USA > Tennessee > The military annals of Tennessee. Confederate. First series: embracing a review of military operations, with regimental histories and memorial rolls, V.1 > Part 3
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III.
General Beauregard's illness continuing, he transferred the command of the army to General Bragg, a distinguished soldier who, in the Seminole and Mexican wars, was noted for his cour- age and as an unyielding disciplinarian, possessed of superior
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powers of administration. He had joined the army at Corinth with a well-drilled and well-organized division from Pensacola, and commanded a corps at Shiloh. As second in command to Beauregard, his generalship had free play in ordering the preliminaries and conducting the masterly retreat from Cor- inth. But wanting in what we now try to express by the words "magnetic qualities," which distinguished Lee, Albert Sidney as well as "Joe" Johnston, Stonewall Jackson, Cleburne, Cheat- ham, and Forrest, he was not popular with the rank and file. They had confidence in his abilities, but the subtle power which eludes language adequately to express, and which ties men to lead- ers of such varying dispositions as lie between the first and last of the above-named Generals, was wanting; and though they respect- ed him, and fought well under him, they never came to regard him as an idol. General Bragg could be enterprising even to rash- ness, and, as the battles he fought prove, he made use of a very high order of intelligence, by none so much admitted or admired as by those most competent to judge, who held high commands and knew something of the powers necessary to the performance of the duties of so weighty a trust. He was a man of inflexible will and determination, self-reliant even to the borders of stub- bornness, but his resources were in other directions limited, and he failed to profit by his victories and push on to overwhelming success. Soon after his assumption of command the Army of Mississippi, reenforced and reorganized, was put in motion, and in July was transferred from Tupelo, Mississippi, to Chattanco- ga, Tennessee, via Mobile and Montgomery, Alabama,* to con-
*Captain-afterward General -- John H. Morgan was ordered and made the first raid into Middle Tennessee and Kentucky after the battle of Shiloh, "there," as General Beauregard directed him, "to cause as much damage as possible to the enemy's railroads, bridges, and telegraph lines. He was authorized to raise his battalion to a regiment, and even to a brigade if he could." This duty was as- signed him because on the retreat from Bowling Green, Kentucky, to Corinth, Mississippi, he " had highly distinguished himself by his great energy and effi- ciency. He had kept the commanding General thoroughly advised of the move- ments of the enemy, and had performed many acts indicating high military abil- ity." He obeyed orders literally, and succeeded in inflicting irreparable damage upon the enemy, and confusing him as to the movements of the Confederates. On this raid General Morgan first awakened his countrymen to a sense of his pre- eminent abilities as a partisan soldier and his fitness for the responsible trust of independent command without being trammeled by the orders of a department General. He followed the example already set by Forrest in his reconnaissance to
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front Buell, who had been ordered to occupy that place while Grant held the line along the Charleston railroad from Hunts- ville, Alabama, to Memphis, Tennessee. As Buell neared Chat- tanooga, Bragg, after concentrating his troops, suddenly took up his line of march to invade Kentucky, moving east of the Louis- ville railroad, and so compelled the rapid retreat of the Federals, who, owing to the delays incident to the Confederates storming and capturing most, if not all, of the many fortified outposts on their line of march, were enabled to reach Louisville a day in ad- vance of Bragg. The arrival about the same time of a column of Confederates, under General Kirby Smith, in the vicinity of Cincinnati, Ohio, had the effect of arousing the North-west, ter- rorized by what seemed a probable invasion of their country; and the result was that Buell was heavily reenforced, and Bragg and Smith* were compelled to retreat without accomplishing but one of the three purposes that were said to have induced the movement. They gathered an immense quantity of sup- plies, but failed to arouse the State of Kentucky or secure any great number of recruits, and they did not enter Louisville.
Green River and the affair at Sacramento, Kentucky. General Morgan was a bold, enterprising, and intelligent officer, who knew well the country he was sent to operate in, and he pushed his little column rapidly into work as novel as it was exciting. since all their operations were undertaken and accomplished within the enemy's lines. He was completely successful, and aided materially toward the movements of General Bragg made soon after, and which began the long struggle in Tennessee, which only ended with the defeat of Hood's army.
