Free Terrible Swift Sword by Joseph Wheelan Page B

had been captured that spring while on one of Sheridan’s missions. They had escaped from the Chattanooga jail before they could be sentenced for spying. 51
    Card found a Unionist who had been persecuted by Rebel guerrillas and wanted to move to the West. He agreed to locate Bragg’s army if Sheridan would buy his livestock to pay for his relocation costs. Sheridan readily consented.
    Sheridan’s spy found Bragg’s army in the Pigeon Mountain area of north Georgia. After infiltrating the Rebel camp, the spy was arrested. He managed to escape somehow, then to slip through the enemy picket line in the dark by crawling on his hands and knees and grunting like a wild hog.
    He reached the Union lines on September 12 with the sobering information that Bragg was just twenty miles away and that he intended to fight. Moreover, Lieutenant General James Longstreet’s vaunted I Corps was on its way from Virginia to reinforce Bragg.
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    AFTER GENERAL THOMAS “STONEWALL” Jackson’s death at Chancellorsville in May, imperturbable Longstreet had become Robert E. Lee’s right hand. Grand strategy
was Longstreet’s new passion. He rightly believed that the Rebel army could utilize its interior lines of transportation to overwhelm the Yankees at any given point by shifting troops from one theater to another.
    Longstreet had persuaded Lee and Confederate president Jefferson Davis to permit him to bring troops from Virginia to Bragg’s army. Together, they would drive Rosecrans’s army from Chattanooga, and Bragg would then return to the offensive in Tennessee.
    On September 8, the day Bragg evacuated Chattanooga, two divisions from Longstreet’s I Corps began streaming into Richmond to board worn-out trains for the long trip over rickety tracks to northern Georgia. With Knoxville now in Union hands, the 12,000 troops had to make a much longer journey through southern Virginia and both Carolinas to reach their staging area at Catoosa Station, Georgia. 52
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    ALARMED BY MOUNTING EVIDENCE that the Confederates were planning to attack him, Rosecrans issued a flurry of orders to hasten the reconcentration of his three corps. They were spread over fifty-seven miles of heavily wooded hills southeast of Chattanooga, on the lee side of Missionary Ridge.
    On September 17, the units had reached supporting distance of one another, and Rosecrans was on the scene. Scouts reported that Confederate troops were just three or four miles distant.
    On September 18, a wall of dust arose from the Pigeon Mountain area, moving northward. It was Longstreet’s two divisions. Suspecting that the Rebels outnumbered his men—they, in fact, did, 66,000 to 58,000—Rosecrans prepared for a defensive battle.
    Flowing through the area where the two armies were forming for battle was the sluggish, tannin-stained Chickamauga Creek, whose Cherokee name has been variously said to mean “bad water,” “good country,” and “river of death”—the latter becoming the popular translation after what would happen there. 53

CHAPTER 3
    Defeat and Victory at Chattanooga
    SEPTEMBER–NOVEMBER 1863
    With the instinct of military genius [Sheridan] pushed ahead. If others had followed his example we should have had Bragg’s army.
    â€”MAJOR GENERAL ULYSSES GRANT DESCRIBING
SHERIDAN’S PURSUIT AFTER MISSIONARY RIDGE 1
    SEPTEMBER 20, 1863–CHICKAMAUGA CREEK, GEORGIA—The blood-red sunrise was portentous, even if lingering smoke from the previous day’s fighting was its cause. “This will indeed be a day of blood,” predicted Brigadier General James A. Garfield, chief of staff to Major General William Rosecrans, commander of the Army of the Cumberland. Puffy-faced from lack of sleep, Rosecrans rode along the Union lines, encouraging his men.
    Phil Sheridan had not slept either. During a meeting of division and corps commanders the night before, there was “much