A Fine Opportunity Lost: Longstreet’s East Tennessee Campaign, November 1863 – April 1864 (Lowe - CWC)

by Ed Lowe For James Longstreet, the transfer to the Western Theater in 1863 offered opportunity. For his opponent Ambrose Burnside, the hope of redemption. Longstreet, whom Robert E. Lee called his “Warhorse,” had long labored in the shadow of both his army commander and the now-dead Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. When Confederate fortunes took a turn for the worse in Tennessee, Lee dispatched Longstreet and most of his First Corps to reinforce Braxton Bragg’s ill-starred Army of Tennessee. Within hours of his arrival, Longstreet helped win the decisive victory at Chickamauga and drive the Union Army of the Cumberland back into Chattanooga. For a host of reasons, some military and some political, Bragg dispatched Longstreet and his troops to East Tennessee. Waiting for him there was Ambrose Burnside, whose early-war success melted away with his disastrous loss at Fredericksburg in late 1862 at the head of the Army of the Potomac, followed by the humiliation of “The Mud March.” Burnsid