The Rock of Chickamauga

September eighteen sixty-three. The Union Army had just driven Confederate forces out of Chattanooga without a major battle, a strategic coup. General William Rosecrans, commanding the Army of the Cumberland, pressed the advantage, pushing his forces south into Georgia in pursuit of the retreating Confederates under General Braxton Bragg.

Bragg had not retreated far enough to be broken. He had been reinforced, including by troops under General James Longstreet sent by rail from Virginia. On September eighteenth, Union and Confederate forces collided at Chickamauga Creek, about twelve miles south of Chattanooga. The fighting was two days of close, bloody, densely wooded combat. The second morning, a miscommunication in the Union command structure opened a gap directly in the path of one of Longstreet's massive assaults. The Union right crumpled. Rosecrans himself was swept from the field. One-third of the Army of the Cumberland streamed back toward Chattanooga in disorder.

What remained held. Major General George Henry Thomas, commanding the left wing, pulled his forces onto a ridge called Snodgrass Hill and held it against repeated Confederate charges until nightfall. His defense saved the army. The troops called him what they had seen that day. He became the Rock of Chickamauga.

The Battle of Chickamauga was the most significant Union defeat in the Western Theater of the war, and the second-bloodiest battle of the entire conflict after Gettysburg. More than thirty-four thousand men were killed, wounded, or missing across both armies in two days. The Confederates had won the field. What they did with it would change everything.