Day 2 – Afternoon: If you’re me the goal of any trip to Chattanooga, Tennessee is to see the battlefields of Chattanooga as well as the field of Chickamauga nine miles away in northwest Georgia. I say that now like it’s no big thing but you have no idea how positively gob-smacked I was when, while rolling through the down of Rossville, I saw the sign welcoming me to Georgia. Wow, thought I, this is really a long trip.
I knew very little about the Battle of Chickamauga, interestingly there really isn’t that much to know. It was not a battle of grand strategy or brilliant tactical maneuvering. Rosecrans scared the Confederate Army of Tennessee out of Chattanooga, they fell back into northwest Georgia, gathered strength and prepared to fight. The Federal Army of the Cumberland went after them in pursuit of its next objective – presumably Atlanta – and when they found each other they fought like hell. It’s a strange battlefield and a strange battle. Fought through piney woods and occasional open fields it strikes me as the first of the 1864 battles: both sides just stood and slugged it out. No great flanking maneuvers, no grand charges, no tactical effort whatsoever, just a down and dirty slug fest in the Georgia pine barrens.
Such slug fests can be wearying and this one apparently wore Rosecrans down to the point where he pulled a whole division out of line at the precise moment Longstreet happened to send five divisions toward the new hole. End of Story.
For me, coming from Gettysburg – which battle was only two and a half months ago to the fellows at Chickamauga – it was very cool to see many of the outfits I recognized engaged in this fight and the one at Chattanooga. Longstreet’s First Corps moved down to Georgia in time for Chickamauga and delivered the coup de grace. Poor John Bell Hood took his second terrible wound in three months yet rose up to command the Army within a year. Later, at Chattanooga, I came across men from the Army of the Potomac who came all the way to Tennessee to fight the same outfits they had fought over the previous two years in Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania.
You begin to conceive the scope of the war as you travel through Tennessee and Georgia. Men transferred from other theatres to fight, little engagements on nearly every inch of territory in the states, bushwhacking, barn-burning and all the horrors of Civil War. It reminds me of the grounds of Carolinas campaign in the Revolution which I had just tramped two weekends before.
My general experience in this vacation as in all vacations is early mornings and late nights. I never managed to get settled into the hotel before 7 and rarely finished supper before 10. Hence, no blogging from the road and my poor attempts now to reconstruct everything I did over a very long three days.
This evening I spent my late hours riding through a tunnel under Missionary Ridge between my hotel and downtown Chattanooga and cruising the club district a bit. I ate some unexciting barbequeue, drank some Guinness and finally went to bed. Thank God.