Why is the Battle of Chickamauga overlooked regarding the Civil War?

29 comments

1. I feel most people would struggle to name civil war battles beyond Gettysburg and Antietam. People overlook a lot of battles.

2. Because while the numbers are rough, everything is dwarfed by Gettysburg. Gettysburg had roughly twice the KIA in just *3 Days.*

   Chikamauga was almost *3 weeks.*

   Or, as another example, like Spotsylvania which had more KIA in two weeks.

3. The western theater is generally less well known in popular memory. Chickamauga is definitely well known if you know the civil war though.

4. We didn’t spend much time on individual battles in my high school courses. There’s simply an enormous amount of detail to a 4 year war, everything that led up to it, and the fallout that came later. Teachers and curriculums have to be selective, there’s only so much time in a school year.

5. As one other person said, I think the reason is that it was in the western theater. Out of sight out of mind.

6. That is a good question. The first problem is level of detail. In education, you have to pick and choose the level of instruction keeping in mind you are only have a set amount of time on a topic. So, you are forced to focus on only the larger key points.

   The second problem is that among the Civil War buffs, you have a good deal of Grant devotees. Who have somehow managed to learn that he disliked Thomas. I can’t tell you how many times i have found someone interested in the Civil War only to find they could not have a reasonable discussion about Thomas.

   Finally being a Civil War buff is a hobby of the old timers. Not like is used to be. Sorry.

7. There was a battle for the chimichanga?

8. There were many bloody battles in the Civil War, not all of them can get equal billing.

9. To be fair, I didn’t study individual battles until college.

   Even in AP American history in high school we only discussed Fort Sumter and Gettysburg.

10. Probably because its the hardest civil war battle to spell that’s important. the rest are easy to remember and spell. Sharpsburg, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, etc.

11. I’m not a civil war buff, but I’ve read a few history books on it, and there are just too many battles to remember them all. I’d also guess that with military technology advancing so much since then, that the tactics used become less relevant. I think nowadays people reading about the civil war have expanded into the non-military aspects more as well

12. Google says there were 10,000 “engagements” in the Civil War time frame. It says 50 of them are considered major engagements. No one in high school takes an entire class on the Civil War. Even an entire class couldn’t handle details on 50 battles. But the Civil war is only a segment in U.S. history anyway. So there is even less time.

    Add to that that the battle was a loss to the overall winning side in the war, which means, ultimately, that it did not affect the overall outcome, no matter how many died fighting the battle. The Union won the war, and the loss was made moot. It wasn’t a deciding pivot point.

13. Shiloh is always the one I hear about most, other than Gettysburg.

14. Other than Gettysburg and Sherman’s March, we were preoccupied with the many major battles in Virginia.

15. My great grandfather was wounded during Chickamauga. I have a lot of information about his movements throughout the war, but haven’t yet put together a full timeline.

16. My experience is that the western theater of the civil war is similar to the eastern theater of WWII, in that it’s mentioned that it happened and was pretty vital in the ultimate outcome, but the details are generally left vague.

    The western campaign tended to go much more in favor of the union, so you don’t get the back and forth drama, and there wasn’t much worry about the CSA armies capturing major union cities.

17. Because it wasn’t as strategically important relative to history, I guess;

    -Gettysburg for obvious reasons was extremely important and was the confederates attempt to go on the offensive, which wasn’t really a thing for the beginning of the war

    -Antietam was the bloodiest battle

    -Vicksburg pretty much neutered the south in the western theater, and was the most important battle on the western front

    -Chickamunga was a major and bloody victory for the south but they already lost Gettysburg and Vicksburg

    Not saying there’s no significance. There’s a lot, but I think it doesn’t hold up as a battle when talking about the entirety of the war and its aftermath… at least imo based on what I know about the civil war. There’s a few others that hold up more like Sumter, 1st bull run, and Atlanta to name a few. That said I’m not into civil war history like that so any actual history/civil war nerd who wants to correct me feel free

18. Agree with everyone saying the western theatre gets less attention in general but Chickamauga is a double whammy because it’s both a western theatre battle AND it lacks any of the “big name” generals people tend to know – No Grant. No Lee. No Sherman.

