February 18, 2025

On September 18, 1863, two armies clashed along the banks of West Chickamauga Creek in northern Georgia. Major General William S. Rosecrans, commanding the Federal Army of the Cumberland, faced off against Confederate General Braxton Bragg at the head of the Rebel Army of Tennessee. They fought for control of the city of Chattanooga, a critical transportation hub connecting roads, rails, and rivers; a city which fell to Rosecrans nine days earlier without a shot fired.

Bragg was forced to abandon the city after the Federals swarmed across the Tennessee River downstream from Chattanooga in a well-planned flanking maneuver. Now Bragg, heavily reinforced, intended to turn the tables by counterattacking and retaking the city, undoing Rosecrans’s success. The Battle of Chickamauga raged for three bloody days, until the Federals were all but routed and driven into Chattanooga’s defenses. Chickamauga went down in history as the second-bloodiest battle of the entire war, and afterwards, both sides claimed victory.  

David A. Powell is a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute (1983) with a BA in history. He has published numerous articles in various magazines, and more than fifteen historical simulations of different battles. For many years, David’s focus has been on the epic battle of Chickamauga, and he is nationally recognized for his tours of that important battlefield. The result of that study are five books, The Maps of Chickamauga (2009,) Failure in the Saddle (2010,) and the three volumes of a Chickamauga trilogy; The Chickamauga Campaign: A Mad Irregular Battle (2014,) The Chickamauga Campaign: Glory or the Grave (2015,) and the final volume, The Chickamauga Campaign: Barren Victory, (2016).  Subsequently, he has turned to the study of the battles for Chattanooga. Battle Above the Clouds, concerning the Battle of Lookout Mountain, was published in June of 2017. Decisions at Chickamauga followed in 2018. Two more books, “All Hell Can’t Stop Them´(on Missionary Ridge) and Union Command Failure in the Shenandoah Valley both appeared in 2019. More recently The Tullahoma Campaign (co-authored with Eric Wittenberg) and Grant at Chattanooga, were published in 2020. Decisions at Shiloh appeared in 2023, and he is now hard at work on The Atlanta Campaign, a projected multi-volume study. Volume One appeared in July, 2024. David, his wife Anne, and their trio of bloodhounds live and work in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, Illinois.