Member Review The Impulse of Victory, Ulysses S. Grant at Chattanooga

You hit the nail on the head. Thanks,
Lubliner.
Nail, Bristol England Rob Ward:Public Domain.jpeg
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One of the Nails, Bristol England
Rob Ward/Public Domain
I have literally hit the nail on the headl. My wife & I sailed from Boston to Bristol as crewmen on the tall ship HMS Rose. Our walking tour of Bristol included the "nails" outside the Corn Exchange. Striking the head of nail results in a resonate sound. That sound sealed a deal for immediate payment. The lip on the top kept coins from jiggling off. When you hit the nail on the head, this is the one that is being struck.

Kinda cool, ¿no?
 
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I don't quite follow your line of reasoning. Anybody worth his salt wanted to have McClernard relieved as soon as he could. It wasn't just Grant who wanted to see the back of him. Powell covers the reasons that Grant found Hooker annoying. His Missionary Ridge report was a work of fiction. As it was, Grant had nothing to do with Hooker's resignation.

glad to be of service
Using McClernand and Hooker as examples of an "enemy list" isn't a very persuasive indictment of Grant. The good old "too many more to list" is not a useful substitute for specific names - unless the (absurd) proposition is that there are 50 or 100.
 
McClernand was an effective politician, but even Henry Halleck knew it was dangerous to the soldiers to allow McClernand to be in command.
Rosecrans was highly intelligent, but had problems dealing with authority, with respect to both McClellan, Grant and most importantly Stanton.
Thomas' tactical skill and devotion to his soldiers' welfare were unmatched.
Hooker played his cards wrong and did not understand how to play the old army game, despite having witnessed both McClernand and Rosecrans, (as well as McClellan and Buell) losing their commands.
"Hooker played his cards wrong and did not understand how to play the old army game, despite having witnessed both McClernand and Rosecrans, (as well as McClellan and Buell) losing their commands"

With Joe, there's a little more to it than his not understanding "how to play the old army game". In a business in which subordination, discipline, and alliegance to authority are essential, Hooker earned a C- at best. Hence his scheming behind Burnside's back and his seditious talk around HQ about a dictatorship that forced Lincoln to respond in writing. Neither he nor McClernand were guys who the head coach would want in the locker room long-term.
 
For whatever reason, Maj Gen Schofield convinced Stanton & Grant to allow him to appoint Stoneman to lead the cavalry in the Department of the Ohio. The 2,000 mile December 1864 raid he led through six CSA states justified Schofield's faith in Stoneman's leadership. The Spencer carbines his 4,000 men carried surely helped.

Stoneman had earned Hooker's enmity for Chancellorsville, although Eric Wittenberg gives him a somewhat positive treatment in his Union Cavalry Comes Of Age.

More troublesome is Stoneman bungling a raid around Atlanta in 1864 and getting nearly his entire force surrounded and captured. That should have ruined his career.

His winter cavalry raids into the western Carolinas were impressive but he wasn't facing much resistance.
 
Did he really have no supporters in Congress? And did it ever really matter he was from Virginia?
Did he ever really lack in rank? By early 1862 he ranked in the top 24 and he ended the war in the top 6.
He was unhappy that he got his Major General in the Regular Army so late in 1864. Those things mattered to those men. About the other issues, if you have other info I'd be glad to see it. But Sherman had a brother who was a Senator and Sheridan was an unusual Irish Republican.
I think Grant was correct that Thomas' health was declining late in the war. And he was not the only Civil War general whose health suffered in that way.
 
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Did he really have no supporters in Congress? And did it ever really matter he was from Virginia?
Did he ever really lack in rank? By early 1862 he ranked in the top 24 and he ended the war in the top 6.
Just an opinion, @NedBaldwin , but I think if Thomas had not been a Virginian he could have been promoted after Chickamauga and Thomas could have managed the Chattanooga recovery. It seems that by October of 1863, Stanton and Seward were willing to build up Grant further, even if that endangered Lincoln.
Thomas had a very good record by October of 1863.
 
