Defeat in Victory at Chickamauga On Sept, 11, 1863, the Confederates lost a crucial opportunity to destroy Brig. Gen. James Negley's exposed division at Dug Gap, south of Chattanooga, Tenn. Negley's division was part of William Rosecrans's Army of the Cumberland, which was on a relentless campaign to push the rebels out of Tennessee. Even though Negley's men somehow survived destruction, Rosecrans was shaken. The Confederates, having recently abandoned Chattanooga, had looked to be on the run. Now they had turned and fought, and almost won. Rosecrans realized that his grand pursuit had gone tragically awry - his forces were divided into three widely separate corps, and if he failed to unite them rapidly, he might well find himself the pursued. Rosecrans" subsequent orders took on a ring of desperation. 12 he called his Reserve Corps up from Bridgeport, Ala., with a plea to Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger: "The enemy has concentrated in the vicinity of La Fayette [Georgia]. We are concentrating the army to...fight a general battle. Come immediately... If all reports are true, we have not a moment to lose. Rosecrans had more time than he imagined. The inexcusable failure of the generals under his opponent, Gen. Braxton Bragg, to follow orders at Dug Gap paralyzed the Confederate leader, handing Rosecrans four precious days to assemble his army. Not until Sept. 15 did Bragg shed his lethargy. Perhaps the prospect of imminent reinforcements overcame his disappointment and fatigue - after much debate, the Confederate high command had agreed to an interdepartmental troop transfer to enable Bragg to achieve numerical superiority over Rosecrans. Two divisions from the Army of Northern Virginia under Lt. Gen. James Longstreet and one division from Mississippi were on their way to join the Army of Tennessee; their arrival would boost Bragg's command to 68,000 men. Rosecrans had 63,000 troops in the Army of the Cumberland - the only time during the war that the Confederacy faced a major battle with a numerical edge over the Federals. Finally Bragg announced his intention to resume the offensive. He contemplated a rapid march north and then west to interpose the Army of Tennessee between Chattanooga and the federals. Thus outflanked, Rosecrans would be forced either to fight to regain the city or to fall back across the Tennessee River to preserve his supply line. But to cut Rosecrans off from Chattanooga, Bragg would have to cross West Chickamauga Creek quickly enough to close at least one of the two roads between the creek and Missionary Ridge, which ran south of the city. The one nearest Chickamauga creek was known as the La Fayette road. It crossed from the east to the west side of the creek at a site called Lee and Gordon's Mill and then continued north eight miles to Rossville Gap. Well-maintained, the La Fayette road was natural route of withdrawal for the Union army. The second possible line of retreat, Dry Valley road was more an expanded trail than a true wagon road. The Chickamauga Creek country was only four decades removed from a state of nature. Homesteads were rudimentary; their owners poor. Most farmhouses were one- or two-room cabins. Fields were laid out haphazardly and indifferently cleared. Where cattle grazed and hogs rooted, visibility in the forest east of the La Fayette road might just exceed 100 yards; in other places, briar-laced underbrush cut it to almost nothing. There were few landmarks, either natural or manmade to help find one's way. It was a bad place to fight a battle. Although its waters were neither swift nor especially deep, Chickamauga Creek was an effective barrier to east-west movement. Its banks were either steep and rocky or low and swampy. Even in the drought-ridden summer of 1863, all wagons, cavalry, and large bodies of infantry would have to cross over one or more of the five bridges or nine fords that offered access to the prospective field of battle. Three days passed before Bragg implemented his plan of battle. By then Rosecrans had his three corps within supporting distance of one another. 18 the Confederates fought their way across Chickamauga Creek. But they met serious resistance: Col. Robert H. G. Minty's Union cavalry brigade and Col. John T. Wilder's Lightning Brigade of mounted infantry, armed with Spencer repeating rifles, yielded ground grudgingly, and by nightfall only one Confederate division stood on the west bank of the creek. General Rosecrans availed himself of Minty and Wilder's defense to shift his four corps northward along the La Fayette road. He leapfrogged Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas's corps over that of Maj. Gen. Thomas L. Crittenden, which occupied what had been the Union left at Lee and Gordon's Mill. Thomas halted at the Kelly Farm and turned east. Meanwhile, Maj. Gen. Alexander McD. McCook's corps closed on Crittenden's right, and Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger's Reserve Corps covered a vital road that led from Reed's Bridge to Rossville. Bragg knew none of this; he awoke at sunrise on Sept. 19 believing the federal left remained at