Terrible Swift Sword by Joseph Wheelan

apprehension for the future” because of the large Confederate troop formations in the area. Major General George Thomas, who commanded the XIV Corps, had roused himself from his intermittent naps, whenever Rosecrans addressed him, to say, “I would strengthen the left.” The meeting ended about midnight, coffee was brought in, and for reasons unknown
XX Corps commander Major General Alexander McCook felt moved to sing the ballad “The Hebrew Maid.”
    Afterward, Sheridan had paced for hours, wondering whether he had done everything possible to prepare his men for the coming battle. As the sun poked above the horizon, a Confederate attack was expected momentarily. But none came. 2
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    ON SEPTEMBER 19, VETERANS of both armies had remarked on the ferocity of the fighting, although Braxton Bragg described it as “skirmishing.” It was far more than that. A division from Thomas’s corps on the Union left had started it by fording Chickamauga Creek to engage what it thought was merely an enemy brigade.
    The collision exploded into a raging battle pitting four of Thomas’s six divisions—half of Rosecrans’s army was concentrated in Thomas’s sector—against large Rebel forces in the dense woods. The terrific noise made by myriad artillery batteries and thousands of muskets sounded to an Alabama soldier “as if all the fires of earth and hell had been turned loose in one mighty effort to destroy each other.” (Decades later, local sawmills would reject logs from Chickamauga because embedded minié balls, grapeshot, and shell fragments fouled the saw teeth.) Amid the furious combat, the soldiers saw an owl fly up, only to be attacked by crows. One infantryman was heard to exclaim, “Moses, what a country! The very birds are fighting!” 3
    The fighting had spread down the line to Thomas Crittenden’s XXI Corps in the center and then to McCook’s XX Corps on the right. There, at about 4 p.m., Major General John Bell Hood’s two divisions from the Army of Northern Virginia struck Jefferson C. Davis’s division. Sheridan’s timely arrival with two brigades from Lee and Gordon’s Mills, south of the battlefield, and the appearance of Thomas Wood’s division from Crittenden’s corps had stopped Hood’s attack. But Sheridan described it as “an ugly fight” in which he had lost a brigade commander, Colonel Luther P. Bradley.
    As the Hood fight was ending, Confederate major general Patrick Cleburne’s division assaulted the Union left—Thomas’s corps. Thomas held, but the sun set on chaotic fighting. When darkness came, the shooting stopped.
    Sheridan suggested to Crittenden that they counterattack that night, but Crittenden’s men were fought out and in no condition for a night attack. The exhausted Yankees camped without fires and ate dry meals of hardtack and bully beef from their haversacks. The day’s fighting was only a prelude. 4
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    THE EARLY REBEL ATTACK anticipated for September 20 did not materialize. Lieutenant General Leonidas Polk was at a farmhouse three miles away, reading a newspaper and waiting for his Sunday breakfast, when one of Braxton Bragg’s staff officers finally located him. Polk knew neither that there was to be an early-morning attack nor that he was supposed to lead it.

    Hours later, at 9:30 a.m., the Rebels struck hard at the Union left, defended by Thomas’s massively reinforced XIV Corps. Thomas pleaded for more reinforcements, and Rosecrans sent brigades from Crittenden’s corps in the center and McCook’s on the right. Rosecrans and Thomas were certain that the Confederates intended to break the Union left in order to seize the roads behind Thomas and isolate the Army of the Cumberland from Chattanooga.
    They were wrong, although their mistake was understandable given that dense woods, smoke, and fog largely hid the armies from one another. With the