Who won the Battle of Chickamauga?
The Confederate Army of Tennessee under Braxton Bragg defeated the Union Army of the Cumberland under William Rosecrans at Chickamauga in northern Georgia on 19 and 20 September 1863. A mistaken order opened a gap in the Union line just as James Longstreet's assault struck it, routing the Union right, but Major General George H. Thomas held on Snodgrass Hill and Horseshoe Ridge, earning the name the Rock of Chickamauga and saving the army, which fell back into Chattanooga. It was the bloodiest battle of the war's Western Theater.6
In September 1863 the two great western armies collided in the tangled woods along Chickamauga Creek, just over the Georgia line from Chattanooga. For two days some 125,000 men fought in forest so thick that officers could rarely see their own lines. It was a Confederate victory bought at a fearful price, the costliest battle of the war after Gettysburg, and it is remembered above all for one general who refused to run.7
Part of The greatest battles of the Civil War · Before: The Second Battle of Fort Wagner · Next: The Battle of the Wilderness
The road to Chickamauga
Chattanooga was a small place in 1863, about 2,500 people, but four railroads met there, and whoever held it held the gateway between Tennessee and the Deep South. In the summer the Union Army of the Cumberland under William Rosecrans outmaneuvered Braxton Bragg in the Tullahoma campaign and then forced him to abandon Chattanooga without a fight.8
Flushed with success, Rosecrans pressed on into the mountains of northwest Georgia with his three corps strung out across miles of ridges and valleys. Bragg concentrated at LaFayette and waited for help. It came from the east: on 17 September Virginia divisions under John Bell Hood began to arrive, the vanguard of James Longstreet's corps, sent by rail from Robert E. Lee's army, along with a division from Mississippi. For once in the West, the Confederates would fight with the advantage of numbers.9
The armies
The American Battlefield Trust puts the Union army at about 60,000 men and the Confederate at about 65,000, some 125,000 in all. Rosecrans had three corps in the line, the XIV under George H. Thomas holding the left, and Gordon Granger's Reserve Corps standing behind them toward Chattanooga. Bragg, once Longstreet arrived, split his army into two wings, Longstreet commanding the left and Lieutenant General Leonidas Polk the right.10
18 September: the creek crossings
Bragg's plan was to cross Chickamauga Creek, get between Rosecrans and Chattanooga and cut the LaFayette Road, the Union army's route home. On 18 September his columns marched for the bridges and fords and ran into stiff resistance. At one key crossing Colonel John Wilder's Lightning Brigade, mounted infantry armed with Spencer repeating rifles that could fire 14 to 20 rounds a minute, held the Confederates back for hours. That night Rosecrans shifted his army north, toward the threatened road.11
19 September: a soldiers' fight
The battle proper opened shortly after dawn on 19 September, when Union troops ran into Confederates they had believed were farther south. In dense, trackless woodland where no one could see far, the fight spread from one end of the field to the other. Brigade slammed into brigade among the trees, attacks flared and died away, and generals lost touch with their own commands. The Confederates gained ground but could not break the long Union line. By nightfall the killing had been immense and neither side had won.12
During the night both armies prepared for the next day. Union troops threw up breastworks of logs, while at eleven o'clock Longstreet himself reached the field and took command of Bragg's left wing.13
20 September: the gap in the line
Bragg meant to attack at dawn on the 20th, starting from his right, but the assault did not get under way until about half past nine. Wave after wave struck Thomas's fortified line on the Union left. Rosecrans, alarmed, kept pulling units from his right to strengthen it.14
Around an hour later came the mistake that decided the battle. Acting on a mistaken report of a gap in his line, Rosecrans ordered Brigadier General Thomas Wood to move his division and fill it. No gap existed. Wood, who had twice been criticized for not obeying orders promptly, pulled his division out of the line anyway, and a real hole a whole division wide opened in the Union center.15
At that moment Longstreet's attack struck exactly there. He had massed eight brigades in three lines, led by Hood, and they poured through the gap in a dense column. The Union right collapsed, and a third of the army, Rosecrans with it, was swept back toward Chattanooga in a rout.16
The Rock of Chickamauga
The battle might have become a catastrophe, but George H. Thomas refused to break. A Virginian who had stayed loyal to the Union when his state seceded, disowned by his own family for it, he gathered shattered regiments and stray units on Snodgrass Hill and Horseshoe Ridge and formed a new line facing the victorious Confederates.17
Help came from a general who acted without orders. Gordon Granger, watching the smoke from the Reserve Corps position miles to the north, reportedly said he was going to Thomas, orders or no orders. Around half past eleven James Steedman's division set off at the double, and between one and quarter to two its lead regiments reached the Snodgrass cabin. Thomas threw them straight into a gap on Horseshoe Ridge. They charged, were driven back, and held. Granger and Steedman brought some 3,700 men to the ridge, and by one count the Reserve Corps lost about 1,800 killed, wounded or missing before the day was out.18
Through the afternoon the Confederates attacked again and again, and each time the line on the ridge held. James A. Garfield, Rosecrans's chief of staff and a future president, wired from the field that Thomas was standing like a rock. When darkness fell Thomas withdrew in good order toward Rossville. For that stand he was known ever after as the Rock of Chickamauga.19
Thomas wanted to fight again the next day and urged Rosecrans to attack, but Rosecrans, shaken, refused and pulled the whole army back into Chattanooga. Wilder's stand at the creek was not forgotten either: Thomas recommended him for promotion to brigadier general.20
Besieged in Chattanooga
Chickamauga cost about 34,600 men killed, wounded and missing, 16,170 on the Union side and 18,454 on the Confederate side, the second bloodiest battle of the Civil War after Gettysburg and by far the worst in the West. Ten Confederate generals were killed or wounded. Yet Bragg had won a field, not a campaign. He did not pursue. Instead he occupied Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge above Chattanooga and tried to starve the Union army out.21
For a month the besieged army went hungry, short of rations, forage, firewood, shoes and coats. Rosecrans was relieved, and Thomas took command of the Army of the Cumberland. Ulysses S. Grant arrived on the rainy night of 23 October, and on 27 October a surprise crossing at Brown's Ferry opened the "cracker line," named for the hardtack it carried, that brought food back into the city. The plan was Brigadier General William F. "Baldy" Smith's: in the small hours a Union force crossed the river at Brown's Ferry by surprise, seized the crossing and linked up with Joseph Hooker's approaching troops. In late November Thomas's men stormed Missionary Ridge, broke the siege and turned Bragg's victory at Chickamauga into a strategic defeat.22
The battle shaped the men who fought it. Thomas went on to defeat John Bell Hood's army at Nashville in December 1864, which won him the thanks of Congress, and died in San Francisco in 1870. Garfield left the army a few months after Chickamauga to take a seat in Congress, was elected president in 1880 and was shot four months into his term. He died on 19 September 1881, eighteen years to the day after the battle opened.23
The river of death and the battlefield today
Chickamauga is often said to be a Cherokee word for river of death. The ethnologist James Mooney, writing in 1900, found otherwise. The Cherokee told him it was not a word of their language at all and had no meaning in it. The stream, he wrote, came to be called, poetically, the River of Death because of the hard fighting along it in the Civil War, and the phrase was then passed off as a translation of the old name.24
In 1890 Congress created a national military park on the battlefields of Chickamauga and Chattanooga, and the fields and woods along the LaFayette Road, Snodgrass Hill and Horseshoe Ridge are preserved in it today.25 › Battle of the Wilderness, 1864
