Grant dismissed General Rosecrans immediately upon taking command.
On October 10, 1863, a month before the battle of Chattanooga, General Ulysses S. Grant met with a secretary of the War Department and was given two nearly identical orders and asked to choose one. Both orders gave him command of the Mississippi Military Division, a new Union Military Division that would rally all armies in the West. One order, however, would keep General William S. Rosecrans in charge of the Cumberland Army and the other would replace Rosecrans with General George H. Thomas. This deserves to be one of the facts about the battle of Chattanooga.
William S. Rosecrans, born Sept. 6, 1819, in Kingston Township, Ohio, US, Union general and excellent strategist early in the American Civil War; after his defeat in the Battle of Chattanooga in September 1863, he was relieved of his command. A graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, NY, in 1842, Rosecrans served 12 years as a military officer and then resigned to become an architect and civilian engineer in Ohio and Virginia. Returning to active duty at the outbreak of war, he served under General George B. McClellan and General John Pope, each of whom he succeeded as he moved east with greater orders. During 1862, Rosecrans led Union forces to victory in the battles of Iuka and Corinth, and then moved to Nashville, to take command of the Cumberland Army. He fought well in the battle of the River Stones or the tense but indecisive Murfreesboro.
