Chattanooga Battle Quotes

[During this winter the citizens of Jo Davies County, Ill., subscribed for and had a diamond-hilled sword made for General Grant, which was always known as the Chattanooga sword. The scabbard was of gold, and was ornamented with a scroll running nearly its entire length, displaying in engraved letters the names of the battles in which General Grant had participated. Congress also gave him a vote of thanks for the victories at Chattanooga, and voted him a gold medal for Vicksburg and Chattanooga. All such things are now in the possession of the government at Washington.]

Ultimately, the South cannibalized turpentine and brandy stills, sending purchasing agents amid great secrecy to seize or buy those stills wherever they found them. “Thus,” Broun admitted, “all the caps issued from the arsenal … during the last twelve months of the war manufactured from the copper stills of North Carolina.

When the battle did not go according to his plan, Grant adapted and modified that plan. A stumble in one sector met with success elsewhere, and Grant capitalized upon that success. This flexibility should not be dismissed lightly. Far too many commanders, when confronted by an unexpected reverse, responded with passivity—Braxton Bragg, for example.

Chattanooga made Grant in a way that Vicksburg’s triumph had not. Within slightly more than a month of being given authority over the entire Western Theater, Grant erased the defeat of Chickamauga, saved the Army of the Cumberland, and routed Bragg.

If Rosecrans wanted to establish a line on this encircling high ground, he would need a large number of men to do so. Troops would have to man the entire length of Missionary Ridge at least as far as Rossville, more troops would be needed to hold the two miles of valley, and then additional forces at the foot, on the plateau, and on the top of Lookout. In all, this line would require about 100,000 men to properly man all the necessary defensive works. In the immediate aftermath of Chickamauga, however, Rosecrans had at most 30,000.

Thomas’s deployment on the morning of September 21 encompassed less than one-third of the overall length needed to secure all of Chattanooga’s approaches.

Union regiments counted officers as well as enlisted men as a matter of course, but Confederate formations often omitted their officers in their own accounting–

Dowd reached this line shortly after the combined 27th/24th line crumbled, and though Walthall had ordered him “to hold my post till Hell froze over,” to Dowd it now looked like “the ice was about five feet over it.

Though not widely understood at the time, this lack meant that the average soldier suffered from a deficiency of Vitamin A, which rendered men night-blind—a condition noted in some letters and diaries, though the writers had no explanation for the cause.

Breastworks, however rudely and hastily constructed, would be a feature of Union battle positions wherever possible from now on.39

the Federals who rallied atop Horseshoe Ridge did so of their own volition, and the initial gathering there had as much to do with individual tenacity and a stubborn unwillingness to admit defeat as it did with the presence of any general.

Unlike Gettysburg, Chickamauga does not contain imposing statues of Thomas, Longstreet, or any other general officer.

the men who rallied and initially held Horseshoe Ridge did so with little regard to tactical manuals. They simply refused to quit.

September 19 bears the hallmarks of a large-scale meeting engagement, albeit one seemingly conducted with most of the participants blindfolded.

Bragg was a good strategist, a competent planner, a solid logistician, and demonstrably capable of turning civilians into first-rate soldiers through training and discipline. He was also a failure as a leader, incapable of inspiring loyalty among his subordinates or forging disparate personalities into a functioning combat command. He could be remarkably inflexible on a field of battle.

For reasons that remain obscure, Ingraham’s body was never removed from the battlefield. After the war, the Reed family marked his grave with a proper headstone and encircled it with an iron fence.

The victory at Chattanooga was won against great odds, considering the advantage the enemy had of position, and was accomplished more easily than was expected by reason of Bragg’s making several grave mistakes: first, in sending away his ablest corps commander with over twenty thousand troops; second, in sending away a division of troops on the eve of battle; third, in placing so much of a force on the plain in front of his impregnable position.