Like all soldiers, they were used to receiving orders for unknown reasons. That this particular one would initiate a chain of disaster for the Army of the Cumberland, they had no way of knowing. Its reasons, on the high command level, was a simple one.

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In the morning Major General George H. Thomas, commanding the Union left, had decided (correctly) that the main Rebel assault of the battle’s second day was aimed at his wing of the army. He called for reinforcements. Major General William S. Rosecrans, army commander, was sending him the 2d Division and Brigadier General Thomas J. Wood’s division was ordered to relieve them. A little later Rosecrans received a message that there was a gap in the line to the right of Reynolds’s division. Assuming that this accounted for Thomas’s call for more reinforcing, he ordered Wood to close up with Reynolds. Unfortunately, Brigadier General John M. Brannan’s division was nicely closed up with Reynolds and directly behind Wood and Reynolds; there was no gap in the line. As Wood obeyed Rosecrans’s order in the only way he could, by pulling out of the line and marching behind Brannan, the Confederates, under Lieutenant General James Longstreet, smashed through the now genuine gap left by Wood, and chaos engulfed two-thirds of the Army of the Cumberland.

But in the freshness of the morning, as the 2d Division was moving out, the leathery veterans of the 21st Ohio knew nothing of the high-level commands given or high-level mistakes about to bear fruit. They only knew they had a march of a mile and a half to make, leaving their hard-won breastworks for one of Wood’s regiments to use.

As they marched behind the Union front on the way to their unknown destination, without warning disaster exploded around them. Suddenly the division was gone, the brigade was gone, and all that was left was a swirling mass of men, horses, wagons, cannons, screaming shells, and utter disorganization.

In the midst of the roaring thunder of guns, running troops, smoke, dust, and careening wagons, the regiment paused. To the 21st’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel D.M. Stoughton, only one thing was clear in the bewildering storm of a thousand unclear things. He would hold the regiment together and continue to the position he thought the 3d Brigade was aiming for. To carry out his decision, the regiment had to push through fleeing remnants of the center of the army and find the right of Brannan’s division.

As the moment, Brannan’s division, or what was left of it, was trying to curl itself around some high ground to check the Confederate waves advancing through the broken line. Stoughton and the 21st didn’t know that the whole right and center of the Union army had come apart and was streaming in a disorganized retreat back to Chattanooga. They didn’t know that Thomas had determined to hold his single corps steady and anchor its flank on a small rise called Snodgrass Hill to try to prevent annihilation of the Army of the Cumberland. They knew only that they had been given orders to reinforce Thomas, and if they could find him, they would carry out those orders.

Stoughton’s determined march brought the 21st Ohio into contact with some of Brannan’s men, who were standing off what looked like all the Rebels in the world. After a brief halt at the foot of Snodgrass Hill, Stoughton got some shouted orders and the wave of an arm from a frenzied officer. The 21st again moved…over the hill, through the woods, past a huddled log house and down over the southwestern brow of the ridge.

Here, too, were gray – and butternut-clad soldiers advancing. And here, too, a quick glance showed the men of the 21st Ohio that there was no one – literally no one – to their right. They were the anchormen of Thomas’s stand. Fate, garbled orders, and sheer luck of the draw had put, at the far end of the crumbling Union line, a regiment of veterans armed with repeating rifles.

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