster to report to him in person the particulars of the situation. He approved my suggestion that I should advance the whole line in the morning and settle the question what force was before us. The wagons had come into the town, and my headquarters with them; so taking each of us a blanket, myself and the two staff officers who had accompanied me (Colonel Sterling and my brother) rode back again at midnight to the front, and rested till daybreak on the rough floor of a log cabin. The line then was advanced, but the enemy had taken the hint from the preparations of the evening and had decamped. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxii. pt. ii. p. 184.] Detachments went in pursuit some eight miles, but the Confederates had definitely withdrawn, and we obtained conclusive proof that only their cavalry had followed us across the Holston River.
The interrupted movement toward Knoxville was resumed, but it required me to remain another night in roughest bivouac, and another day without food, except as a mouthful could be found at hazard. I had begun the Dandridge movement with a cold which threatened pneumonia, but had grown steadily better through all the exposure, finding, as often happened to me in the course of the war, that the physical and mental stimulus of active campaigning even in the worst of weather was tonic and health-giving.
As soon as the situation was cleared up by trustworthy information of Longstreet's movements, General Foster resumed his plans for winter quarters. His first intention of sending the Fourth Corps toward Sevierville was modified by Grant's directions to put that corps where it could most readily rejoin the Army of the Cumberland. He therefore ordered me to move the Twenty-third Corps in that direction, and formally united to the corps the brigade of East Tennessee troops under Brigadier-General James G. Spears, which had theretofore been an independent organization. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxii. pt. ii. p. 162.] Sturgis, who had marched with most of the cavalry on the route thus assigned to me, reported that the road was the worst he ever saw, and, with all the experience of bad roads we had had, this meant that it was impracticable for our few and weak teams. [Footnote:Ibid.] This put an end to all hope of living on the country, and Foster accepted the necessity of distributing his troops about Knoxville and along the lines leading to Chattanooga.
On the 22d of January orders were issued assigning the Fourth Corps to quarters extending from Kingston to Loudon along the river and railroad. The Ninth Corps took post between Campbell's Station and Knoxville. The Twenty-third Corps encamped at Knoxville and in the immediate vicinity. [Footnote: Id., p. 183.] The cavalry occupied the country southeast of the Holston holding a front on the French Broad River. A few small outposts further up the valley were maintained for observation.
A brilliant cavalry combat near Sevierville on the 27th ended the active work under General Foster's command. Longstreet, hearing of the presence of our cavalry south of the French Broad, directed General Martin, commanding his cavalry corps, to get his forces across the river and meet Sturgis at once. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxii. pt. ii. p. 611.] The latter had McCook's division in advance, supported by Garrard's near Pigeon River. Martin advanced upon McCook, but was surprised to find his adversary seize the initiative. Learning of the Confederate advance, McCook marched to meet them on the road leading to Fair Garden. Martin was driven back, his right (Morgan's division) being routed by a gallant charge led by Colonel La Grange, First Wisconsin Cavalry, who commanded a brigade. [Footnote: Id. pt. i. pp. 139, 141.] Two regimental commanders, seven other commissioned officers, over a hundred privates, and two pieces of artillery were captured by the charge. General Morgan's battle-flag was also among the trophies. Our own casualties amounted to only thirty-one. Martin beat a hasty retreat across the French Broad to Dandridge, and Longstreet frankly admitted Martin's defeat with a loss of 200 men and the two guns. [Footnote:Id. pp. 149-150.] He attributed it to the inefficiency of his cavalry commander, and urged that one more competent be sent him. [Footnote: Idpt. ii. p. 632.] Sturgis followed on the 28th to Fair's Island Ford near Dandridge, where he was met by Armstrong's division of the Confederates. Longstreet now passed over an infantry force in rear of our cavalry, and they fell back to Maryville. [Footnote: Id., p. 653.] Both parties found the winter work too costly, and were now glad to take a few weeks for rest and recuperation.