    Fellow Civil War nerds will know that the battle has 2 important and generally well respected generals playing big roles during the course of the battle, Thomas and Longstreet. But those names are going to get blank stares from most.

19. You mean you’ve never heard of the Battle of Schrute Farms?

20. all i know is that the biggest contender of that battle was dixie kong

21. So there a couple reasons this is true.

    1. The more commonly known battles like Antietam, Shiloh, Gettysburg, and Vicksburg and others, occured in placed where riverine traffic was possible, or telegraphs were established and allow extremely rapid communication for the time. Gettysburg for example was known to be happening as far away as St. Paul Minnesota on July 2nd, something unthinkable or impossible only 20 years before.
    2. Chichamauga was far away more or less in enemy territory, and occured at the same time as other actions alongs the Mississippi River, and by the time the news of the battle reached.
    3. The Union Army was in a state of flux, Meade was about to make two last campaigns before Grant took over overall control of all Union Armies, Henry Hallack was not yet Chief of the Army, so the battle was competing with legitimately relevent news.
    4. Chickamauga was not instrumental in a strategic sense, the battle happened, and the Union Army managed to escape being trapped, the Union was repelled but at a pyrric victory. Chatanooga, and Knoxville turned out to the be the turning point in the Tennesse Campaigns.
    5. Both sides lost an unusual amount of senior officers, inclunding Lincoln’s Brother in Law(husband of wife’s sister in Lincoln’s case) who was a Confederate General. Both sides more or less seem to want to have forgotten the battle.

22. Let me ask a different question: What factors make a battle significant enough to history to be worth studying in high school? What makes it seminal as opposed to being a stepping stone? After all, we don’t remember the Wright Brother’s gliders before they succeeded at powered flight? We don’t really study the early cars before the Model T, because it’s the Model T that showed cars could be made affordable and that assembly lines improved productivity.

    We don’t consider teaching military tactics or strategy as the goal of high school history (but perhaps for JROTC). Gettysburg is important not because of the number of deaths but because it was a turning point; Lincoln’s Address helps, too. But Sherman’s march arguably had a much bigger direct impact on society.

    Sure, some battles have interesting aspects that might help motivate students. But few are strategic, and the number of deaths or casualties doesn’t always correlate with strategic importance.

23. I know all about it, I was assigned to the 1-19 infantry while I was in the army. Our motto was “The Rock of Chicamagua” after I got out I went to visit the site and a park ranger guided me through the entire battle.

24. Depends who you mean, really.

    In schools… unfortunately, unless you somehow have an AP class that just teaches Civil War History, most classes are survey courses with a *lot* of stuff to cram into a small space. If we encouraged a culture of lifelong learning, we’d be more up-front about that, but we aren’t.

    It’s almost the opposite problem with the Civil War enthusiast community, where there’s an extremely high assumed level of knowledge. So you go from “I’m aware there was a Civil War” to “I have opinions about specific skirmishes”, fairly quickly. This is also, not to put too fine a point on it, a pretty specific community, offline you don’t see them around so much on an average day.

25. A lot of battles are tbh. Not just in the American Civil War, but other ones too.

26. Because in the grand scheme of things that specific battle was not as “important” than say the subsequent Chattanooga campaign and the campaigns that followed.

    It’s the same reason why when the Spanish American war is taught you hear about the battles in Cuba and the Philippines but barely anything about the Puerto Rico campaign.

27. If I had any influence in Hollywood I’d love to convince someone to make a 10-episode miniseries about George Thomas.

    From rooming with Sherman at West Point, to serving in the Mexican War, to training several future Confederate generals alongside Robert E Lee, to being one of the only Southerners to remain loyal to the Union, to Chickamauga and Nashville, there’s a ton of material there.

28. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone under 50 who knows anything about the Civil War other than the agenda that they’ve been spoonfed. Asking them to name specific battles? That’s a futile effort.

29. It’s mostly because Chickamauga ultimately failed to be strategically significant. It’s end result was the Confederacy laying siege to Chattanooga, which ultimately ended in defeat for them.

    When it does get brought up, it’s usually in the context of the narrative of Systemic Incompetence within the Union Army, since a series of extremely catastrophic blunders on the Union side resulted in a complete rout.