Lee and Gordon's Mill. He ordered the corps of Major Generals Simon Bolivar Buckner and John Bell Hood to outflank and crush Crittenden, which he still believed constituted the Federal left - but was now the middle. Instead of flanking Crittenden, they would run smack into Thomas's corps. But a chance encounter between a Union infantry brigade and a brigade of Brig. Gen. Nathan B. Forrest's cavalry corps Bragg's flank attack before it began. But then the union moved: Thomas advanced two divisions toward Bragg's men, Bragg moved forward Maj. Gen. William H. T. Walker's reserve corps to counter Thomas and reinforce Forrest, and the battle was on. Rosecrans's knowledge of the situation was limited, but he did know that the enemy would have to come from the east. From this knowledge evolved the single imperative that guided his actions on Sept. 19: deny Bragg the La Fayette road. Rosecrans concentrated his divisions with a decisiveness that Bragg failed to counter. By early afternoon the Confederate commander had lapsed into a familiar, strange detachment in the face of plans gone awry that never failed to enrage his subordinates. One general offered the most charitable explanation for Bragg's tactical apoplexy: "In the depth of that thick woodland he could see nothing with his own eyes, very little with the eyes of others, but every sign must be read through a glass darkly." Meanwhile, in the murky forests and scattered fields west of Chickamauga Creek, the battle degenerated into a blind and bloody slugfest. The day ended with Rosecrans in firmer possession of the La Fayette road than he was of his faculties - like Bragg, he was nearly spent. So were the armies. An estimated 7,000 Union troops and at least that many Confederates fell that day, one of the bloodiest of the entire war. The future writer and satirist Lt. Ambrose Bierce described the day's slaughter from his vantage point behind a line of Union batteries in Poe Field: Nothing could be heard but the infernal din of their discharge, and nothing seen through the smoke but a great ascension of dust from the smitten soil. When all was over and the dust cloud had lifted, the spectacle was too dreadful to describe. The Confederates were still there - all of them, it seemed - some under the muzzles of the guns. But not a man of all those brave fellows was on his feet, and so thickly were all covered with dust that they looked as if they had been re-clothed in yellow. "We bury our dead," said a gunner, grimly. While brooding beside his campfire that night, Bragg decided to reorganize his Confederates in the face of the enemy, a bizarre move that compounded the prevailing confusion. The army would fight as two grand wings: Lt. Gen. Leonidas Polk, a bitter political foe of Bragg, would command the right; Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, just arrived from Northern Virginia, would command the left. Although less strange than his organizational reshuffling, Bragg's battle plan lacked creativity. He gave Polk oral instructions to attack at daylight on the extreme right. Because of the limited visibility, the advance could not be simultaneous; therefore, each brigade commander was to move only after the left flank of the unit to his right started. Rosecrans's plan, in contrast, was simple: hold on to the La Fayette road and hope for the best. The sun rose early in the Georgia autumn. Frost blanketed the ground. Smoke lingered in the forests. The low moans of wounded soldiers hummed and heaved. A heavy fog descended upon Chickamauga Creek. Nevertheless, an anxious Tennessean reflected, "the world never seemed half as attractive before, now that there was a good chance for leaving it soon." Garbled orders and the petulance of Polk and his subordinates delayed the dawn attack until 9:30. When it came, the Confederate assault struck a defensive salient that Thomas's men had built that night in Kelly Field. What followed, a series of ill-coordinated lunges at troops behind breastworks, failed miserably. Among the Confederate dead was Brig. Gen. Ben Hardin Helm of Kentucky. President Abraham Lincoln mourned Helm's passing; the general's widow was Mary Todd Lincoln's sister. Thomas made a nuisance of himself that morning. He overreacted to the danger, importuning Rosecrans relentlessly for reinforcements. To accommodate him, Rosecrans released his only mobile reserve division and drew in his right until it rested nearly in front of his headquarters. Doubts teased Rosecrans" tired mind as he rapidly dictated orders that would put nearly half his army in motion. Should he really be stripping his center and right in the face of the enemy? Then the inevitable happened. Misinterpreting Rosecrans" intentions, an inexperienced staff officer wrote an order to Brig. Gen. Thomas A. Wood that created a division-sized gap in the Union center. At the very moment Wood pulled out of the line (11 a.m.) to fill a non-existent hole, General Longstreet launched an attack with eight brigades stacked on a narrow front against the very spot Wood had occupied. The pleasantly surprised Confederates surged across the La Fayette