As my headquarters were assigned to Knoxville, I had the opportunity of increasing my knowledge of the people and of the social complications which grew out of the war. I found quarters for myself and Lieutenant Theodore Cox, my aide, at the house of Mr. Cowen, a young merchant of the city, whose father was one of the prominent business men. The house was on the north side of a suburban street running parallel to the river, and not far from the buildings of the East Tennessee University, which were partially fortified and connected with Fort Sanders by a line of infantry trench. The fields on the opposite side of the road were open, and sloped down to the river bank, and in these my headquarters guard pitched their tents and the general quarters of the staff were also placed. A near neighbor, in the direction of the college, was the Rev. Dr. Humes, rector of the Episcopal parish, and after the war President of the University. General Burnside had spoken of him as a noble man, of devoted loyalty as well as earnest piety, and I was glad to know him as one who by his high intelligence and character was an authority on all that related to Holston valley. [Footnote: Thomas W. Humes, S.T.D. He has, since the war (1888), published a volume devoted to the East Tennessee loyalists, entitled "The Loyal Mountaineers of Tennessee.">[ John Williams, John M. Fleming, and O. P. Temple were among those who represented the Union sentiment of Knoxville, as did Perez Dickinson among the merchants. [Footnote: Since this chapter was written, Chancellor Temple has contributed a valuable work to the history of the Rebellion, in his "East Tennessee and the Civil War," Cincinnati. 1899.] John Baxter, afterward Judge of the United States Circuit Court, was a strong and wise friend of the government. Horace Maynard represented the district in Congress both before and after the war, and was regarded at Washington as its official representative even in the period when the Confederate occupation made him an exile from his home. William G. Brownlow was in Knoxville also, having returned as soon as our army had opened the way. His son, "Colonel Jim," was doing gallant service at the head of the First East Tennessee Cavalry. Around this group of leading men were arrayed the great majority of the people, devoted in their attachment to the Union. The men of property among them had sometimes been forced to dissimulate in order to protect their persons and their possessions; but now that the National army was in the valley, there was no mistaking the earnest satisfaction and the hearty sympathy of these people. There was a minority who had been open Secessionists, and these had been influential beyond their numbers, by reason of their wealth and social standing; for here, as well as everywhere else in the South, owners of slaves easily became champions of the extreme doctrines of what they called the constitutional guaranty of their property. They claimed to include most of the "upper class" in their numbers, though this was by no means true in this region.
The feelings of both Union men and Secessionists were very bitter, and social life was as strongly marked by these divisions as the hostile camps. The number of slaves was comparatively small, but they were the house servants in the towns, and their disposition to assert their liberty added to the social turmoil. The mistress of the house where I lodged hired her cook from a neighbor who claimed the woman as a slave; but the employer found herself obliged to make another bargain with the cook, and to pay her a second wage in order to keep her at work at all. The Unionists of East Tennessee were not yet fully advanced to the emancipation of the slaves as a result of the war. Parson Brownlow had fiercely denounced the Secessionists for arguing that secession was necessary to preserve property in slaves. Our army commanders thought it prudent not to agitate this question, and contented themselves with keeping within the limits of the statutes and the general orders of the War Department, which forbade military interference to return fugitives to the masters or to compel their obedience. The matter was left to work itself out, as it rapidly did.
After the first of February the weather became settled and gave us a more favorable opinion of the East Tennessee climate. We had sharp frosts at night with occasional light flurries of snow, but the days were usually bright, it thawed about midday, and the average temperature was such as to make active exercise delightful. The summits of the Great Smoky Mountains were covered with snow, and made a picturesque framing for the natural loveliness of the valleys. The roads were nowhere metalled, and the alternate freezing and thawing made them nearly impassable; but if we had been able to bring forward proper forage and supplies, we should have overcome the other obstacles to active campaigning. As it was, we could only await the approach of spring, when the settling of the roads and the opening of railroad communication with Chattanooga and Nashville would make it possible to bring back from Kentucky and feed our horses which had been sent to the rear.
There was, beside, the question of the change necessary in the command of the department, since there was no probability that General Foster's health would permit him to retain it and he had urgently requested that his successor should be assigned to duty. Indeed, the question of organization reached down to the regiments and brigades, and was a burning one in all the armies of Grant's Military Division. Besides this, the revival of the grade of Lieutenant-General was already mooted in Congress, and it was nearly a foregone conclusion that Grant would have the command of all the armies and the task of co-ordinating their movements. Our little army in East Tennessee was agitated not only with the speculations as to our new commander, but with debates as to our probable part in the next campaign, and the forces which would be given to us with which to do our work. Would the Ninth Corps remain in the department, or would it be ordered to the East for duty under Burnside, as was already rumored? Would our task be simply to garrison East Tennessee; should we make Longstreet's army our objective and follow him into Virginia; or should we be united to Sherman's and Thomas's armies for a campaign in Georgia? We eagerly listened for every hint which might be dropped at headquarters, but Grant's proverbial reticence left us to our conjectures, and each question was answered only when official orders were finally published. Much that was very blind to us is now easily traced in the Official Records.
