Failure in the Saddle

Nathan Bedford Forrest, Joe Wheeler, and the Confederate Cavalry in the Chickamauga Campaign

David A. Powell

• Publisher: Savas Beatie
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781611210569
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

An award–winning, "deeply researched and thoroughly analyzed" account of the Confederate cavalry's mistakes that turned Chickamauga into a Pyrrhic victory (Eric J. Wittenberg, award-winning author of The Battle of Brandy Station ). Tales of the Confederate cavalry's raids and daring exploits create a whiff of lingering romance about the horse soldiers of the Lost Cause. Sometimes, however, romance obscures history. In August 1863 William Rosecrans' Union Army of the Cumberland embarked on a campaign of maneuver to turn Braxton Bragg's Army of Tennessee out of Chattanooga, one of the most important industrial and logistical centers of the Confederacy. Despite the presence of two Southern cavalry corps—nearly 14, 000 horsemen—under legendary commanders Nathan Bedford Forrest and Joe Wheeler, Union troops crossed the Tennessee River unopposed and unseen, slipped through the passes cutting across the knife-ridged mountains, moved into the narrow valleys, and turned Bragg's left flank. Threatened with the loss of the railroad that fed his army, Bragg had no choice but to retreat. He lost Chattanooga without a fight. After two more weeks of maneuvering, skirmishing, and botched attacks, Bragg struck back at Chickamauga, where he was once again surprised by the position of the Union army and the manner in which the fighting unfolded. Although the combat ended with a stunning Southern victory, Federal counterblows that November reversed all that had been so dearly purchased. David A. Powell's Failure in the Saddle is the first in-depth attempt to determine what role the Confederate cavalry played in both the loss of Chattanooga and the staggering number of miscues that followed up to, through, and beyond Chickamauga. Powell draws upon an array of primary accounts and his intimate knowledge of the battlefield to reach several startling conclusions: Bragg's experienced cavalry generals routinely fed him misleading information, failed to screen important passes and river crossings, allowed petty command politics to routinely influence their decision-making, and on more than one occasion disobeyed specific and repeated orders that may have changed the course of the campaign. Richly detailed, Failure in the Saddle offers new perspectives on the role of the Rebel horsemen in every combat large and small waged during this long and bloody campaign and, by default, a fresh assessment of the generalship of Braxton Bragg. This judiciously reasoned account includes a guided tour of the cavalry operations, several appendices of important information, and original cartography. Winner of the Civil War Round Table of Atlanta's Richard Harwell Award

Chapter 1

Turned out of Middle Tennessee: The Tullahoma Prelude

“I HAVE ARRIVED HERE and assumed command. My forces are on picket from this place to Chattanooga.”¹ With this communiqué from Kingston Tennessee on July 30, 1863, Brig. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest informed Maj. Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner that his cavalry division had completed its retreat from Middle Tennessee and had assumed responsibility for patrolling the south bank of the Tennessee River between Kingston and the mouth of the Hiwassee River. It also marked an official end to one campaign and, after a short pause, the beginning of another.

The campaign just ended was Tullahoma. Five weeks earlier, Gen. Braxton Bragg’s Confederate Army of Tennessee was camped 100 miles closer to Nashville at the southern edge of the Highland Rim, the geographical divide surrounding the Tennessee capital. Major General William S. Rosecrans’ Union Army of the Cumberland opposed Bragg from its camps around Murfreesboro. Both armies had gone into winter quarters there after the savage late December 1862 and early January 1863 fighting at Stones River just outside Murfreesboro. Both sides had spent the following six months training and drilling, and resupplying. Although his superiors wanted him to act, Rosecrans had reasons for patience—foremost among them his need to stockpile supplies. Moving southeast from Nashville against Bragg meant crossing land known as “the Barrens.” Forage there was scarce. Rosecrans also needed to enhance his cavalry strength. And so the months slipped past.

This lull ended at the end of June 1863, when Rosecrans launched a flanking movement designed to cut off Bragg’s Confederates from their rail supply line leading back to Chattanooga. Rosecrans set out with a battle in mind because he believed that any large-scale combat would be waged on his terms. If his flanking operation was successful, Rosecrans would have the initiative and Bragg would be out of position. In addition, the Union army significantly outnumbered its Confederate opponent.²

While the Tullahoma operation did not turn out to be the Army of Tennessee’s final stand—though only by a narrow margin—Rosecrans’ effort to deceive Bragg worked brilliantly. He feinted with his own cavalry and two infantry divisions against the Confederate left near Triune in order to convince Bragg that the threat would come from this direction, while the bulk of the Federal infantry (nearly 40,000 men) moved against the Rebel right. The feint fooled Maj. Gen. Joseph Wheeler, the leader of Bragg’s cavalry. Wheeler’s command was already in the process of transferring from the Rebel army’s right flank, riding west from Manchester and McMinnville to Shelbyville in response to an order from Bragg to concentrate for the coming campaign. Bragg intended that Wheeler, together with Brig. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s cavalry division, already in place on Bragg’s left, either oppose the expected Union advance (the feint) or launch a raid against Rosecrans’ long line of communications that stretched back into Kentucky. Thus, when the Federal feint got underway, Wheeler was riding west to join Forrest at Spring Hill, where he would assume command of the united force and await Bragg’s next set of instructions.

