MISSION OF MERCY
The Union Army’s 17th Missouri Infantry arrived at Bridgeport, Ala., on the Tennessee River in late November 1863. Known as the Western Turner Rifles, they fought in Maj. Gen. Peter Osterhaus’ 1st Division in the Army of the Tennessee’s 15th Corps, part of Ulysses S. Grant’s command reinforcing besieged Chattanooga, Tenn. “We have had hard times since I left you,” wrote Private William Heldman of the 17th. “First we had to fight every day and now we have marched about 200 miles without one day’s rest and not enough to eat. They are making a railroad bridge here across the river today. I don’t think we will stay here long. We have got the right wing of the army.”
Grant’s arrival in Chattanooga on October 23 had effectively opened a key Union supply chain into the city known as the “Cracker Line”—welcome relief not only for the starving Federal soldiers inside the city but also the army’s animals. “The men had been on half rations of hard bread for a considerable time,” Grant would note. “The besieged Union troops were happy to get the food supplies but they were without sufficient shoes or other clothing suitable for the advancing [winter] season.”
That’s not to say their counterparts in gray weren’t suffering, too. The torrential rains had muddied the roads to the Confederate positions, significantly preventing the routine flow of supplies. As President Jefferson Davis noted of the Army of Tennessee during an October 10 visit: “[T]hey had given still higher evidence of courage, patriotism, and resolute determination to live freemen, or die freemen, by their patient endurance and buoyant, cheerful spirits, amid privations and suffering from half-rations, thin blankets, ragged clothes, and shoeless feet, than given by baring their breasts to the enemy.”
Private Sam Watkins of the 1st Tennessee recalled that as Davis and his staff galloped by the Tennessee troops, the soldiers mixed cheers with chants of “Send us something to eat, Massa Jeff! I’m hungry!” Those supplications were answered by the end of October; Davis had made sure his men were much better fed and clothed. The 19th Louisiana Infantry, in Colonel Randall Gibson’s Brigade occupying Missionary Ridge, were among those to draw jackets, pants, caps, shirts, drawers, shoes, and blankets. Private George A. Bruton, however, lamented the lack of a key item in winter time, writing to his sister: “As for clothes, I now have plenty of evry thing but socks. Socks can not be had for love or money.”
Douglas John Cater, the regiment’s drum major, described the unbalanced food situation: “Our cooks were with the wagons in the rear