When General Foster informed the War Department that the opening of his old wound made it necessary to relieve him of command in East Tennessee, the President was in some perplexity in regard to several prominent officers. He was disposed to find some adequate employment for Rosecrans, who was still backed by a very strong political coterie in Washington. He was convinced that injustice had been done Burnside, and was thinking of sending him with the Ninth Corps, largely increased in numbers, to his old field of successful work on the Carolina coast. The opposition of influential politicians of Kansas and Missouri to Schofield, whose confirmation as major-general was still obstructed in the Senate, he felt as a personal hostility to himself. Grant was also desirous of suitable assignments to command for McPherson, W. F. Smith, and Sheridan. The almost certain passage of the bill to give a higher grade in the army, and the assumption that Grant would be promoted to it, gave the opportunity to make a satisfactory arrangement of all these cases. Burnside's return to active work and the removal to the East of the Ninth Corps were determined on, with General Parke's return, at his own desire, to the position of Burnside's chief of staff. McPherson was to take the Army of the Tennessee when Sherman should be promoted to the command of the Military Division of the Mississippi. Smith and Sheridan were to have high assignments in the Eastern army. Rosecrans was sent to Missouri, and Schofield, to his great content, was appointed to command the Army of the Ohio. These changes were gradually shaped in the correspondence of Grant with army headquarters during the fall and winter. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. iii. pp. 122, 277, 458, 529, 571; vol. xxxii. pt. ii. pp. 79, 80, 182, 202, 209, 229, 230, 251, 336; also a curious letter of Hooker to Stranton, id., pp. 467-469. See also Schofield's "Forty-six Years in the Army," pp. 108-110. I have treated these changes more in detail in chapter vii. of Force's "General Sherman" (Great Commanders' series). See preface of the work last named.] They were followed by others in the corps divisions and brigades, so that the organization of all the Western armies took permanent form before Grant was called to Washington to assume his new rank at the beginning of March.
In regard to general officers the question of assignments and promotions was always an embarrassing one for commanders of armies in the field. As the law prescribed the maximum number of major-generals and of brigadiers, political and military pressure combined to keep the list always full. [Footnote: In reply to Grant's request for the promotion of General W.F. Smith, Halleck Informed him, on Jan. 13, 1864, that there was not only no vacancy, but that by some error more had again been appointed that the law authorized, and some already in service would have to be dropped. Official Records, vol. xxxii. pt. ii. p. 80. As to brigaders, see Halleck to Grant, Id., p. 481.] Closest watch was kept by politicians and others at Washington, and if a vacancy occurred, the pressure to fill it was exactly such as would be made for a civil office in the gift of the government. Officers of the regular army found in General Halleck a powerful support, and it was assumed that those appointed from civil life would be looked after by their political friends. The effort which was made by the War Department in the winter to force into active service or into retirement all officers who for any cause had been "shelved" was well intended, but in practice it accentuated the feeling of experienced commanders that a radical reform was essential. An intelligent system was demanded, reaching from top to bottom of the army, separating its discipline, its assignments to duty, its promotions and its removals from political influences, and making merit alone the basis of advancement. In the condition of public affairs no such thorough work was possible. The embarrassments of army commanders had been very bluntly explained to the War Department in the confidential dispatches of Mr. Dana from Chattanooga. His judgments may sometimes have been hasty, but he gives a very vivid picture of the mischiefs which follow from having incompetent, intemperate, or inefficient men saddled upon an army. The same dispatches, however, showed also how unwillingly the commanders resorted to extreme severity with men toward whom they had feelings of personal kindness. In strong hands like Grant's or Sherman's the power to get promptly rid of such incumbrances (which Dana recommended) would be ably used and work well. As to political considerations, the President on more than one occasion admitted that he felt obliged, at times, to let these control his action, instead of reasons based on the efficiency of the army. [Footnote: For Dana's dispatches on this subject, see Official Records, vol. xxx. pt. i. p. 220; vol. xxxi. pt. i. pp. 69, 73, 265; pt. ii. pp. 54, 63. In his published "Recollections of the Civil War" (1898), Mr. Dana has omitted some of his most trenchant personal criticisms.]
