Rosecrans found occasion after the battle to congratulate his army on their retention of Chattanooga. He said, "You have accomplished the great work of the campaign; you hold the key of East Tennessee, of Northern Georgia, and of the enemy's mines of coal and nitre." He claimed that he held in his hands the substantial fruits of victory, and sought to persuade his government that the battle of Chickamauga was merely an incident to the concentration of his forces and his cover of Chattanooga. He lost no time in reorganizing his army at Chattanooga. He assumed a fortified line about a mile and a half in length, covering the pontoons, stores and hospitals, and commanding all the south east and eastern approaches to the place, leaving Bragg no chance to dislodge him by direct attack, only by long and toilsome maneuvers and marches threatening his communications. Bragg's awkward pause before Chattanooga was the occasion of new propositions of the campaign on our side. Of one of these General Bragg communicated as follows to the War Department at Richmond. "The suggestion of a movement by our right immediately after the battle, to the north of the Tennessee, and thence upon Nashville, requires notice only because it will find a place in the files of the Department. Such a movement was utterly impossible for want of transportation. Nearly half our army consisted of reinforcements just before the battle, without a wagon or an artillery horse, and nearly, if not quite, a third of the artillery horses on the field had been lost. The railroad bridges too had been destroyed to a point south of Ringgold, and on all the roads from Cleveland to Knoxville. To these insurmountable difficulties were added the entire absence of means to cross the river, except by fording at a few precarious points too deep for artillery, and the well known danger of sudden rises by which all communication would be cut, a contingency which did actually happen a few days after the visionary scheme was proposed. But the most serious objection to the proposition was its entire want of military propriety. It abandoned to the enemy our entire line of communication, and laid open to him our depots of supplies, while it placed us with a greatly inferior force beyond a difficult, and at times impassable river, in a country affording no subsist ence to men or animals. It also left open to the enemy, at a distance of only ten miles, our battle-field, with thousands of our wounded, and his own, and all the trophies and supplies we had won. All this was to be risked and given up, for what? to gain the enemy's rear and cut him off from his depot of supplies, by the route over the mountains, when the very movement abandoned to his unmolested use the better and more practicable route half the length, on the south side of the river. "It is hardly necessary to say the proposition was not even entertained, whatever may have been the inferences drawn from subsequent movements." The plan preferred by General Bragg was to invest Chattanooga, and starve the enemy out. Rosecrans' shortest and most important road to his depot at Bridgeport lay along the south bank of the Tennessee; and, as Bragg held this, the enemy was forced to a road double the length, over two ranges of mountains, by wagon transportation, upon which long and difficult route our cavalry might operate with advantage. Looking to a speedy evacuation of Chattanooga, for want of wood and forage, General Bragg declared that he "held the enemy at his mercy, and that his destruction was only a question of time." Alas, we shall see hereafter how vain were the sanguine expectations and the swollen boast of this ill-starred and unfortunate commander! General Bragg has burdened the story of Chickamauga with recriminations of his officers: a resource to which he showed, on all occasions, a characteristic and ungenerous tendency. His course, in this respect, invites and justifies severe criticism of himself. Whatever may have been the faults of his subordinate officers in the action of Chickamauga, it is certain that the military opinion of the Confederacy indicated two important errors of his own in the conduct of this famous battle. 1. That he failed to cut off the enemy's exit to Chattanooga, which it is considered he might have done, if he had marched his army by the right flank, and crossed lower down on the Chickamauga; at such point throwing his army across the creek and valley, forming it at right angles to the Lafayette and Chattanooga road, and so covering the exit from the valley in the direction of Chattanooga. As it was, he crossed his army north of Lee and Gordon's Mills, ordered a demonstration there, which might have been well used as a cover for the proper movement, and utterly failed, as his critics say, to grasp the situation. 2. That he failed to pursue a routed and disorganized enemy, threw away the opportunity of completing his victory, realized no substantial fruit from it, and, after one of the most splendid successes in the record of Confederate arms, left his enemy in statu quo, reorganizing at leisure. In this latter respect, Chickamauga must indeed be confessed to be a second and enlarged edition of the famous Bull Run. It will stand conspicuous among the various fruitless victories gained by the Confederates-among the least pardonable blunders and shortcomings of history.* * We may place here, in conjunction with Chickamauga, some interesting passages from a private letter of a distinguished general officer in the West, reviewing the campaign there, and criticising with great intelligence, the general military policy of the Confederacy: . . It would be a laborious task to review the campaigns even of the Army of Tennessee. Yet what profound lessons do they teach? What errors have been committed? What opportunities have been lost? The man who does not see these, and who has not learned from them powerful lessons for the future, is totally unfit for any responsible military position in the pregnant future, on which the destiny of untold millions now trembles. We lost Donelson, and as a consequence Middle Tennessee, from the want of rapid combination and concentration. We lost Shiloh first by delay, then by want of persistence in the first day's fight, then for the want of the proper distribution of troops at the close of that day. We threw away the golden moments at Mumfordsville, in Kentucky, and further neglected to make security doubly sure by concentrating the two armies, Smith's and Bragg's; and yet again these two armies, for the want of proper generalship and energy together, precipitately and ingloriously abandoned the broad territory between the Ohio and the Cumberland rivers. It is remarkable, that this campaign in Kentucky presented more glorious opportunities for great results, than any other in this, or, perhaps, any other war, and all was lost for the want of the simplest combinations. Again, Nashville, garrisoned by a few thousand Federals, was not taken, simply because the attack was prohibited. God knows how often this city might have been taken before the battle of Murfreesboro', while the two armies were lying idle or being slowly moved, without any decided plan or purpose. How often before and subsequent to the battle of Murfreesboro', did the dispersed condition of the Yankee forces offer the opportunity for a good general to make a vigorous and rapid movement, such as would have destroyed its fragments in detail? Murfreesboro' was lost by want, first, of proper combination on the field, and then by want of persistence in the fight, especially on the left. In six weeks after the battle of Murfreesboro', our army in Tennessee |