Battle of Chickamauga and Gordon Granger’s Reserve Corps
By Gordon Berg

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A blood-red autumn sun burned off the dense ground fog as it rose over the gently rolling Georgia hills into a cloudless turquoise sky on Sunday, September 20, 1863. But Lieutenant Colonel William Kinman took little comfort in the beauty of the tranquil Sabbath morning. He had had a premonition. “We shall have a desperate battle today, many of us will be killed, and I expect to be among the number,” he told a fellow officer in the 115th Illinois Volunteer Infantry.

About 300 yards away on a hillside behind McAfee Church, Lt. Col. Isaac Clarke was more optimistic. He assured a comrade in the 96th Illinois Volunteer Infantry: “I have no fear for myself. I shall go into this fight, and go through it, and comeout of it all right.”

Kinman and Clarke were officers in the Reserve Corps of the Union Army of the Cumberland, 5,400 men and three artillery batteries, many of whom had never before been in battle. On that Sunday the Reserve Corps would shed its untested status and experience warfare’s fury, fighting Confederate General Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee on the second day of the Battle of Chickamauga. The maelstrom would prove Kinman’s vision and destroy Clarke’s optimism. Before the sun set, the two officers and hundreds of their comrades in arms would lie dead or maimed on the bramble-covered slopes of Horseshoe Ridge.

Major General Gordon Granger, commander of the Reserve Corps, was Regular Army, West Point class of 1845. The gruff New Yorker had served in the Mexican War, fought Indians in Texas, and seen action at Wilson’s Creek, New Madrid, Island No. 10 and the siege of Corinth. But Granger knew little more than his men about the role his command would be expected to play in the fighting taking place just a few miles up the La Fayette Road. The last order he received from Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans, commander of the Army of the Cumberland, came late Saturday night, directing Granger to place his corps on the eastern slope of Missionary Ridge to provide support to the corps of Maj. Gens. Alexander McCook and George H. Thomas.

That command did not make much sense to Granger.

From his position at the junction of the Ringgold and Cleveland roads, his troops were in poor position to assist McCook’s XX Corps at the far right of the Union lines. Their best route to Thomas’ XIV Corps on the Union left would be a march of more than four miles along the La Fayette Road. To Granger, it seemed the only thing he was in a good position to do was protect the Rossville Gap and keep the road to Chattanooga, Tenn., open.

As mid-morning approached, a growing volume of gunfire soon reached Granger’s ears, but he had no new orders from Rosecrans. Granger vacillated. Should he go to support Thomas, who hadn’t asked him for help, or hold his position and guard the road to Rossville and Chattanooga? Staff officers sent to Rosecrans for guidance returned, unable to reach the commanding general.

Between 10:30 and 11 a.m., Granger and his chief of staff, Major J.S. Fullerton, climbed a haystack to get a view of the action. When Granger climbed down, one account has it that Colonel James Thompson, his chief of artillery, remarked that Thomas was “having a hell of a fight over there.” That convinced Granger it was time to move and “if we don’t hurry it will be too late.”

Major Fullerton’s version, however, has come down through history as the more popular account. He wrote that after 10 minutes of watching on the haystack, Granger “jumped up, thrust his glass into its case, and exclaimed with an oath, ‘I am going to Thomas, orders or no orders.’”

“And if you go,” Fullerton replied, “it may bring disaster to the army and you to a court-martial.” “There is nothing in our front now but ragtag bobtail cavalry,” Granger replied. “Don’t you see Bragg is piling his whole army on Thomas? I am going to his assistance.”

Tags: 19th Century, America's Civil War, American Civil War, Historical Conflicts

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