v1.1.3 / chapter 59 of 93 / 01 sep 11 / greg goebel / public domain
* As winter closed in, there was one more inconclusive burst of action in northern Virginia, while in the mountains of east Tennessee the confrontation between Longstreet and Burnside at Knoxville came to a very decisive conclusion.
* After the announcement of the victory at Chattanooga, President Lincoln announced that the last Thursday in November, 26 November 1863, was to be a day of national thanksgiving. Thanksgiving holidays had been previously celebrated in various states and as special national events, but President Lincoln's proclamation put the celebration on the road to become a formal annual national holiday after the war. In any case, on that Thanksgiving Day, Union General Meade celebrated by taking his Army of the Potomac on the offensive against Lee's Army of Northern Virginia.
Of course, Lincoln and his people had been prodding him to move, but Meade had more positive reasons to take the offensive. His troops had bloodied Lee's during the earlier fall campaigning, giving Meade confidence that Lee wasn't really ten feet tall, and Union intelligence also indicated that with Longstreet gone the Army of Northern Virginia was down to about 40,000 men, while there were over 84,000 in the ranks of the Army of the Potomac. In reality, Lee had over 48,000 men, but the odds in Meade's favor were still very good. It was also a good sign that the days when McClellan doubled or even tripled the number of rebels facing him were long since gone. Meade planned to move his troops over a downstream crossing on the Rapidan, and then hook west to hit the rebels before Lee managed to concentrate his forces in defense. It was a simple, direct plan that relied on mass and speed.
The Army of the Potomac had the mass, but did it have the speed? When the troops moved out in the early morning of 26 November, it seemed so, and by good luck there was a heavy fog that masked their movements from rebel eyes.
Then things started to go wrong. General William "Old Blinkey" French, in charge of III Corps, got his troops into a traffic jam that held everyone up. French didn't get his men across until sundown. He tried to make up for the delay on 27 November, but led his men on a wrong turn and had to backtrack. When French finally got his men going in the right direction and moved forward, he ran into a concentration of rebels and had a big fight on his hands. The shooting cost each side about 500 casualties; it would have cost more had it not been late in the day and darkness put an end to the shooting.
Lee had got wind of preparations for a Federal advance on the evening of the 26th, and his troops were thoroughly alert. With French fumbling his advance, Lee was able to quickly transfer II Corps troops under Jubal Early to block French's men. After the sun went down, Lee ordered Early to pull his men back about a mile to establish a proper defensive line on high ground, behind a stream named the Mine Run that flowed northward into the Rapidan. Lee ordered A.P. Hill to move up in support.
When the sun came up again on 28 November, the Federals moved forward again. The weather had been crisp and pleasant, but now it was pouring down miserable cold rain. When the Union soldiers arrived in front of the rebel defensive line at Mine Run, they found the prospect even more miserable: the Confederate position was so formidable that to attack it directly would be another Fredericksburg.
Meade's generals clearly recognized the difficulty of the attack as well. There was no assault that evening. After a freezing cold night, the Federals spent the next day, 29 November, inspecting the rebel line for weak spots. Generals John Sedgwick and Governeur Warren reported to Meade that it seemed the Confederate defenses were vulnerable around the flanks, and Meade ordered an assault for the next morning, 30 November.
Federal guns opened up with a bombardment to soften up the rebel line at sunrise and the troops prepared to go forward. They had no great confidence in accomplishing much more than getting themselves killed, and pinned pieces of paper with their names and next-of-kin on their uniforms. To their immense relief, they were finally ordered to stand down. Warren had inspected the rebel defenses once more in the daylight and found they had been substantially strengthened. He simply refused to obey orders, infuriating Meade, but Warren was an expert engineer. Meade inspected the Confederate line himself, reluctantly agreed with Warren, and the attack was called off.
