The seizure of the city owed to Major General William S. Rosecrans—“Old Rosy” to his men—who was then in command of the Army of the Cumberland. Thomas had already seen to it there wasn’t much left to pursue. (4) “Oration of General James A. Garfield, on the Life and Character of General George H. Thomas,” Society of the Army of the Cumberland, Fourth Reunion (Cincinnati, 1870), 84. Chattanooga was yet another Civil War battle that did not go even faintly the way it was supposed to. The kind of careful picket work Thomas had done at Mill Springs might have let Rosecrans know what he was getting into, but he pushed forward scarcely knowing where his own troops were. In view of the fact that he held Rosecrans in high regard, then and later, this juxtaposition would have dismayed Thomas. But Thomas was having none of it. Rosecrans could have regrouped his forces, but instead he committed the fundamental error of mistaking withdrawal for retreat. The only emotion Thomas evidenced was scratching his beard more than usual. The Union army didn’t own horses that fast. As a graduate of and former instructor at the US Naval Academy, Confederate Lieutenant Hunter Davidson understood the Union Navy, as well as how submersible vessels and spar torpedoes could be used to exploit its weaknesses. He had picket companies patrolling the area a mile in front of his main force and mounted sentinels three-quarters of a mile in front of the pickets. He was one of Zachary Taylor’s gunners during the Mexican War and was breveted for heroism at Monterrey and Buena Vista. He wanted Sherman. When something didn’t work, he tried something that did. He took his soldiers on a night march through heavy rain, hoping to surprise Thomas in his camp. Grant also wrote off the Army of the Cumberland as an attacking force. Thomas, who had earned a reputation as a good artilleryman in Mexico and a better cavalryman in the Indian campaigns, developed his own syllabus. He was ranked behind Sherman, George Meade, and Phil Sheridan. Be the first to ask a question about Rock of Chickamauga. There was some friction between the two. The earliest source I can find for the claim is Byron A. Dunn, On General Thomas’s Staff (Chicago, 1907), 344. After going over some of the same ground they covered on the way to Atlanta, Thomas and Hood met in earnest on the frozen turf outside Nashville. He attacked when there was no prospect of victory and didn’t mind running up a big butcher’s bill. For example, at a reunion of the Army of the Cumberland in November 1870, a few months after Thomas’ death, Garfield gave a memorial oration in which he declared, “He was, indeed, the ‘Rock of Chickamauga,’ against which the wild waves of battle dashed in vain. Yet Thomas does occupy one prominent place in the mythology of the war: his performance on the second day of the Battle of Chickamauga, when he saved the Army of the Cumberland from likely destruction and earned a lasting nickname—“the Rock of Chickamauga.”. At the academy Thomas picked up one of his more enduring nicknames, Slow Trot, because he wouldn’t let his students drive their poor mounts any faster. The autocratic Schoepf never learned how to handle the rude soldiery of the American volunteer army, and Zollicoffer, whose only military experience consisted of a year’s service fighting the Seminoles in 1836, simply didn’t know what he was doing. It will stand forever in the annals of his country, that there he saved from destruction the Army of the Cumberland.”(4) The statement presumes that his listeners were already familiar with the phrase. If it could stay there, the President noted, “the Rebellion must dwindle and die.”. At Gettysburg George Pickett had led a charge following an extended artillery bombardment and lost 1,354 men trying to cover one mile. It was, as were all fights in this snarled Tennessee country, an unruly business. Educated at Bates College and the University of New Hampshire, Freeman Cleaves worked as a news reporter and financial writer. (Washington, 1880–1901), Series I, vol. At first everything went off splendidly. Sherman never seemed to sleep at all and was forever prowling about his camp at night in his undershirt, smoking cigars. As Sherman said of Thomas, “He’s my off-wheel horse and knows how to pull with me, though he doesn’t pull in the same way.”