A Requiem for Old Rosy

The night of December 30, 1862, the Union Army of the Cumberland and the Confederate Army of Tennessee bivouacked a little over a third of a mile apart outside Murfreesboro, Tennessee. During the evening, the bands of the two respective armies playfully competed with each other, one side performing “Yankee Doodle” and provoking a hearty response of “Dixie.” When one band started playing “Home! Sweet Home!” the other joined in. Soon, thousands of Yankees and Rebels were singing in chorus.

The camaraderie was short lived. At dawn the next morning, ten thousand Confederates struck the right flank of the Army of the Cumberland, surprising thousands of Union soldiers who had yet to finish breakfast. Within a few hours, the Union division on that right flank had been devastated, suffering over 50 percent casualties. By 10 A.M., the division had been driven back three miles to the Nashville & Chattanooga Railroad and the Nashville Pike.

The commander of the Army of the Cumberland, Maj. Gen. William Starke Rosecrans, canceled his planned assault on the Confederate right, rushing reinforcements to steady his own collapsing right flank. As Rosecrans sped across the battlefield directing his units, his uniform was splattered by the blood of his friend and chief of staff, Col. Julius Garesché, who was beheaded by a cannonball. Thankfully for Rosecrans, one of his subordinate officers, Brig. Gen. Philip Sheridan, had anticipated an early Confederate attack and ordered his division up at 4 A.M. Sheridan’s men repulsed three separate Rebel charges in a cedar forest soon nicknamed “The Slaughter Pen.”

Though the Confederate Army of Tennessee suffered 9,000 casualties that day, its commander, Gen. Braxton Bragg, was convinced of a Rebel victory. (Unbeknownst to Bragg, so were many of Rosecrans’s own senior staff!) Before retreating to bed, Bragg relayed a telegram to the Confederate government in Richmond: “The enemy has yielded his strong position and is falling back. We occupy [the] whole field and shall follow him…. God has granted us a happy New Year.”

Yet the fighting continued for three brutal days into 1863. When a demoralized Bragg withdrew his exhausted troops, the Union Army claimed the field. What would become known as the Battle of Stones River featured the highest percentage of casualties of any major battle in the Civil War, higher in absolute numbers than even the unprecedented bloodbaths of Shiloh and Antietam the previous year.

President Abraham Lincoln was thrilled to hear of the Union triumph. “You gave us a hard-earned victory, which had there been a defeat instead, the nation could scarcely have lived over,” he wrote to Rosecrans. Indeed, the battle was a professional high-water mark for Rosecrans, the senior-most Catholic in the Union Army. Northern press (and artists) sang his praises, with Harpers Weekly declaring that as “a strategist Rosecrans has proved himself second to none.”

Rosecrans’s response to the triumph likely struck Northern Protestant sensibilities as uncomfortably papist. “Non nobis Domine! non nobis sed nomini tuo da gloriam,” he ended his official report of the battle, reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Henry V at Agincourt. “Thank God and our Lady for the victory,” he wrote to his wife, Ann.

The Ohio-born Rosecrans had not begun life as an adherent of the Roman religion. His father, Crandall Rosecrans, was a descendant of Protestant Dutch-Scandinavian nobleman Harmon Henrik Rosenkrantz, who arrived in New Amsterdam in 1651. Crandall had William baptized into the Episcopal faith. His mother, Jemima Hopkins, was a widow of Timothy Hopkins, a man of Puritan ancestry and a relative of Stephen Hopkins, the colonial governor of Rhode Island and a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Though William had little formal education, he so impressed Ohio congressman Alexander Harper that the politician nominated him to attend the military academy at West Point, where he would graduate fifth in his class of 56. At his graduation, Old Rosy, as his classmates called him, met Anna Elizabeth Hegeman of New York City, whom he married the following year. They would have eight children together. After a year of engineering seawalls in Fort Monroe, Virginia, he requested and received an assignment to teach engineering at West Point.

It was at that bastion of American Protestantism that Rosecrans encountered the Catholic faith. As his daughter Anita later recounted, the West Point instructor one day came across a bookseller in New York who was marketing various religious publications, including the English Catholic bishop John Milner’s The End of Religious Controversy (1818). “I’ve read about every religion but the Catholic,” Rosecrans reportedly announced. “I believe I’ll investigate that for a change.” Following an intense period of study, he was conditionally baptized a Catholic in 1844, due to a lack of confidence in the validity of his Episcopal baptism.

