Wauhatchie: The Night Battle and the Cracker Line

By October eighteen sixty-three, the Union Army of the Cumberland was trapped in Chattanooga and starving. Confederate General Braxton Bragg held the high ground on Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, commanding the Tennessee River crossings and cutting off the main Federal supply line. Men were reduced to quarter rations. Artillery horses were dying in the streets for lack of forage. Something had to change or the army would have to surrender or starve.

The solution was what Union soldiers called the Cracker Line, a new supply route using Brown's Ferry on the Tennessee River, far enough upstream that Confederate artillery could not reach it. On October twenty-seventh, Union troops seized Brown's Ferry, and the next day General Joe Hooker moved a force through Lookout Valley to secure the line's southern end. He detached Brigadier General John Geary's division at Wauhatchie Station on the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad to guard a large train of Federal supplies.

The Confederates saw the isolated division and the supply train and attacked. General Micah Jenkins's division came out of the Lookout Mountain darkness after midnight on October twenty-ninth in what became one of the only true night battles of the entire Civil War. Jenkins hit Geary hard, but Geary's men held in the darkness, fighting largely by sound and muzzle flash. Hooker sent two divisions rushing back to Geary's relief. As more Federal troops arrived, Jenkins withdrew to Lookout Mountain.

The Cracker Line opened the next day. Within two weeks, Federal supplies were flowing freely into Chattanooga. The starving army recovered its strength. A month later, Grant broke the siege entirely at Missionary Ridge. The night skirmish at Wauhatchie, a fight most people have never heard of, was the hinge on which the Chattanooga campaign turned.