Rock Of Chickamauga (February 1962 | Volume: 13, Issue: 2)

Rock Of Chickamauga

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Authors: Bruce Catton

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February 1962 | Volume 13, Issue 2

The man who succeeded Rosecrans, of course, was General George H. Thomas, who saved the day at Chickamauga and was known as “The Rock” forever after; a man whose fame was immeasurably enhanced by the very defeat which put Rosecrans’ own fame under an enduring cloud. Yet if Thomas won national acclaim for what he did at Chickamauga, he remains another general who, almost unaccountably, was somehow deprived of the full measure of recognition he might have had. His record contains no blots, yet he was obscured by others: the towering reputations of men like Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan put just a little shadow on him.

Perhaps one trouble with Thomas was that he had no important backing. He came from Virginia, and his state had seceded; he stayed with the Union, but when the war began, his state had no important representatives in Washington to push his cause. His merits spoke for themselves, but nobody else bothered to speak for them; at one point, when his name was up for promotion, Lincoln is supposed to have remarked, “Let the Virginian wait.”

Thomas waited, and what he waited for never quite came … until long after his death, which may have been a little too late. Anyway, he is now the subject of a genuinely first-rate study in Francis F. McKinney’s Education in Violence , a book which is unreservedly recommended to anyone who wants to know more about one of the nation’s greatest soldiers.

It appears from this, and from all the rest of the record, that Thomas got his reputation on the wrong basis. He was supposed to be the immovable man, the soldier who was indomitable and who stolidly dug in his heels and refused to be moved, and at places like Chickamauga he earned that reputation beyond question. When Rosecrans was driven back to Chattanooga, it was Thomas who stayed, formed a new line out of broken remnants of beaten men, held the line in spite of everything, and reduced the battle from an overwhelming disaster to a mere setback. Yet he was not primarily a defensive fighter. On the contrary he was aggressive and mobile, and he struck some of the most devastating offensive blows in all the war; and the legend that portrays him simply as a man who could hold the line when things went badly is a pronounced bit of miscasting.

It was Thomas who first cracked the Confederate line in Kentucky, unhinging its right wing in the Battle of Mill Springs early in 1862. It was Thomas who provided the essential stiffening for the Army of the Cumberland at Stones River and at Chickamauga; it was Thomas who managed to combine a care for details—provision of proper training, adequate uniforming and equipping, due attention to logistics—with the capacity for swift movement once the details had been taken care of. Twice in all the war a Federal army was