Along with the graver embarrassments which General Grant found in organizing his armies for a new campaign were smaller ones, which though sometimes concerned with trivial matters were not on that account likely to be less annoying. When the general visited us at Knoxville and Strawberry Plains in the severe weather of early January, he came practically unattended. He had with him Lieutenant-Colonel C. B. Comstock of the engineers, who continued in confidential staff relations to him to the end of the war, well known then and ever since as an officer of rare ability and discretion. At Knoxville Grant received a dispatch in cipher which he could not read because the telegraph operator at his headquarters at Nashville alone had the key. This gave him great annoyance and might have had very serious consequences. When therefore he reached Nashville on his return ride over the mountains, he directed the operator to reveal the key to Colonel Comstock, who was always with him. The operator of course reported the fact to the superintendent of military telegraphs at Washington (Colonel Anson Stager), and on the report of the latter to the Secretary of War, Mr. Stanton ordered the operator summarily dismissed from his employment, and formally reprimanded Colonel Comstock as if the revelation had been merely on his personal order. Of course Grant, who had never dreamed that he was treading upon anybody's toes, immediately assumed the full responsibility. He showed the folly of making details of method override the public necessity to which they were subservient, and asked that the operator should be restored to his employment and not made to suffer for obeying his personal order. He said: "I could see no reason why I was not as capable of selecting a proper person to intrust with this secret as Colonel Stager." One would think this ought to have ended the matter, but it did not, though the operator was restored to duty. Mr. Stanton had the old cipher thrown away, issued a new one, and stuck to the plan of trusting it to an ordinary civilian operator, whilst it was not allowed to be known to the commanding general or the most responsible staff officer. Grant made the sensible suggestion that the key be given to military officers only, and be kept from the civilian operators; but Mr. Stanton adhered to the farcical notion of carrying on a cipher correspondence which should be open to the irresponsible transmitter, but secret as to the responsible commanding general to whom it was addressed. If it were meant for a system of espionage upon the general by thus inseparably tying to him a civilian over whom he had no control, like an agent of a secret police reporting to a Fouche or a Savary, it would be an intelligible though bungling contrivance; but as a means of secret communication with a general it was ridiculous in the extreme. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxii. pt. ii. pp. 150, 159, 161, 172, 323, 324, 361.]
The telegraph operators were young men who had learned the art usually in the northern telegraph offices and were hired for military service like other civilian employees. The operator at Grant's headquarters at Nashville had a busy place, and could not be spared to accompany the general whenever he visited a distant post, even if such inseparable attendance had been agreeable to the commander. Many of the operators were faithful and intelligent men, but there were some who were not; and an incident occurred in the Nashville campaign in the next year which showed what mischiefs were likely to happen when a telegraph operator was cowardly or untrustworthy. [Footnote: See "The Battle of Franklin," by the present writer, pp. 29, 30.]
Returning to the affairs of the Army of the Ohio, at the same time that General Schofield was ordered to report to Grant for duty, Major-General George Stoneman was sent from the East with a similar order. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxii. pt. ii. pp. 166, 182.] It had not then been announced that the Ninth Corps would return to the East, and apparently assuming that the Army of the Ohio would include more than one corps of infantry, General Grant suggested the assignment of Schofield to the department and Stoneman to the Twenty-third Corps. This was ordered accordingly on the 28th of January. [Footnote:Id., pp. 229, 251.] Stoneman's last service had been as Hooker's chief of cavalry in the Chancellorsville campaign, and under Hooker's orders he had been upon a separate expedition of cavalry during that unfortunate battle. In the general miscarriage of the campaign, he was, with questionable justice, held responsible in part for the failure and was displaced. In the general plan of setting everybody to work again, he was sent to Grant, though, as time had brought about a more favorable judgment regarding him, it would have been fair to assign him to duty again with the Army of the Potomac. I think he expected the command of the cavalry of the western army, but Grant had selected Brigadier-General William Sooy Smith for that position, and looking about for suitable duty for Stoneman, the Twenty-third Corps was seen to have no permanent commander assigned by the President, and Stoneman was nominated for it. As events turned out, the appointment was for a very short period.
My command of the corps with the rank of brigadier was of course anomalous, and would necessarily be temporary unless the appropriate rank were restored to me. Had Burnside remained in East Tennessee, it is probable that his wish would have prevailed; but he was absent, and I was a comparative stranger, forming new relations to Grant and his principal subordinates. Foster had also assured me that he would wish no change in the corps command if he stayed at the head of the Department, but as his health caused his withdrawal, the new arrangements were made without consulting him. Under these circumstances there was nothing for me to do but to accept the inevitable and take such active work as my seniority in my present rank would give.
When General Foster learned that he would soon be relieved, he very cordially offered to do anything in his power to further my wishes in regard to any choice of duty when I should be superseded in the corps. I replied that my strong desire was to get the most active field service, and as it was doubtful whether the corps would not be kept to garrison East Tennessee, I would like to be transferred to the Army of the Cumberland, which was certain to make the next campaign in Georgia. On his suggestion I wrote a letter to General Grant asking the transfer on the grounds stated. This application General Foster forwarded with a letter of his own supporting it in very friendly manner. Nothing came of this, but it was the reason for the delay which occurred in my assignment to permanent work in the Army of the Ohio. Some of my friends in the Fourth Corps, knowing that Sheridan was to leave his division, had suggested my appointment there, but the surplus of general officers prevented. Major-General Newton, one of those who came west from the Potomac army, was assigned to that division. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxii. pt. i. p.18.]
Generals Schofield and Stoneman reached Knoxville on the 9th of February, and the changes in command were promptly made. [Footnote: Id., pt. ii. pp. 356, 358, 359, 364, 365.] For a fortnight I was off duty, awaiting orders. General Foster took his leave of us, thoroughly respected by all, though his crippled physical condition had interfered with his personal activity.
My separation from the corps command only affected myself and my two personal aides-de-camp. I had recommended Major Bascom, my adjutant-general, and Major Treat, my commissary, for permanent positions on the corps staff, and these recommendations were kindly adopted by General Stoneman, so that they ceased to belong to my military family, though both offered to follow my fortunes. The other staff appointments were in the nature of details, most of which were temporarily continued. Pending General Grant's action on my application, I remained at Knoxville, looking on and making the acquaintance of the officers newly arrived.
General Stoneman was a tall, thin man, full bearded, with large eyes. He had an air of habitual sadness, or gravity approaching it, and was commonly reputed to have an irritable temper, but I saw nothing of it. I think he would have made an acceptable commander of the corps if fortune had left him in that position. His place in the regular army (Major of the Fourth United States Cavalry [Footnote: He and General Sturgis were the two majors of the same regiment.]) had led to his assignment to a cavalry command at the East, and he returned to that arm of the service a little later. Grant took a dislike to Stoneman, partly on account of the manner in which he had been sent to him from the East. When the suggestion was made that, if the opposition in the Senate to Schofield's confirmation should defeat his promotion, Stoneman should succeed to his command, Grant dryly replied that he did not know General Stoneman's merits. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxii. pt. ii. p. 394] Even a year later he showed the same distrust by speaking of him as an officer who had failed. This was by no means just, but showed the persistence of Grant's impressions. [Footnote: General Stoneman retired from the army at the close of the war and made his home in California, of which State he became governor.]
With General Schofield's arrival began my close association with him which was to last until the end of the war. In person he was a solid, rather stout man, of medium height, with a round bald head and long black beard coming down on his breast. He had a reputation for scientific tastes, and had, after his graduation at West Point, been instructor in astronomy there. He was two or three years my junior in age, and was among the younger general officers. The obstruction, thus far, to his confirmation in his higher grade so far resembled my own experience as to be a ground of sympathy between us. As I was glad of his better luck in his prompt reappointment, I may also say that his hearty recognition of my own service and experience inspired me with sincere friendship. I look back to my service as his subordinate with unmixed satisfaction.