The Battle Above the Clouds

After Chickamauga, the defeated Union Army retreated to Chattanooga and found itself besieged. Bragg's Confederate forces occupied the heights surrounding the city, Lookout Mountain to the southwest, Missionary Ridge to the east, Raccoon Mountain to the northwest. Supply lines were cut. Rations were down to quarter allotments. Army mules were dying of starvation. The Union Army of the Cumberland, trapped in Chattanooga in the fall of eighteen sixty-three, was slowly starving.

Washington sent Ulysses Grant to fix it. Grant opened a supply corridor called the Cracker Line and began planning an offensive. The attacks came November twenty-third through twenty-fifth, eighteen sixty-three. On the twenty-fourth, Union forces under General Joseph Hooker assaulted Lookout Mountain.

The engagement has been called the Battle Above the Clouds, because that morning a fog bank settled partway down the mountain's slope. Union troops climbing through timber and rocky terrain disappeared into gray mist. The sounds of fighting drifted up out of the cloud. Confederate forces under General Carter Stevenson could not clearly see what was happening below them. By afternoon, Hooker's men had driven the Confederates off the mountain and emerged at the summit in clear air.

The following day, November twenty-fifth, Grant ordered the Army of the Cumberland to take the Confederate rifle pits at the base of Missionary Ridge as a limited demonstration. The soldiers took the pits, then, without orders, kept climbing. They climbed the full height of the ridge and broke through what Grant himself believed should have been an impregnable defensive line. Bragg's army retreated to Georgia. The gateway to the Deep South was open. Sherman and Grant would use it the following spring.