the battle itself, chickamauga, the second bloodiest battle of the war. a two-day battle, september 20, a sunday, the day of the famous fatal order. thomas wood, the misinterpretation. a lot of standard histories will say that thomas wood willingly made the decision to follow an order he knew couldn't work in order to destroy his army. i can't accept that. self-preservation alone would not have something to do with that. recent scholarship has cast a lot of doubt on that. it was a mix up, all these battles. james longstreet who had been transferred from the army of northern virginia down to bragg's army, amassing a great force. rosecrans was outnumbered. the union army had fewer people on the field in september 1863 than the confederate army. the right is shattered, and then rosecrans is criticized for fleeing the battlefield in panic. another side of the story. rosecrans met up with james a garfield. garfield, an interesting fellow. he said at one point that he loved every bone in rosecrans's body. he was a self-made man, he had studied theology and was

he is the guy that orchestrated the move from virginia down to chickamauga. the biggest problem that these guys had to deal with was the confederate rail system wasn't really a system at all. it was a connection of short railroads. you see the pattern of the east coast. railroads converging at seaports. most of the confederate railroads were actually feeder lines to water transportation. it was actually the water transport system that was the southern national transport system. there were 99,000 miles of railroad. there were over 100 different railroad companies. the average southern railroad was less than 90 miles long. there was some construction in the 1850's. they were building some longer road road. the problem is, they are in the long place -- wrong place, and they run in the wrong direction. what the confederacy really needs our rail lines that link the features of war spanning the appalachian mountains. at the time of the war, the north had four railroads that span the appalachian mountains. you are looking at one here. how is that? does that look pre

by a number of different routes, all by rail, and half of the army, ,000 of the men arrived at chickamauga in time to help at the battle there. that's a pretty remarkable move. oh, and, incidentally, the union in following weeks paralleled that move. talk about symmetry. both sides are doing basically the same thing here. so the southern rail effort is looking pretty good. and, yet, a year and a half later, the confederate rail system is in virtually complete collapse and the union rail system both civilian and military is booming along like never before. hat caused that asymmetry to occur? well, everybody knows the answer to that one. okay. the northern railroads were standard gauge and the southern railroads were all different gauges so they couldn't interchange traffic. everybody knows that. right? no i'm not going to ask for a show of hands. because it's wrong. if you remember nothing else from this presentation please walk away with this. it was not about the railroad gauges. there was no standard gauge nyplace in the 1860's. gauge simply refers to the distance from the inside of this

point graduate who played a role in union victories and multiple battles, including the battle chickamauga . after his military career, he went on to serve as ambassador to mexico and congressmen, representing california. this event is from the museum of the confederacy. it's about 50 minutes. i want to start by reading from an introductory chapter of my book. just to kind of set things up.