Iowa Soldiers on Lookout Mountain

Collecting the wounded after the Battle of Lookout Mountain

Lookout Mountain rose straight out of the Tennessee River valley, a wall of rock and timber that loomed over Chattanooga like a warning. Clouds wrapped its upper slopes so often that soldiers joked it belonged more to the sky than the earth. An Iowa private wrote home saying it looked “like a giant standing with his head in the weather and his feet in the war.”

By November 1863, Iowa troops had been staring up at it for weeks.

 

After Chickamauga, the Union army was trapped in Chattanooga, half-starved and half-defeated. Confederate guns crowned Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, closing the valley like a vise. Rations were thin. Shoes were thinner. A soldier in the Fifth Iowa Battery said men were living on “cracker dust and hope.” Another said the army felt “held down by hunger and hills.”

 

The fighting on Lookout Mountain

Iowa newspapers followed every word. The Davenport Democrat warned its readers that Chattanooga was “no secure camp, but a prison overlooked by hostile heights.” The Burlington Hawk-Eye said Union soldiers were “boxed in by rock and rifle,” adding that relief must come soon or not at all.

 Relief came with Ulysses S. Grant. He arrived in October and set about reopening supply lines and planning an escape from the trap. His plan called for simultaneous blows—Sherman against Missionary Ridge, Thomas holding the center, and a force under Joseph Hooker moving against Lookout Mountain.

 

Hooker’s column included Iowa men.

 

The Eleventh, Thirteenth, and Fifteenth Iowa Infantry were part of the divisions moving south of Chattanooga toward Lookout’s western slopes. These were veteran regiments by now, hardened by Shiloh, Corinth, and the long grind of the war. They knew mountains were worse than fields. An Iowa sergeant said hills “multiply bullets and double fear.”

 

On the morning of November 24, 1863, Hooker’s men stepped off in mist and rain. The clouds hung low. Smoke and fog blended until the distance disappeared. A correspondent said the mountain “seemed to swallow sound.”

 

That’s how the battle earned its name. An Iowa soldier, Private William H. Clayton of the Thirteenth Iowa, wrote that the fog was so thick “a man could lose his company by taking ten steps.” Another said he could hear firing above and below but “saw nothing but gray air and darker shapes.”

 

General Fighting Joe Hooker

Confederate troops under General Carter L. Stevenson occupied rifle pits and rough works partway up the mountain. They believed the slopes, broken by rock and timber, were protection enough. A Confederate officer admitted the position was thought “secure against anything but artillery,” which the Union could not bring up the mountain.

 So the infantry went instead. Iowa regiments moved along narrow paths, sometimes single file. Muskets slipped on wet stone. Men grabbed roots and brush to pull themselves forward. Sergeant John W. Deering of the Fifteenth Iowa said the climb was “more like scrambling than marching,” and breath came “short and sharp as the shots.”

 

When the firing started, it was closeup and sudden. A soldier in the Eleventh Iowa said the first volley “came out of the fog like a door slamming.” Men fired by sound and movement. Officers shouted directions no one could see.

 

The Muscatine Journal said the Iowa troops advanced “into a cloud that concealed friend and foe alike,” calling it “war stripped of all ceremony.” The Dubuque Herald said the battle was fought “without lines, without banners, and almost without sight.”

 

Despite the confusion, the pressure held. Iowa regiments pushed forward steadily, driving Confederates from one rocky shelf to the next. Colonel James C. Hall of the Eleventh Iowa said his men moved “with the quiet determination of veterans who knew stopping was worse than climbing.”

 

The fog worked both ways. Confederate fire was scattered. Artillery above could not see its targets. An Iowa private said the cannonballs “went screaming into nothing.”

 

By mid-afternoon, Union troops had seized key positions along the mountain’s western face. Confederate defenders began falling back toward the summit. A Southern soldier said the Union advance “came out of the mist like ghosts and would not be stopped.”

 

The Iowa State Register called it “a battle fought in the clouds and won by men who would not wait for the sky to clear.” The Keokuk Gate City said the fog had become “a Union ally,” hiding movement and masking courage.

 

By nightfall, Lookout Mountain belonged to the Union. Hooker’s men camped on the slopes they had taken, looking down through thinning clouds at Chattanooga below. Fires flickered in the mist. A soldier in the Thirteenth Iowa said the view felt unreal. “We stood above the enemy and above ourselves,” he said.

 

The Confederates abandoned the mountain entirely that night, retreating to Missionary Ridge. An Iowa officer said Lookout had been “won more by legs and lungs than by bullets.”

 

Losses were lighter than feared, but they were real. Iowa regiments reported killed and wounded scattered along the slopes. The Burlington Hawk-Eye reminded readers that victory still came “with empty places at Iowa tables.”

 

The significance of Lookout Mountain was immediate. The siege was broken. Union morale surged. A soldier wrote home saying the army felt “hungry no longer, no matter what we ate.”

 

Grant said Lookout Mountain was “one of the most picturesque battles of the war,” but Iowa men remembered it differently. They remembered wet stone, blind firing, and the steady burn in their legs.

 

The next day, November 25, Missionary Ridge would be taken in a charge that stunned the world. But Lookout Mountain made it possible.

 

The Davenport Democrat said the battle proved that Iowa troops could “climb as well as charge.” The Iowa City Republican said the men had shown “discipline without display and courage without noise.”

 

Letters home carried quieter pride. Private Clayton did not know how famous the battle might become, “only that we went up and did not come back down.”

 

Lookout Mountain didn’t decide the war by itself. But it lifted a weight that had been crushing the Union army in the West. It turned a siege into a campaign and despair into motion.

 

The Dubuque Herald summed it up best: “Our soldiers have learned that no ground is too high when the cause is just and the will is firm.”