Lytle’s brigade, spearheading the
advance, was in the lead when the army
reached the hamlet of Cowan, Tennessee,
in early July. There, wrote Lytle, one of his
sharpshooters accidentally shot and killed
a young boy dressed in gray who ill-advis-
edly ran toward them in the rain. The
youth was attempting to put back a fence
rail, and Lytle’s men took him for a sniper.
It later transpired that the boy’s family was
pro-Union, and his teary-eyed sister leaned
out an upstairs window as they passed and
cried: “Hurrah for the Union, but oh you
have killed our dear little Freddy.” “Such
is war,” Lytle sighed sympathetically.
In one of the smoothest strategic feats of
the war, Rosecrans feinted Bragg out of
Middle Tennessee with a series of brilliantflanking maneuvers. At Bridgeport,
Alabama, 25 miles southwest of Chat-
tanooga, the army stopped to replenish
supplies before a final push toward Chat-
tanooga. Lytle’s brigade was tasked with
rebuilding a railroad bridge across the Ten-
nessee River that the Confederates had
partially burned. During a break from his
bridge-building duties, Lytle was invited to
a special encampment of his old 10th Ohio
Regiment, at which Colonel William W.
Ward presented him with a jewel-
encrusted Maltese cross, a belated parting
gift from the regiment.
Never at a loss for words, Lytle responded
with a graceful speech thanking his old
friends for remembering him and promis-ing, in turn, to remember them for the rest
of his life. “It may not be for all of us there
today to listen to the chants that greet the
victor, nor to hear the brazen bells ringing
out the new nuptials of the states,” Lytle
said. “But those who do survive can tell
how their old comrades died with their har-
ness on, in the great war for Union and lib-
erty.” The speech was reprinted in the
Cincinnati Commercial,where it received
“quite a run at home,” Lytle bragged. His
commanding general was less impressed.
Rosecrans needled Lytle, in the presence of
a number of other officers, “Lytle, was your
father a better orator than you?” Lytle,
understandably, was not amused.
The time for speeches quickly passed. In
early September, the Army of the Cumber-
land occupied Chattanooga without
a shot, the Confederates falling back
into northwest Georgia. Rosecrans
would have been well advised to
remain in Chattanooga and wait for
reinforcements before pursuing
Bragg’s army into the heavy woods
beyond. But stung by the repeated
criticism of Secretary of War Edwin
Stanton and the implied displeasure
of President Lincoln, he ignored
advice to do just that and instead
pushed ahead, convinced that
Bragg’s army was retreating in disarray.
Dividing his own army into three wings,
Rosecrans stalked after Bragg, in the
process dangerously extending his own lines
and isolating his three corps in the moun-
tainous gaps below Chattanooga. In the
meantime, Bragg had secretly consolidated
his army in the deep woods to the east of the
mountain passes. He intended to destroy
the Union army at his leisure, one corps at
a time. Had it not been for a bungled pre-
liminary attack at McLemore’s Cove,
Bragg’s plan might well have worked. As it
was, Rosecrans belatedly realized the deadly
peril he was in and hastily ordered his units
to concentrate in the vicinity of Crawfish
Springs, a puddle-sized hamlet 12 miles
south of Chattanooga.
On September 19, the Battle of Chicka-
mauga exploded. As Rosecrans had
guessed, Bragg intended to turn the Unionleft and block the road back to Chat-
tanooga. With unparalleled savagery, the
two armies collided in the vine-covered
thickets around Chickamauga Creek.
(“Chickamauga” is an old Indian word
romantically mistranslated as “the River
of Death.” It actually means “bad water,”
commemorating a long-ago smallpox epi-
demic.) The fighting raged until long after
dark, “one solid, unbroken wave of awe-
inspiring sound,” a participant recalled,
“as if all the fires of earth and hell had
been turned loose in one mighty effort to
destroy each other.” The Union line,
although forced back in places, somehow
managed to hold together. The next day,
each side realized, would prove decisive.
Lytle’s brigade, left behind to safeguard
the army’s right at Lee and Gordon’s Mill
astride the La Fayette Road below
Chickamauga, missed the first day of
combat altogether. Summoned hastily to
reunite with its besieged comrades, the
brigade pushed on to the battlefield, arriv-
ing about 2 AMand bivouacking on a hill-
side near Rosecrans’ headquarters, the
cabin of a backwoods widow named Eliza
Glenn. The night was unseasonably cold,
and campfires were prohibited. Lytle’s
men slept on the frosty ground, their mus-
kets beside them—those who could actu-
ally sleep with the screams of hundreds of
wounded and dying men cascading
around them in the dark.
Lytle was untypically gloomy. Besides
the dangerous position of the army and the
prospect of even more desperate fighting
the next day, he was suffering from a heavy
cold that made it hard for him to
breathe—sleep was out of the question.
Calling his aide, Cincinnati-born Lieu-
tenant Alfred Pirtle, to his side, Lytle put
his arm around him and said quietly, “My
boy, do you know we are going to fight
two to one today?” He explained that
Bragg’s Confederates had been reinforced
by Lt. Gen. James Longstreet’s redoubtable
I Corps from the Army of Northern Vir-
ginia. Even then, Longstreet’s men were
creeping stealthily through the woods less
than two miles away from Lytle’s camp in
preparation for one of the most startlingLibrary of CongressRussian-born Colonel John Basil Turchin, left, disgusted
Lytle by allowing his men to sack and plunder the town
of Athens, Alabama. Confederate Brig. Gen. Patton
Anderson, right, commanded the troops that mortally
wounded Lytle at Chickamauga.CWQ-EW16 William Lytle_Layout 1 10/22/15 2:42 PM Page 78