Missionary Ridge: The Charge Nobody Ordered

On November twenty-fifth, eighteen sixty-three, Ulysses Grant ordered George Thomas to take the Confederate rifle pits at the base of Missionary Ridge and hold. It was a limited objective. The ridge itself, rising roughly three to four hundred feet above the Chattanooga valley with near-vertical slopes, was considered effectively impregnable. No sane commander expected an infantry assault on that slope to succeed.

What happened next is one of the most debated moments of the Civil War. Thomas's four divisions, about twenty-three thousand men, swept into the rifle pits at the base of the ridge and took them in minutes. Then, without orders, without a signal from anyone, they kept going. Up the slope. Into the Confederate guns. Soldiers later said they went up because staying in the captured rifle pits, caught between Confederate fire from above and their own artillery behind them, was more dangerous than advancing. Some said pride drove them. Some said they simply could not stop.

Grant watched from Orchard Knob, furious. He turned to Thomas, and then to Gordon Granger, and demanded to know who ordered those men up the ridge. Neither man claimed the order. Grant said someone would answer for it if it turned out wrong.

It did not turn out wrong. The Confederate defenders on the ridge crest, many of them veterans already shattered by weeks of siege and the recent loss at Lookout Mountain, broke and ran before the climbing Union soldiers reached the top. The entire Confederate line collapsed in minutes. Bragg's army fled into Georgia. Grant's furious question became a footnote. The charge that nobody ordered had cracked the Confederacy's hold on Chattanooga and opened the road to Atlanta.