Free Terrible Swift Sword by Joseph Wheelan Page A

and an infantry brigade, the Rebels were gone. Sheridan sent the units back to his division.
    Weary after ten days of campaigning, Sheridan requested that a handcar be sent to the mountaintop to carry him and Colonel Frank Sherman to the bottom. He and Sherman began walking down the track to meet the handcar. But no handcar came, and it grew dark.
    The anticipated easy trip down the mountain became a dangerous adventure: in the nearby cabins lived hostile Southerners; the tracks on which they walked tie to tie dropped off into black chasms. Falling often on the uneven roadbed in the dark, they slogged eleven miles without meeting the handcar. They reached their camp around midnight. Sheridan later learned that the handcar crew was captured after taking a wrong turn. Sore and bruised for months, Sheridan had many occasions to repent his lark. 46
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    BRAGG’S LONG WITHDRAWAL ENDED at Chattanooga, a ragged town of wooden sidewalks and rutted dirt roads ringed by picturesque mountains and ridges. Located on the banks of the foaming Tennessee River, it was the crossroads of the Confederacy’s two most important railroads: the East Tennessee & Virginia, which ran north and south, and the Memphis & Charleston, running east and west. It was the perfect springboard for any new Rebel offensive. 47
    To prepare the ground for operations against Chattanooga, Sheridan’s division was sent to Bridgeport, Alabama, southwest of Chattanooga. There, he established a supply depot and chose a place to build a bridge over the Tennessee River to provide Rosecrans’s army a pathway into Chattanooga.
    On August 29, Sheridan began building the bridge. In one day, 1,500 men felled trees to make 1,500 logs while foragers stripped planking from nearby barns and homes. On September 1, the bridge was completed—an astounding feat to accomplish in so short a time. Sheridan’s division and other units crossed the bridge the next day. 48
    Newspaper correspondent William F. G. Shanks happened to witness a vivid display of Sheridan’s temper when he was accompanying Major General George Thomas by train to show off the new bridge and the repaired railroad line. When the train inexplicably stopped and the delay dragged on, Sheridan asked the conductor, a burly six-footer, to get the train moving again. The conductor boorishly replied that he only obeyed orders from his military railroad superintendent.

    At that, Sheridan sprang to his feet, slugged the conductor two or three times, and kicked him off the train, Shanks wrote. Sheridan ordered the train forward, and he and Thomas resumed their conversation as though nothing had happened. When informed of the incident, Rosecrans admonished Sheridan not to interfere with railroad employees. Sheridan replied that the man was “saucy and impertinent.” 49
    The Army of the Cumberland finally marched on Chattanooga, only to discover that Bragg’s army had withdrawn from the city on September 8.
    Rosecrans sent two of his three army corps through the mountain gaps southeast of Chattanooga in the hope of locating Bragg’s army, presumed to have withdrawn deep into Georgia. The third he kept in Chattanooga. The two corps probing southeastward—one of them Alexander McCook’s XX Corps, to which Sheridan’s division belonged—lost contact with one another.
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    SHERIDAN, TOGETHER WITH MOST of the division and brigade commanders, began to suspect that Bragg was not marching to Atlanta. This was a disturbing thought because if Bragg’s army was nearby, it might attack Rosecrans’s now dispersed army corps and cut them off from their supply base in Chattanooga on the other side of the mountains. 50
    On September 9, Sheridan summoned James Card and asked him to find an East Tennessean willing to slip through the Rebel lines in Georgia to learn what Bragg was up to. He would have preferred to send Card, but the Rebels knew him; Card and one of his brothers