The Maps of Chickamauga: The Tullahoma Campaign, June 22 – July 1, 1863

By David Powell

The Maps of Chickamauga explores this largely misunderstood battle through the use of full-color maps, graphically illustrating the complex tangle of combat’s ebb and flow that makes the titanic bloodshed of Chickamauga one of the most confusing actions of the American Civil War. Track individual regiments through their engagements at fifteen to twenty-minute intervals or explore each army in motion as brigades and divisions maneuver and deploy to face the enemy. The Maps of Chickamauga allows readers to fully grasp the action at any level of interest.

Now available as an ebook short, The Maps of Chickamauga: The Tullahoma Campaign, June 22 – July 1, 1863 plows new ground in the study of the campaign by breaking down the entire campaign in 7 detailed full page original maps. Situation maps reflect the posture of each army on an hourly basis, while tactical maps reveal the intricacies of regimental and battery movements.

The Maps of Chickamauga: The Tullahoma Campaign, June 22 – July 1, 1863 offers one “action-section”:

- The Tullahoma Campaign

The text accompanying each map explains the action in succinct detail, supported by a host of primary sources. Eyewitness accounts vividly underscore the human aspect of the actions detailed in the maps as brigades and regiments collide. Meticulously researched and footnoted by David Powell with cartography by David Friedrichs, The Maps of Chickamauga relies on the participants’ own words to recreate the course of battle.

The Maps of Chickamauga is an ideal companion for battlefield bushwhacking or simply armchair touring. Full color brings the movements to life, allowing readers to grasp the surging give and take of regimental combat in the woods and fields of North Georgia

• Language: English
• Publisher: Savas Beatie
• Release date: Sep 20, 2013
• ISBN: 9781611211719

David Powell

David A. Powell is a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute (1983) with a BA in history. He has published numerous articles in various magazines, and more than fifteen historical simulations of different battles. For the past decade, David’s focus has been on the epic battle of Chickamauga, and he is nationally recognized for his tours of that important battlefield. The results of that study are the volumes The Maps of Chickamauga (2009) and Failure in the Saddle (2010), as well as The Chickamauga Campaign trilogy. The Chickamauga Campaign: A Mad Irregular Battle was published in 2014, The Chickamauga Campaign: Glory or the Grave appeared in September 2015, and the final volume, Barren Victory, was released in September 2016. David and his wife Anne live and work in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, Illinois. He is Vice President of Airsped, Inc., a specialized delivery firm.

Book preview

© 2009 by David Powell (text) and David Friedrichs (cartography)

The Maps of Chickamauga: The Tullahoma Campaign, June 22 - July 1, 1863

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN-13: 978-1-932714-72-2

eBook ISBN: 978-1-61121-171-9

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This book is lovingly dedicated to our wives,

Anne Powell and Laura Friedrichs

Contents

Introduction

Acknowledgments

Prelude: The Strategic Situation in 1863

The Army Commanders

William S. Rosecrans

Braxton Bragg

Operations in Middle Tennessee

(June 22 - July 1, 1863)

Map Set 1: The Tullahoma Campaign

Appendix 1: Tullahoma Order of Battle

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

By any definition this book you now hold in your hands is a labor of love. The general idea germinated in 1997, when I first began researching the battle of Chickamauga for an entirely different project.

Back then I was designing historical war games (paper games, not computer simulations) and wanted to tackle Chickamauga as my next subject. For those of you who aren't familiar with the rather arcane hobby of historical board games, they are highly detailed (some say overly complicated) manual simulations of past events. Printed maps represent the terrain, overlaid with a hexagonal grid that acts as a sort of chessboard, with die-cut cardboard counters portraying the regiments, battalions, batteries, and leaders who fought these epic encounters. Players use these tools to recreate the struggles of the event portrayed or to explore alternative outcomes. Think of them as a step between reading about the event and participating in a Civil War reenactment of it. My goal was to produce an epic of the genre, including as much detail as I could about Chickamauga. Accurate maps of the battlefield—and lots of them—were of prime importance, as were accurate numbers and losses for the organizations that fought there. The project took about a year to complete, and when the game was finally published it was well received. As I soon discovered, I was not yet finished with Chickamauga.

Like so many other people with a strong interest in the Civil War, I spent many years studying Gettysburg (for which I had also designed a board game). The July 1863 battle was the largest of the war. Much of it was fought across generally open terrain, and neither side was broken or driven from the field. Chickamauga was a very different affair. The combat in North Georgia in September 1863 was the Confederacy's only clear-cut victory in the Western Theater (and a barren one at that, rendered so by the crippling Rebel defeat just two months later at Chattanooga). The dark forests and limited clearings triggered a host of unexpected combats, flanking maneuvers, and direct assaults that left commanders on both sides confused as to the exact ebb and flow of the battle. Commanders William Rosecrans (Army of the Cumberland) and Braxton Bragg (Army of Tennessee) exerted only limited control over the action, groping for whatever meager details of the fighting that came their way. Unlike so many battles, Chickamauga was largely fought by brigade, regimental, and sometimes even company commanders; senior officers often remained frustrated spectators to the chaos swirling around them. Thirty years later when the National Park was created, veterans of the battle recognized this truth when they decreed Chickamauga to have been the quintessential soldiers’ battle. No statues honoring individual generals are to be found on the field.

There were other significant differences. One consideration that drew me to Gettysburg was the wealth of published and easily accessible primary and secondary resources on the battle. I could learn about it in as much detail as I wished. There was always another letter or diary or newspaper account coming to light, or another book being published. I remember at one point many years ago counting nearly ninety Gettysburg-related titles on my personal library shelf. Hundreds more were in print and/or easily available. Gettysburg is—and will likely continue to be—a publishing mainstay.

The opposite is true about Chickamauga. Nearly all of the primary sources penned on the battle are in archival holdings and old newspapers, and so are not readily available. The secondary literature is remarkably sparse. Despite the battle's size and importance to the course of the Civil War, only two modern battle studies exist: Glenn Tucker's Chickamauga dating from the centennial era, and Peter Cozzens’ This Terrible Sound, published in 1992. In the microtactical genre (such as the multiple monographs that exist for each of Gettysburg's three days) Archibald Gracie published in 1911 The Truth About