Ringgold Gap: Cleburne Holds the Door

The gap through Taylor's Ridge just south of here is a narrow pass where a railroad line cuts through solid rock. On November twenty-seventh, eighteen sixty-three, it was the only thing standing between the shattered Confederate Army of Tennessee and destruction.

Two days earlier, Union forces had broken the Confederate lines on Missionary Ridge near Chattanooga in one of the most stunning reversals of the entire war. General Braxton Bragg's army was in full retreat, and its artillery, supply wagons, and equipment were streaming south along the Western and Atlantic Railroad. If Union forces caught them in the open, the army's fighting capacity might be finished entirely.

Bragg ordered Major General Patrick Cleburne to take his division of roughly four thousand two hundred men and hold the gap at Ringgold long enough for the supply trains to escape. Waiting for them was Major General Joseph Hooker with sixteen thousand troops.

Cleburne positioned his men in the rocky slopes flanking the gap and waited. The fighting lasted about five hours. Hooker attacked repeatedly and was thrown back each time. In terrain that nullified his numerical advantage, Cleburne's smaller force inflicted more than five hundred casualties while suffering roughly two hundred twenty of their own.

By noon, the Confederate supply trains were through. Cleburne withdrew in good order. The Army of Tennessee lived to fight another season.

It was Cleburne's masterpiece. He had already earned a reputation as one of the Confederacy's finest division commanders, but Ringgold Gap sealed it. Fellow generals began calling him the Stonewall of the West, a comparison to Thomas Jackson that carried the highest military compliment the Confederate officer corps could offer.

Cleburne was killed at the Battle of Franklin in Tennessee less than a year later. He was thirty-six years old, an Irish immigrant who had become one of the most gifted combat commanders either side produced during the entire war.