With the rains falling, Meade was now faced with watching his troops become frozen in slicks of ice or bogged down in mud, depending on the variation in the thermometer, and late the next day, 1 December, he ordered the Army of the Potomac to withdraw. That was also prudent in that simply sitting idle in front of Robert E. Lee was an invitation to attack. Lee had been preparing exactly such a counterstroke, but when his flankers went forward on the morning of 2 December, there was no one there to attack. The Federals had gone back to where they had come from, and done it so efficiently that the rebels didn't know they had left. Lee was embarrassed: "We should have never have permitted those people to get away."
* The whole thing had been something of a fiasco for Meade and certainly it had been miserable for the muddy and freezing soldiers. The Yankees had also taken the worst of it in casualties, losing over 1,650 men to rebel losses of about 629. Meade expected, mistakenly, that he would be relieved of command.
There were silver linings. The plan had been basically sound, though the execution flawed. When the plan had come clearly unraveled, the generals did not push forward blindly into a disaster: they realized the vulnerability of their position and withdrew. General Warren was particularly praised by the men for his courage and sensibility in recommending that the futile assault be called off, and Meade's sensibility was recognized as well. The offensive had been a failure, but not a blind, bumbling, bloody failure, and the confidence of the men of the Army of the Potomac in their leadership, which had so often failed them, rose accordingly.
* Out West in Tennessee, the permanent loss of Chattanooga cut the supports out from under Longstreet's siege of Knoxville, but even when Longstreet got the news, he didn't give up right away. That was not just obstinacy: he felt he had a better chance of escaping with his troops across the mountains into Virginia if he dealt with Burnside beforehand, and if Longstreet left without dealing Burnside a blow, Burnside would join Grant and destroy Bragg's Army of the Tennessee once and for all. Longstreet told one of his officers: "There is neither safety nor honor in any other course than the one I have chosen and ordered."
Such thinking required nerve, all the more so because Longstreet knew
perfectly well that he was far out on a limb. With Bragg's force knocked off
the playing board for the moment, the Federals could now concentrate their
attention on Longstreet -- which was exactly what they were doing. Lincoln's
congratulations to Grant had been short and to the point:
WELL DONE. MANY THANKS TO ALL. REMEMBER BURNSIDE.
On 27 November, Grant ordered that Granger's reserve corps to be sent to
Knoxville. However, when Grant returned to Chattanooga on 29 November after
chasing Bragg down into the Georgia hills, he found Granger and his men still
sitting in Chattanooga. Granger, who seems to have had erratic ideas about
how things were done in an army, had decided that the order was a bad idea
and simply hadn't complied. Grant gave Granger's reserve corps to Sherman
and ordered Sherman to relieve Burnside. Granger ended up being transferred
to the Department of the Gulf.
Sherman was by no means happy about the assignment, either. The Unionists in the hill country might have been dear to President Lincoln, but they were not to Sherman. He was baffled why anyone wanted to fight for such a wild, poor, and worthless region. Sherman wrote Grant: "That any military man should send a force into East Tennessee puzzles me."
* As it turned out, Sherman's move into the region would be a waste of time by anyone's assessment. After many delays, Longstreet ordered an attack on Burnside's defenses around Knoxville for the morning of 29 November, focusing on a set of earthworks named Fort Sanders, named after the cavalry commander who had protected Burnside's escape into Knoxville.
Fort Sanders was formidable, but it was near a creekbed that could provide cover for an assault. Longstreet hoped to achieve surprise and so he planned for a daybreak assault without artillery preparation, but showed his hand by seizing rifle pits in front of Fort Sanders the evening before. He wanted to place sharpshooters in the pits to suppress the defenders. Unfortunately, the only result was that he completely lost the element of surprise.
The rebels were ordered to charge fast without firing and take Fort Sanders by bayonet. The Federals were waiting for them. The rebels dashed forward in the early light into a storm of bullets and canister shot. They did not notice strands of telegraph wire that the Yankees had wound around trees and stumps and stakes in front of their defenses. The dash towards the Federal entrenchments was broken as rebel troops in the lead were thrown on their faces by the wire. They got up again, swearing furiously, to run into more of the same while Union troops poured fire into them.
