September 10 - 11, 1863 - Mistake at McLemore’s Cove Unlike Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, Confederate armies west of the Appalachians and east of the Mississippi River seldom won major battles. The biggest success, at Chickamauga in late September 1863, was a Pyrrhic victory, costing the Rebel Army of Tennessee more casualties than the defeated federal Army of the Cumberland. Kennesaw Mountain was a sizable Confederate win, but most of the other convincing victories in the region – Chickasaw Bayou, Holly Springs – were strategically small. Yet there were at least two instances when the Army of Tennessee should have achieved a significant victory, but failed for mysterious reasons. The first was at McLemore’s Cove on Sept. 10 and 11, 1863, shortly before the nearby battle of Chickamauga. Things had not gone well for the Confederates in Tennessee that summer. The Union general William Rosecrans had deployed his Army of the Cumberland with such skill in mid-June 1863 that it suffered minimal casualties when maneuvering Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee out of the central part of the state. Bragg was forced to retreat into fortified Chattanooga, which was barely within Tennessee state lines. Then, on Aug. 21, Rosecrans began a follow-up campaign to dislodge Bragg from Chattanooga in order to capture the railroad center without storming its defenses. On Sept. 9 he succeeded, when Gen. Thomas Crittenden’s corps entered the town without the loss of a single man. Ominously, however, the Union movements left parts of Rosecrans’s army widely separated and vulnerable to defeat by a larger, massed Confederate force. Rosecrans’s army was composed of three corps under Generals Crittenden, George Thomas and Alexander McCook. On Sept. 10, Crittenden was in Chattanooga, but Thomas was 15 miles southwest in the Stevens Gap area of Lookout Mountain, while McCook was another 20 miles southwest of Thomas at the town of Alpine. If the Confederates launched a concentrated assault on one of them, the others were too distant to provide support, particularly considering the mountainous terrain. Rosecrans, however, was unconcerned, since he assumed that the rebels were desperately trying to retreat farther toward Atlanta. It was precisely what Bragg wanted him to believe. Earlier Bragg had directed selected rebel soldiers to pretend to desert and propagate phony reports among the Federals of despondency within Confederate ranks. Rosecrans took the bait. He instructed a skeptical General Thomas, whose corps was in the center of the Union formation, to quickly push his divisions eastward through Stevens Gap in Lookout Mountain and continue through Dug Gap in Pigeon Mountain, several miles farther east. Thomas could then attack the retreating Confederates on their flank. Along the way Thomas’s troops would enter a geological formation called McLemore’s Cove, a canyon-like feature with a broad floor plain and a steep dead end created by the conjunction of Lookout and Pigeon mountains. If attacked by superior numbers from the north and east, Thomas’s troops would have no way to escape. General Thomas’s corps was composed of four divisions. Although he was opposed to Rosecrans’s hasty pursuit order, there was no choice but to comply. On Sept. 9 he sent Gen. James Negley’s 4,600-man division into McLemore’s Cove from the west. By evening it was camped just short of Dug Gap, through which it would march the next day across Pigeon Mountain, where Rosecrans hoped it would find Bragg’s demoralized army marching southward. The Union forces were walking right into Bragg’s trap. The Confederate commander ordered Gen. Thomas Hindman’s division to block the northern exit from the Cove and attack Negley’s flank on the morning of Sept. 10. He also ordered Gen. D. H. Hill to dispatch Patrick Cleburne’s division – the best in his army – into Dug Gap, where it would simultaneously attack Negley from the east. “The destruction of Negley’s division was as certain as good generalship could make it,” wrote the historian Steven Woodworth. “Bragg’s subordinates needed only to carry out his orders and the Army of Tennessee’s first clear-cut victory would be a reality.” It didn’t happen. Hill and Hindman responded inscrutably. Hill said he could not comply because Cleburne was ill and Dug Gap was too encumbered with obstacles. In truth, Cleburne was perfectly healthy and the Dug Gap obstacles could have been cleared in an hour. Hindman got into position O.K., but decided not to attack until he heard the guns of Hill’s assault, which never happened. Bragg temporarily accepted Hill’s excuses but almost immediately ordered Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner to reinforce Hindman with two additional divisions to compensate for Hill’s refusal to use Cleburne. Hindman and Hill were mystifying officers. A year earlier, a copy of confidential marching orders for Robert E. Lee’s entire army addressed to Hill inexplicably fell into Union hands. The incident may have changed history by triggering a normally tentative Union general George B. McClellan into prompt action that stopped Lee’s first invasion of the North at the Battle of Antietam. Similarly, 10 months earlier, in Arkansas, Hindman brilliantly marched an army into an advantageous position, only to forfeit decision-making to subordinates once the fight at Prairie Grove got under way. The consequent uncoordinated rebel attacks resulted in an indecisive battle. Despite his frustration, Bragg appreciated that the morning of Sept. 11 would give him a second chance, because Hill finally agreed to attack from the east and Butler’s two additional divisions were available to help Hindman from the north. Although by then Negley had figured out that the Confederates were out there, he did not know how many, and General Rosecrans, his superior, still believed the rebels were retreating on the east side of Pigeon Mountain. Rosecrans did not want any of Thomas’s divisions to backtrack. Although Thomas ordered a second division to reinforce Negley, the combined 10,000 Federals still remained decisively outnumbered by 30,000 rebels on the morning of the 11th. Unfortunately, on the evening of Sept. 10th Hindman became apprehensive that he was about to be attacked by unseen Federals at his rear. He sent a messenger to Bragg, then encamped with Hill near the next day’s anticipated action at Dug Gap. The messenger was a French staff officer named Nocquet who could barely speak English and whose loyalty to the Confederacy was questionable. After listening to Nocquet’s message, Bragg asked an informed cavalry officer if enemy troops were near Hindman’s rear and was told there were none. Therefore, Bragg instructed Nocquet to tell Hindman that he was to attack on the morning of Sept. 11 as ordered, even if he lost his entire command. Even though Nocquet returned by 6:30 a.m., Hindman spent most of the day rearranging troop attack formations and otherwise delaying. Nonetheless, the harmless rebel activities alerted Negley to his endangered position, from which he quietly withdrew. Hindman did not attack until 4 p.m., by which time there were few Union soldiers remaining to be trapped. Bragg was enraged, but Hindman later claimed that Nocquet told him Bragg’s orders were discretionary. The following month Nocquet infiltrated (returned to?) federal lines with $150,000 in funds intended for construction projects. The Confederate failure at McLemore’s Cove wasn’t merely a lost opportunity to destroy 1 or 2 divisions of the 12 comprising the opposing Union army. Even some of the average rebel infantrymen were nearly in tears at the obvious mismanagement of a golden opportunity. As the historian Glenn Tucker explained: Had Thomas’s corps, or a sizable portion of it, been captured in McLemore’s Cove, Crittenden’s corps isolated fifty miles from McCook could scarcely have escaped, and with Crittenden captured or driven beyond the Tennessee River, McCook would have been easy prey. In short, Rosecrans’s army would likely have been decimated, and the Union push toward Atlanta halted. As it actually happened, however, the incident at McLemore’s Cove convinced Rosecrans that the Confederates were not retreating. Consequently, and fortuitously, he ordered his own army to concentrate. The result was the battle of Chickamauga, where the two mighty armies faced each other in full force. Source: opinionator.blogs.nytimes - by: Philip Leigh Pictured below: Braxton Bragg, CSA; William Rosecrans, USA cafepress/CivilWar1861to1865Part2 cafepress/USCivilWarColoredApparel
Posted on: Thu, 11 Sep 2014 09:34:24 +0000
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