“Opening the Cracker Line and Keeping it Open: The Decisive Battles of the Chattanooga Campaign” 

For More Info: WWW.ChicagoCWRT.Org

 Following the battle of Chickamauga in September 1863, General William S. Rosecrans' Army of the Cumberland retreated into Chattanooga. Braxton Bragg's Army of Tennessee surrounded the city on three sides and laid a quasi-siege for more than a month. Supplies for the Union forces gradually dwindled, reaching crisis level by the third week of October. Rosecrans, who seemed incapable of lifting the siege, gave way to Ulysses S. Grant, who approved a daring plan to open a new line of supply. That plan succeeded on October 27, opening what the Federal soldiers called the "Cracker Line." The Confederates' effort to redeem the situation resulted in one of the Civil War's rare night battles near a railroad junction called Wauhatchie. Will Greene will argue that these two relatively minor actions decided the outcome of the campaign for Chattanooga and that the famous battles of Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge should have never occurred. A. Wilson "Will" Greene is a native Chicagoan who grew up in Western Springs and Wheaton. Following a sixteen-year career with the National Park Service, Greene became the first executive director of the Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites, now the American Battlefield Trust. He then became the founding director of Pamplin Historical Park and the National Museum of the Civil War Soldier. Greene is the author of six books and a dozen published articles and essays dealing with the Civil War. His current project with the University of North Carolina Press is a three-volume history of the Petersburg Campaign. The first volume, A Campaign of Giants, was published in 2018 and Volume 2 is due out early in 2025. Greene was the recipient of the Nevins-Freeman Award in 2012. Greene now lives in Walden, Tennessee, hard by the Anderson Pike, about which he will speak at our meeting.