Knowing that Wheeler’s departure would leave his own right flank denuded of mounted troops, Bragg intended to move Brig. Gen. John Hunt Morgan’s cavalry division from Sparta to McMinnville. Wheeler left behind a small cavalry force to screen Bragg’s right until Morgan arrived. Morgan, however, had other plans.³

An inveterate risk-taker, for some time Morgan had envisioned a daring raid across the Ohio River onto Union soil. In Virginia early that June, Gen. Robert E. Lee began moving his Confederate Army of Northern Virginia north with the intention of clearing Federal troops from the Shenandoah Valley in preparation for a thrust into Maryland and beyond. Swept up in his own enthusiasm, Morgan told his subordinates—but somehow failed to inform Bragg—that perhaps they could meet Lee or remain in Illinois or Indiana for an extended period of time. The idea was entirely unfeasible, but Morgan could not be dissuaded from undertaking the raid.

Knowing he could not gain approval for such an impractical and dangerous operation, Morgan deliberately deceived his superiors by scaling back his ambitions. He asked Wheeler instead for permission to take a smaller force north and attack Louisville. On June 14, Wheeler pitched the idea to Bragg. This less ambitious plan appealed to both men because both wanted to strike at Rosecrans’ lengthy supply lines stretching between Louisville and Nashville. Bragg approved a raiding force of one brigade, or about 1,500 men. Morgan wheedled Wheeler into upping that number to 2,000 troopers, all the while knowing he had no intention of moving with anything less than his entire command. On June 20, his duplicitous approval in hand, Morgan crossed the Cumberland River with three brigades of cavalry, about 2,500 men. His move carried the gray troopers into Kentucky—and out of the rest of the campaign.⁴

Rosecrans’ movement began in the midst of all this shuffling of Rebel mounted troops. Wheeler reported to Bragg that the Triune movement was the primary Union advance. At the same time, a lack of cavalry on the Rebel right flank meant the Confederates failed to notice Rosecrans’ main effort at all. Wheeler’s men were rding hard to finish their redeployment to Shelbyville when the first Union troops appeared near Manchester and seized the gaps through the Highland Rim. When Union infantry in strength appeared seemingly out of nowhere at Liberty and Hoover’s gaps, the terrible truth of what was unfolding struck Bragg. Rosecrans was turning his right flank, and the unexpected move threatened to envelop and destroy his badly outnumbered army. Bragg had no choice but to order a rapid retreat.

Federal and Confederate cavalry collided at Shelbyville on June 27 in a fight that rang an ominous note for future Confederate cavalry operations. Shelbyville, an important depot for Bragg’s army, was being evacuated and wagon trains were rolling south across the Duck River as fast as they could. To protect them, Wheeler’s troopers deployed behind breastworks north of town, where they hoped to delay the enemy advance. Forrest’s division was still riding toward town when the first Union cavalry arrived at Shelbyville. The fight that followed, spearheaded by Col. Robert H. G. Minty’s Federal brigade, was not one the Rebels would celebrate around campfires or in song. Minty’s troopers overran Wheeler’s breastworks and thundered into the village, where a desperate street fight ensued. Wheeler had no choice but to hold on for as long as possible to make sure Forrest was not cut off and trapped north of the rain-swollen river. At one point Wheeler was forced across the river to the south bank, but when he heard from one of Forrest’s staff officers that the column was approaching Shelbyville, Wheeler called for volunteers and charged his way back across the bridge in a desperate effort to keep the route open for Forrest’s men.⁵ The two columns, however, never linked up. Instead, Forrest’s troopers found a crossing several miles outside of town and made their way successfully to the far side of the river. Forrest, however, neglected to send a messenger to inform Wheeler of his change in plans.⁶ Wheeler’s men were overwhelmed, several hundred were taken prisoner, and many barely escaped with their lives when they were forced to swim across the Duck. Shelbyville was a stunning triumph for the well-handled Union horsemen. Wheeler’s Rebel cavalry were routed and large amounts of supplies captured. The battle was similar in one important respect to the larger and bloodier June 9 cavalry battle at Brandy Station, Virginia, where Jeb Stuart was surprised and nearly routed by Alfred Pleasonton’s command. Both signified that the Union mounted arm was emerging as a powerful combat force.⁷ “Altogether it was the greatest cavalry disaster of the war,” concluded a Rebel officer caught up in the whole mess, “and I can attribute it to nothing but bad management. Gen. Wheeler was not himself at all.”⁸

