Battle of Chickamauga and Gordon Granger’s Reserve Corps

By Gordon Berg | America's Civil War  | 0 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

The men of the Reserve Corps were ready to march in less than 30 minutes. Around 11:30 a.m. 1st Division commander Maj. Gen. James Steedman put the 1st Brigade of Brig. Gen. Walter Whitaker, the 96th and 115th Illinois, the 40th and 89th Ohio, the 22nd Michigan, 84th Indiana and the 18th Battery of the Ohio Light Artillery, on the march for the La Fayette Road. Right behind them came Colonel John G. Mitchell’s 2nd Brigade, comprising the 78th Illinois and the 98th, 113th and 121st Ohio supported by Battery M of the 1st Illinois Light Artillery. Granger left his remaining five regiments and an artillery battery under Colonel Daniel McCook at the McAfee Church, charged with keeping the escape route to Chattanooga open.

Confederate Lt. Gen. Leonidas Polk’s right wing was attacking Thomas, just as it had done the day before. But soon Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, sent west with three divisions to bolster Bragg’s army and in command of the Confederate left, would order Maj. Gen. John Bell Hood and 11,000 men concealed east of the Brotherton farm to advance.

Elements of Hood’s division poured through a gap in the Federal lines a quarter mile wide near the Union center. Brigadier General Thomas J. Wood was withdrawing his division and moving it to the left even though he knew he was following an order from Rosecrans that was based on faulty information.

Brigadier General Bushrod Johnson, who assumed command of the attack after Hood was wounded, described the scene as “unspeakably grand.” Union staff officer Ambrose Bierce wrote that he “saw the entire country in front swarming with Confederates; the very earth seemed to be moving toward us!” Decisive leadership and the courage of small groups of soldiers from splintered Union regiments, probably numbering no more than 2,000 men in all, would slow the pace of the Confederate juggernaut just enough to ensure that there would still be a Union army for the Reserve Corps to save.

Granger moved his column at quick time, and Major Fullerton recalled the narrow road “was covered ankle-deep with dust that rose in suffocating clouds.” When the column reached the La Fayette Road near the Hein house, Maj. Gen. Nathan B. Forrest’s Rebel cavalrymen began to lob shells into the blue ranks. Provoked, Steedman sent out skirmishers and unlimbered Battery M of the 1st Illinois Light Artillery.

Granger reined in Steedman, re-formed the column and decided that the La Fayette Road was too dangerous. The open fields southwest of the Cloud Church offered a safer and more direct route to Thomas. He also sent Major Fullerton back to the McAffee Church with orders to bring up McCook’s brigade to deal with Forrest. Granger had now fully committed his corps.

The column now moved at double-quick time directly toward the Snodgrass cabin, with the lead regiments of the Reserve Corps arriving there between 1 and 1:45 p.m. While the tired Confederates were regrouping at the foot of Horseshoe Ridge, Thomas ordered the new arrivals to fill a half-mile gap in his line between Colonel Charles G. Harker’s brigade of battered Ohioans and the division of Maj. Gen. Joseph J. Reynolds on the far right of the Kelley farm field.

Before Steedman could deploy his winded regiments, the sound of musketry to the right of the XIV Corps made Thomas change his mind.

If there were Confederates advancing around the right, the rear of Thomas’ entire defensive perimeter would be exposed. A courier soon galloped up to confirm that attacking Rebels faced only remnants of the 21st Ohio on Horseshoe Ridge.

“Those men must be driven back,” said Granger. Thomas agreed, then asked, “Can you do it?” Granger said: “Yes, my men are fresh, and they are just the fellows for that work. They are raw recruits and they don’t know any better than to charge over there.”

“Those men” were Maj. Gen. Thomas C. Hindman’s Division, comprising Brig. Gen. Patton Anderson’s Mississippi brigade, Brig. Gens. Zachariah C. Deas and Arthur M. Manigault’s Alabama regiments, and Bushrod Johnson’s Tennesseans. The mostly untested soldiers of the Reserve Corps would receive their baptism in blood that day against these veteran regiments on the boulder-strewn slopes of Horseshoe Ridge.

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

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