uch of what the history books have told us about William Rosecrans is untrue. We have long been told that he ruined traps set by Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant at Iuka and Corinth, and that Grant won those battles in spite of errors by Rosecrans; that Rosecrans stumbled his way to a bloody draw at Stones River; that he delayed launching his Tullahoma Campaign until it was nearly too late, and by doing so endangered Grant’s Vicksburg Campaign; that Rosecrans mishandled his troops at Chickamauga, then compounded the error by panicking and fleeing the battlefield while his army fought on; and that he was on the verge of pulling his starving and near-mutinous command from Chattanooga until Ulysses S. Grant removed him from command in the nick of time and salvaged the situation. In fact, none of those assertions are true. There is not sufficient space in this essay to formally challenge the “facts,” but this can be a beginning. Let us lay out the truth, and see what history looks like when shorn of the distortions and the lies.[1]
William Rosecrans was born in 1819, in Ohio. He had little formal education before he entered the U. S. Military Academy at age 19. Rosecrans graduated fifth in his class, and served for twelve years- including ten years in the Engineer Corps- taking no part in the U. S. – Mexican War. He resigned at the rank of first lieutenant, had an undistinguished business career (which included incurring facial scarring when an experimental kerosene lamp he was working on exploded), and rejoined the army a week after the firing on Fort Sumter.