* General E. K. Smith, a West Pointer by education and a soldier of much ex- perience, had seen service in Virginia under General Joseph E. Johnston, having been wounded at the battle of Manassas, the first of the civil war. He was in command of the Department of East Tennessee-head-quarters at Knoxville- at the time Bragg moved up to Chattanooga from Tupelo, and it is asserted was the author or suggester of the movement into Kentneky. He entered Kentucky through Big Creek Gap, twenty miles south of Cumberland Gap, and after several small and successful affairs met the Federals in force at Richmond, Kentucky, where he fought a battle in which he was victorious, taking several thousand prisoners and capturing a large number of small arms, artillery, and wagons. He then advanced on Lexington, next to Frankfort, and thence to the Ohio River, which he would have crossed, and probably captured Cincinnati, but that he was acting under orders from General Bragg, and was cooperating with him. Mr. Jefferson Davis, in his "Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government," says: "His (Smith's) division was but the advance of General Bragg's army, and his duty to cooperate with it was a sufficient reason for not attempting so important a movement."
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The line of retreat was toward Chattanooga, but they were over- taken on the Sth of October at Perryville, Kentucky, where a battle was fought, the Federals being so crippled that they did not any farther attempt to interrupt the retreat, which was con- tinued until Chattanooga was reached. The Federal losses in this battle were fifteen pieces of cannon and four thousand men, and that of the Confederates about two thousand five hundred men. Rosecrans taking Buell's place as commander of the Federal army, conducted it to Nashville, which it fortified and occupied.
After a few weeks of rest, the Army of Tennessee moved up from Chattanooga and occupied Murfreesboro, where it remained for some days undisturbed. After taking position, General N. B. Forrest was ordered to report to General Bragg in person, and by him was ordered to take post at Columbia, and there pre- . pare for an expedition into West Tennessee. On taking com- mand of his brigade for that purpose, he found it to consist of one thousand eight hundred men, poorly mounted and armed only with old, unserviceable flint-lock muskets and shot and squirrel guns. He reported to the commanding officer the con- dition of the brigade, and its consequent unpreparedness for a service so hazardous; but the answer came back curtly and per- emptorily to march without delay. This he did, and crossed the Tennessee River on the 13th of December. By the 3d of Jan- uary, 1863, he was back again, and his brigade, much augmented, was encamped at Mt. Pleasant, a few miles from Columbia, hav- ing in two weeks accomplished more hard fighting, rough riding, and destruction and capture of property than the annals of war up to that time afforded any account of. These superb troopers had averaged over twenty miles of marching each day, had fought three well-contested engagements, with daily skirmishes, de- stroyed fifty large and small bridges and much of the trestle-work on the Mobile and Ohio railroad, rendering it useless during the remaining years of the war; they had captured and burned eight- een or twenty stockades, captured or killed two thousand five hundred of the enemy, taken or disabled ten pieces of field artil- lery, carried off fifty wagons and ambulances with their teams, captured ten thousand stand of excellent small arms, one mill- ion rounds of ammunition, and returned thoroughly armed and equipped, most of the men with re-mounts, and with a surplus
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of five hundred Enfield rifles and one thousand eight hundred blankets and knapsacks-Forrest having covered in his operations nearly the whole of West Tennessee from the Tennessee River to the Mississippi. This was one of the most brilliant achievements of the war, and convinced the authorities, both civil and mili- tary, as the people had been convinced long before, that in For- rest Tennessee was to find her greatest soldier, a General of more than hap-hazard fortune or luck, a man of something more than brute courage, an officer of skill, judgment, and providential or prescient outlook, who took advantage of his knowledge of the country and the relative positions of the outlying detachments of the Federal army in an intelligent way to strike them in de- tail and elude all their plans for his capture or overthrow. This invasion of West Tennessee in very inclement weather was the most notably brilliant achievement of the campaign." General
* General Forrest first attracted attention by his reconnaissance to Green River. Kentucky, at the outset of the war, the affair at Sacramento, and by his bravery and determination at, and his escape with his regiment from, Fort Donelson, whence he passed out between the enemy's right and the Tennessee River. His coolness and daring on the night of the 7th of April at Shiloh, and on the Sth while charging a strong reconnoitering party of the enemy, brought him conspicuously to the attention of General Beauregard, to whom he reported for duty at Tupelo, though still suffering from wounds received. On the 9th of June. 1862, he was ordered to take command of a brigade of cavalry already on service in Tennessee to assist General Kirby Smith in an offensive movement into Middle Tennessee from Chattanooga.