The defenders were mostly Scotsmen of the 79th New York Highlanders regiment. The rebels managed to make it to a ditch in front of the walls of Fort Sanders. The ditch had been assessed by Longstreet as about 5 feet (1.5 meters) deep, but which turned out to be about 9 feet (2.75 meters) deep. Longstreet, observing the ditch earlier with binoculars, had seen a man walking across it with his head and shoulder above the ditch. Longstreet failed to realize that the man had been walking on a plank set across the ditch.
The attackers had not thought to bring scaling ladders, and the far side of the ditch was muddy and icy. They went into the ditch to find themselves penned in, to be slaughtered by volleys of Yankee musketry and blasts of canister. Lieutenant Samuel L. Benjamin, the artillery commander in Fort Sanders, ordered his men to take 50 cannon shells and set them with 3-second fuzes; the shells were lit and thrown into the ditch, with devastating effect. Benjamin commented grimly: "It stilled them down." Some rebels managed to scale up the far side of the ditch, only to have the Scotsmen simply snatch them, haul them roughly over the top, and take them prisoner. One rebel officer was hauled away demanding that the Federals surrender while the Scotsmen laughed at him.
Longstreet was coming up with the second assault wave and saw his plan was a complete bust. He ordered the recall sounded immediately, even though the brigadiers with him wanted to give it a try themselves. The Confederates floundering in the ditch pulled out, leaving behind dead, wounded, and those who'd had enough and surrendered. One rebel private of Irish persuasion, now a captive of the Yankees, saw some humor in the situation. He casually lit up his pipe and told his comrades: "Bedad, boys, General Longstreet said we would be in Knoxville for breakfast this morning, and so some of us are."
Burnside and Longstreet had been friends before the war. Given Burnside's decent nature, it was little surprise that Longstreet quickly received a Yankee courier under a flag of truce, relaying General Burnside's respects and offering Longstreet the opportunity to retrieve his dead and wounded; Longstreet didn't even have to ask. He gratefully accepted, and in fact he had to request an extension. There were simply too many dead and wounded to take care of. The assault had cost him 813 casualties, about half of them taken prisoner. The one-sided fight had cost Burnside 13 men.
* That seemed like an entirely final settlement of the issue, but the same day Longstreet received an order from Bragg that pounded one more nail in the coffin of his excursion in East Tennessee. The order specified that Wheeler take his cavalry and rejoin the survivors of the Confederate Army of the Tennessee in Dalton, Georgia, and that Longstreet march his men to Dalton as well.
Wheeler left immediately. Longstreet was uncertain that moving towards Dalton was safe. Once again he demonstrated good sense, since he quickly learned that Sherman was on the march with six divisions and would certainly tear him to pieces. Longstreet decided to disobey the order. Beginning on the evening of 3 December, he pulled out from Knoxville, marching northeast in the direction of Virginia. He halted his force in Rogersville for the winter.
Sherman's cavalry arrived at Knoxville to find they were not needed. Sherman followed with his troops, and Burnside treated Sherman to a fine turkey dinner in a local home. Burnside suggested to Sherman that reports of the distress of the defenders of Knoxville had been exaggerated. Sherman was disgusted.
Grant wanted Burnside and Sherman to hunt down Longstreet, but much to Grant's annoyance they didn't pursue. There was good cause for this, since the terrain was rugged and winter was settling in, and Sherman wanted no more part of campaigning for a barren wilderness anyway. The real action in the West was now in the direction of Atlanta. Grant shrugged and dropped the matter. Sherman detached two of his divisions to help hold down East Tennessee and marched the other four back to Chattanooga.
Longstreet's misadventures in the West were all but over. There would be complaints about his failures, but Longstreet had generally done what he could under impossible conditions. There was nothing in it all to give him much satisfaction, but at least he had washed his hands of Braxton Bragg.
