Terrible Swift Sword by Joseph Wheelan Page B

were slammed backward as though struck by a flash flood. Under “terrible fire,” Sheridan recalled Lytle’s and Bradley’s brigades, which had begun marching to Thomas, to meet the onslaught. But the intensive gunfire unleashed by Longstreet’s assault columns “shivered the two brigades to pieces.” 8
    Lytle, a lawyer and well-known lyric poet from Cincinnati, as well as one of the most beloved brigade commanders in the Union army, pulled on his gloves prefatory to leading a counterattack and reportedly said, “If I must die, I will die as a gentleman.” He was shot four times and killed. Confederate officers who had known Lytle before the war guarded his body; a Rebel surgeon cut a lock of Lytle’s hair and sent it to his sister, along with her brother’s notebook and a poem he had composed. 9
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    BOTH SHERIDAN’S AND DAVIS’S divisions had been routed. In just forty-five minutes, Longstreet’s divisions had crushed the Union right and driven it back one mile. In the hour of stunning defeat, Captain Edwin Parsons of the 24th Wisconsin saw Sheridan “come tearing down in the rear of our line, alone, his hat in hand, and showing in his face the agony he felt at the disaster that had befallen our army there.” 10

    As Longstreet turned his columns to strike Thomas’s right and Leonidas Polk continued to hammer his front, Longstreet’s left column, commanded by General Thomas Hindman, encountered the only serious resistance from the Union right.
    Union colonel John T. Wilder had led his cavalry brigade to a hilltop that faced the left side of the charging column. Quickly dismounting, the Yankees opened fire on the Rebels with their Spencer repeating rifles. The lethal volley prompted Hindman’s division to veer to its left and attack Wilder’s brigade. With sheeting gunfire from their seven-shot carbines, Wilder’s men repelled four assaults before the Rebels gave up. 11
    Rosecrans believed that holding the Dry Valley Road, which looped around the rear of his lines, south to north, was essential to his army’s survival. It must be kept open so that the routed troops from the right and center could reach McFarland’s Gap and Rossville, byways to Chattanooga.
    Rosecrans ordered Sheridan and Davis to make a stand on the Dry Valley Road with their divisions. Longstreet had to be prevented from marching up the road and capturing the Union commissary wagons, or capturing Rossville and severing the way to Chattanooga. 12
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    ON A LOW RIDGE overlooking the former positions of the army’s right and center wings, Sheridan collected his stunned division. Never had he been beaten so badly. Sheridan and Davis began marching up the Dry Valley Road.
    Lieutenant Colonel Gates Thruston, the XX Corps chief of staff, encountered the two generals as they marched their men around the army’s rear. Sheridan, he wrote, was “furious . . . . swearing mad, and no wonder. . . . . His splendid fighting qualities and his fine soldiers had not had half a chance. He had lost faith.” Thruston offered to find out what Thomas’s situation was and to report back to Sheridan and Davis as soon as possible. He rode off. 13
    At last free to report to Rosecrans, Sheridan discovered that he had already left the battlefield. “It is to be regretted that he did not wait till I could join him, for the delay would have permitted him to see that matters were not in quite such bad shape as he supposed,” Sheridan later wrote.
    Rosecrans had joined the shattered formations making their way back to Chattanooga, where he intended to organize the city’s defenses and a “straggler line” to turn back troops retreating from the battlefield. He had planned to send his chief of staff, Garfield, to Chattanooga, but Garfield had convinced Rosecrans to take charge of Chattanooga himself while Garfield went to Thomas.
    Rosecrans reached