Judge Romain, in "Military Operations of General Beauregard," says: " For- rest hesitated at first, modestly alleging his inability to assume such responsibil- ity, but yielded finally, when again urged by General Beauregard, and after re- ceiving the promise that his old regiment should be sent to him as soon as it could be spared from the Army of Mississippi. Thus began the brilliant military career of this remarkable man. He was a born soldier, and had he received a military education would have ranked among the greatest commanders of the late war. Even as it is, he should perhaps be counted as one of the first."
General Richard Taylor, in his work "Destruction and Restoration," says of General Forrest that, "like Clive, nature made him a great soldier; and he was without the former's advantages. . . . He employed the tactics of Frederick at Leuthen and Zorndorf, though he never heard these names. Indeed, his tactics deserve the closest study of military men. Asked after the war to what he at- tributed his success in so many actions, he replied: 'Well, I got there first with the most men.' Jomini could not have stated the key to the art of war more concisely."
General Granville Dodge, a distinguished Federal commander, when asked what he thought of the Confederates and the way they were handled in the war, replied : .
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Forrest was recalled from a field he had not fully garnered by orders from General Bragg, who, still at Murfreesboro, was on the last day of the year, 1862, attacked by Rosecrans, when a battle resulted that continued until the evening of the 21 of Jan- uary, 1863, when the Confederates retired a few miles south of the battle-field, and took position on Duck River. This battle of three days resulted in a loss to the Confederates of ten thousand men killed, wounded, and missing, out of thirty-five thousand engaged, and of twenty-five thousand men to the Fed- erals, out of sixty-five thousand engaged-six thousand of them prisoners. It was a fierce and a bloody contest. the advantage be- ing with the Confederates at the close of the first day; but Rose- crans, having been heavily reenforced and greatly strengthened by the massing of his artillery, it was found impossible to dislodge him. and Bragg wisely retired-his men having been in line of battle for five days; and, with little food or rest, and without any shel- ter from a continuous cold rain, their endurance, pluck, and ralor being more severely tried than during any of the previous en- gagements. He fell back to Tullahoma, where he took position on the 4th of January, and there remained for some days. the cavalry under Forrest and Wheeler keeping the enemy actively on the defensive. About the middle of January, two weeks after the battle, General Wheeler, in command of the cavalry of the army, made an expedition to break up the enemy's communica- tion. After destroying several miles of railroad, be moved over to the Cumberland River, where he captured four loaded trans- ports, three of which were burned, the fourth being bonded and released to carry home four thousand paroled prisoners. He also captured a gun-boat, on which he crossed his men to the landing at Harpeth Shoals, where he destroyed an immense quantity of provisions in wagons ready for transportation to Nashville. Two weeks later, and early in the first week of Feb- . ruary, General Van Dorn, another enterprising cavalry officer
"They were some of the finest soldiers in the world, and they had commanders in many cases superior to ours. Forrest, for example, was one of the best cavalry commanders in history. I heard General Sherman say that if he could only match Forrest with a man of equal enterprise many of hi- difficulties wou! ! fale." General Forrest's achievements out-ide of Tennessee were of the same adven :- urous character. For the last two years of the war he was the sentinel an I sar- guard of North Mississippi and North Alabama, to the very last defeating every arny organized to capture or destroy his forces.
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and distinguished commander, made an expedition into Middle Tennessee with eight thousand hastily organized and poorly mounted and equipped cavalry, and occupied the neighborhood of Columbia, thus enabling General Bragg to feed his troops.