road. Swinging north, Longstreet rolled up Rosecrans's lines like tissue paper. South of the breakthrough point, Rosecrans and a third of the army fled up the Dry Valley road toward Chattanooga. But most of the federal units north of Longstreet's breakthrough retreated to a heavily wooded elevation called Horseshoe Ridge, creating a makeshift defensive line perpendicular to Thomas's salient. Meanwhile, Thomas moved his headquarters to Snodgrass Hill, a low rise that marked the eastern limit of Horseshoe Ridge. There he sat stolidly amid the noise and confusion. Word of his presence spread quickly down the line, giving peace of mind and added determination to the soldiers who were about to defend Horseshoe Ridge. From that day forward, Thomas would be known as the "Rock of Chickamauga." From 1 p.m. until dusk, the Confederate divisions on the left launched a series of fierce but futile attacks against Horseshoe Ridge. In the crucial first hours General Longstreet removed himself from the fighting, content to play the role of bystander. He issued no orders of consequence to his generals, who were left to muddle through as best they could. They nearly turned Thomas" right flank, but the timely arrival of Union reinforcements sent the Confederates reeling off the ridge. The fighting all along Horseshoe Ridge was fierce and desperate. Occasionally federal units staged limited counterattacks that were no more successful than the Southern assaults. A 17-year-old Ohio lieutenant named Wilson Vance penned a chilling account of the carnage: Scattered over the burning and smoking hillside lay a number of wounded men belonging to the regiment, who had fallen in our swift advance or slow and stubborn retreat to the old position, and soon their cries for relief became fairly appalling, as the agony of being roasted alive was added to the pain of their wounds. Volunteers rushed forward and drew the poor fellows back; but some of them were piteously burned, the white, cooked flesh peeling back from their charred finger-bones, and in the case of an old schoolmate of mine, great flakes falling off his cheeks. And so they died. Gallantry and grit could not save the day for Thomas. By 6 p.m. the weight of Confederate numbers told. Prodded by Bragg, Polk had renewed his assault, slowly driving the four federal divisions from their breastworks. An hour later, Thomas began a well-executed withdrawal from Horseshoe Ridge. By nightfall the battlefield belonged to the Confederates, a turn of fortune entirely lost on the Southern commanders. Bragg went to bed believing the federals were still on the field in strength and that morning would bring a renewal of the contest. He neither issued orders to his wing commanders nor bothered to seek them out to learn the situation on their fronts. Even Longstreet was unaware that Thomas had sneaked off Horseshoe Ridge. When the federal withdrawal finally became evident, Bragg's corps commanders begged him to take the offensive. But Bragg declined. By his reckoning, the Army of Tennessee was too badly hurt for a forward movement. Food, ammunition and transportation were all in short supply. By the time the Army of Tennessee felt its way onto Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, the commanding terrain overlooking Chattanooga, the Army of the Cumberland was firmly in control of the city. Technically speaking, Bragg won the Battle of Chickamauga, but he failed to achieve his objectives of destroying Rosecrans's army and recapturing Chattanooga. Casualties at Chickamauga were appalling. Missing reports preclude a precise calculation of Confederates losses, but 18,000 seems a reasonable estimate. Union losses were 16,179 killed, wounded or missing. Whatever the precise number of Southern casualties, Chickamauga was the bloodiest battle after Gettysburg, and the bloodiest two days of the war. Most observers saw Chickamauga for the empty Confederate victory that it was. In the uncertain aftermath of the battle, President Lincoln told General-in-Chief Henry Halleck, "I think it very important for General Rosecrans to hold Chattanooga. If he can only maintain this position ... the rebellion can only eke out a short and feeble existence, as an animal sometimes may with a thorn in its vitals. Contemplating Chickamauga two decades after the Civil War, Confederate corps commander Lt. Gen. Daniel Harvey Hill summarized the consequences of the battle from the Southern perspective. "There was no more splendid fighting in "61, when the flower of Southern youth was in the field, than was displayed in those bloody days of September "63," wrote Hill. But it seems to me that the élan of the Southern soldier was never seen after Chickamauga - that brilliant dash which had distinguished him was gone forever ... He fought stoutly to the last, but after Chickamauga, with the sullenness of despair and without the enthusiasm of hope. That barren victory sealed the fate of the Southern Confederacy. Peter Cozzens is the author of 16 books on the American Civil War and the Indian Wars of the American West, including "The Darkest Days of the War: The Battles of Luka and Corinth."