Reminiscences of the Civil War

31 December 1862 – 2 January 1863

Battle of Stones River

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The antecedent campaign runs back in a connected chain to the battle of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in the preceding December. Under General Bragg, at Mur- freesboro, as one of his division commanders, was an ex- Vice-President of the United States, who had also been a prominent candidate for the Presidency in the campaign of 1860, and had presided over the joint session of the two houses of Congress when Abraham Lincoln was declared duly elected. This illustrious statesman, who was fast winning his way to distinction in his new role of Confederate soldier, was John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky. Tall, erect, and commanding in physique, he would have been selected in any martial group as a typical leader. In the campaign in the Valley of Virginia, where I afterward saw much of him, he exhibited in a marked degree the characteristics of a great com- mander. He was fertile in resource, and enlisted and held the confidence and affection of his men, while he inspired them with enthusiasm and ardor. Under fire and in extreme peril he was strikingly courage- ous, alert, and self-poised. No man in the Confederate army had surrendered a brighter political future, sacri- ficed more completely his personal ambition, or suffered more keenly from the perplexing conditions in his own State. With all his other trials, and before he had fairly begun his career as a soldier. General Breck- inridge had been strongly tempted to challenge to personal combat his superior officer. General Bragg, who at the time was commander-in-chief of the Con- federate forces in the Department of Tennessee and the West. At the battle of Murfreesboro, Tennessee (Decem- ber, 1862), this brilliant soldier from the blue-grass region had led his gallant Kentuckians through a consuming fire on both flanks, losing about thirty-six per cent, of his men in less than half an hour. General Bragg, who, it seems, was not present at the point where this move-

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These high-bred sons of Kentucky who had left home and kindred behind them had already made a record of devotion and daring, which grew in lustre to the end of the war, and which any troops of any army might envy. At this battle of Murfreesboro they had waded the river in chilly December, had charged and captured the first heights and doubled back one wing of their stubbornly fighting antagonists. They had, however, been repelled with terrific slaughter in the impossible effort to capture the still more commanding hill. In this fearful assault they had marched between converg- ing lines of fire drawn up in the shape of the letter V, the apex of those lines formed by hills crowned with batteries. Among their killed was the dashing General Hanson, one of the foremost soldiers of Bragg's army. No troops that were ever marshalled could have suc- ceeded under such conditions and against such odds. Had they persisted in the effort, they would simply have invited annihilation. Smarting under a sense of the in- justice done themselves and their dead comrades by the commanding general's despatch to Richmond, and realiz- ing their own inability to have the wrong righted, they appealed to General Breckinridge, their own commander, to resent the insult. Resolutions and protests were powerless to soothe their smarting sensibilities or to assuage their burning wrath. They urged General Breckinridge to resign his position in the army and call General Bragg to personal account— to challenge him to single-handed combat. General Breckinridge must have felt as keenly as they the wrong inflicted, but he was more self-contained. He sought to appease them by reminding them of the exalted motives which had im- pelled them to enlist in the army as volunteers, of the

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The Fabian policy of General Bragg, adopted after the bloody encounter at Murfreesboro, his retreat to Chatta- nooga and beyond it, called from press and people fewer and milder protests than those afterward made against General Joseph E. Johnston for a like policy. It would seem that the persistent criticisms of General Johnston for not meeting General Sherman between Dalton and At- lanta in determined battle, might have been applied with equal force to General Bragg for surrendering the strong positions in the gaps of the Cumberland Mountains and the line of the Tennessee River to General Rosecrans, with- out more resolute resistance. It is much easier, however, to criticise a commander than to command an army. In both these cases the strong positions alluded to could have been successfully flanked and the Confederate com- manders forced to retire, as the Union troops moved around toward the rear and threatened the Southern lines of communication and supplies. General Rose- crans was too able a soldier and too wise a strategist to assail General Bragg in his selected stronghold when the country was open to him on either flank. His policy, therefore, was to cross the Tennessee River, not in front of Chattanooga, where Bragg was ready to meet him, but at a distance either above or below it. Both were practicable ; and he set his army in motion toward points both above and below the city, thus leaving General Bragg in doubt as to his real purpose. He sent a force to the hills just opposite Chattanooga, and opened heavy fire with his batteries upon Bragg's position. He sent