The 10 Biggest Civil War Blunders by Edward H. Bonekemper III

Author:Edward H. Bonekemper III
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781621577607
Publisher: Regnery History
Published: 2017-12-28T05:00:00+00:00

General Henry W. Halleck. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Responding to Grant’s September 30 letter, Halleck wrote obliquely on October 11 that a decision had been made in Washington to use Grant for something other than a Mobile campaign: “I regret equally with yourself that you could not have forces to move on Mobile; but there were certain reasons, which I cannot now explain which precluded such an attempt. You need not fear being left idle. The moment you are well enough to take the field you will have abundant occupation.”31

Grant, who had been injured when his spooked horse fell on him in New Orleans, reported his recovery to Halleck and soon received a major new assignment. Lincoln, Stanton, and Halleck sent Grant to Chattanooga to rescue Rosecrans’s army. Rosecrans’s personal fate was left in Grant’s hands. Assuming command of the Military Division of the West, which included three armies, and relieving Rosecrans of command, Grant traveled to Chattanooga, where he saved the Union army with a victory that forced Bragg’s army back into northern Georgia. With his victory at Chattanooga on November 25, Grant once again became a national hero.32

The Union lost the Southern winter campaign season for advancing on the Confederates because Halleck continued to deny Grant’s renewed recommendation to attack Mobile and then move on to Montgomery and Atlanta.33 By late 1863, after his successes at Vicksburg and Chattanooga, Grant took a greater interest in a national strategy that would finally end the war. Bruce Catton explains, “[Grant] had at last reached the point where he could see that final triumph for the Union depended on crowding a beaten foe without respite, permitting no breathing spell in which the weaker antagonist could regain his balance and repair damages—using the superior power of the North, in short, to apply unrelenting pressure of a sort the Confederacy had not the resources to resist.”34

So Grant looked again toward Mobile. He persuaded Charles Dana of the desirability of a Mobile campaign, and on November 29, after the crushing victory at Missionary Ridge only hours before, Dana wrote to Stanton from Chattanooga about Grant’s plans for a winter campaign. He reported that Grant wanted to use thirty-five thousand “surplus” troops from his armies for “an offensive campaign against Mobile and the interior of Alabama.” Grant would move from New Orleans or Pascagoula Bay. Dana outlined the proposal and endorsed it:

Investing Mobile, [Grant] will leave a sufficient force to hold his lines and keep the garrison imprisoned without any unnecessary fighting, while with the mass of his army he operates in the interior against Montgomery, Selma, or whatsoever point invites attention. He has asked me to lay this plan before you, and to ask for it the approbation of the Government. He will himself write to General Halleck on the subject, and perhaps also to yourself. I earnestly hope that you will agree to his design, and as soon as may be give your assent to its execution. A winter campaign may be made there with little if any difficulty.

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