. Thereafter he rose to command a corps, played a key role in several major battles, and in October 1863 was placed in command of the Army of the Cumberland. Grant, in his Virginia headquarters, did not realize how completely Thomas had control of the situation and was afraid Hood might get loose. Standing with a bow and arrow, the Indian hit three soldiers and drove a shaft through Thomas’s chin, into his chest. Read more >>, The magazine was forced to suspend print publication in 2013, but a group of volunteers saved the archives and relaunched it in digital form in 2017. Nevertheless, the Georgia campaign was a dazzling success. On the road to Atlanta, Thomas provided the base that allowed William Tecumseh Sherman to weave his flamboyant flank attacks, and flamboyance is always more interesting than solidity. Sherman. This article appeared in the Fall 2019 (Vol. From his command post at Orchard Knob, Grant could see the battle was getting away from him. His battered army was getting hard to hold together, and he was tired of maneuvering to no effect. He badgered Thomas to attack. Two years before, Sherman had been removed from the field under suspicion of being insane. Each night he set up an elaborate outlay of officers’ tents. Fought in mid-September 1863, Chickamauga was the largest battle in the western theater and one of the bloodiest of the war. Largely eclipsed by these two commanders is Major General George H. Thomas. His triumph at the Battle of Nashville in December 1864 was one of the few truly decisive victories of the entire conflict. The army was beaten, but it still held Chattanooga. For West Point graduates and militiamen alike, combat was the true university of future Civil War generals. Thomas suffered a massive stroke and collapsed. Thomas might have been well advised if, like Sherman, he had cut off all communication lines with Washington before he started. “I thought,” Thomas said, “after what I had done in the war, that I ought to be trusted to decide when the battle should be fought. No one likes surprises on a battlefield, and Thomas did what he could to see there were as few as possible. John Bell Hood, on the other hand, was tone-deaf. Johnston was a classicist well versed in the history and the art of war. Once the Cumberland men got the pits, however, they were on their own. To the North he was a Virginia slaveowner and, therefore, suspect. This punctiliousness was bothersome to the high command, which was trying to get on with the war. Thomas, who led the army’s XIV Corps, took charge of the troops still organized and able to fight. For instance, the coverage of the battle at Nashville is much more detailed in the latter. Nonetheless, Thomas was prominent in the battles of Mill Springs, Shiloh, Corinth, Perryville, and Nashville, and was immortalized at Chickamauga, where he tenaciously held the field until ordered to withdraw. The lieutenant colonel’s slot went to Robert E. Lee. When Bragg resumed the battle the next day it was much the same story, and the Army of the Cumberland gamely held its ground. To license content, please contact licenses [at] americanheritage.com. For a time Old Rosy was considered one of the North’s best generals, and until the fall of Vicksburg he was arguably more successful than Grant. When Grant arrived, there occurred one of those social mischances that should not matter in so serious an enterprise as war but do. His troops struck the Union line almost exactly at that opening and routed the northern army’s entire right wing. Thomas withdrew the remainder of his units to positions around Rossville Gap after darkness fell. Thomas said he didn’t know, but Gordon Granger, commander of the IV Corps, allowed that “when those fellows get started all hell can’t stop them.”. When Thomas complained that Rosecrans had been improperly promoted over him, Lincoln rewrote the date of Rosecrans’s commission, giving him seniority. Chickamauga was a bloody defeat, but Thomas had saved the Army of the Cumberland. Then came service in the Western frontier with the 2nd Regiment of Cavalry. He doesn't come out and say, for instance, that Thomas was furious at Grant over a number of different matters or that he felt Sherman was stupid when he failed to employ Thomas' battle strategy. Nicknames, when freely given, are generally a sign of affection. The Rebel riflemen, reasonably enough, retreated in the face of an approaching army. The bulk of them took up a position on Snodgrass Hill, in what had been the center of the Union line. Besides, there were horses to look after and men to equip before fighting again. If Old Reliable was sticking around, it was probably going to be all right. For a moment it looked as if the Rebels might pull it off. July 31, 1816 Born on July 31, 1816, in Southampton County, Virginia, General George H. Thomas was known as "The Rock of Chickamauga." And so eighteen thousand men of the Army of the Cumberland did what only trained professional soldiers can do. By sundown Crittenden’s army of four thousand men had melted away. Garfield met Thomas in Rossville that night and wired to Rosecrans that "our men not only held their ground, but in many points drove the enemy spl… From January 1862 at Mill Springs, where he won the first major Federal victory of the war, through December 1864 at Nashville, where he destroyed the Army of Tennessee, Thomas never lost a battle when he was in command.

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