The Battles for Chattanooga: Grant Breaks the Siege

In the autumn of eighteen sixty-three, the Union Army of the Cumberland was trapped. After its defeat at Chickamauga in September, the army had retreated to Chattanooga, and Confederate General Braxton Bragg seized the high ground surrounding the city, cutting off the supply lines. Soldiers inside Chattanooga were on half rations. Horses and mules were dying of starvation. The army could not move and could barely eat.

Washington responded by consolidating command. Ulysses S. Grant was given authority over all Union forces in the western theater and arrived in Chattanooga in late October. He immediately began solving the supply problem, establishing what soldiers called the Cracker Line, a supply route through the Tennessee River valley that broke the worst of the food crisis. Then he prepared to fight.

Reinforcements arrived: twenty thousand troops under General Joseph Hooker from the east, more under General William Tecumseh Sherman from the west. On November twenty-third, Grant opened his offensive with a demonstration against Confederate positions at Orchard Knob. The next day Hooker attacked Lookout Mountain; Sherman hit the northern end of Missionary Ridge. On the afternoon of November twenty-fifth, Grant ordered a limited assault on the rifle pits at the base of Missionary Ridge. What happened next surprised nearly everyone, including Grant himself.

The men who took the rifle pits kept going. Without orders, regiment after regiment began climbing the ridge toward the Confederate line at the top. By tradition, Grant turned to General George Thomas and asked who had ordered the assault, and no one claimed to have done so. Instead, the Confederate line broke. The Army of the Cumberland ran up Missionary Ridge in one of the most dramatic unordered charges of the Civil War, ending the siege and opening the door to Sherman's Atlanta campaign the following spring.