At the Edge of Glory

One of the fascinating subchapters of history is the story of the man who did not quite make it—the talented man, richly deserving, who rises very near to the top and then, in a sudden moment of crisis, sees all that he has gained slip away from him. Looking back afterward we may see clearly that his solid achievements greatly outweigh his failures. Taken all in all, his career has been a success. Yet the real pinnacle eludes him, and instead of coming down in history as one of the country’s giants, he is remembered simply as a good competent man who lacked something—good fortune, perhaps, or the capacity for doing precisely the right thing at a time of extreme pressure.

Sometimes, with such a man, a full reappraisal is called for. History can render faulty verdicts; now and then a man is fully entitled to a sort of posthumous promotion. In other cases history’s verdict seems fair enough, but we are left with the tantalizing realization of the part that luck can play in the life of a man or a nation.

The Edge of Glory: A Biography of General William S. Rosecrans, U.S.A., by William H. Lamers. Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. 499 pp. $6.95.

The American Civil War is especially rich in cases of this sort, partly no doubt because it saw so many obscure men placed in the center of the stage with incalculable values depending on their actions. Their contemporaries rendered judgment on them while the heat was still on; they looked for concrete results, and they did not always bother to make an objective examination of the way those results were achieved.

One of the most interesting of all the Civil War soldiers is William S. Rosecrans, major general in the United States Army, a solid soldier and also a man of genuine brilliance, who—if things had gone just a little differently—could conceivably have gone on to occupy the place U. S. Grant finally occupied. His story is examined in detail by William M. Lamers in a spirited biography, The Edge of Glory.

Rosecrans is worth knowing: a burly, red-faced man, jovial, well-liked by his soldiers, devoutly religious but gifted with a sure command of profane idiom, loyal to the Union, refusing to play politics—all in all, a good man. His military record was excellent. As McCIeIlan’s right-hand man he was largely responsible for McClellan’s successful campaign in West Virginia in the first year of the war. He served with distinction under Grant, winning the battles of Iuka and Corinth and having a bitter falling-out with Grant afterward: these two battles fell just a little short of the sweeping success that both men wanted, and they argued over who was at fault. Rosecrans took over the dejected Army of the Cumberland after Don Carlos Buell was removed, restored its morale, and fought and won the Battle of Stones River at the end of 1862.

Lincoln went on record as considering the Stones River victory one of the most important of the war. Actually, the battle was a stand-off; the Union army came within a hairsbreadth of rout, and was at last able to claim a win simply because the Confederate commander, the inexplicable Braxton Bragg, retreated from the field after having telegraphed to Richmond that he had won a great triumph. Yet however it may finally be judged, the battle did show Rosecrans as owning one of the basic traits of a great field commander—inability to admit that he had been licked.

In the following summer came Rosecrans’ most glittering achievement: the campaign of maneuver which compelled Bragg to evacuate central Tennessee, including the vital city of Chattanooga, and retreat into northern Georgia. This was as fine a strategic accomplishment as any in the war, and it fully establishes Rosecrans’ claim to high rank as a military leader. At the middle of September, 1863, the national administration might with justice have concluded that Rosecrans was its best general.

It never came to that conclusion, because this campaign, like Rosecrans’ own rise, came to a full stop at Chickamauga.

When Bragg retreated, Rosecrans pursued, and in pursuit he was careless, apparently assuming that his only problem was to overtake the foe who was running away so fast. But Bragg was strongly reinforced, and he turned to strike, and Rosecrans had let his army get so scattered that Bragg might have regained all he had lost if he had recognized and used his opportunity promptly. In the end, Bragg gave Rosecrans just time enough to pull his army together, and when the Confederate blow was struck—on September 19 and 20—the Federal general had his men in hand.

Sometimes it seems that Chickamauga must have been one of the most completely dreadful of all Civil War battles. The two armies all but wrecked themselves. Each one lost approximately twenty-eight per cent of the total number on the field, the butcher’s bill for the two armies together ran to an appalling 34,000, and the old legend which said that the word Chickamauga meant “river of blood” got abundant confirmation. And for Rosecrans personally, the battle was unmitigated disaster.

One of this general’s troubles was that battle overstimulated him. He was the bravest of the brave, but in action he grew excitable, issuing too many orders too rapidly, acting sometimes on inadequate knowledge. It was so here. Toward noon on the second day, Rosecrans overhastily moved a division from a comparatively quiet sector to a place that was under heavy pressure. The movement left a temporary gap in the Federal line, and before the gap could be closed the hard-hitting General James Longstreet struck into it with an army corps. The whole right wing of Rosecrans’ army was routed, and the General himself was caught up in the rout and separated from the main battlefield. Apparently the spark went out of him. For once in his life he admitted defeat. He rode back to Chattanooga, letting the rest of the battle fight itself. In the end he had to stand siege in Chattanooga, on the defensive, his bright prospects gone.

