August 20th, 2012 – Our 41st Meeting!! We continue our fourth year!
The next meeting of the Nashville (TN) Civil War Roundtable will be on Monday, August 20th, 2012, in the visitor’s center of Ft. Negley Park, a unit of Metro Parks, Nashville, TN. This is located off I-65 just south of downtown between 4th Avenue South and 8th Avenue South on Edgehill Avenue/Chestnut Avenue. Take Exit 81, Wedgewood Avenue, off I-65 and follow the signs to the Science Museum. The meeting begins at 7:00 PM and is always open to the public. Members please bring a friend or two – new recruits are always welcomed.
OUR SPEAKER AND TOPIC: “TO THE EDGE OF GLORY: WILLIAM S. ROSECRANS’ CAMPAIGN FOR CHATTANOOGA”
William Starke Rosecrans’ defeat at Chickamauga, and his removal from the command of the Army of the Cumberland soon thereafter, have shaped history’s perception of the man and his final campaign. On the strength of his victories in Western Virginia, at Corinth in Mississippi, and at Stones River in Tennessee, Rosecrans had, by the summer of 1863, risen to be one of the Union’s most respected, most successful, and most promising commanders. All this changed, however, due largely to the impact of the ill-considered and ill-timed orders issued at mid-morning on the third day of the Battle of Chickamauga. This one bad day on a battlefield, September 20, 1863, cast William Starke Rosecrans from the limelight of Civil War history.
The defeat in Chickamauga’s bloody forest and fields has also colored how Rosecrans’ Campaign for Chattanooga has been and is viewed. The focus becomes the battle itself and the unfortunate orders of September 20th. Far less attention is given to his plan of campaign, a plan of campaign that even after the Chickamauga defeat, allowed Federal forces to maintain and then go on to secure total control of the Chattanooga region, the strategic “Gateway to the Deep South.” The Rosecrans who planned this campaign is obscured by the fatigued and mentally exhausted Rosecrans who was in command on that fateful September Sunday now over one hundred and forty-five years ago.
Rosecrans faced many obstacles in planning his Campaign for Chattanooga. He would be operating at the end of a tenuous supply line that stretched through country he had to consider hostile. The geography--a major river, several mountain ranges, and numerous ridges--constrained his movement while offering potentially great defensive opportunities to his opponent. These factors limited his logistics; they and others dictated that to gain success, he would have to develop a plan of campaign that would force his enemy to react largely on terms Rosecrans would define.
In his talk “To the Edge of Glory: William S. Rosecrans’ Campaign for Chattanooga,” National Park Service historian Jim Ogden will examine the plan the Army of the Cumberland’s commander developed and then implemented. He will explore the factors Roscrans was forced to address and relate how those considerations shaped the 1863 Campaign for Chattanooga. He will show that Rosecrans’ campaign was not the hazardous, careless dispersal of his forces in the face of a numerically superior foe that it is often depicted to have been. This was the campaign that brought Old Rosy, to paraphrase William M. Lamers’ aptly titled Rosecrans biography, “the edge of glory.”
James (Jim) Ogden, III is a native of St. Mary's County, Maryland. Interested in the Civil War since childhood, he obtained a degree in American History through the Civil War period and American Military History from Frostburg State College. During college, he worked summers for the Maryland Park Service at Point Lookout State Park, Maryland, site of the largest Civil War prison, where historical interpretation and research were among the many positions he held. As part of a college internship, he worked for four months at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, West Virginia, doing research and writing on an aspect of that site's Civil War history that had not previously been addressed.
Beginning work with the National Park Service in 1982, he has been stationed at Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, Georgia and Tennessee, Russell Cave National Monument, Alabama, and Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, Virginia. In November, 1988, he returned to Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park as the Historian, the position he presently holds.
He speaks regularly on aspects of the Civil War to historical organization across the eastern half of the U. S. including Civil War Round Tables in New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Birmingham, New Orleans, and Austin. In addition to doing tours of the Chickamauga and Chattanooga battlefields, he periodically takes groups to Stones River, Nashville, Franklin, and some of the Atlanta Campaign sites.
He has taught a number of Civil War history courses for the Continuing Education Department of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and this Spring Semester of 2012 is teaching the for-credit Civil War and Reconstruction course there. He has published a number of short articles in several local publications and has appeared in Greystone Communications/Arts and Entertainment Network's "Civil War Journal" episode on the Battles for Chattanooga and in the History Channel’s “Civil War Combat” program on Chickamauga as well as several other educational and public television programs. He has also appeared in an episode of PBS’s “History Detectives.”
Since 1986, he has been an instructor for over four hundred groups of officers of the U. S. Army conducting Staff Rides (an in-depth analysis of a historical military event) at Chickamauga and Chattanooga. For a decade, his Staff Ride clients even included two to six hundred officers annually from the British Army’s Joint Services Command and Staff College.
Jim, his wife Lora, and their son Jamie (born on the133rd anniversary of the Battle of Fredericksburg) live in Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia.
Do not miss this program as Jim will be moving red and blue pieces over a very large map of the region to show how the campaign developed!