The convert took quite zealously to the faith. He attended Mass as frequently as possible and eagerly sought to evangelize his family. Anna, though initially resistant, followed her husband into the Church in 1846 after experiencing a vision of Hell, apparently related to a difficult pregnancy. William’s efforts eventually persuaded his brother Sylvester, who not only converted but was ordained a priest in 1852 and, 16 years later, was ordained the first bishop of Columbus, Ohio. Both of William’s parents entered the Church on their deathbeds. “Unlike many men of his era content to leave religion to their wives, he [Rosecrans] played the central role in his family’s faith life,” writes University of Virginia historian and Civil War scholar William B. Kurtz, the pre-eminent authority on Rosecrans.

The fervor of Rosecrans’s piety also affected his friends, including fellow West Point graduate George Deshon who, after his conversion, became superior general of the Paulist Fathers. With his future chief of staff and fellow West Point classmate Julius Garesché, Rosecrans maintained regular correspondence regarding army officers he thought likely to convert. (Garesché was himself a serious Catholic evangelist, organizing the first local conference of the St. Vincent de Paul Society in Newark, N.J., contributing to the famous convert Orestes Brownson’s Quarterly Review, and receiving the decoration of a Knight of St. Sylvester from Pope Pius IX.)

In the late 1840s, Rosecrans founded a Confraternity of the Sacred Heart for current and former military officers, which encouraged a routine of prayers to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In 1853 Giacomo Cardinal Fransoni, prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, awarded him a gold medal and commended his “singular zeal in performing the duties of the Catholic faith.”

At the same time, Rosecrans grew increasingly frustrated by the lack of upward professional mobility in the army. In 1853 he was granted a leave of absence and returned to Ohio, where he became a prominent critic of rising anti-Catholic sentiments spurred by the Know-Nothing Party. Invited to speak at the Catholic Institute in Cincinnati, Rosecrans delivered an address on the compatibility of Catholicism and republican government. The lecture was so popular that Bishop Martin J. Spalding of Louisville, Kentucky, consulted Rosecrans on “further facts & references.”

While in Ohio, Rosecrans found employment as president of a coal company, which he subsequently left to open a coal-oil refinery. When working there, a safety lamp exploded in his face, scalding him and leaving a permanent scar that resembled a smirk. After an 18-month recovery, Rosecrans developed an odorless coal oil that he was planning to market in 1860. Broader national events dramatically altered those entrepreneurial endeavors.

Following the secession of several Southern states, Rosecrans took charge of a Cincinnati-based militia unit. By May 1861 he had secured the rank of brigadier general and was placed under the command of Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan in northwestern Virginia. There, in July, he performed credibly under fire at the battles of Rich Mountain and Corrick’s Ford. Rosecrans followed that up by successfully outmaneuvering Confederate general Robert E. Lee, who had yet to make his name as the South’s most celebrated military commander.

The next year, Rosecrans visited Washington, D.C., where he had several acrimonious interactions with the new secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, foreshadowing a trend that would affect the remainder of his military career. That spring, Rosecrans was transferred to the Western Theater, taking command of two divisions of the Army of the Mississippi and soon falling under the command of Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. The two achieved an important victory at Iuca, Mississippi, though Grant’s final report of the battle did not speak highly of Rosecrans, possibly because the Northern press lavished praise on the latter while describing the former as drunk and incompetent. After another victory at Corinth, Mississippi, Rosecrans ignored Grant’s order to pursue the enemy — he did not assess his troops capable of pressing the chase — which further intensified enmity between the two generals.

The fall of 1862 marked another shift for Rosecrans. Though for years he had been critical of slavery, he opposed the abolitionists, even voting for Democrat (and Southern sympathizer) Stephen A. Douglas in the 1860 election, as did many Catholics who feared the radicalism and anti-Catholicism popular in the Republican Party. Yet witnessing the eagerness with which slaves fled their masters for the Union camps left an indelible impression on Rosecrans. “Our lines are to them the Canaan of their deliverance and rest,” he wrote to Anna. He soon became so outspoken in his opposition to slavery that he was labeled by some as a “crazy abolitionist,” albeit, he would argue to his wife, a Catholic one who placed his trust “in God and the intercession of our Lady.”

Rosecrans’s reputation as a vocal Catholic with an aggressive evangelizing impulse also grew. He kneeled alongside his soldiers during Mass, wore a watch with a cross attached to it, and regularly prayed the Rosary. He provoked spirited theological debates with his non-Catholic staff late into the night. “He is one of the most devoted religious men I ever knew,” acknowledged the former preacher and future president James A. Garfield, who served as his chief of staff after Garesché’s death.

