| Rosecrans exploits a weakness in the Confederate defenses |
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By: MIKE WEST, Managing Editor
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Posted: Sunday, August 31, 2008 8:31 am
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The Confederate Cemetery at Beech Grove is a final resting place for Rebel dead from the Tullahoma Campaign.
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For nearly six uneventful months the Confederate Army of Tennessee held a 20-mile front in the hills between Shelbyville and Tullahoma and had pickets and cavalry units scattered as far as 70 miles away.
Those hills of the Highland Rim were an effective barrier against the Union Army of the Cumberland and its headquarters in downtown Murfreesboro and the surrounding area. The idea behind the Confederate position was to protect the railroad and block access to the all-important city of Chattanooga, which was the gateway to Atlanta.
Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans feared disaster if his army moved against the Confederates. It took Abe Lincoln, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, General-In-Chief Henry Halleck and his own chief of staff, James Garfield, to persuade Rosecrans to advance.
"I would not push you to any rashness, but I am very anxious that you do your utmost, short of rashness, to keep Bragg from getting lost to help Johnston against Grant,” Lincoln wired Rosecrans.
But when Rosecrans finally put his troops in motion on June 23, 1863, he followed a brilliant plan designed to make the Army of Tennessee fight or at the very least retreat from the rich farmlands of Middle Tennessee.
His plan exploited a weakness in Bragg’s defenses.
Due to the terrain, Bragg believed any Union attack would come against his left flank through Guy’s Gap and toward Shelbyville. He placed his largest infantry corps, commanded by the “Fighting Bishop” Lt. Gen. Leonidas Polk, to defend that key point. Yet fearful that Rosecrans would attempt to flank him, Bragg arranged a 70-mile-long curtain of cavalry to serve as an early-warning system.
Eight miles from Shelbyville, the corps of Lt. Gen. William J. Hardee was stationed in fortifications overlooking Wartrace and protecting the main road to Chattanooga. Hardee, a more capable field commander than Polk, was positioned to reinforce Liberty and Hoover's Gaps and any attempt to break through at Bell Buckle.
This plan left Hoover’s Gap lightly defended. An entrenched cavalry regiment was assigned to protect the narrow, four-mile-long gap between two 1,110-foot-high ridges. The road through the gap was so narrow that two wagons could barely pass side by side.
Despite the shoving from Washington, Rosecrans had put the six-month lull to good use with an exhaustive training program and re-equipping his forces. Rosecrans had wired Washington so often that he was accused of hampering the war effort by the cost of his incessant telegrams. One of the things he kept requesting was more cavalry. His constant requests were met with denials.
Equipping cavalry units was extremely expensive considering the costs of mounts and remounts, saddles and other equipment and the actual cost of feeding the horses, which required some seven or eight pounds of grain daily.
Rosecrans’ concern was legitimate. Confederate raiders were a constant problem for his army. They destroyed equipment, captured supplies and men. Nearly a third of the Confederate Army of Tennessee was cavalry led by well-known raiders John Hunt Morgan and Nathan Bedford Forrest and the lesser-known Joseph Wheeler.
In fact it was the fruitless chase of Morgan in Kentucky that prompted a novel idea by a brigade commander in the Army of the Cumberland.
The unit, Col. John T. Wilder's brigade of Reynolds' division—1,500 men of the 17th and 72nd Indiana regiments and the 98th and 123rd Illinois, was among those assigned to pursue Morgan.
Wilder was an ingenious individual. In his early 30s, he was a nationally known expert on hydraulics and owned his own foundry in Greensburg, Ind. In the days before the Civil War, he supervised the casting of two six-pound cannons at his foundry and recruited a company of light artillery troops.
Wilder’s men ended up being mustered in as Company A of the 17th Indiana Infantry, a regiment Wilder was soon commanding.
In the days before the Battle of Stones River, Wilder’s men and the rest of Reynolds' Division had been assigned the fruitless duty of hunting down and stopping the cavalry of Confederate raider John Hunt Morgan. The chase was an embarrassment for Wilder who tried mounting some of his men on wagon train mules in a vain attempt to catch Morgan in the Glasgow, Ky. area.
The mules bucked, rolled and did everything possible to throw their riders. Meanwhile, Morgan captured 1,877 Union prisoners and destroyed $2 million in U.S. property. Giving up the chase, the federal troops were loaded on a train at Cave City, Ky. and returned to Nashville where they heard the news of victory at Stones River.
The failure to even spook Morgan got Wilder to thinking. Previously, when he noticed the inefficient use of bayonets by his men, he equipped them with something more effective – a long-handled hatchet. That earned the unit their first nickname, “The Hatchet Brigade.” They would soon earn another, more fitting name.
The four-day trip from Kentucky to Murfreesboro gave Wilder time to think and immediately upon arrival he approached Rosecrans with his idea for mounted infantry.
Rosecrans was enthralled with the idea and immediately passed it onto Washington.
“I must have cavalry or mounted infantry. I could mount infantry had I horses and saddles ... with mounted infantry I can drive the rebel cavalry to the wall and keep the roads open in my rear. Not so now,” Rosecrans wrote Halleck.
By February, Washington granted Rosecrans’ request and word was passed to Col. Wilder, who immediately confiscated horses and mules from farms in DeKalb and Wilson County.
By the middle of March, Wilder’s entire brigade was mounted and had received new uniforms and the necessary equipment for feeding, watering and maintaining the horses.
That same month, Wilder and the Army of the Cumberland were to witness a sales pitch that would result in “The Hatchet Brigade” becoming a revolutionary fighting force. Gunsmith Christopher Spencer visited Murfreesboro in mid-March to demonstrate his seven-shot repeating rifle.
The army was wowed by the accuracy and fire power of the weapon. Wilder, who had vowed to arm his brigade with the best weapons available, was particularly impressed and contacted his bankers in Greensburg, Ind. The bankers agreed to buy enough Spencers to equip the brigade. Each man in the unit signed a promissory note for $35 for their rifle. Wilder co-signed all of the notes and the rifles were ordered.
On May 15, the new repeating rifles arrived. They got their first test in a June 4 skirmish near Liberty, Tenn. The “Hatchet Brigade” was becoming a formidable fighting force particularly when working in concert with the “Jackass Battery.”
“The Jackass Battery” was the 18th Indiana Light Artillery led by Capt. Eli Lilly, who later gained greater fame as a pharmacist. The battery was unusual because of the large number of college students among its ranks. Originally equipped with six, 3-inch ordinance rifles (cannons), the battery was supplemented shortly before the Tullahoma campaign with two mountain howitzers.
The little howitzers were perfect for ridge-running and were carried by two pack mules, earning the name “Jackass Battery.”
Together, these units would give Rosecrans the shock troops necessary to make his plan work.
Rosecrans would feign a major attack on Shelbyville, threaten Wartrace and send his real attack right through narrow, unlikely Hoover’s Gap. |
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