Mountains Touched with Fire by Wiley Sword

Author:Wiley Sword
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 1995-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

At 1:30 P.M., disaster had seemed imminent for Carter L. Stevenson’s Confederates on Lookout Mountain. Walthall’s Brigade had been shattered and nearly destroyed; the remnants were barely able to hang on along the fringes of Moore’s line. John C. Moore had re-formed his brigade along a boulder-strewn copse in front of the Summertown Road. Both Moore’s and Walthall’s troops were in such disarray that Walthall told a staff officer if the enemy attacked, they couldn’t hold their position. Walthall’s men were nearly out of ammunition, and Moore’s troops had been largely supplied with improper ammunition for their old, defective arms. Moreover, there was no sign of the division commander, John K. Jackson. Mudwall Jackson said he had started out to join them but was delayed in attempting to rally some of Walthall’s retreating men. After allegedly failing to stop them, he had returned to his headquarters.26

Due to the lengthy impasse after the loss of the Cravens house, a semblance of order was restored in the Confederate Summertown Road line. Most importantly, however, about 1:45 P.M. the all-Alabama brigade of Edmund W. Pettus moved into position behind Walthall’s thin line. Responding to urgent requests from Moore and Walthall for reinforcements, about 12:30 P.M. Carter L. Stevenson, at the mountain crest, had sent Pettus and his troops rushing to the defense of the Cravens house plateau. Although it was Stevenson’s intention to defend the nose of the mountain along the plateau, Pettus arrived too late—the Cravens house and its line of breastworks were already lost. After replacing Walthall’s exhausted men, who quickly went to the rear, Pettus made a limited advance along the base of the palisades, displacing some of David Ireland’s soldiers.27

This soon created an interesting situation. Ireland asked for support from Geary’s other troops. Walter C. Whitaker was nearby, in charge of the reserve line. Although a veteran brigade commander, Whitaker had been drinking heavily, said one of David Ireland’s aides. Most of Whitaker’s men were resting with stacked arms near the Cravens house, and he refused to order his troops forward as requested by David Ireland. Already, said the tipsy Whitaker, he had asked some of Hooker’s newly arriving troops to help take the Summertown Road. The colonel of one of Cruft’s brigades, William Grose, had flatly refused to do so, displaying a copy of Hooker’s order to halt at the plateau.28

Although Ireland pleaded with Whitaker to move forward, he was only offered a drink from Whitaker’s large flask. Thereafter, since Pettus’s troops had halted in the heavy timber adjacent to the bluff, Geary’s mixed front-line troops became ensnarled in a desultory, ragged firefight through the thickening mist. Visibility was restricted to less than a hundred yards, yet the fighting was vicious and often deadly. The Confederates rolled giant boulders down from the heights, the huge rocks hurtling out of the mist and crashing randomly through the Federal lines. Mixed among the boulders were artillery shells hurled by hand, their fuses cut and ignited so as to explode among the Yankees below.

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