By the beginning of July, the Southern army was concentrated at Tullahoma, where some months before Bragg had prepared entrenchments in anticipation of just this kind of fight. What Bragg could never have planned for was the need to send significant numbers of men to Mississippi, where Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s army had trapped the Confederates inside the city of Vicksburg. Once those troops were siphoned away, he was too shorthanded to stand and wage a pitched battle against the Army of the Cumberland. After a day’s deliberation, Bragg abandoned Tullahoma and fled to Chattanooga where, with the Tennessee River acting as a barrier, Bragg hoped to recover his equilibrium. Rosecrans pursued the withdrawing Army of Tennessee, but heavy rains and the need to use secondary roads to bypass and outrun the retreating Confederate columns prevented him from catching Bragg. Despite Bragg’s ultimate escape, Rosecrans’ Tullahoma Campaign was a very important—and largely overlooked—success. The well-planned and executed operation cleared a large swath of Tennessee from Confederate control at minimal cost. The unexpected abandonment of so much acreage demoralized both those soldiers who served inside the Army of Tennessee and the Southern civilian population living in the abandoned region. The fact that the news came quickly on the heels of the twin Confederate defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg only added to the growing despair.

Arguably, Bragg’s failure to divine Rosecrans’ intentions immediately was an ironic stroke of good fortune. Had Wheeler figured out early what the enemy intended, Bragg may have stood and fought his heavily outnumbered and off-balance Army of Tennessee with a pair of rain-swollen rivers (the Duck and Elk) behind him. The failure of Rebel cavalry to provide Bragg with the intelligence he needed made his retreat and strategic defeat all but certain. Some reasons for the deficiency in Bragg’s mounted arm are obvious, but others are more obscure and worth exploring.

Cavalry was a Civil War-era army’s primary source for the gathering of intelligence, especially day-by-day tactical movements. Its many tasks included the screening of friendly forces, the shadowing of the enemy, and the transmission of timely and accurate reports. An effective screen kept friendly movements hidden, while the penetration of an opposing screen revealed enemy movements and plans. In this game of cut and thrust, the army with the fewest effective mounted troops usually operated at a disadvantage.

Keenly aware of the importance of cavalry to his Tullahoma plans, Rosecrans made strenuous efforts to increase both its effectiveness and the raw numbers of his mounted arm. During the six long months between the fighting at Stone’s River and his advance on Tullahoma, Rosecrans bombarded his superiors in Washington with requests for more horses, more cavalry regiments, and better weapons. Despite pressing needs on every front, the War Department sent him several thousand horses. When those animals did not prove sufficient for his needs, Rosecrans authorized several infantry regiments to press local animals into service, and then converted them into mounted infantry. Colonel John T. Wilder’s brigade of five regiments was the principal beneficiary of these round-ups. By June, 2,500 mounted infantry were added to Rosecrans’ horse cavalry strength. The firepower of the Federal cavalry was also significantly increased when the War Department sent Rosecrans several thousand Colt revolving rifles and breech loading carbines. Despising bureaucratic red tape, Wilder and his men arranged privately for the purchase of nearly 2,000 seven-shot, breech loading Spencer repeating rifles, which gave the brigade enough firepower to take on an enemy division.⁹ These significant improvements gave Rosecrans a sense of at least mounted parity with the Southern horsemen.

Bragg was at a considerable disadvantage in overall numbers, but he possessed a much larger contingent of mounted men than did Rosecrans. In May 1863, Bragg fielded some 17,000 horsemen in five divisions—half again as many as his opponent. By the end of June, transfers to Mississippi and Morgan’s raid into Ohio had diminished Bragg’s cavalry arm by 5,000 men. Still, the 12,000 troopers remaining left him on par with Federal mounted strength.¹⁰ The Rebels could not match the Federals weapon for weapon, of course. Most of Bragg’s troopers still carried muzzle-loading long-arms, at best an infantry weapon, and perhaps one-quarter of those were antiquated smoothbore muskets.¹¹ Scouting and screening, however, involved less stand-up combat than a pitched battle, minimizing this deficiency.

