With Rosecrans After Chickamauga
F or First Lieutenant Edwin Nicar, serving as aide-de-camp on the brigade staff of General George D. Wagner, General Rosecrans surprise appearance at brigade headquarters in Chattanooga on the afternoon of September 20, 1863, was indelibly etched in his memory. “The fugitives streamed back towards and into Chattanooga and by 4 p.m. on the 20 th we knew, or rather believed, that our army was beaten,” he wrote. “Rosecrans himself with a single staff officer arrived at our headquarters about the hour mentioned looking as white as a sheet and had to be helped from his horse. His staff officer, Captain Drouillard, gave us to understand that all was lost but cautioned secrecy.” The following passages about the Chickamauga campaign come from Captain Nicar’s memoir of the war published just as the U.S. was about to enter World War I and published in the pages of the South Bend Tribune . His story picks up in late August 1863 as Wagner’s brigade is marching towards Chattanooga: