Charles River Editors - The Greatest Civil War Battles: The Battle of Chickamauga

By Charles River Editors

Painting by Alfred Waud depicting a Confederate advance at Chickamauga

Charles River Editors was founded by Harvard and MIT alumni to provide superior editing and original writing services, with the expertise to create digital content for publishers across a vast range of subject matter. In addition to providing original digital content for third party publishers, Charles River Editors republishes civilizations greatest literary works, bringing them to a new generation via ebooks .

Sign up here to receive updates about free books as we publish them , and v isit Our Kindle Author Page to browse todays free promotions and our most recently published Kindle titles.

The Battle of Chickamauga

I know Mr. Davis thinks he can do a great many things other men would hesitate to attempt. For instance, he tried to do what God failed to do. He tried to make a soldier of Braxton Bragg. General Joseph E. Johnston

Americans have long been fascinated by the Civil War and its biggest battles, particularly Gettysburg, Antietam, and Shiloh, all of which involved Robert E. Lee or Ulysses S. Grant. But the second biggest battle of the entire war mostly gets overlooked among casual readers, despite the fact it represented the last great chance for the Confederates to salvage the Western theater.

In mid-September, the Union Army of the Cumberland under General William Rosecrans had taken Chattanooga, but rather than be pushed out of the action, Army of Tennessee commander Braxton Bragg decided to stop with his 60,000 men and prepare a counterattack south of Chattanooga at a creek named Chickamauga. To bolster his fire-power, Confederate President Jefferson Davis sent 12,000 additional troops under the command of Lieutenant General James Longstreet, whose corps had just recently fought at Gettysburg in July.

On the morning of September 19, 1863, Bragg's men assaulted the Union line, which was established in a wooded area thick with underbrush along the river. That day and the morning of the next, Bragg continue to pummel Union forces, with the battle devolving from an organized succession of coordinated assaults into what one Union soldier described as a mad, irregular battle, very much resembling gue r rilla warfare on a vast scale in which one army was bushwhacking the other, and wherein all the science and the art of war went for nothing.

Late that second morning, Rosecrans was misinformed that a gap was forming in his front line, so he responded by moving several units forward to shore it up. What Rosecrans didnt realize, however, was that in doing so he accidentally created a quarter-mile gap in the Union center, directly in the path of Longstreet s men . Described by one of Rosecrans own men as an an gry flood, Longstreet's attack was successful in driving one-third of the Union Army off the field, with Rosecrans himself running all the way to Chattanooga, where he was later found weeping and seeking solace from a staff priest.

As the Confederate assault continued, George H. Thomas led the Union left wing against heavy Confederate attack even after nearly half of the Union army abandoned their defenses and retreated from the battlefield, racing toward Chattanooga. Thomas rallied the remaining parts of the army and formed a defensive stand on Horseshoe Ridge , with more units spontaneously rallying to the new defensive line. T homas and his men managed to hold until nightfall, when they made an orderly retreat to Chattanooga while the Confederates occupied the surrounding heights, ultimately besieging the city. Dubbed The Rock of Chickamauga, Thomass heroics ensured that Rosecrans army was able to successfully retreat back to Chattanooga.

In the aftermath of the Battle of Chickamauga, several Confederate generals blamed the number of men lost during what would be the bloodiest battle of the Western Theater on Braggs incompetence, also criticizing him for refusing to pursue the escaping Union army. General Longstreet later stated to Jefferson Davis, Nothing but the hand of God can help as long as we have our present commander.

The Greatest Civil War Battles: The Battle of Chickamauga comprehensively covers the campaign and the events that led up to the battle, the fighting itself, and the aftermath of the battle. Accounts of the battle by important participants are also included , along with maps of the battle and pictures of important people, places, and events . Y ou will learn about the Battle of Chickamauga like you never have before, in no time at all.

A picture of Horseshoe Ridge today

Of all the commanders who led armies during major battles of the Civil War, historians have by and large agreed that the most inept generals to face each other were the Unions William Rosecrans and the Confederacys Braxton Bragg. The two generals armies , the Union Army of the Cumberland and the Confederate Army of Tennessee, had already fought at the Battle of Stones River (Battle of Murfreesboro) at the end of 1862, inflicting massive casualties on each other without gaining an advantage.

Rosecrans and Bragg

During the first half of 1863, the two armies maneuvered around Chattanooga, Tennessee, one of the important railroad hubs of the theater. With Ulysses S. Grant laying siege to Vicksburg and trying to close off the Mississippi River, the Lincoln Administration hoped that a decisive campaign by Bragg in southern Tennessee would lay the groundwork for the capture of Atlanta, one of the Confederacys most important cities.

That very thought terrorized the minds of Confederate officials and generals, even some of those fighting in the East. Early in 1863, Robert E. Lees principal subordinate, James Longstreet, had advocated letting him take his corps west to try to relieve Vicksburg or conduct a campaign in Tennessee that would force Grant to stop his siege or send some of his men elsewhere. Lee had not wanted to detach any soldiers from his own army, given that it was badly outnumbered by the Union Army of the Potomac, but after the fall of Vicksburg and the defeat at Gettysburg, the situation had changed. Longstreet explained in his memoirs:

To me the emergency seemed so grave that I decided to write the Honorable Secretary of War (excusing the informality under the privilege given in his request in May) expressing my opinion of affairs in that military zone. I said that the successful march of General Rosecrans's army through Georgia would virtually be the finishing stroke of the war; that in the fall of Vicksburg and the free flow of the Mississippi River the lungs of the Confederacy were lost; that the impending march would cut through the heart of the South, and leave but little time for the dissolution; that to my mind the remedy was to order the Army of Northern Virginia to defensive work, and send detachments to reinforce the army in Tennessee; to call detachments of other commands to the same service, and strike a crushing blow against General Rosecrans before he could receive reinforcing help; that our interior lines gave the opportunity, and it was only by the skilful use of them that we could reasonably hope to equalize our power to that of the better-equipped adversary; that the subject had not been mentioned to my commander, because like all others he was opposed to having important detachments of his army so far beyond his reach; that all must realize that our affairs were languishing, and that the only hope of reviving the waning cause was through the advantage of interior lines.