In the summer of 1863, Rosecrans followed his defeat of Braxton Bragg at Stones River with the strategic Tullahoma Campaign, outmaneuvering his Confederate opponents with minimal casualties to his own army. Lincoln described it as “the most splendid piece of strategy I know of.” Composer J.E. Spratley penned the tune “Rosecrans the Brave” in his honor:

And with Rosecrans to lead us on,
no matter where’t may be,
All hearts will leap with a joyful shout
marching to victory.
Hurrah! hurrah! hurrah!
We’ll storm their forts and rifle pits,
Brave Rosecrans, Hurrah!

Those paeans were soon abbreviated. In September 1863, having overextended his forces into northwestern Georgia, Rosecrans became vulnerable to counterattack, which is exactly what Bragg’s Army of Tennessee did. On the second day of fighting, a miscommunication led to the near annihilation of Rosecrans’s forces, who beat a hasty retreat to Chattanooga. It was the most significant Union defeat in the history of the Western Theater and resulted in the second-highest number of casualties of any battle in the entire war.

Though his men still adored him, Rosecrans’s reputation was in tatters. Some in the press blamed the defeat on his Catholicism. The New York Times alleged he was “subject to fits of religious depression.” The New York Herald claimed he was too busy requesting priests to say Masses for his army to attend to his artillery. In October Grant removed him from command. Rosecrans was subsequently directed to the trivial Department of Missouri, a backwater where he remained for all of 1864.

Despite his fall from grace, Rosecrans, a “war Democrat,” was briefly considered for the Republican ticket as Lincoln’s running mate in the 1864 presidential election. His old friend Garfield sent him a telegram querying his interest, to which Rosecrans replied hesitantly and cryptically in the affirmative. Garfield never received the return telegram. Some of Rosecrans’s friends speculated that his old nemesis, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, had intercepted and concealed it.

In December 1864 Rosecrans was once again removed from command. When Stanton asked Grant what should be done with him, Grant replied, “Rosecrans will do less harm doing nothing than on duty. I know no department or army commander deserving such punishment as the infliction of Rosecrans on them.” Given Old Rosy’s earlier popularity with his men, it was a calumnious claim. But coming from Grant, it was enough to doom a once-stellar military career to ignominy.

After the war, Rosecrans moved to California, receiving a hero’s welcome of bands, fireworks, and a parade in San Francisco in July 1865. Mark Twain happened to be working there at the time. In his column “Steamer Departures,” Twain declares with his usual clever flourish, “And off goes General Rosecrans, without ever doing anything to give a paper a chance to abuse him.”

After a few years in the railroad business, Rosecrans was appointed by President Andrew Johnson as U.S. Minister to Mexico, but Grant removed him once he assumed the presidency in 1868. A year later, Rosecrans purchased 16,000 acres of land — the Rosecrans Rancho — in the Los Angeles basin. In 1880 he was elected U.S. representative to California’s 1st Congressional District, and in the mid-1880s he served as a regent of the University of California. Rosecrans died in 1898 in Redondo Beach, California, preceded in death by several of his children, including Adrian, a Paulist priest, and Mary Louise, an Ursuline sister.

A Pontifical Requiem Mass for Rosecrans, celebrated by the Right Rev. Bishop George Montgomery at the Los Angeles Cathedral, was followed by a Schmidt’s Requiem Mass. It was the largest funeral in the city to date. In 1902 Rosecrans’s remains were transferred to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, where his interment was attended by many notables, including President Theodore Roosevelt and Speaker of the House of Representatives David B. Henderson, the latter having served under Rosecrans at the Battle of Corinth.

“He was one of the most fearless officers that I ever saw in battle,” Henderson declared of Rosecrans at his burial. “He seemed unconscious of danger…. Swinging his sword he called out to us: ‘Stand by your flag and country, my men!’ How he escaped, God only knows. It seemed the air was so full of lead, and death was holding high carnival along his pathway, and yet fearless he rode into the very teeth of death, rallying successfully his men for the mighty struggle before them.”

Today, Rosecrans Avenue in Los Angeles and Orange Counties runs adjacent to the late general’s former ranch, which he subdivided and sold in the 1870s. The major thoroughfare is notorious for violence and crime, and it has been cited in numerous hip-hop songs, including by Kendrick Lamar, Dr. Dre, and the late Tupac Shakur, whose tribute to his home, “California Love,” topped the charts in 1995. As Tupac sings in a strangely fitting reference to a street named after one of America’s greatest 19th-century Catholics, “Let ’em recognize from Long Beach to Rosecrans.”

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