For the approaching campaign around Chattanooga, however, the Rebel cavalry was reinforced by another 5,000 men from East Tennessee. This new force largely offset both the earlier detachments and the losses suffered during Tullahoma, returning Bragg’s mounted strength to about 16,000 men. His troopers were led by cavalry generals of large reputation, including Joseph Wheeler and Nathan Bedford Forrest. How these leaders would do with the material at hand was yet to be determined.

Chapter 2

Army of Tennessee: The Cavalry

By the mid-summer of 1863, Braxton Bragg’s cavalry strength was imposing—at least on paper. Despite the loss of two divisions to other missions, on June 10 the Army of Tennessee’s mounted arm numbered 13,868 officers and men present for duty.¹ Another 500 troopers were acting as escorts for the various corps and army headquarters. Unfortunately, Confederate cavalry commanders maintained less than accurate records. This fact irritated Bragg’s chief of staff W. W. Mackall, who rarely missed an opportunity to remind his boss.² Even allowing for sloppy record keeping, Bragg had at least 12,000 troopers present in the ranks.³

Unlike the Federals, Bragg’s large mounted arm was not organized as one unified cohesive command. Prior to the summer detachments, the Southern army functioned with a pair of cavalry corps under Maj. Gens. Joseph Wheeler and Earl Van Dorn. Each officer was tasked with watching one of the army’s flanks.

The first of these officers, Joe Wheeler, had been serving as General Bragg’s chief of cavalry since July 1862. The native Georgian was a bantam of a man. In fact, he barely met the West Point height requirement when he was appointed to the academy in 1854. At just 26, he was also young. Although Wheeler was born on September 10, 1836, outside Augusta, he spent most of his youth far to the north in Connecticut and New York and secured his academy appointment from the latter state. After he graduated near the bottom of his 1859 class—nineteenth out of twenty-two—Wheeler was commissioned a brevet 2nd lieutenant in the 1st United States Dragoons and assumed his first duty post at Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania. In 1860, Wheeler transferred to the Regiment of Mounted Rifles and headed west to the New Mexico Territory and Fort Craig, where he was promoted to 1st lieutenant that September. “Fighting Joe” was forever affixed to the young soldier during a skirmish with Indians.⁴

Despite his years spent above the Mason Dixon Line, Wheeler considered himself a Southerner. After his home state left the Union, the Georgian submitted his resignation and accepted a commission in March 1861 as a lieutenant with a Georgia artillery unit. Fort Sumter fell the next month, and a week later Wheeler was dispatched to Pensacola, Florida, where his initial service under Braxton Bragg began. Wheeler began his Confederate career as colonel of the 19th Alabama Infantry that September, moving north to Huntsville, Alabama, and then south again to Mobile, where his regiment was assigned to Brig. Gen. Jones Withers’ command. Events ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction and Acknowledgments
• Dramatis Personae
• Chapter 1 Turned out of Middle Tennessee: The Tullahoma Prelude
• Chapter 2 Army of Tennessee: The Cavalry
• Chapter 3 Chattanooga: Union Intentions
• Chapter 4 Crossing the Tennessee: August 22 to September 6, 1863
• Chapter 5 The Right Flank: Evacuation of Chattanooga and Retreat to Lafayette (September 6-13, 1863)
• Chapter 6 The Left Flank: Bragg Resumes the Offensive (September 6-15, 1863)
• Chapter 7 Rosecrans Retreats, Bragg Pursues (September 13-15, 1863)
• Chapter 8 Bragg’s Fitful Advance to Battle (September 16-18, 1863)
• Chapter 9 The Fight at Reed’s Bridge (September 18, 1863)
• Chapter 10 The Fight at Alexander’s Bridge (September 18, 1863)
• Chapter 11 The Night of the Missing Southern Cavalry (Evening, September 18, 1863)
• Chapter 12 Forrest Finds a Fight: Day One at Chickamauga (September 19, 1863)
• Chapter 13 Wheeler vs. Crook: The Cavalry Fight at Crawfish Springs (September 20, 1863)
• Chapter 14 The Confederate Pursuit (September 21-25, 1863)
• Chapter 15 Failure in the Saddle: An Appraisal of the Confederate Cavalry
• Epilogue In the Eyes of History: Historians Evaluate the Campaign
• Appenidx 1 Confederate Cavalry Strength and Losses
• Appendix 2 The Chickamauga Campaign: A Cavalry Driving Tour
• Appendix 3 Colonel Alfred Roman’s Inspection Report of Joe Wheeler’s Cavalry Corps
• Appendix 4 Reassessing the Forrest–Bragg Confrontation
• Appendix 5 An Interview with Author David Powell
• Bibliography
• About the Author
• Footnotes