Battle of Chickamauga – September 18-20, 1863

The battle of Chickamauga took place on September 18-20, 1863 between the Army of Tennessee, under the command of General Braxton Bragg and Lt. General James Longstreet, and the Army of the Cumberland, under the command of Major General William Rosecrans and Major General George H. Thomas. General Bragg’s overall objective was to retake Chattanooga, Tennessee, which was an important rail center for the Confederacy. The battle ended in the Union’s defeat, as Confederates encircled  Chattanooga and forced the Union troops to fall back into the city. General Ulysses Grant, who broke the Confederate’s siege of Chattanooga in November 1863 and pushed their forces back into Georgia, removed General Rosecrans from his command. Teachers can find some resources on the battle at the National Park Service website, including a short essay that provides a broad overview of the campaign as well as historic photographs of the battlefield and monuments. (Most of the images were produced after the war). The NPS also has two pamphlets that some might find helpful: The Campaign for Chattanooga (1932), Chickamauga and Chattanooga Battlefields (1956). The Official Records also published a number of documents related to this battle, including Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana’s reports to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Dana observed the engagement first hand and his initial dispatch  reflected his fear that the Union had suffered a major defeat. “Chickamauga is as fatal a name in our history as Bull Run,” as Dana explained late in the afternoon on September 20, 1863. He later admitted that his first report “[had] given too dark a view of our disaster,” but Union forces had suffered heavy losses. Some estimates put the total number of casualties at 34,624 (Union 16,170, CSA 18,454). The large number of casualties on both sides was a subject that Confederate General James Longstreet reflected on in his memoir that was published after the war:

“Official reports show that on both sides the casualties – killed, wounded, and missing – embraced the enormous proportion of thirty three per cent. of the troops actually engaged. On the Union side there were over a score of regiments in which the losses in this single fight exceeded 49.4 per cent., which was the heaviest loss sustained by a German regiment at any time during the Franco-German war. The “charge of the Light Brigade” at Balaklava has been made famous in song and history, yet there were thirty Union regiments that each lost ten per cent. more men at Chickamauga, and many Confederate regiments whose mortality exceeded this.”