The Army of Tennessee remained at Tullahoma until April, and then fell back to Chattanooga, and eventually to Chicka- mauga. Before it had reached this latter place, the intrepid, daring, and enterprising General Forrest, who had recently joined the army from his very successful expedition to West Tennessee, was ordered to North Alabama to the relief of Gen- eral Roddy, who was very closely pressed by a heavy force of Federals under Colonel Streight, a dashing officer, who, after a series of encounters in which the losses on both sides were se- vere, surrendered a force three times that of Forrest, with a cor- responding quantity of small arms, horses, and equipments. Forrest returned from this duty to take part in the affairs cover- ing the retreat of the army to Chickamauga, where another battle was fought-a desperate and bloody contest-on the 19th and 20th of September: the Federals, under Rosecrans, numbering sixty- four thousand three hundred and ninety-two, and the Confeder- ates forty-seven thousand three hundred and twenty-one, the latter achieving a signal victory, which Bragg failed to take ad- vantage of and push, as he might have done, to the destruction of the enemy. The Federal losses were heavy, among them being eight thousand prisoners, fifty-one pieces of artillery, and fifteen thousand stand of small arms. Rosecrans, demoralized and carried away by the terrors of the occasion, telegraphed President Lincoln that he had been utterly routed, as he would have been but for the almost superhuman efforts of Thomas's division, which, fighting desperately, kept the Confederates em- ployed until darkness set in, and thus enabled the panic-stricken and straggling soldiery to get into Chattanooga, to which Bragg the next day laid siege, until the timely arrival of fresh troops under Sherman and Hooker compelled the raising of the siege, and the Army of Tennessee fell back and, took position on the heights overlooking the town. 1692126
After the fruitless victory at Chickamauga, and on the 15th of November, General Forrest -- who had retired disgusted with the commanding General's inability to take advantage of the demor- alized condition of the Federal army -under orders from Gen-
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eral Bragg, at President Davis's suggestion, was on his way with five hundred men for a second expedition into West Tennessee, which was as successful as the first. Entering that portion of the State at Saulsbury on the 4th of December with these five hundred men, two guns, and five ordnance-wagons, he left it at Lafayette Station on the 27th with three thousand five hundred well-mounted men, forty wagons and teams loaded with subsist- enc two hundred head of beef-cattle, three hundred hogs, and his artillery intact, losing only thirty men killed, wounded, and captured, and inflicting a loss upon the enemy of two hundred killed, wounded, and captured; and all this in the very teeth of the Twenty-fourth Army Corps of the Federal army, number- ing over ten thousand men, sent out specially to crush him. But the intelligence and energy of Forrest were equal to so great an emergency, and for a second time he recruited a car- alry division in West Tennessee, and armed and equipped it from the enemy's stores.
While General Forrest was preparing for this foray, General Grant, who, fresh from his great and crowning victory at Vicks- burg, Mississippi, had been ordered to the command, was con- solidating the Federal armies at Chattanooga, and an advance all along the line followed. On November 23d and the two fol- lowing days. the battles of Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge were fought, ending in a defeat of the Confederates and the loss of positions deemed by General Bragg himself impregna- ble. The army fell back to Dalton. Georgia, where, on the 18th of December, General Joseph E. Johnston was assigned to the command, General Bragg being relieved and ordered to service on the staff of the President.
