For the first year and a half of the Civil War, Southern spirits rode high. But by the fall of 1863, the Confederacy found itself against the ropes.

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First came the loss of Kentucky in late 1862. Then the stunning Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July 1863, and by September Confederate morale was at its lowest ebb since the beginning of the war. With the Confederacy sliced in two by the loss of the Mississippi River, and the repulse of Robert E. Lee’s vaunted Army of Northern Virginia in the East, Southerners everywhere were wondering whether independence was still realistic. It was obvious a clear-cut, major military victory was desperately needed.

The slipping of Southern hopes possessed Confederates young and old with a sense of the unreal. They had believed Confederate victory and independence were foreordained. The 1864 Johnson’s Elementary Arithmetic had asked Southern schoolchildren, “If one Confed-erate soldier can whip seven Yankees, how many soldiers can whip 49 Yankees?” Patriotism had been furious in most of the South. Although a crisis in confidence had accompanied the disaster in Kentucky, morale rose again and was solid until July 1863.

“All of us are…ripe and ready for the fight,” wrote one soldier from Albemarle County, Va. “I shall be shoulder to shoulder with you when ever the fight comes off. I go for wipeing [sic] them out.”

But gloom spread over the armies and the home front following Vicksburg and Gettys­burg. “I see no prospect now of the South ever sustaining itself,” a paroled Southern private wrote his wife from Vicksburg. “We have lost the Mississippi and our nation is Divided and they is not a nuf left to fight for. I don’t look for eny thing Else but total anahighlation…of the South if She continue to carry on the war for we have a Powerfull nation fighting against us. They have Every thing…while we are half fed.”

The despondency spread far and wide. A movement in North Carolina, for example, began courting a return to the Union. “The men are low spirited and have been ever since they heard of the fall of Vicksburg,” wrote a Louisiana private near Jackson, Miss. “I never saw such a depression.”

A broadside titled “COMMON SENSE,” posted in Dallas County, Texas, claimed that Southern civilians had been deluded by their leaders, and called for a peace convention. It was signed, “One who was at VICKSBURG.”

All this doom and gloom called for swift action and a decisive victory to turn the war’s momentum around. Confederate President Jefferson Davis realized his back was against the wall.

The North, naturally, hoped to continue pressing the advantage, to bring an end to the war as soon as possible. Gettysburg had been the climax of a vast, evolving campaign in the East; Vicksburg had been the result of a months-long series of operations in the West.

And in the center of the divided nation, events in the late summer and early fall were building toward another major military clash.

The principal forces in southern Tennessee at that point were the Union Army of the Cumberland, under Maj. Gen. William Starke Rosecrans, and the Confederate Army of Tennessee, commanded by General Braxton Bragg. Both commanders were interesting characters whose backgrounds and military training would play into the campaign to come. Rosecrans, a 43-year-old Ohioan who graduated fifth in the West Point Class of 1842, had served as an engineer before leaving the Army in 1854 to work in the coal and petroleum industries. He did not serve in the Mexican War.

“Old Rosy,” as he was known, was a well-tempered, jovial man who became quite popular with his men. Somewhat heavy, with soulful eyes, a neatly cropped beard and shaggy hair over his ears, Rosecrans reportedly earned his nickname not because of his name but because of his prominent Roman nose. Rosecrans looked every bit the part of a competent commander.

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