The Chickamauga Campaign

Barren Victory: The Retreat into Chattanooga, the Confederate Pursuit, and the Aftermath of the Battle, September 21 to October 20, 1863

David A. Powell

• Publisher: Savas Beatie
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781611213843
• eBook ISBN: 9781611213294
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

Winner of the Laney Book Prize from the Austin Civil War Round Table: "The post-battle coverage is simply unprecedented among prior Chickamauga studies." —James A. Hessler, award-winning author of Sickles at Gettysburg
This third and concluding volume of the magisterial Chickamauga Campaign trilogy, a comprehensive examination of one of the most important and complex military operations of the Civil War, examines the immediate aftermath of the battle with unprecedented clarity and detail.
The narrative opens at dawn on Monday, September 21, 1863, with Union commander William S. Rosecrans in Chattanooga and most of the rest of his Federal army in Rossville, Georgia. Confederate commander Braxton Bragg has won the signal victory of his career, but has yet to fully grasp that fact or the fruits of his success. Unfortunately for the South, the three grueling days of combat broke down the Army of Tennessee and a vigorous pursuit was nearly impossible.
In addition to carefully examining the decisions made by each army commander and the consequences, Powell sets forth the dreadful costs of the fighting in terms of the human suffering involved. Barren Victory concludes with the most detailed Chickamauga orders of battle (including unit strengths and losses) ever compiled, and a comprehensive bibliography more than a decade in the making.
Includes illustrations

Chapter One

A Battle Won?

Morning, September 21st

By

all appearances, as first light filtered through the trees on Monday morning, September 21, 1863, Braxton Bragg’s Confederate Army of Tennessee had won a glorious victory. William Starke Rosecrans’s Federal army had been driven from the field at all points. Thousands of prisoners had been captured, and the Army of the Cumberland’s entire hospital complex was in Southern hands, as were large stores of armaments and many other sorely needed supplies. The Confederates had paid a bloody price for this stunning success, but the Northern enemy had been routed and had fled the field. Chattanooga, Tennessee—the important logistical and industrial river hub—seemed within the grasp of the Confederacy’s outstretched fingers. Perhaps much of the state of Tennessee would soon be back in the Southern fold.

Unfortunately for the Confederates, Chickamauga was not a turning point in the war for Southern independence. The hard-fought and bloody three-day battle instead represented nothing more than a temporary check to the cause of restoring the Union. In time, this outcome would spark sharp accusations and sow bitter divisions within the Confederate army. Why was such a spectacular achievement not followed up immediately? Where was the vigorous pursuit needed to convert tactical success—one of the rarest events to unfold under a Southern banner in the Western Theater—into strategic victory?

Recriminations, virtually all of them leveled at Braxton Bragg, have muddied the historical waters. As darkness mantled the battlefield on September 20, however, the state of affairs did not seem quite so clear-cut. The night brought with it a general Confederate halt. Fearing that a collision between the army’s two wings somewhere between Horseshoe Ridge and Kelly Field would result in “serious consequences,” Bragg ordered all of his generals to stop where they were and let the men sleep on their arms. Everyone expected the battle would renew with the dawn.

Bragg spent the night at his headquarters on the Brotherton Road near Jay’s Mill. Even from that distance he could hear the enemy. “Desultory firing was heard until 8 p.m.,” he noted, and “other noises, indicating movements and dispositions for the morrow, continued until a late hour.” Bragg staffer Col. Taylor Beatty recorded the day’s results in his diary: “About dark [the] enemy [was] routed. We expect him to rally though & the fight to be continued a few miles on tomorrow. Hope he will as I want daylight to follow him. Some though hope it is over as our loss is heavy.”¹

The Army of Tennessee’s Left Wing commander, Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, sent two communiqués to Bragg that evening. The first, at 6:15 p.m., reported that things had “been entirely successful in my command today and [I] hope to be ready to renew the conflict at an early hour.” Longstreet went on to note that Maj. Gen. Thomas C. Hindman’s troops were badly scattered, and again asked Bragg for the loan of a division to replace Hindman in the line so that he “might collect his men.” A second dispatch reported that Hindman believed the enemy even then were “fighting him hard,” and reiterated the need for support from Lt. Gen. Leonidas Polk’s Right Wing. As it stood that evening with darkness covering the field, Longstreet fully expected to reengage the Federals at dawn.²

Without waiting for Bragg to act, sometime after dark Longstreet turned to Brig. Gen. Evander Law’s three brigades to bolster his battered front. After its sharp fight at midday on the 20th, Law’s division spent the rest of the afternoon in the vicinity of Brotherton Field, recovering and awaiting a new mission. Longstreet directed the men back into the front line. It was fully dark by the time Col. William F. Perry led the way, marching his Alabamans north aligned with and just west of the La Fayette Road. They drew to a halt somewhere west of Kelly Field without contacting any Federals. Brigadier General Jerome Robertson, whose brigade followed Perry’s, reported that “late in the evening, I was moved to the position of General Preston, where I relieved General [Joseph B.] Kershaw, and bivouacked for the night.” During this exchange, at 10:00 p.m., Kershaw informed Robertson that the Federals were finally gone from their front. Kershaw “immediately communicated the fact to the Lieutenant General Commanding [Longstreet].” Presumably Brig. Gen. Henry L. Benning’s Georgians filled out the remainder of this line, coming into place between Perry and Robertson, though the lack of filed reports makes any specific determination of these movements difficult³

Longstreet might have had a better understanding of his wing’s relative positions had Brig. Gen. Bushrod Johnson been able to report in. By full dark, Johnson’s three brigades were badly jumbled and short of ammunition, their ranks thinned due to exhaustion and heavy straggling. Colonel Cyrus A. Sugg was “thankful” to let Col. Robert Trigg’s men (General Preston’s division) take over his front. Colonel John S. Fulton ordered his Tennesseans to fall back south off the crest of Horseshoe Ridge to align his brigade with Brig. Gen. Arthur Manigault’s men for the night, somewhere near the Vittetoe House. Colonel David Coleman, commanding McNair’s brigade, made no mention of his actions after nightfall, but he likely emulated Fulton. With his men disengaged, about 8:00 p.m. Johnson sought new orders. Three hours of fruitless wandering ensued. “I … searched until about 11 o’clock for the headquarters of the army, or the wing, with a view to making a report of my position. Failing in this attempt I returned to my command, worn out with the toils of the day.”⁴

On the army’s right, Leonidas Polk found himself mired in similar difficulties. Around 8:00 p.m., while 1st Lt. William Gale, his aide-de-camp, was setting up Polk’s camp amidst “the enemy’s works at the state [La Fayette] road,” Polk ordered Lt. Philip B. Spence to ride the length of the Right Wing’s battle line to ascertain everyone’s position. Once that laborious task was accomplished, Spence had orders to locate General Bragg and report his findings to the army commander. Worn out by a very trying day, Polk went to bed.⁵

It took Spence a couple of hours to trace the lines and find Bragg, who was also asleep. The army leader shook himself awake to hear the news. “I … reported the situation of the Right Wing … as near as I could,” recalled Spence, “drawing a diagram in the sand showing the position of each Corps Division and Brigade and as near as I could of each battery.” Bragg received this report without comment, and sent the lieutenant off to summon Longstreet and Polk to a late-night meeting. Spence reached Polk first, informed him of Bragg’s request, and then rode off in search of Longstreet. The rider met with no more success than had Bushrod Johnson and eventually gave up the hunt and spurred his horse back to Polk’s fire.⁶

Leonidas Polk slept only fitfully, surrounded by the awful detritus of combat. “Within ten yards” of camp, recalled Lieutenant. Gale, “one poor devil … lay sobbing out his life all night long.” Family concerns also troubled Polk’s rest. Sometime around 11:00 p.m., Polk sent Gale off to check on his nephew, Brig. Gen. Lucius Polk, whose brigade was also camped within the confines of Kelly Field. “For two hours I rode around and among our men,” Gale wrote, “most of the time in a dense forest…. The moon was shining … and gave a most unearthly appearance to this horrid scene. Wounded, dying and dead men and horses were strewn around me … for the field was yet hot and smoking from the last charge.” Gale failed to locate the younger Polk (a common problem this night), and he, too, returned to headquarters. There, he found Lieutenant Spence back from his own horrific trip through the grotesque landscape.⁷

Their night was not yet done. Gale and Spence both recalled how they accompanied Lieutenant General Polk to meet with Bragg. By now the hour was very late, the ride trying, and Polk cross. At one point Bishop Polk complained “that he wished the commanding general would remain near the front.” Spence recorded only that the party reached Bragg “some time after midnight.” Gale was equally vague. In one description he placed the meeting before midnight, but in another gave the time as 1:00 a.m. Discrepancies as to the timing of this meeting would prove much less important that its substance. Bragg did not mention in his report what passed between them. Polk never filed a regular report of the battle, mostly because he was about to become embroiled in a much larger controversy with the army commander, and also because he would be killed the next summer. In an 1882 letter to Polk’s son William, Lieutenant Gale insisted it was Polk who first apprised Bragg that his army had won a great victory. General Polk, wrote Gale, told Bragg “that the enemy was routed and fleeing precipitously … and that then was the opportunity to finish the work … by prompt pursuit, before he had time to reorganize and throw up defenses at Chattanooga.” As Gale subsequently discovered from Tennessee Governor Isham G. Harris, “the Commanding General would not believe the Federals had been beaten but insisted that we were to have a harder fight the next day.”⁸

This story first appeared in 1893, long after Polk and Bragg were dead. By this time Bragg was being universally pilloried for his failure to pursue Rosecrans, a lapse that supposedly let the fruits of victory slip away. In reality it was not until well into the morning of September 21st that any senior Confederate, Polk included, understood the Army of the Cumberland had retired from the field.

The first bits of light on Monday morning were penetrating the smoke-shrouded woods covering Horseshoe Ridge when Lt. Clarence Malone roused the survivors of Company C, 10th Tennessee Infantry. When the combat closed the night before, Confederate troops all across the field dropped to the ground and spent the night wherever darkness found them. Malone and his men “encamped on the top [of the ridge] amid the grones of the dying and the prayers for assistance.” None of these horrors overly bothered the exhausted Malone, who later recorded that he “slept soundly.” As for the morrow, “all thought [that September 21] would be another day of strife, but great was our surprise to awake and find the Yankees gone.”⁹

But gone where? That was the question uppermost on every Confederate’s mind from private to full general. A round of celebratory Rebel Yells had swept Bragg’s army from one end to the other the night before, but most Confederates still expected the Federals to be waiting for them just over the next hill, having fallen back only as far the next piece of defensible ground. It seemed unlikely the battle could actually be over.

Brig. Gen. St. John Richardson Liddell was one of the more active Rebel commanders on the morning of September 21. Library of Congress

At 5:30 a.m., Longstreet sent a rider to Maj. Gen. Joseph Wheeler asking him to “send forward at once a strong cavalry force, and at once ascertain the position of the enemy.” Just over an hour later, at 6:40 a.m., a courier from Bragg found Longstreet near the Dyer house and informed him that the army commander wished to confer. The big Georgian thought the invitation unwise and declined, explaining that he expected the fighting to resume at any minute, and he was even somewhat worried about a Federal counterattack.¹⁰

One of those who did suspect a wholesale enemy withdrawal was Brig. Gen. St. John Liddell. After his division was thrown out of McDonald Field by John Turchin’s Federals, Liddell sent scouts cautiously forward later that night to investigate his front. They returned at 9:00 p.m. to report the Yankees had vanished. At first light, Liddell hunted up Polk, whom he “found in bed in his ambulance half asleep.” After hearing Liddell’s news, Polk ordered the Louisianan to press forward and discover where the Yankees might have gone. Before Liddell could depart, however, General Bragg rode up. “Near sunrise … [I] met the ever-vigilant Brigadier General Liddell,” Bragg recalled, “who was awaiting to report … that the enemy had retreated during the night…. Instructions were promptly given to push our whole line of skirmishers to the front.”¹¹

Liddell recalled things a little differently. He remembered waiting for some time while Bragg and Polk conferred, expecting orders to pursue that never came. Finally, Liddell “left … in entire ignorance of the steps that had been determined upon.” According to Liddell, he ordered out his skirmishers of his own volition and awaited additional instructions.¹²

Lieutenant Gene...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Prologue: Who Won?
• Chapter 1: A Battle Won? Morning, September 21st
• Chapter 2: A Battle Lost? September 21: Within Union Lines
• Chapter 3: Into Chattanooga: September 22 and 23
• Chapter 4: The Cost
• Chapter 5: The Consequences
• Appendix 1: Last Clash at Chickamauga
• Appendix 2: Rosecrans, Garfield, and Dana
• Appendix 3: Union Order of Battle
• Appendix 4: Union Losses
• Appendix 5: Confederate Strength—Sources and Methodology
• Appendix 6: Confederate Losses
• Appendix 7: Polk’s Corps October 22, 1863 Return
• Bibliography