Don Stivers Gateway to VictoryAfter their defeat at tine Battle of Chickamauga, Colonel William S. Rosecrans' Union Army of the Cumberland found themselves under siege at Chattanooga, Tennessee. Some 40,000 worn-out, demoralized Yankee soldiers entered the city and were held there-with their backs to the Tennessee River- by Confederate General Braxton Bragg's Army of Tennessee. Confederates then occupied Lookout Mountain which commanded a big loop in the river and effectively cut off Rosecrans' major supply line. With the river route controlled by the Confederates, the only other supply line was overland, a tortuous route of 60 miles.
Without supplies from the Quartermasters' Corps, famine struck man and beast alike. Horses gnawed at hitching posts, pine fences and wagon spokes: 10,000 horses and mules died of starvation. The men fared no better: they followed the empty supply wagons picking crumbs of hardtack-the Army "cracker"-out of the mud to eat. The Confederates just waited.
Rosecrans was relieved of command and a reorganization of Federal forces brought to Chattanooga Generals Joseph Hooker and William T. Sherman. Most significantly, U.S. Grant arrived at Chattanooga on October 23, 1863, to command the entire operation and put into effect a plan to supply the starving army. It was surprisingly simple: utilize a fern' landing and roads that cut across the big loop in the river out of range of Confederate guns on Lookout Mountain.
Cutting local timber and building a flat-bottomed, steam powered barge christened the "Chattanooga," Brig. Gen (Bvt.) William G. Le Due, Assistant Quartermaster to Grant's forces, ran the treacherous, stormy Tennessee River at night to deliver 40,000 rations and 39,000 pounds of forage for animals-the first of many deliveries-to Kelly's Ferry within five miles of the starving Union soldiers. Hie word went through the camps like wildfire, the men shouting to one another as if a victory had been won: "The Cracker line is open, lull rations, boys! Three cheers for the Cracker line." Indeed it was a victory-and the U.S. Army Quartermasters had won it.