The Battle Above the Clouds

On the morning of November twenty-fourth, eighteen sixty-three, a thick fog rolled across Lookout Mountain and swallowed the battlefield whole. Soldiers waiting in Chattanooga below could see nothing but clouds clinging to the upper ridges. They could hear the distant crack of rifle fire and the heavier percussion of artillery, but the action was invisible, happening somewhere up in the gray.

General Joseph Hooker had been given the assignment of taking Lookout Mountain as part of Grant's larger offensive to break the Confederate siege of Chattanooga. Hooker commanded roughly ten thousand men. The Confederates under General Carter Stevenson held the mountain with about eighty-seven hundred troops dug into defensive positions on the slopes and at the summit.

Hooker sent Brigadier General John Geary's division across Lookout Creek and up the western slope of the mountain. The terrain was brutal: boulders, steep timber, and the natural fortification of the rock face itself. Confederate fire poured down through the fog. But the Union advance pushed relentlessly upward, pressing the Confederate line back across the slopes through the afternoon hours.

By late afternoon, the Confederates had been forced back to the summit. During the night, with the Battle of Missionary Ridge about to open the following day, Braxton Bragg ordered his men to abandon Lookout Mountain entirely and consolidate their forces. When the fog lifted the next morning, Union soldiers looked up to see the Stars and Stripes flying from the summit. The men below cheered.

Officially, the battle was over, won in fog no one could see through. The name came after the fact: soldiers and journalists called it the Battle Above the Clouds, and the nickname captured something true about the nature of war, where the most important things often happen out of sight.