He was unhappy that he got his Major General in the Regular Army so late in 1864.
Yes he was like that - felt he was entitled
About the other issues, if you have other info I'd be glad to see it. But Sherman had a brother who was a Senator and Sheridan was an usual Irish Republican.
Was there such a thing as a “usual Irish Republican”? Didn’t think Sheridan was politically involved, unlike the Sherman/Ewing clan
 
Most Irish immigrants were machine Democrats. Sheridan was unusual, not usual, my error, in that he was a Republican and a staunch supporter of civil rights.
Most of the Irish immigrants did not have the means to get beyond the east coast cities, and the Democrat party was one of their social protections against hardship in the US.
 
Yes he was like that - felt he was entitled

Was there such a thing as a “usual Irish Republican”? Didn’t think Sheridan was politically involved, unlike the Sherman/Ewing clan
In comparison, S. Phillips Lee had a profitable post in the North Atlantic blockade squadron, and Admiral Farragut was becoming a New York hero. By late 1864 many of them could see the end of the war and the end of promotions coming. In an inflationary environment the economic squeeze was probably apparent.
 
David Powell's newly published The Impulse of Victory, Ulysses S. Grant at Chattanooga has come at a perfect time for me personally. This summer, the Huntington Library made the logs of Charles Dana's dispatches from Chattanooga available online. About the only thing I knew about what Dana had actually reported to Stanton & Lincoln was a few catchy lines that everybody quotes followed by a paragraph of often snarky comments by various authors. Reading the original Dana log was, I suppose, a lot like reading the Book of Mathew in the original Greek. I had put together a lot of the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, but was in need of pieces to fill in the voids so that I could understand what I had read. David Powell did that in spades. Until I read his book, for example, I did not know that Dana's messages were transmitted using a personal cipher. Pretty obvious when you think about it, but a bit of an ah-ha when encountered on the page.

One of the strengths of Powell's book is that he allows the narrative of events to flow. The digression into opinionating by the author that clunks up many accounts of the Battle of Chattanooga are missing. It is only when events such as Thomas being rude to Grant when he arrived that he takes issue with the usual depiction. Powell, using the words of men who were there, debunks that oft repeated tale.

Powell does a very good job of showing just how complex Grant's situation was. Holding Knoxville & East Tennessee was as much a part of his tactical thinking as was Lookout Mountain. Grant famously rode the truly awful sixty mile route that reeked of dead mules that the Army of the Cumberland's supplies had to traverse. What surprised me was that he also made a personal passage of the supply line to Knoxville. It is no wonder that Grant displayed a situational awareness that few, if any, of his opponents had.


As I write this, Powell's The Impulse of Victory is sitting atop Powell & Wittenberg's Tullahoma book. Reading both is a case of the result being greater than the sum of the parts. Underneath those new books is Connelly's classic Army of the Heartland that documents the Tullahoma Campaign & Chattanooga from the Confederate side & Cozzen's The Shipwreck of Their Hopes with emphasis on the tactical & printouts from Dana's message logs. On an easel behind the stack are American Battlefield Trust maps. It is a stratigraphy of my understanding of the six months of strategic victories here in Tennessee that destroyed the Confederacy.

I first read about the Battle of Chattanooga in Bruce Catton's Grant Takes Command. I read it by candlelight during the rainy season in a valley 9,000 feet up in the Andes. Powell's Impulse of Victory ties up all the threads from that day to this. I look forward to my next plate of BBQ & grilled okra on the porch at Sugar's on Missionary Ridge... it will be something to look out there & see all the pieces of the puzzle in place.
Appreciated this book. Powell asserted few were as offensive minded as Grant and encouraged the offensive (p. 52).

Powell made one relationship worthy of investigation though. Those general officers received criticism from Grant in some shape or form- except for Sherman.

Interesting.
 
I agree, it seems an ambiguous word for a title. So I looked Impulse up. 1. "a sudden strong & unreflective urge or desire to act." 2. "a driving or motivating force; an impetus." Make of that what we will.
Powell wrote in a way to suggest that Grant seemed to be the "Force". How did he handle subordinates? According to Powell, with authority.
 
