CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE • 18-20 SEPTEMBER 1863
By August 1863, the Confederacy seemed in dire straits. President Jefferson Davis and his key advisers and military commanders debated long and hard about what their next step should be. Robert E Lee’s second attempt to take the war to the north and inflict a decisive defeat that would bring the Union to the negotiating table had failed. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, fresh from its spectacular triumph that spring at Chancellorsville, had been heavily repulsed a few months later at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania, suffering irreplaceable losses of men and commanders.
At the same time as this news arrived at Davis’ government in Richmond, so General Ulysses S Grant’s capture of the vital Confederate port of Vicksburg quickly followed. Now the Union navy dominated the Mississippi River, splitting the Confederacy in half. It seemed only a matter of time before more western strongholds fell.
The Union Army of the Cumberland, led by General William S Rosecrans, was now on a relentless advance to capture all of Tennessee, destroy the Confederate forces led by General Braxton Bragg, and seize the vital railway terminal in the city of Chattanooga, which lay on the banks of the Tennessee River north of the Appalachian Mountains. If successful, Union forces would then be able to plunge deep into the Confederate heartlands. Davis, sensing this danger, now took a huge
