Gateway to the Confederacy: New Perspectives on the Chickamauga and Chattanooga Campaigns, 1862–1863 ed. by Evan C. Jones and Wiley Sword (review)

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Reviewed by: Gateway to the Confederacy: New Perspectives on the Chickamauga and Chattanooga Campaigns, 1862–1863 ed. by Evan C. Jones and Wiley Sword Jonathan A. Noyalas Gateway to the Confederacy: New Perspectives on the Chickamauga and Chattanooga Campaigns, 1862–1863. Ed. Evan C. Jones and Wiley Sword. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014. ISBN 978-0-8071-5509-7, 328 pp., cloth, $39.95 As Gen. Braxton Bragg’s army retreated from Chattanooga on November 25, 1863, Lt. R. M. Collins, 15th Texas Infantry, told a comrade that the defeat would prove “the death knell of the Confederacy.” Collins’s remarks proved prophetic, as Union success at Chattanooga opened the Deep South to Union invasion, the pressures from which contributed mightily to the Confederacy’s collapse. While historians such as Steven Woodworth, Peter Cozzens, and Wiley Sword have produced splendid studies of various aspects of the operations for Chattanooga, this volume serves as a useful reminder that much still remains to be explored. Evan Jones and Wiley Sword have assembled a fine group of scholars who in ten essays attempt “to address vacuums in the relevant literature” and “consider aspects of the battles and their aftermath that have received little, if any, previous attention” (6). Russell Bonds opens the volume with a superbly crafted essay about Chattanooga’s strategic importance as a crucial rail center and avenue of invasion. He also offers an engrossing examination of how the Confederacy could not survive militarily without control of the area’s significant natural resources used in the manufacture of such important items as percussion caps, gunpowder, and cannon barrels. Five of the volume’s essays examine various aspects of leadership. Gerald Prokopowicz examines Gen. Don Carlos Buell, who has long been scrutinized for his inability to capture Chattanooga in 1862. Prokopowicz presents compelling evidence that a variety of factors, such as logistical problems, transportation issues, and interference [End Page 466] from Gen. Henry Halleck complicated Buell’s efforts. Similarly, William Glenn Robertson illustrates that while Confederate general Leonidas K. Polk has long been lambasted for the delay in the Confederate attack at Chickamauga on September 20, 1863, and Union general Thomas Wood has been held singularly responsible for the opening of a gap in the Union line, evidence shows these indictments to be unfair. Robertson clearly illustrates that other factors, including the function of army staff officers and procedures deserve some of the blame for both errors. Moving away from exoneration, David Powell challenges the idea promulgated for decades that Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest was an “authentic genius” (60). While Powell is clear to point out that by 1864 Forrest had matured as a general, he argues that the man many regarded as a hero at Chickamauga should instead be viewed, at least in the context of autumn 1863, as immature, unable to execute orders, and unaware of how to properly gather intelligence. The final two essays on leadership constitute an insightful investigation of relationships. Craig Symonds addresses the issues of dysfunction among Bragg and his subordinate commanders and how President Jefferson Davis, despite a visit to Bragg’s command in the autumn of 1863, failed to do anything to solidify the command structure in the Army of Tennessee. Evan Jones examines another strained relationship—the feud between Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William Rosecrans. Jones’s balanced assessment, while it places much of the blame on Grant for Rosecrans’s military demise, ably shows how other factors, such as the efforts of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, coupled with Rosecrans’s own missteps both during and after the conflict relegated him to “a footnote in American history” (217). David Powell’s second contribution presents an examination of how the Army of the Cumberland became the most innovative Union force as it became the first to experiment with the use of new weapons, battlefield tactics, and staff structures—things which helped influence ultimate Union victory. Wiley Sword proffers his musings on what Union victory at Chattanooga meant to the war’s outcome. Sword examines how that Union success opened the gateway to the Deep South and ably chronicles how the campaign depleted Confederate manpower and prompted the Confederacy to...