The battles of Chickamauga and Chattanooga, only two months and a few miles apart in the fall of 1863, were not only brutal and dramatic, but also pivotal to the outcome of the Civil War. If the South had won both battles decisively, the war might have dragged on, Lincoln might have been forced out of the presidency in 1864, and the Union might have had to settle for a negotiated peace.

What did happen is that in late September Confederate forces under General Braxton Bragg took a stand against invading Yankees near Chickamauga Creek in northwest Georgia, and in a fierce and bloody two-day battle stopped Major General William S. Rosecrans's Union Army of the Cumberland and drove it back to Chattanooga.

There on the Tennessee River, under the towering heights of Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain, dominated by Confederate artillery and seemingly impenetrable Rebel defensive lines, the Yankees were trapped. Or were they?

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Bragg, in typical fashion, refused to press his advantage, Rosecrans was replaced by Major General Ulysses S. Grant, who brought Major General William T. Sherman with him. Desperately needed supplies and reinforcements arrived in the city and suddenly, in late November, without Grant's or, it seems, anyone else's order, Union soldiers stormed up the almost-sheer sides of Lookout Mountain and routed the startled Rebels.

Bragg fell back, and the Union drive led by Sherman to Atlanta and, ultimately, Savannah and the sea - the drive that tore the Confederacy in half and doomed it - had broken through.

John Bowers, whose Tennessee ancestors fought on the Confederate side at Chickamauga, tells this dramatic and powerful story with great narrative skill and insight, and he enriches it with his in-depth profiles of the marvelous cast of personalities on both sides: Rosecrans; George H.

Thomas, the loyal Union man from Virginia, disowned by his family, who earned the nickname "the Rock of Chickamauga" for his steadfastness; Grant; Sherman; Bragg, the general only Jefferson Davis could admire; James Longstreet, who almost turned Chickamauga into a rout; the fiery Nathan Bedford Forrest; the much-wounded John Bell Hood; and many more.