American Civil WarStuff Happened · War
Missionary Ridge
Take the Rifle Pits, and Stop? · November 1863

Late in the afternoon, around half past three, Grant ordered Thomas’s army forward. The target was the first of two Confederate lines on the ridge. The Confederates had split their force between a row of rifle pits (shallow trenches for infantry) dug along the base of the ridge, and a second line up on the crest at the top. Thomas’s men were to cross the open valley, take those lower trenches at the base, and pull Confederate attention off Sherman.

So they went. Across the open valley they came, some 23,000 to 24,000 men, straight into the lower rifle pits, which held only about 9,000 Confederate defenders. The Federals overran the trenches, and then found themselves in the worst possible place: pinned at the foot of the ridge, in the open, with the second Confederate line firing down on them from the crest several hundred feet above. Staying put meant being shot to pieces. Going back meant recrossing the valley under the same fire. Going up, straight up that brutal slope, meant closing with the guns that were killing them.

Nobody is entirely sure what the men were supposed to do once they had taken the lower trenches, and it changes who gets the credit. By one telling, the base was the only sanctioned objective: seize the first line and stop. By another, drawn from the National Park Service, Grant was already impatient before the assault even began, pressing Brig. Gen. Thomas J. Wood (North) about why his attack had not gone in:

“I ordered your attack an hour ago. Why has it not been made?… I order you to attack.”

Grant to Wood, before the assault

The surviving record cannot fully settle which it was, and standing where the men stood it almost did not matter. The position made the decision for them. Pinned and furious at the bottom of the ridge, the soldiers of the Army of the Cumberland made the choice their generals had not made for them.

Meanwhile in the Confederate crest
Bragg’s badly-built line
The flaw that would doom the Confederate center was partly self-inflicted, and partly dug into the ridge before the battle began. In the weeks before, Gen. Braxton Bragg (South) had hollowed his own army out: feuding with subordinates who had openly tried to have him removed after Chickamauga, he had detached Lt. Gen. James Longstreet’s (South) corps north to Knoxville, stripping thousands of men from the very line that was about to break. What was left, he split between the two positions, base and crest, so that neither was strong. Worse, his engineers ran the upper works along the true top of the ridge instead of the military crest (the line a little below the summit, the place from which defenders can actually see and shoot down the whole face of the slope). From the true top there were stretches of the lower slope the defenders simply could not see or fire on: dead ground, blind spots. As one account put it, the works were placed “along the physical crest rather than what is termed the military crest,” and the error “severely handicapped the defenders.” Bragg’s line, in the same telling, was “only a thin crust,” with no real reserve to be had on a ridge too narrow to hold one. The Union soldiers about to climb did not know any of this, and the ground would let them live long enough to reach the top.
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“Who Ordered Those Men Up the Ridge?”