The Rock of Chickamauga

There, in January 1862, he sent a bulletin of encouragement to a Union hungry for good news. After an 18-day march on muddy roads, his division confronted Rebels at Mill Springs, Kentucky. Amid cold rain and gun smoke, he led his outnumbered troops in repulsing Confederates under Maj. Gen. George Crittenden and then drove them across the Cumberland River. Though not a massive victory, it was the first notable Northern success of the war, turning back a Confederate move from eastern Tennessee into Kentucky. Thomas was promoted to major general, an advancement that would soon create friction with his old roommate "Cump" Sherman and Grant, who had become so close that an affront to either was resented by both.

After winning praise for capturing Forts Henry and Donelson in western Tennessee, Grant had fallen out of favor for mismanaging and very nearly losing the bloody Battle of Shiloh. He was criticized for taking 13,000 casualties and was suspected of drinking on the job. Sherman, whose excitability and wild overestimates of Rebel strength had caused some to question his sanity, had fought bravely after an initial mistake at Shiloh. When Union forces moved south toward Corinth, Mississippi, that spring, Union general Henry Halleck shunted Grant into a figurehead role and gave Thomas temporary command of the wing that included Grant's Army of the Tennessee. Grant, angered, was talked out of quitting by Sherman. Grant would not forget the incident.

Grant and Sherman would redeem themselves by grasping control of the Mississippi River in the costly, circuitous campaign that resulted in the capture of Vicksburg in mid-1863. While they were operating on the Mississippi, Thomas led a corps in Rosecrans' Army of the Cumberland, earning respect in fights like that at Stones River, where he declared, "This army does not retreat," and backed up his words with actions on the field. There and at Tullahoma, Rosecrans' force pressed the Confederates back into eastern Tennessee.

As Thomas rose, he proved to his men that his addiction to detail and his insistence on preparation saved lives and won battles. His generalship behind the front, before the battle, was generations ahead of his peers. He organized a professional headquarters that made other generals' staff work seem haphazard. His mess and hospital services, his maps and his scouting network were all models of efficiency; he was never surprised as Grant had been at Shiloh. He anticipated modern warfare with his emphasis on logistics, rapidly repairing his railroad supply lines and teaching his soldiers that a battle could turn on the broken linchpin of a cannon. He demanded by-the-book discipline, but taught it by example. He made no ringing pronouncements to the press. His troops came to understand his fatherly concern for their welfare, and when they met the enemy they had faith in his orders.

In late summer, Rosecrans moved against the Rebel stronghold of Chattanooga, a crucial gateway between the eastern and western theaters of war. Confederate general Bragg pulled out of the town onto the dominating nearby mountains, waiting for Maj. Gen. James Longstreet to bring reinforcements from Virginia. When they came, Bragg threw everything into an assault on Union lines along Chickamauga Creek, just inside Georgia. Thomas' corps was dug in on the Union left. On the second day of furious fighting, a misunderstood order opened a wide gap on his right. Longstreet's Rebels crashed through; with the always aggressive John Bell Hood's division leading, they bent the Union line into a horseshoe.

Rosecrans, certain the battle was lost, retreated into Chattanooga with five other generals and thousands of blue-uniformed soldiers. But Thomas inspired his men to stand fast, and only their determined resistance saved his army from destruction. They held all that afternoon against repeated Confederate assaults, withdrawing into Chattanooga after nightfall. It was the greatest of all battles in the West, and since that day, Thomas has been known to history as the Rock of Chickamauga.

For their actions, Rosecrans was fired and Thomas took command of the Army of the Cumberland. But the Union situation remained dire. Bragg, still holding those formidable mountains, laid siege to Chattanooga. Grant, commanding Union armies between the Mississippi and the mountains, ordered Thomas to hold the city "at all costs," and rushed troops east to help.

"I will hold the town till we starve," Thomas replied, and they almost did starve. Cut off from supplies, his army was living on half rations. Thousands of horses and mules died. Weeks passed before Grant assembled strength sufficient to lift the siege. The key terrain was towering Missionary Ridge. Grant ordered Sherman to drive onto the ridge from the left and Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker from the right, with Thomas aimed at the center. Sherman tried and failed to carry his end, but Hooker's troops took Lookout Mountain on the far flank. Thomas waited for Grant's order to advance. When it came, Thomas took his time studying the crest with his binoculars, then sent his troops ahead with orders to occupy only the first line of the Confederate works. They did so in fine style—and then, seeing that they were exposed to fire from above, kept going. Thomas was surprised and Grant angry, demanding "Who ordered those men up the hill?" No one had. The troops plunged ahead, pressing on against heavy fire, struggling up the steep slope and jubilantly planting their flag on the heights for all to see.

Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana, an eyewitness, called the assault "one of the greatest miracles in military history....as awful as a visible interposition of God." Thomas, moved by the sight, ordered that a cemetery be created for his soldiers on a beautiful slope of the battlefield. When a chaplain asked if the dead should be separated by state, Thomas did not hesitate. "No, no," he said. "Mix them up. Mix them up. I'm tired of states' rights." Once he had made up his mind to stay with the old flag, he never expressed misgivings; if he had them, they had long been erased by seeing so many men die to preserve the Union.

By late 1883, U.S. Colored Troops were filling some of the gaps opened in Federal forces by battle and disease. Although Sherman had resisted using black soldiers, Thomas gladly accepted them. In the drastic move from serfdom to freedom, he wrote, it was probably better for ex-slaves to be soldiers, and thus gradually learn to support themselves, than "to be thrown upon the cold charities of the world without sympathy or assistance."

