Hoover's Gap and the Lightning Brigade

On the morning of June twenty-fourth, eighteen sixty-three, in a steady drizzle, Colonel John T. Wilder led his brigade of mounted infantry into the narrow valley of Hoover's Gap and changed the nature of the war in Middle Tennessee in a single morning.

Wilder's men were called the Lightning Brigade, and they had earned the name. Unlike ordinary infantry, they rode horses, which gave them the speed of cavalry. Unlike ordinary cavalry, they fought on foot with rifles, which gave them the staying power of infantry. And unlike almost anyone else in the western theater at that point, they carried Spencer repeating rifles, seven-shot lever-action weapons that could fire three times faster than a muzzle-loader. Wilder's men each signed a note to pay for the Spencers, and Wilder co-signed the notes, because the Army would not issue them.

The Confederate cavalry regiment holding Hoover's Gap was overwhelmed before it could react. When Confederate infantry under General William Bate rushed forward to retake the gap, they were met with a withering volume of fire they could not match. Bate attacked three times and suffered heavy losses before pulling back. The Lightning Brigade held the gap against all comers.

Hoover's Gap was the opening move of the Tullahoma Campaign, Rosecrans's nearly bloodless maneuver that drove Bragg out of Middle Tennessee in about nine days. By threatening multiple gaps simultaneously with fast-moving forces, Rosecrans forced Bragg to abandon Tullahoma and retreat all the way to Chattanooga. The Union gained a hundred miles of Tennessee without a major set-piece battle. Military historians consider the Tullahoma Campaign one of the most efficient operations of the war. It started here, in the rain, with seven-shot repeaters.