I enjoyed Powells’s comments about Sherman’s lackluster performance at Tunnel Hill. Powell also challenges Grant for sticking to his story the Battle of Missionary Ridge was carried out just at Grant planned it. Powell confirmed that Grant was protecting Sherman for his lackluster performance. Giving credit to Sherman and not to the AOC for their Impulse of Victory. Good to see that in writing from an accomplished Historian. Powell has spent a lot of time on the battles around Chattanooga. Pretty much made it his second home. Told me if his wife would let him. He would buy a home in this area. Great Book, as usual.
 
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I enjoyed Powells’s comments about Sherman’s lackluster performance at Tunnel Hill. Powell also challenges Grant for sticking to his story the Battle of Missionary Ridge was carried out just at Grant planned it. Powell confirmed that Grant was protecting Sherman for his lackluster performance. Giving credit to Sherman and not to the AOC for their Impulse of Victory. Good to see that in writing from an accomplished Historian. Powell has spent a lot of time on the battles around Chattanooga. Pretty much made it his second home. Told me if his wife would let him. He would buy a home in this area. Great Book, as usual.
If anybody knows his stuff about Chickamauga and Chattanooga, it's Dave Powell. It would be interesting to know how many miles he's logged walking those fields. If you see his name on a book, you won't go wrong buying it. And regarding Sherman, he touches on something that escapes a lot of people. If there's a Hall of Fame for mediocre tacticians, the two statues in it are Cump and Stonewall. Both were proficient at operational maneuver, but when it came time to execute on a battlefield, each would have done better delegating to a subordinate.
 
I enjoyed Powells’s comments about Sherman’s lackluster performance at Tunnel Hill. Powell also challenges Grant for sticking to his story the Battle of Missionary Ridge was carried out just at Grant planned it. Powell confirmed that Grant was protecting Sherman for his lackluster performance. Giving credit to Sherman and not to the AOC for their Impulse of Victory. Good to see that in writing from an accomplished Historian. Powell has spent a lot of time on the battles around Chattanooga. Pretty much made it his second home. Told me if his wife would let him. He would buy a home in this area. Great Book, as usual.
My personal conclusion is that Grant was, quite naturally, favored the army he commanded. The Army of Tennessee was very much Grant’s creation. It was carrying out his plan. The man had a great deal invested. The Army of the Cumberland’s improbable blitz of Missionary Ridge just did not fit into the scheme. No argument there. Grant, Sherman & Thomas personally made the recon that left all three with a profound misunderstanding of the nature of the gully between Tunnel Hill & the ridge. To reduce all that to a simple personal preference for Sherman is, in my opinion, simplistic.
 
My personal conclusion is that Grant was, quite naturally, favored the army he commanded. The Army of Tennessee was very much Grant’s creation. It was carrying out his plan. The man had a great deal invested. The Army of the Cumberland’s improbable blitz of Missionary Ridge just did not fit into the scheme. No argument there. Grant, Sherman & Thomas personally made the recon that left all three with a profound misunderstanding of the nature of the gully between Tunnel Hill & the ridge. To reduce all that to a simple personal preference for Sherman is, in my opinion, simplistic.
Another subordinate who got short shrift from Grant was Joe Hooker. It's understandable that for many and various reasons Grant didn't like the bombastic, thrusting Hooker and likely resented getting stuck with him, but when I was researching my talk on the battle of Ringgold I came to appreciate that Fighting Joe had actually done very well in the campaign. The usual story I'd heard from sources like the NPS and Bruce Catton, no doubt based largely on Grant's memoirs, is that Hooker merely "occupied" Lookout Mountain - which was supposedly of no military significance - then got tangled up in Lookout Valley and made no further contribution to the action at Missionary Ridge. That turned out to be a gross exaggeration and far from the truth: forced by Grant to work with a scratch force made up of a division from each of the three Federal armies with commanders unknown to him, Hooker first stormed Lookout then successfully - albeit belatedly, due to a broken bridge - captured most of a small Confederate brigade in Rossville Gap, turning Bragg's southern flank in the process; and being the nearest and freshest force available led the next-day pursuit as far as Ringgold.
 
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