During the time of the operations in front of and about Chat- tanooga, General Longstreet. detailed from Lee's army to strengthen Bragg, and who commanded the left wing on the bloody field of Chickamauga, was detached by Bragg to prevent the junction of Burnside's Federal corps. then in Knoxville, with the army under Rosecrans. He laid siege to that city, which was strongly fortified, but, after some very serious skir- mishing and several attacks, was compelled to raise the siege and retreat on the approach of an army under Sherman, who had been ordered on that service so soon as Bragg had retired from Chattanooga to the mountains. Longstreet effected a
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junction with Bragg, but afterward moved back to Virginia and joined Lee again. Under General Johnston the army was con- tinually employed in contesting the advance of the Federal army under Sherman, until Atlanta was occupied in July, 1864, fight- ing by the way the battles of Resaca ( May 14 and 15), New Hope Church (May 25 and 28), and Kennesaw Mountain (June 22 to July 3). Gererals Hardee and Stewart agree that the Army of Tennessee during these operations, although constantly under fire and retreating through what was believed to be the section of the Confederacy easiest of defense, attained its highest con- dition of efficiency. The morale of the troops was superb; and their trust and confidence in the General commanding-ex- pressed in the diminutive "Joe," by which he was affectionately known to them-were all that could be desired. His prudence and discretion in avoiding battles save on his own chosen ground and in his own good time, his care of his troops, his almost prov- idential outlook for them, were qualities that, most prominent in his management of a campaign full of instruction for future generations, did not obscure his alertness, his anticipation of the movements of an adroit, active, intelligent, and enterprising enemy, and his readiness to meet that enemy and deliver battle with courage and persistency. It was his intention, he says, after he had compelled Sherman to lengthen his lines from his base of supplies to the most dangerous limit, to attack him from behind the well-constructed fortifications around Atlanta, and make a desperate effort to annihilate or rout him. But the pec- ple and politicians became impatient of his plan, and the influ- ences for his removal from command, which had been growing every day as he fell back from point to point, prevailed with the President, who, as he himself says, yielding after he became satisfied, from answers by General Johnston to categorical ques- tions, that even Atlanta would not be held under certain contin- gencies, ordered him to turn over the command of the army to General Hood, then commanding one of the corps comprising it .* It was a momentous step to take in face of the enemy, and
* General Joseph E. Johnston ranked next to Lee in the estimation of the pen- pie and soldiers of the Confederate States, and by the troops he commanded was idolized. By the most accomplished of all the Federal commanders-General Sherman-he was held to be the ablest of the Southern commanders, the ablest General he had ever encountered, always confilent, alert, careful, and prudent.
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especially in view of the condition of the Confederacy-its almost exhaustion of men, money, and means-and the number of well- appointed armies the enemy had in the field threatening the few remaining strongholds of the Confederate Government. It was a step that cost the President, as he himself has told, a great deal of grave anxiety, and in making it he hastened to explain, in coun- cil with Hood and General Beauregard *-- then in command of the
War with General Johnston did not mean butchery or massacre or useless sacri- fice of life. He regarded the various arms of the service as so many parts of a great engine, each neeessary to perfect work and the best results. His resources and sources of supply were always in his mind as part of that care of his men es- sential in nursing and conserving the strength of his army. He was an accom- plished master of the art of war, and if left to himself would doubtless have closed his part of the great conflict-as elosed it must have been in any event- in a way less disastrous, overwhelming, and humiliating. As it was, he obtained at the surrender from General Sherman much better terms than Lee did from General Grant. It was his misfortune to serve a Government constantly oper- ated on from without, and harried by an impatient though exceedingly patri- otic public. This forced untimely interferences, and notably in the case of his removal at Atlanta to make way for the heroically rash General Hood-his an- tithesis in every respect. General Sherman paid General Johnston the highest tribute of praise one commander could offer another. In that long, tedious, and harassing campaign from Dalton to Altanta, Sherman never caught him off his guard. He was always ready, and made his dispositions as coolly and as promptly, and with as much intelligent care for victorious results, as if upon the chess- board he was moving knights, bishops, and castles. His removal from the com- mand of the Army of Tennessee was generally regarded as a great blow, and it was followed by a feeling of depression among the people that subsequent disas- trous events deepened. But it was as much due to that fickle and too elamor- ously hasty public as to the Government that in part justified a movement by that fickleness which by all the lights now before us stands condemned as a great blunder. It resulted in the utter disconfiture and dispersion of that army and the opening of a free way for Sherman to march through Georgia. It hastened by months -- perhaps a year-the final catastrophe, because it uncovered the naked- ness of the South, her poverty in men and means, and showed Grant the road to final victory. Criticisms of his course have been varied, but all agree upon the exalted patriotism of General Joseph E. Johnston, one of the first Generals of the civil war. * General Beauregard, who organized the Army of Mississippi-which event- ually became the Army of Tennessee -- was one of the most distinguished officers and commanders of the Confederate armies. As an engineer, he enjoyed in the Federal army before the civil war an enviable distinction as a scientific officer of rare accomplishments and the highest attainments. As the commander of armies he did not rank so high-not because he did not possess the abilities necessary, but that disease on several occasions interfered to prevent the gathering of the . full fruits of his opportunities. This wa, notably the case at Shiloh, and at the close of the war when he unselfishly volunteered to become second in commandi
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