That Bloody Hill: Hilliard's Legion at Chickamauga

          Every time I visit the Chickamauga/Chattanooga National Military Park I end up in a specific area of the Park. I’ve studied that location. I’ve walked it. I’ve read reports and letters while walking it (which is sort of spooky) and I’ve photographed it.

          I have stood in various vantage points and tried to listen into the past to hear the rifle fire and blasting boom of artillery pieces. Above all, I have tried to listen to the human sounds, the shrieks and cries of the wounded. Those sounds are all around you if you listen hard enough. You can hear the history if you stand long enough on That Bloody Hill.

          The Federals defended hills one, two and three along Horseshoe Ridge during the afternoon and early evening hours of September 20, 1863 as the determined Confederates attacked. Eventually the Confederates pushed the heroic Union soldiers off the hill and away from the fighting. Some have termed the Battle of Chickamauga the Battle of Iron Hail and I shudder when I think of that description while visiting that area.

          I have written a book about those final hours of the three-day fight at Chickamauga. Specifically, my book follows a Confederate command that was part of a brigade commanded by Brigadier General Archibald Gracie through its movements during the battle. It took me thirteen years to complete the project and the result, which I completed the last work on this week, is named That Bloody Hill: Hilliard’s Legion at Chickamauga, will be published by McFarland early next year.

Looking at Hill 1 from Hill 2.

          During the research there were occasional moments of clarity but many more of confusion. At the suggestion of a professional historian I once taped together several sheets of legal-sized note paper and began writing a long timeline for the fighting on the Ridge and it was while performing that exercise that I began understanding how many events that happened in different places must have happened at the same time. Time estimates by the soldiers who fought along that Ridge vary greatly. In one important instance, the time variation was due to the similarities of two different events that seemed to be the same event. Go ahead, deal with that one for a while.

          My admiration for the soldiers on both sides of the fighting is complete. After more than a decade of trying to make sense of the whole thing, I told a friend that while I thought I knew what happened, I wasn’t sure how they did it.

          Chickamauga pitted the Confederate Army of Tennessee, reinforced by a portion of the Army of Northern Virginia, against the United States Army of the Cumberland. There are heroes on both sides of the story and there are goats, examples of good battlefield decisions by commanders and poor judgement, there is both praise and condemnation for the same soldier in many cases and there are personality conflicts galore. If the bloodletting along Horseshoe Ridge is a sad tale of killing, it is also a tale of failure and success, of valor and the vanquished and of victory and defeat.

          I hope you’ll buy a copy of my book when it is published. In fact, I suggest you buy vast quantities of copies. Anyone who does pick up a copy will hold in their hands the results of a journey. That journey included visits to archival collections, university libraries, homes of descendants of the armies, cemeteries and the battlefield. Lots of trips to the battlefield. I honestly don’t know how many trips I made to a local library so that I could use a microfilm reader to go through a collection of papers.

  

        Part of the book is a roster of the original members of Hilliard’s Legion. I will never again produce a book with a roster of names. My thumb, wrist and elbow were sore for months after I completed the roster, the victims of prolonged computer use.

          I spent so much time following those men through their military careers – in some instances through the end of their lives – that I felt as though I knew them. When I found a grave stone of a Legion soldier I frequently recognized the name even before I saw the regimental affiliation. It was always a solemn moment for me to reach the final resting place for a Chickamauga veteran, regardless of which side they served. My wife and I found two cemeteries in Ohio that had been on the grounds of POW camps during the war and there were Legion veterans in both cemeteries. Few experiences in life are as desolate as feeling your health fail while locked up as a prisoner of war.

          One location I visited was once a home for elderly Confederate veterans in Alabama. It is now called The Confederate Memorial Park and has two cemeteries. In one of them is a sign indicating that a tree had been planted in memory of a Legion member who immigrated to Brazil after the war. He was one of several former Legion men who became Confederados in Brazil. Now we’re talking about international history. As my long-time pal and fellow Civil War student Bucky Weber says, I’m not going down that rabbit hole, thank you very much.

          You can pre-order a copy of my book, That Bloody Hill: Hilliard’s Legion at Chickamauga, on the McFarland website, on Amazon or on the Barnes & Noble’s website. I hope you do.

          Thanks for reading.