by Glynn Wilson

Glynn Wilson

Holiday Trav-L-Park of Chattanooga

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn., Feb. 26 — The cardinals are singing their morning song as the sun tries to break through the clouds on this spot where the 84th Indiana Infantry camped in the fall of 1863 before the Battle of Chickamauga.

Chattanooga was a vital rail hub between Nashville and Atlanta in those days when telegraph lines were the new technology, and the town, located on the Tennessee River, served as an important manufacturing center for the production of iron and coke.

It served as the “Gateway to the Lower South” for the Union Army then, and by the time all the battles of Chattanooga were over, Abraham Lincoln’s forces under Gen. Ulysses S. Grant held undisputed control of the state of Tennessee. The city became the supply and logistics base for Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s 1864 “March to the Sea” through Atlanta that broke the spirit of the Confederacy and helped bring the Civil War to in an end.

Now the Holiday Trav-L-Park of Chattanooga serves as another encampment for another assault in the war to preserve American Democracy.

In just a little while, we will be heading over to Broad Street with a video camera to try and find out if it’s true that the key evidence against Bush administration officials in their perversion of democracy is still backed up on computer servers with the company that produced and stored Websites and e-mail accounts for the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush and the Republican National committee.

Smartech still boasts on its Web site about being the “official hosting provider” for the 2008 Republican National Convention and brags that they “will ensure the site is always up and available. Smartech’s infrastructure gives companies that host with them the most security and redundancy, ensuring that their website is always up and running.”

So if they are so reliable, they must have saved backup copies of all those e-mails from Karl Rove on that RNC Blackberry he used to run the administration’s political ops from the White House. Like the Zen Master said, “We will see.”

At one point in the Battle of Chattanooga, Gen. Braxton Bragg’s Confederate Army of Tennessee had the Union Army surrounded from positions on Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain, and had a plan to starve them into surrender.

Grant sent reinforcements down from Knoxville, however, and they successfully opened what came to be called “a Cracker Line” of supply to the troops. (Maybe that’s where the Cracker Barrel restaurants get their name?)

But a combination of misunderstood orders and the pressure of the tactical situation caused some of the Union forces to try a direct frontal assault on Missionary Ridge, where they routed the Army of Tennessee, which then retreated to Dalton, Georgia. The Army of the Cumberland’s ascent of Missionary Ridge was one of the war’s most dramatic events of the war, according to historians, “the war’s most notable example of a frontal assault succeeding against entrenched defenders holding high ground.”

Bragg had committed the most egregious error of his checkered career, they say. He had allowed rancor to crowd out rational thought and, without a coherent plan, he had divided his army in the face of a superior foe — with more reinforcements on the way.

Confederate enthusiasm was dashed at Chattanooga, one of the many moments during the Civil War that allowed the United States union to stand. Portions of the Chattanooga battlefields are preserved by the National Park Service as part of the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park.

Let’s hope the campsite serves a similar mission in the Age of the “Internets.”

Tags: Battle of Chattanooga

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 26th, 2009 at 10:43 am and is filed under Secret Vistas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.