Rosecrans and Grant

George McClellan and William Rosecrans got the reputation of being slow-moving generals in the Civil War US Army, but they moved fast enough in western Virginia in 1861 to create the conditions for a new state of the Union. And that summer, as in the fall of 1862 under Grant in west Tennessee, it was Rosecrans and his soldiers who were doing the actual fighting.

Today is the 157th anniversary of his first victory, at Rich Mountain, Virginia (now West Virginia).

The next year, at the battles of Iuka and Corinth, Grant was dissatisfied enough with his performance that he was on the verge of relieving him, when (perhaps to Grant's surprise) Rosecrans was promoted to command the Army of the Cumberland. The promotion came because to most people Iuka and Corinth looked like victories for which Rosecrans should receive credit. But Grant thought he was slow in pursuit. 

At the end of the year, at Murfreesboro, Rosecrans eked out a hard-won victory as his chief of staff  riding alongside was decapitated by a cannon ball. Then he gathered strength for half a year, infuriating Secretary of War Edwin Stanton back in Washington, before launching the Tullahoma campaign that drove the Confederates out of middle Tennessee -- without, however, severely damaging their army.

Rosecrans had a bad second day at Chickamauga, which justified his ouster by Lincoln, Stanton and Grant. The latter, en route to take over a defeated army, crossed paths with Rosecrans. As Grant relates in his Memoirs, quietly twisting the knife, "we held a brief interview, in which he described very clearly the situation at Chattanooga, and made some excellent suggestions as to what should be done. My only wonder was that he had not carried them out."

Rosecrans was shifted to Missouri, where in 1864 he dispatched Alfred Pleasonton's cavalry to help drive out Sterling Price's Confederate raiders. (Grant, predictably, found fault with his performance.)

He left the Army after the war, and was elected to Congress in 1880, where he opposed a pension for Grant. But at the last, as Grant's life was running out, according to Adam Badeau: "Rivals in the army like Buell and Rosecrans made known that the calamity which impended over the nation was a sorrow for them, because they were Americans."