As the Federals gathered strength to thrust into Georgia, this was not the only disagreement between the tightly strung Ohioan and the calm Virginian. In early March, Lincoln called Grant east to become general in chief of all Northern armies. No one was surprised that Grant's friend Sherman, rather than Thomas, replaced him as commander in the West, even though as a major general Thomas was senior to Sherman. Ex-colonel Donn Piatt, a 19th-century booster and biographer of Thomas, called it "the nakedest favoritism that ever disgraced a service."

At the start of his 1864 drive toward Atlanta, Sherman rejected Thomas' plan to take his command through Snake Creek Gap to cut off and smash Joseph Johnston's Confederate army. More than a month into Georgia, an impatient Sherman complained to Grant that Thomas' Army of the Cumberland was slowing his advance—"a fresh furrow in a plowed field will stop the whole column." He was still in this mood a few days later when he ignored Thomas' advice against attacking the strongly entrenched Rebels head-on at Kennesaw Mountain. The Federals lost more than 2,000 troops in trying to take what Thomas had warned was an impregnable position.

Thomas commanded about two-thirds of Sherman's infantry; his army was the center force, the sledgehammer in the four-month campaign, and led the way into Atlanta. But neither Sherman, Grant, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton nor Lincoln cited Thomas in their congratulations. As in the 1864 Virginia campaign, where all the official praise and headlines went to Grant, in Georgia it was all Sherman. In his special order announcing the victory, Sherman credited Maj. Gen. Henry W. Slocum's corps with entering the city first—although Slocum was under Thomas' command and had headed the corps for only six days.

When Atlanta's mayor protested Sherman's harsh military rule, the general replied, "War is cruelty and you cannot refine it...those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out....You might as well appeal against the thunderstorm." Then he set out on his storied march to infamy and greatness, pillaging the countryside as he cut a great swath through the Confederacy.

Thomas took a different view. Stern though he was in combat, he posted a guard at the house of a citizen suspected of disloyalty because, he said, "We must remember that this is a civil war, fought to preserve the Union that is based on brotherly love and patriotic belief in the one nation....The thing becomes horribly grotesque...when we visit on helpless old men, women, and children the horrors of a barbarous war. We must be as considerate and kind as possible, or we will find that in destroying the rebels we have destroyed the Union."

Opposite in personality, tactics and philosophy, Thomas and Sherman were thereafter gratefully separated in geography as well. While Grant grappled with Lee in Virginia and Sherman gutted the eastern Confederacy, Thomas was sent back to Tennessee to reorganize the stripped-down Army of the Cumberland and deal with Hood. The Confederate general had got away from Atlanta with some 40,000 troops and evaded Sherman's effort to catch him. Now he was marching north through Tennessee. Thomas' Federals under John Schofield slowed and badly damaged the Rebels in the fierce battle of Franklin, but by December Hood was dug in on the high ground facing Nashville. Thomas fortified the city while he gathered strength for a decisive blow, but to carry it out he needed more men, horses and supplies.

Grant, 500 miles away, grew impatient. He sent telegrams urging Thomas to move, then ordered him to "attack at once." Thomas said after the war that he was tempted—"grossly improper as it would have been"—to ask why Grant himself, who was entrenched around Petersburg, was not fighting. Defeat at Nashville "would have been a greater calamity than any which had befallen the Federal forces," he said. "It would have cleared the way for the triumphant march of Hood's army through Kentucky, and a successful invasion of Indiana and Illinois, in which there were no Federal troops. It was therefore of the last importance that the battle upon which so much depended should not be fought until I was ready for it." Thomas continued planning, training, stocking—equipping his horsemen with the new breech-loading Spencer carbines.

Then, just when he was ready, a sleet storm froze both armies in place for days. Grant, furious that Thomas had failed to engage the enemy, decided to relieve him from command, first with one general, then another. Finally he started to go west to fire him in person. But before he left Washington, the ice melted in middle Tennessee.

On December 15, Thomas, unaware that Grant intended to fire him, roared out of his works against Hood. In two days his troops crushed the Rebel army. His infantry, including two brigades of U.S. Colored Troops, smashed into Hood's troops while the Union cavalry, dismounted with its fast-firing Spencers, curled around and behind the Rebel left. Almost a century later, historian Bruce Catton summed up the battle in two words: "Everything worked."

Thomas "comes down in history...as the great defensive fighter, the man who could never be driven away but who was not much on the offensive. That may be a correct appraisal," wrote Catton, an admirer and biographer of Grant. "Yet it may also be worth making note that just twice in all the war was a major Confederate army driven away from a prepared position in complete rout—at Chattanooga and at Nashville. Each time the blow that finally routed it was launched by Thomas."

Nashville was the only engagement in which one army virtually annihilated another. Thomas B. Buell, a student of Civil War generalship, wrote that in Tennessee, Thomas performed the war's "unsurpassed masterpiece of theater command and control....So modern in concept, so sweeping in scope, it would become a model for strategic maneuver in 20th-century warfare." After it, there was no more large-scale fighting west of the Blue Ridge.

When the bloodshed was over at last, after Lincoln was assassinated and the nation was recovering from the shock, 150,000 soldiers of all the Union armies converged on Washington for the most memorable victory parade in the nation's history. All of them, that is, except the Army of the Cumberland. When Sherman proudly passed in review before Grant, President Andrew Johnson and multitudes of cheering onlookers, Thomas had already said goodbye to his few remaining troops. Back in Nashville, in a message that his innate reserve did not let him utter in person, he described his thoughts as he watched their last parade:




"The coldest heart must have warmed" at seeing the men who had endured "this great, modern tragedy," he wrote—men "who had stemmed with unyielding breasts the rebel tide threatening to engulph the landmarks of freedom, and who, bearing on their bronzed and furrowed brows the ennobling marks of the years of hardship, suffering and privation, undergone in defense of freedom and the integrity of the Union, could still preserve the light step and wear the cheerful expressions of youth."