Mr. Lamers suggests that the defeat looked a great deal worse than it really was; that if Rosecrans had lost a battle he had nevertheless won the campaign, whose great objective had been to occupy and hold Chattanooga, and this led ultimately to the bisection of the Confederacy; and that because both Grant and Secretary of War Stanton disliked him, Rosecrans was relieved of his command when he ought to have been retained. His argument is persuasive, even if not wholly convincing: at the very least it makes it clear that there is a good deal to be said on the side of this general whose career was wrecked.

In any case, Rosecrans was shelved, then and thereafter, and his qualities all in all were good enough to entitle him to this reappraisal. He was one of those men who, as the title of the book suggests, touched the edge of glory without going any farther.

The Other Hill

Back to Chickamauga again: this time to take a look at the Confederate side. One of the gifted soldiers there was a withdrawn, somewhat cantankerous man named Daniel Harvey Hill, who commanded an army corps under Braxton Bragg and who, like most of Bragg’s other top commanders, emerged from the battle feeling that the Confederacy had missed a great opportunity because of the failings of the man at the top.

Hill was “one of the two Hills” in Confederate memory. He and the Virginian A. P. Hill wrote their names large, on the record of the Army of Northern Virginia and in hot battle action. Perhaps A. P. Hill was the more fortunate: he died in action just before the war ended and was enshrined in the special legend that attached itself to the generals of the lost cause who did not outlive the cause itself. D. H. Hill survived the war by nearly a quarter of a century, and during all of the postwar years he spoke his mind vigorously. Since he had pronounced opinions about the merit of things done by himself and by others, and since he was frank beyond the bounds of prudence, he pulled controversy about himself like a blanket. Lee himself took a distaste to him, while the war was on and afterward, and this undoubtedly hurt Hill more than Grant’s dislike hurt Rosecrans and Thomas. Hill has come down in memory as a capable soldier who just did not quite fit in anywhere.

He too needs another look, and a perceptive study of him is available in Hal Bridges’ Lee’s Maverick General. Reading this book, one is likely to feel that the Confederacy never really made the best use of this man’s capacities. He was undeniably very difficult, in a way Rosecrans and Thomas were not, which is to say that he had a thorny personality and spoke his acidulous mind at times when he should have kept quiet. All the same, it is hard to escape the feeling that as a soldier he was an extremely good man to have on one’s side. Not a man, probably, for the top command anywhere, but an extremely good subordinate for anyone who knew just how to use him.

Hill was frail, racked all his life by poor health, dyspeptic, morose, contentious. He won his reputation in the Army of Northern Virginia, and even in that army, whose untrained soldiers insisted that their generals must show an instinctive contempt for personal peril, he was famous as a man who did not know what fear was. He fought well whenever there was fighting to be done, but he argued about it afterward; he finally tried the patience of Lee beyond Lee’s endurance, and after 1862 Lee concluded that the Confederacy would be just as well served if Hill did the rest of his fighting in someone else’s army. Thereafter the man was on the perimeter.

He was rescued from obscurity late in 1863 when Jefferson Davis correctly concluded that Bragg needed more competent assistants. Hill became, temporarily, a lieutenant general, and went west to command one of Bragg’s army corps. After the Battle of Chickamauga Bragg accused practically all of his subordinates of errors of one kind or another, and Hill was one of the ones he named; but from the record it appears that Hill, like the rest, did about as well as anyone could have done under the erratic leadership which was on display at general headquarters, and it is at least clear that Hill, when the battle ended, realized something which Bragg was unable to see—that the Confederacy had won a great victory which might have important consequences if it could be followed up. Bragg simply sat and thought about it.

Lee’s Maverick General, Daniel Harvey Hill, by Hal Bridges. McGraw-Hill Book Co. 323 pp. $7.50.

Along with others, Hill made outcry. The oddest feature of the Confederate victory at Chickamauga was the fact that a round dozen of Bragg’s generals presently sent a letter to Jefferson Davis complaining that “complete paralysis” had fallen upon the victorious army and urging that Bragg be relieved of his command. Davis, unaccountably, refused to take action; and not long afterward, Hill ceased to be a lieutenant general and ceased to command troops in action. Except for minor assignments in the final days, Hill was finished.

All of that is understandable. Hill was too outspoken, too critical of others, too ready to remind his fellows of their faults; it takes a rare army to keep such a man in high command and make full use of him. Yet the man was a good soldier, and it is hard to quarrel very much with Mr. Bridges’ summary—”a versatile and talented individualist, whose fighting career, marked by great achievement as well as great controversy, strongly suggests, when seen in full, that Harvey Hill was one of the ablest of Lee’s lieutenants.”

He was another man who did not quite make it. He missed making it, probably, by a wider margin than Rosecrans, certainly by a wider margin than Thomas. But he might have been placed higher than he was placed; he could have been used to better effect than the Richmond government did use him. And he compels a backward glance. He was alive, talented … and interesting.